'How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?'

Here is an image I made on Photoshop showing all the physical and digital equipment we used.

This includes an HD camera, a Mac G5 computer (along with a mouse, keyboard and screen) with the programs Final Cut Express, After Effects and Photoshop on it. These pieces of software and hardware have influenced our project very heavily. Using these we were able to create lots of effects such as editing the blue screen footage, and cutting the clips (which allows us to cut to the beat and use different sections of footage whenever we wished to). If technology were not so advanced we would be met with a series of problems such as:

- The special effects in our video from After Effects could not exist, there would be no such thing as blue screening, colour correction, overlapping effects or typography. As a result of this our video would suffer. We wouldn't have had any of the blue screening, layering or fading effects.

- Without social networking such as MySpace, Facebook and Bebo, many of us would not have originally been able to contact the band they wished to make a music video for. Meaning they would have to use a local band, like ours. We would also have had to advertise our music video using posters or leaflets. Producing these would cost money where as advertising online is completely free and is an easy way to quickly communicate with your friends. Being your friends, they would be more likely to partake in helping distribute and making the videos.  For our video, our whole crowd was created by inviting people on Facebook to come.

- If we didn't have Final Cut we would have to use the 'crash editing' technique. You do this by using two tapes and cutting from these instead, completely skipping the use of editing programs which would make life a lot more difficult and would make the video less effective. We would also have to me a lot more selective with our filming, meaning we would miss some of the better footage.

- The HD cameras are also much more effective than the DV cameras. They produce a much higher quality of video improving the overall look. Using DV cameras produces a much more grainy image quality.

- Using websites such as YouTube and Vimeo, we are able to broadcast the things we make to an enormous audience. It stops just being a local audience and immediately becomes viewable worldwide. If these websites didn't exist then we would have to show the video to a media producer/advertiser to get it public in any way. As well as leaflets, posters etc. that I mentioned earlier. Feedback can also be given in the form of YouTube comments and Facebook feedback, rather than us having to show it to an audience and them to log their feedback.