In order to be successful in the research and planning stages of production we used multiple software techniques to gain understanding of our brief and ultimately meet our audience needs.
The blog for the project formed a backbone for us to demonstrate the new tehcnologies we encompassed. We used it to show the progress we made during the months of planning and constuction.
We created our own content on the blog, which was very useful when referring back to our research in the initial stages of construction. By using as many of the features on Blogger.com as possible we made our work presentation visually interesting. For example, when uploading progression videos onto Youtube.com we could stream the videos back onto our blogs, converging the software tehcnologies and taking advantage of the efficiancy and ease of Media 2.0. The blogging system is open to the public to explore, reaching a widespread audience.
The first posts onto the blog were the presentation of our research. We used an array of software and websites to overview our research including gaining statistics from questionnaires from Zoomerang.com and analysing the data by creatng graphs and pie charts in Excel which told us in simple terms what the audience wanted from the coursework.
The next stage of production was the construction of the music video and ancillary texts. For this part of production, which was by far the most time consuming but exciting stage, we used Final Cut Express and Adobe Photoshop CS5. These programs are incredibly sophistacated and used by professional film makers and graphic designers when creating texts. Although I had previous experience with Photoshop (making the ancillary texts a far simpler process), using Final Cut Express proved a demanding learning curb for both me and my partner. However towards to end of production we were able to achieve professional looking text including advanced techniques such as overlaying shots, split screening and colour effects. By being comfotable with this technology we achieved a far higher quality of work, getting close to the standards of mainstream music videos on the market today. If we had no knowledge of the software in hand, creating the product we had invisioned when storyboarding would have been impossible, and probably infuriating.
The biggest corpus of new media technologies used in the process was in fact in the evaluation stages. We used social networking sites to obtain audience feedback from our piers and more importantly the general public. The target audience for our production was the 17-25 year olds, which appropriately enough was the main audience our video was shown to on facebook. Because of this, the feedback we got for the video was positive (proving we were successful). However in order to gain a more comprehensive overview of audience feedback we posted the final video on Youtube.com, where it is possible to see exactly who watched our video. This was important when assessing whether our predicted target audience was in fact the demographic portrayed by the statistics on youtube. Turns out we were correct when forecasting 17-25 year olds would be more appealed by it.
Posting the video on youtube gave us great statistics, however there was no point in doing so if nobody knew it was there. To combat this, we streamed the video onto Twitter.com, a more general social networking site, which gave us brilliant audience feedback. This was the best way to publicise the video, even more so when users 'retweeted' the post to their own followers, uplscaling the audience.
By taking advantage of new media technologies both online and offline, we were successful in creating a media product which met audiences needs and would potentially be a good publication for institutions.
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