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

In the research and planning stages we used a video camera with a stills function to take location shots when we considering which locations to use for our video. The camera wasn't exactly the best (for example, it sometimes had trouble focusing properly if objects were placed near in front of it as well as shallow focusing and deep focusing) but in the end we managed to do the tasks we aimed to do. As for the construction stage, the video camera was vital.

The video camera was an important piece of equipment as we used it to record the footage we needed to create our media product. An issue we had with the camera is that when we were filming the fridge magnet scene, we turned the camera on its side when it was recording (in order to capture all of the footage we were recording) but when we reviewed the image during the uploading stage, we found out that the footage had been recorded diagonally (even though at the time, the display on the camera told us otherwise). We retook the fridge magnet scene. Like in the construction stage, the video camera was useful. The camera was useful in the sense that we used it to record our video feedback. There were no issues.

For the video we used the green screen for most of our lip syncing scenes. The green screen was useful because it allowed us to film scenes and then afterwards we were able to change the background colour of the scenes with whatever colour(s) we chose (which was a convenience as we didn't have to film in front of many different coloured backgrounds). This was particularly useful for us as that is what we did frequently in our video.

This greenscreen is one of the media technologies we used for our video.

Due to the fact that we used a greenscreen in our video, it meant that we had to use cameras which were able to capture and work with the greenscreen effect. The 3 cameras (which were in 'mulitple-camera setup') we used to record the greenscreen scenes were called JVC GY HDMI 251s (with studio attachments). We used the studio attachments such as the Tricaster Video FX Switcher - the software used to operate the cameras, to view the footage taken by the cameras.

These are the JVC GY HDMI 251s cameras. we used to utilise and capture the greenscreen effect in our scenes.

This lens on the camera is what gives the camera its ability to record in and capture the greenscreen effect.

Like the previous cameras mentioned, Final Cut Pro (FCP) was an important tool for the group. FCP was vital for us because it was the software we used to edit our footage. FCP provided us with countless techniques that we could use on our video (such as the transitions (like 'cross dissolve'), effects (like' soft focus'), speed changing, image imposing on a video and others which are too many to include).

Double click the picture above to view it in a larger size.

Another piece of software we used was MPEG Streamclip. We used MPEG Streamclip because the format of the recorded (when uploaded onto the Mac) footage was in a format (.MOV) which FCP could not read meaning that we would not have been able to edit the footage. Therefore MPEG Streamclip, was used to convert the footage into an MPEG format (a format which FCP is able to read) enabling us to use FCP to edit it.
The hardware platoform on which we edited our footage through FCP was an iMac. The iMac was ideal for editing as it had adequate processing power to edit our footage as well as being designed and built specifically for editing video/film footage. Also, FCP will only work on an iMac so we had to use it.

This is the iMac setup we had. On the left is the iMac and on the right is the display monitor which we used to view playing footage.