In all my blogs, research, planning, construction and evaluation: Slideshare was used throughout the project to upload Word documents of the script and as well as our general work on PowerPoint files. This was useful as it meant that group based work could be more easily shared by using the embed code, and as an alternative to USB keys making sure there was somewhere secure to store continuous copies of our work as we went along somewhere online that would accessible from both school and home networks.
In the construction of our music video: We used a Panasonic HD camera to film the video. This was an upgrade from the standard MiniDV 250 camera which we had used the year before, and the quality was noticeable in the footage we had when uploaded onto the camera and viewed through iMovie HD – it was also used to take stills of our video in the making and behind the scenes to show our construction in our project.
A group photobucket was created with a custom URL to make it easier to remember where we had stored our work at photobucket.com/forkingandcountry. I found this site useful in uploading the stills of the video in the making to the construction blog, and to upload the stock footage used where it was accessible to everyone online from home, school, etc. I also posted the location shots on here and made a slide show of it to put on my research blog.
Youtube was used to research different music videos in the folk rock genre, to take screenshots of and help in the analysis of the genre. I also found Pitchfork.com to be helpful in researching different album covers, both front and backs, which was essential in the Digipak research and analysis to help in the formation of our own Digipak. I also used Youtube for my evaluation blog as iMovie HD was being extremely slow to load or sync files, I used Youtube to use the mac's own webcam to record the people for my audience feedback speaking to the camera.
In my research blog: I used the sound recorder program on my Windows Vista to record audio clips in place of written work in some instances e.g. analysing the results of the target audience research. I then uploaded the audio files to Dropbox.com in the public folder so it would be open to anyone to listen, and linked the files in a blogger post. This was done as unfortunately I found in embedding the audio file as it was to listen to on the blog would either not show up, or start automatically no matter how I changed the code – and this was a problem as I had more than one audio clip, so I chose to link them via Dropbox instead.
The program iMovieHD was used to edit the video and I found it extremely helpful in the construction of our video. It was more convenient as it was suited to the Mac computers that we were using, and had a wide variety of effects for the video which we found useful i.e. the colour editing so that the guitar and leaves of the footage would be red, the sepia tone of the narrative footage, the speed and pacing effects, the audio splicing and so on which all helped to keep the music and footage in sync as well as be presented the way we wanted it.
The most useful thing in the construction of the video whilst I did the sound editing was that I could adjust the audio levels of sound and pitch, making sure by making them louder in quiet parts and easing the end of the song quietly into a gradual end. Another useful thing I found was that for parts of our performance footage where the singer wasn't singing entirely in synch, the speed could be altered on iMovie HD to slow him down so that the shape of his mouth would match the words that were being sung on the mp3 which helped the continuity in our music video overall.
I used SoundCloud to upload audio clips of myself speaking for my target audience research analysis in my planning blog. For some reason although I was able to embed audio clips straight into blogger with code last year, this year the code would not work properly and kept starting automatically. I researched many different codes and sites e.g. myflashfetish to put in my audio clips and had almost given up and just put in links to the audio clips when I finally discovered SoundCloud at the last minute which was incredibly helpful to break up all the text I had on my blog with a different form.
I used Dropbox throughout my research, construction, planning and evaluation stages by uploading my voice clips onto it for safe keeping while I tried to find a way to embed them onto blogger as well as general files, e.g. the mp3 file For King and Country so that the original file without being edited wouldn't be lost. If something went wrong whilst doing the sound editing in iMovie HD then I could always go back to my documents saved on Dropbox and find the saved mp3 and download it again, reversing any potential mistakes. Slideshare on many occasions would upload files too slowly so I often used Dropbox to upload any necessary powerpoint files or screenshots so I could continue the work I did in classes at home.
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