How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

For this project we have used a variety of different programmes and techniques to enspire, develop and create our product ideas. During are stages of our research we have used our 'blogs' intensively to express our ideas and creativity. The blog has helped us engage with members of our groups over the weekend as we are updated on their latest developed ideas allowing other members of the group to develop them further. The main aparatus we have used continiously is the 'video camera'. The video camera lets us express and practice our initial ideas for our media product leading to the final production where we were able to film our footage without hesitation and knew exactly what shots and angles would fit our genre of music best. Whilst filming the footage we thought it would be an effective idea to take some shots of our location on the day of filming so we could blog about our day and express to our audience what was going to be expected from our music video. Looking back on the images we realised the images were actually a high quality and were exactly what we were looking at for our album. Leading on to us using 'Instagram' an online social network, photo sharing service that allows individuals to take their own images, apply digital filters and share them. This allowed us to create the images for our album covers and the whole of the digi pak. We have also used 'Photoshop' on the front cover image. Once the effect from Instagram was placed upon the picture the balloons became a dull red and very cartoon like which was not how the balloon was seen throughout the music video. We decided to play around with photoshop to see if we could brighten the balloon without causing any problem to the effect already placed on the image. I was not familiar with 'photoshop' so the members of my group taught me how to create the new effect on the front cover image incase we had to brighten up the balloon again. I am now able to use photoshop without any guidence.

Below is a short video of how we created the image for the album cover using Instagram.


 

Below are screen grabs for how we created the brightness of the red balloon in Photoshop.

 

We used the magic wand in photoshop this was done by pressing down on the button 'alt'.

 

We then clicked refine edge

 

We then made the balloon look less harsh by using the feathering tool in photoshop. We had to make sure the balloons were equally even. After using this tool we were then able to change the colour of the balloons to a much more similar brighter red to the balloons in the music video. The balloons looked more natural and now didn't look as if they had been placed on top of the image.

 

 

However we then went on to image- adjustments- hue and saturation to change the colour again to get the pink tinge off the balloons.

 

Then we changed the lighting, saturation and hue of the balloons to make sure we produced the best red balloons we possibly could.

 

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The image above is the final outcome which we used for the front cover and the advert.

 

Due to the wind of the day of filming when we came to the editing process we tried many different ways to keep the balloon red whilst the background was black and white. We first tried 'Matte Effect' in our practice task which we realised straight away was not suitable for our final outcome. So we decided once the editing process began to use 'Leave colour' effect but again we encountered implications the red balloon was thankfully staying red but other parts of the footage such as scenery that had a slight tinge to the colour was also changing due to the effect. So after deliberating we decided the best idea was to commision someone who knew more professional ways to create the effect we needed for our music video. The effect was then created frame by frame a very time consuming and complicated way to create the effect. However the outcome was outstanding and created the exact effect we wanted with the red balloons.

 

I decided to film James explaing how he created the red balloon with the black and white shots.