What decisions did you make in the post production stages of your two products? Evaluate the success of these decisions.

Music Video

One of the decisions we made during the post production stage of our music video was to film more varied shots. After reading our feedback from our roughcut, we realised that people wanted more varied shots rather than just straight on shots of the artist to make the video more interesting and exciting to watch. We feel this was a successful decision as with a larger variety of shots the video flowed well.

During the editing process we felt that some footage needed to be minimised in order to keep them flowing more professionally. For example we have a shot of the artist being chased where they turn a corner, we decided to cut out the end to make the shot flow better with the following shot. We also enhanced all of our footage after the basic editing was completed. We used the saturation and brightness and contrast tools in final cut to make the footage more vibrant and funky to conform with genre conventions. We feel this decision was a good one as it gave the video an uplifted feel.

We made the decision to use various different transitions between shots in our video as we wanted to make it more interesting. We used the motion key to guide our shots on and off the screen. One transition we thought was particularly successful was the transition where we spun a post it note onto another shot. We thought it was successful because it was timed well and fit with the music.

Our video commentary was fairly straight forward however after we filmed it we decided to cut it down a bit as we spoke about unnecessary things which did not need to be included. This was a good decision as we didnt want people to get bored or loose interest in what we had to say.

Creating our digipack was fairly easy as we had researched previous posters and DVD covers from the hip hop genre so we had a good idea of what to include. We took still images of the artist and made this the main feature in both of the digipack products. We made the decision to photograph the artist in the same clothing as he was wearing in the video to keep continuity but also to enable the consumers to regonise the products and relate them to each other. We were pleased that we made this decision as it gave the final products a professional feel.

Digital Technology - Advantages and Disadvantages

Digital technology is widely used in all media areas. It was important in the making of our thriller project and music video as it allowed us to explore different techniques and enabled us to be more creative with our products. It also gave us an insight into the way that professional industries use advanced technology to create their products.
An advantage of using digital technology is that it is useful to collect a wide range of in depth research by using the internet. During the planning of our music video and thriller project we used the search engine Google to do this. It was useful to help us find out any information we were unsure about, we could also search for images to put on our blog. However, Google also has some disadvantages. Some of the information can be misleading, inaccurate and out of date. It can also sometimes be very irrelevant to the subject being searched. We took this into account and read all information with caution trying not to believe everything we saw.
The programs we used during the production of our products such as final cut, photoshop and itunes were an important element in creating a proffesional looking product suitable for our specific genre. Final cut enabled us to edit our footage, adding transitions and effects to make it as good as we can. Photoshop was important in creating our digipack. It allowed us to add effects to our images and create interesting text. However a drawback of using these programmes is that it they are fairly complicated to use and can be very time consuming if you are unsure of how to use them.