Question 4

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

New media technologies are and were vital in the research, planning and evaluation stages of our product, many were ones that we had used before but some were ones that we had to learn how to use.

Research and Planning
When we first began this project, we were looking for a song that was suitable for us to create a music video for we browsed websites such as Hype M and YouTube as well as our personal music libraries on iTunes. After gathering a list from everyone, a YouTube playlist was created so that everyone could access the songs and listen through them in more detail.

[screen shot of our YouTube playlist and Hype M]

In between our meetings during school we communicated through mobile phone texts and platforms such as Skype and Facebook. Texts were the ideal method of communication since not all of us had smartphones, but when the group was online we used Skype since it also had the webcam option and that way we were able to show each other costumes and props that we had.

[screen shot of Skype and FB chat windows]

For the research of our target audience we used YouTube's statistics option which allowed people to see the demographics of the viewers. This was particularly useful to us because it meant we could see just who had listened to the original song in terms of age and gender and base our target audience off this information. We researched real artist's websites online, picking up on what was conventional for artist's websites, how they were marketed and what ideas we could use for our own artist website. After we had decided on our concept, a moodboard was created using images found online and Photoshop CS5.1.

[screen shot of YouTube's statistics thing and artist's websites and Photoshop making mood board]

Construction
Music Video
to complete

Album Cover
We shot our promotional photos for the album using a Canon 5D camera MII in a Media classroom using four floor lights, two with soft boxes lighting the the front of the artists and two lighting the white paper backdrop in order to minimise shadows.

The main new media technology required for this stage was Adobe Photoshop CS5.1, which both of us the group were familiar with, however there were some feature that we had not used before. We used a skin smoothing action tool, the patch tool and the refine edge tool in order to touch up the photos for the cover.

[screen shot of photoshop working on album cover]

Here is a short screen recording showing how I smoothed the skin. I did this since real celebrity photo shoot photos would be edited to make the person's skin look smoother and to remove any imperfections.
[video]

Here is another screen recording I took to show how I cut the background away from Tasha, ready to digitally paste another background behind her.
[video]

Website
Using a free HTML5 based website hosting site called Wix, we were able to create an interactive artist website. Although I had some experience with HTML coding, I had not used Wix before so this was a new experience for me. Despite this, we picked up the process quickly because Wix was very simple to use and there were many options available, such as embedding videos, images, hyperlinks, sound files and more onto our website, as well as being able to customise background, titles, fonts etc to suit our artist's needs. Although there were some problems that we encountered when using §, such as work not being saved if more than one person was editing a site at a time.

[screen shot of Wix opened]

Our artist website became the hub of everything related to E.G.O., it had links to all the other platforms that they were connected to, an online store to buy E.G.O. products, a gallery with photos from the promo shoot, all the tour dates along with links to purchase tickets, a page telling the story of how E.G.O. came to be and a fan page where fans can interact with other fans as well as upload their photos showing support. It aimed to make E.G.O. easy to discover and learn about so that the audience would buy into the lifestyle that E.G.O. promoted.


Since we decided that we wanted to market E.G.O. across multiple platforms, we created not only a Wix website, but also a Twitter and a Facebook page. The Twitter feed posted similar news as the newsfeed on the website, but shorter and less formal, targeting the 16-24 year old fans that used the site.

[screenshot of twitter + FB page]


Evaluation
In order to get our video out there for friends, family and the wider web community to see, we uploaded it onto YouTube, but we knew that wouldn't be enough so we promoted it through multiple platforms, the main one being Facebook.

[screen shot of promoting on FB]

In addition to asking friends and family to watch the video, we also asked them to answer a short survey hosted on a website called SurveyMonkey. We did this so that we could see not only what sort of people were watching our video but also what they thought about it. Overall we gathered over 40 responses and thanks to the global nature of the internet there was feedback from all over the world coming in through SurveyMonkey. Another very useful feature of SurveyMonkey is that it could draw up rough visual representations, such as bar charts, of the information it was given.

[survey monkey screenshot]

WhatIsMyIPAddress.com is a website that pinpointed where a survey response was answered from and we discovered viewers from Ghana, Uganda, Kenya, Colorado and Michigan in USA and from all across the UK.

[Screenshots of whatismyipaddress.com with responses typed in]