New Media technology was vital during all stages of production. Without it the task would have been near impossible.
Due to our group’s interest in the indie music, we decided to use a song with that genre in mind. We eventually decided to use a Maccabees track but with problems relating to copyright we needed to get permission. This is where new media technology was useful. We researched online whom we would need to contact (the head of technology for the band) and then emailed them. This was an easy method and we received a fast response. Whereas if we couldn’t email we would have had to write to them, and we wouldn’t have known who would be best to contact and so no response would have been guaranteed.
All of our work is documented via blog, which is more efficient as there is a great deal of increased storage. As proof of permission from the Maccabees I printscreeened the email, saved it as a picture and uploaded it onto my blog.
Now that that the permission was sorted we needed to research other Indie music videos to find out the common conventions of this genre. As Indie music has a niche market it was near impossible to conduct this research via television music channels. This is because due to it not being a common genre, music videos from the likes of Arctic Monkeys and The Mystery Jets are rarely if ever seen on music channels other than that of the NME music channel which is not a terrestrial channel. And so I researched them online on YouTube. This was better than television as it allowed a degree of audience control. I was able to choose when and what videos I wanted to watch. It allowed me to access old as well as new songs under the indie genre such as ‘Leave Before the Lights Come On’ which is several years old and so would not have been on television channels such as NME.
We also used itunes to find The Maccabees archive of music to listen to brief snippets of all their tracks to find out which was we should use for our music video. We decided not to use YouTube for this so as not to be influenced by the music video itself, just the music. We eventually decided on the track 'One Hand Holding', which wasn't released by the band as a single. And so after this we watched several music videos by the Maccabees such as 'Can Give It' and 'No Kind Words' just to get a general feel of the way in which there videos are presented. From watching their videos we learnt that many of their videos are narrative based, and so as this was already something we were considering it encouraged us further to use this format.
One member of our team uploaded the song onto her 3G phone and set it to all members of our team via bluetooth so that we could listen t the lyrics and brainstorm ideas we could incorporate in our narrative music video.
I wrote up my findings and used screen grabs from the video making my analysis more understandable. I then uploaded to slideshare and posted onto my blog. Using Slideshare was better than copying and pasting onto my blog as the document remained the same and I didn’t have to re-adjust the images. Uploading it onto my blog allowed me to share my findings with members of my group.
But new media technology was also important in the construction of our video. We needed photos as props/mis-en-scene in the video. We took photos on a 3G mobile phone and bluetoothed them to a computer to print them off. This method was quick, easy and meant that we could take photos as soon as we had finished other tasks. If we had not been able to do this then we would have had to make sure we brought all the correct cables to connect to the computer.
When we finished our video we decided to put it on YouTube. First we converted it to quicktime and then embedded it onto YouTube. This allowed globalisation as we could receive feedback from anyone, and so gained a wider audience than if we had held a screening for it. One girl commented that she’d love “British boys in her cupboard”. We also posted it as a response to a popular Maccabees track called 'Toothpaste Kisses' which enabled us to reach our target audience, that being young adults and Maccabees fans. By putting it onto YouTube we were able to receive constructive criticism to help us improve our music video. For example, some commented on the quality of the video, so we decided to convert it again onto quicktime but at full quality, this was a longer process but improved the quality of the video. Online feedback was more effective as only people who wanted to give feedback did, and so it was a better quality of feedback rather than if for example we had held a screening and handed out questionnaires, as from previous experience it shows that occasionally people are inclined to response somewhat halfheartedly to speed up the questioning process.
Our magazine advert was made through a website called Pinik, which helps to edit photographs. This was more efficient than using other software as we wanted a polaroid image effect on some of the images within the advert. The digipak was created through a piece of software Paintware Pro 8, this was useful as we wanted to use a 'sticky tape' effect which gave the impression of images being stuck on which related to parts of the music video. This may have been possible using other software but we considered this piece of software to be more effective.
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