Written Support for Question 4 - Evaluation

By having the option to use advanced technology for this project, in terms of the camera that I used which enabled me to use depth of field settings, I was able to make my project look a lot more professional, as the use of the shallow focus/depth of field (deep focus) allowed the audience to watch the music video as if they were acting as the camera. The depth of field settings replicates the way the human eye works, so the footage looks more effective and makes more sense to the audience because when the human eye looks at something, the rest of the space around that object/person is blurred out, allowing the focus to be on one particular thing at one time, allowing more of a real-life effect to come to life within the video. 

In terms of the crop function and the problems that I had with that, as I couldn't crop the picture down to the size that I wanted because the crop box wouldn't allow me to make it smaller, I have been told that the iMovie crop setting must lock itself to 16:9, meaning that it won't let me crop down an image even further. This explains the problem that I was having. 

By having the option to add effects onto my work during post-production, I worked around this during the shooting process, as I knew from my research during pre-production that I would be adding the black and white effect to the narrative footage once I was up to the editing stages. By knowing this, I was knew that if I had footage that was too dark/too light, such as during the woods scene when the teenage girl is drinking whiskey. It is far too dark; however with the iMovie settings, I was able to lighten it up:

Although the footage is still quite dark, before I lightened it up you were unable to see the actress at all:

As you can see, you can't even see the actress as the light was completely blocked out by the trees; however by having the access to iMovie settings where I could change the brightness and contrast of the footage, I was able to brighten it up so much so that you could see the actress. 

I also changed some of the gradings on some of the footage of the artist when she was in the woods to ensure that the continuity was solid throughout and that there were no different colours within the trees, as it depended where the sun was shining as to what colours where bright/dark within the woods. 

So by having the option to manipulate the settings within iMovie was a great help, as it made the filming easier as I knew that I could change things during post-production and didn't have to worry so much about them during the filming stages.

Also, in my question 4 evaluation video, I talked about how i'd used blogger within my project and how it'd been a huge help within the evaluation stages as I was able to go back through my blog and look at the progress that i'd made since the research and planning stages, to the production and final stages. Linking also with the audience feedback, blogger also helped as people were able to comment straight onto my blog posts and my teacher was able to give me direct feedback onto different blog posts, which was extremely helpful in terms of gathering audience feedback quick and easily. I also used email, Yahoo, to send out my audience feedback questions to gather feedback on different rough cuts of my video and I also sent out my advert and digipack through email to gather feedback on those. For the feedback that I gathered on the text effects for the front cover of the album, I added the comparisons of the texts into a powerpoint and then attached the powerpoint to an email to then sent out and gather feedback on them - Text Comparisons.

I was also able to attach links to my blog into an email to allow the audience to click straight onto a blog post and comment on how they thought my advert looked etc:

Overall, you can see here how I have used email to gather my audience feedback, but also how helpful it has been in terms of being able to gather the feedback extremely quick and easily; which has been a great piece of technology to use. 

This post explains and expands on the video that I have previous posted (Question 4) and finalises my answer to question 4 of the evaluation questions.