Whilst researching music videos and the music marketing industry, I used the school's Apple Macs, as well as my own personal laptop (running Windows Vista.) The majority of research was conducted using the internet, such as viewing past examples of music videos through YouTube, or other video streaming sites, since YouTube is blocked on school computers. Had this been a professional video, YouTube would have definetely been used to upload the video to a much Wider audience. My animatic was shot using a Canon Legria FS200, and edited using Apple's iMovie software. Discovering my band first took place through social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace, but I could not find an apporopriate song. This led me to NME Breakthrough, a website set up by the music magazine NME to create a platform for unsigned bands to find an audience. This lead me to An Army Of Lights, who i contacted through Facebook for permittion to use their song and band name. Whilst they had agreed and offered to send me their song for free, I had already bought their EP from iTunes for personal listening.
When it comes to the actual filming of the video, I used the same Canon Legria FS200 Camcorder I used for taking the images of the animatic, and was used to shoot the final evaluation videos. This camera is Standard definition, which provides a low-fi feel of the overall video, adding realism to the possibility of a debut music video for a band, as well as the convention of indie-rock bands prefering the low-fi approach in production aspects of their videos and music. Throughout filming I used a tripod supplied by the school An issue with this type of mount, compared to a Steadycam for example, is that shots in which the camera is needed to track or follow is very difficult to film without the shot becoming shakey. Shots that were particularly bad for this needed to be edited through iMovie to make the image stable again. Other than the actual instruments used to mime the playing, there were no other media technologies used in the filming process.
Editing took place on the schools Apple Mac computers, again taking advantage of the iMovie software. I used the Black and White and the Heat Wave effects to differ between band clips and the teenagers, with no effects placed on the singing, connoting the lyrics are relevent for both groups, and that they apply to both. iMovie was particularly helpful, especially in the futher editing of clips that were ether too bright or two dark, so that the details were as clear as possible, without losing the effect.
My cover images were shot using a DSLR camera, experimenting with various effects. The band logo was created through experiments with the fonts given on the the version of Microsoft Powerpoint loaded onto the school's Macs. Unfortunatly nether I, nor the school, own a copy of photoshop, or any similar software, so I used Paint on my Windows laptop to insert the logo into my back cover image. This continued to the low-buget feel I continued throughout the video, as this is the debut album and single of an indie band. I did have difficulty fitting the logo in, as the logo seemed fake, but I tried blurring this with some of the program's effects at an attempt at easing this. Similarly, i used paint to create my poster, but this was far simpler, as inserting white writing onto a plain black background was much easier, as opposed to inserting a logo against the orange fade in the cover image. Again, there were issues in this also, as changing the size of the album image to fit into my poster forced the font of the logo to alter, making it jagged (as seen below). I believe that if I used a program more suited to changing the size of images, such as Photoshop, this would not have occured. But, as i have no access to this, this was not possible.
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