Post production.

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


A2 Music Video.

Introduction:

Discussing the main points (Post Production Elements):
- Editing: We all made the decision to keep it simple, which is more powerful and less nauseous. ..We came to this decision from looking at our peer feedback that we achieved, as some of them did have problems with the effects.
- Consumption/Exchange:
- Marketing (Digipack): decided that wanted to realate the genre to the digipack, also wanted it to stand out against others in shops &be eye catching, while also keeping it simple.
- Sound: We only used the sound from the song as we felt that any other sounds would confuse the audience & wouldn't be appropriate for our video. From the feedback we achieve this very well as they really liked it and thought that it fitted in nicely with the genre type.
- CGI Effects: Did not use this.
- Video Commentary: We decided to show the audience what we look like, & jump from the video to us so that they knew what we were talking about, whilst talking over the top. We also put in clips of other videos and stills of our digipack. This proved effective in our video and from our feedback we found out that many people liked the effect of adding the clip of the existing video by lily allen to our video, although some of the commentary was abit quite and hard to hear for the audience.
- Feedback: The feedback on our blog helped us with constructive critism on our music video, digipack and video commentary.
- Roughcut: When we made our roughcut we didnt have all of our footage, so we put in clips with writting on telling people what these clips would contain and what to expect.
- DVD Menu: We wrote down the tracks and made up some special features/live clips in order on the back of the cover of our DVD Digipack idea.
-Transitions/Effects: we were going to use effects but in the end they would have confused the viewer so we scrapped that. Then for transitions we used a basic transition that faded the previous clip into the next making it simple and bold.

Conclusion: Summing it all up.

Advantages & Disadvantages of using Digital technology.

Advantages.

• Having a Group Blog on Blogger allowed all of the members of our group to access the blog from pretty much anywhere that had internet access, which meant that any of us could add to the blog at anytime, at college or at home. Other groups could also leave feedback.
  
• Garageband; helped us to create our own soundtrack for our thrillers which avoided having to contact bands or record labels in order to have permission to use their tracks.
• Myspace; allowed us to contact bands in order to seek permission to use their tracks in our music video, without the internet this would not have been possible as we would have to find their address and hope they received our letter personally. Whereas with the help of the internet we can send our message and hopefully receive a reply quicker.
• We used Google alot when researching in both projects. Google was a good choice for us as a search engine as it helped us find websites, information, images and videos online from key words. Using Google images we found alot of our images for our Mise-en-scene and mood boards. Google videos helped us find existing videos or music videos which were either not on Youtube or we could not access through Youtube.
• Youtube let us search existing video clips & music videos. Which helped in our research for both projects, we could find existing videos that shared similar ideas to which we had come up with i.e. when we first heard our song for our music video we all agreed that we had a similar idea in our head to the video to Lily Allen's LDN.
• Our music video project required us to create a digipack for our single, which meant we had to create a cover for our CD and a poster for this which could be a tour poster, Photoshop let us edit images, add texts etc.
• We used final cut alot in both our projects to create our final videos. However our skills & knowledge of final cut improved in our second year as we had learnt the basics in As doing our thriller and so we could explore different effects in A2 for our music video we also looked at sound alot more in our music video.
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Disadvantages.

• College equipment; we had access to college equipment and were allowed to take the college (video) cameras out for one weekend and once overnight, which meant we had to plan what we were going to do first, but things don't always go to plan in our case they didn't, we didn't have a backup plan and didn't get the right footage for our music video.
• The problem with our college blog on blogger, was that everyone else could also access it which meant that in some groups cases people had posted innopropriate material on their blogs.
• The problem with researching using the internet is that not all the infomation online is true and with sites like Wikipedia the content is added by anyone online.
  

-Did you experience any problems when working on your Thriller/Music Video?
Thriller. We didn't have many problems with our thriller project looking back at the video now we could have re-filmed a clip where a girl throws a doll into shot and then walks in, but that was about it.
Music Video. Our biggest problem with our music video was that our plan didn't turn out right and so our music video ended up as a completely different idea to our original idea.

Planning & Reseach Essay Plan.

How have the Advantages & Disadvantages of Planning & Research effected your 2 Products (AS/A2).

Introduction.
-Introduce the question and the two products.

Paragraph 1 - Advantages.
-We had a longer period of time to Plan our A2 project than for our AS project, which meant that we could go into more detail in our planning and in depth research.
-We learnt new Theories to help us to plan our video and analyze existing videos for A2 (Goodwin's Points, Auteur theory, etc.).

Paragraph 2 - Disadvantages.
-Despite all the planning we for our A2 Music Video our plan fell through as a member of our cast was unavailable and they were the main character in our plan, Unlike our AS Thriller Project where we had a plan and stuck to it right the way through.

Conclusion.
-Improvement from AS to A2.