Task 4- How Did You Use New Media Technologies In The Construction And Research, Planning and Evaluation Stages?

 Through out the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages we used a large variety of new media technologies to aim us, ranging from Prezi, Final Cut Pro, Google and Digital Cameras.

  Once the song had been decided, Warriors Dance by The Prodigy, we began to research who are target audience would be.
  I used Twitter to see who was 'Following' The Prodigy , looking at other bands that they were 'following', what sort of clothes they wore and what their interests were to establish and build up a profile for a typical member of our target audience.
For Example I found one Twitter used names 'Prodigy_Fanboy' which I thought was a pretty good start. I saw that he was also following 'KerrangMagazine' 'DaftPunkFanboy' and 'MixMag' which is the worlds leading Dance/Club music Magazine.
Here is a link for his page:
https://twitter.com/#!/Prodigy_Fanboy/following
I also noticed that 'FanBoy' had 417 followers himself so decided to have a little stalk of them too.

FanBoy had set up his own website aswell, which acted as a forum, somewhere to find out concert dates and even had links to site where you can book tickets, as well as the latest news on the band.

The fan boy site allowed other prodigy fans to talk together in an online forum, swap videos and photograph, to Fanboy has set up a Knowledge Community with his website that allows the sharing of loads of different files. i sent him Our finished video to see how easy it is to put videos and other information on him website and he replied almost instantly suggesting that he has a lot of E-mail's coming in from other Fans, so from that I decided that our target audience is active in the internet, so i would be able to find a lot about them on social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook.

Here is the E-mail he sent me:

 After Twitter I looked on Google at some images of Prodigy concerts, looking at the lighting, stage props, what the band were wearing and what the fans looked like.

I saw that the Logo and lighting put together had suggestions of both Gothic and Punk/Club Music (which is why we chose the slightly gothic costume with club lighting in the video and the punk style logo in the digipack)

We took inspiration from the lighting design to create a club-like yet dark, slightly threatening atmosphere

These Images really helped up design our video and digipack. It told us what a fan of our band would want to see. 

We used Ebay to find our masks and some props, Ebay also gave us some other suggestions that we may also like, we found some other masks and neon face-paint's which added to the fantasy theme of our video.

when looking for a location, we used Camera-phone's to take test shots of some locations that we might use. This helped us to envisage what the video may look like as it is hard to tell what something will look like on screen if you just go to see it with out taking photo's. 

We found head-shots and put them on to Paint....

then took some images off Google of people wearing what sort of things we may dress our band in. We then took the heads of our band members and out them on the bodies to see what they will all look like together. this made us see that the band would look better if they were all in black. We also wanted them to have tattoos like The Prodigy members, so as to avoid the band looking too young and 'innocent'.

We used Photoshop to create out Digipack.

We drew an image of lips and tongue piercing, we photographer it on a Digital Camera and uploaded the image onto Photoshop. We then tried out a number of tools to try different backgrounds that we found off Google . We used photoshop tools, changing the colour and contrast until we were happy with out poster and digipack. We used the Stamp Tool to put 5 start onto out poster to look like ratings from Kerrang and Rolling Stone Magazine.

This is the finished version of our Digipack cover.

We used Digital Camera's to film our video and we edited on Final Cut Pro. I used Final Cut Pro to select the best shots and cut them to the soundtrack. I synced all of the rushes to the locked and edited soundtrack, then cut them rather than putting in rushes as i go. Last year i did that, just took the shots out of the rush bin when i needed them but this meant that there were some really good shots that i had forgotten. By syncing all the rushes right after we uploaded them, whilst they were fresh in my mind, there were no wasted takes. I then used the Blade Tool to isolate sections of the take that looked best.

We used Effects such as Earthquake and Mirror to add to the visually spectacular chaos. 

 Earthquake added even more action to the video.

mirror create distorted images and silhouettes.

I also used Final Cut Pro to layer 2 images over each other. this added to the chaos yet still told the story and showed what was happening. In this shot we see the girl from the creatures point of view and layered over it is a shot of the creatures from the girls point of view. 

To record our progress, I made a blog on Blogger, which allowed me to upload Prezi's, Power Points and YouTube video's. We could have recorded out progression in a book but this would have been easy to lose and less visual interesting. 

Finally, We used an iPad to record the Focus Group. This made it easier to hear all of their points as we could listen whilst they were talking rather than writing down, and we could watch the video back incase we missed anything.