This essay is all about Interactive Media and the kind of platforms that can play it. There are many types of platforms for which media can run off, these include a few of the basics such as internet, DVD and CD, also media can run off other, more rarely found platforms, such as a media kiosk, these kiosks are usually found in towns and cities for tourist use. There is one outside tower ramparts shopping centre. Other platforms that can play it are things such as “click through TV” which uses the “red button” commonly found on sky, the TV broadcast company. Other such platforms include email attachments and mobile devices which includes; Mobile Phones IPODS and MP3 Players. Examples of email attachments are the infamous “Will it blend?” series in which the company “Blendtec” have hired a crazy scientist actor person too blend things in their Blenders. Without realising it, you can actually see that the videos are actually adverts in which the company have put round in discretion to make people watch them and think oh my god that blender is really powerful. This means that through the uses of interactive media and without spending to much money on advertisement, the company have broadcasted their name and product over the internet and are always referred to as doing crazy things such as blending iPhones, glow sticks and even crowbars. This in all is known as viral marketing.
Below are a couple of examples of BlendTec's adventures;
Another use of interactive media is user generated content, usually done to show the individuals skills. This is usually inspired by another form in media such as guitar hero, a console game which allows people of all ages to pretend they are in a rock band by playing the notes shown to the player at the bottom of the screen.
Below is a version of guitar hero, but done in a different style.
Another almost unstoppable use of interactive media is the games console which also ties into cinematic trailers, these trailers, market the games and movies out to the public causing mass rush to acquire the product when it’s made available to the public.
The good thing about this way of advertising is that it’s quick and easy, plus it’s always in the public’s face, it could be blaring off the radio or off the TV but its still there. The only real problem with it is that it costs a bomb to keep it on the TV for long, the adverts or trailers, take up time slots on the TV rotor, which means that they have to pay a large fee to have that time space, and usually it’s not much longer than about 2 minutes. This means it only has a very short amount of time to have an impact on the public. Below is another example, this is the Assassins Creed 2 launch trailer.
This trailer alone sent the launch sales rocketing up, the public had been waiting for the second game to arrive and when it finally did, this trailer was put all over the TV. The sales immediately rocketed. Also opening videos are an important part to the gaming industry; they gear up the consumer ready for the game itself. Examples of opening videos are on this page below.
Video is used in many interactive media technologies. These mainly consist of the basics like the file formats which all mean different things;
• MPEG – A format which has been developed to be able to play on almost anything.
• AVI – Audio Video Interleave, created by Microsoft, allows continued synchronous playback.
• MOV – A file extension to apply the highest quality
• WMV – Developed by Microsoft to run on anything except on specialist programmes.
Before the video can be viewed, it has to be streamed and downloaded, this means that the content is taken from the internet and encoded into your computer. After this media is done, it has to go through something called a CODEC, this piece of technology is a “digital DataStream decoder” meaning that the content may actually be viewed. If your PC runs on a higher graphics and video card than what the average PC does, or if your home Computer is an Apple Mac, then the content may want to be compressed by a video compressor. This allows the media to operate on a much higher quality than before. Video compressing goes up in hours, according to how many hours the compressor can compress. MPEG-2 can compress 2 hours of footage, where as MPEG-4 can do 4 hours and so on and so forth.
Once media has been compressed, it will have to be played on a station that can deal with the;
• Frame rate
• Screen resolution
• File size
• The picture ratio
The stations that are available to play media are the following;
• DVD – Digital Video Disk, able to contain 6 times more data than a CD.
• IPlayer – an extension of Real Player
• QuickTime – Media Player able to handle various media types
• Windows Media Player – a digital music library developed by Microsoft.
These stations allow media to be played and streamed according to the file it can handle. If there is media that it cannot then the player will freeze or will not play the content to start with.
How video is used today.
Video today is probably a one of the central aspects to our lives. It provides us with many things such as news, entertainment, education and information. These are all played through different means.
Films and film trailers – films and film trailers are there to entertain. They are created in a variety of genres each to fit everyone’s own personal tastes. Films also can inform and educate people in some ways, for example, films like “the day after tomorrow” or “Dante’s peak” can inform and educate the people what is really happening to the earth, and what could happen if not dealt with (the day after tomorrow). Films also sometimes provide a subtle message which sometimes can change someone’s life. This could be shown from films like “pretty woman” obviously her being a hooker at the start, and then not being one at the end. People like this have changed their lives because they have been inspired by films.
Music videos – music videos provide a very deep picture into what the artists are trying to say throughout their song. This means that usually, depending on what the song is about, the video will be quite powerful in terms of shots and sequences. For example, Linkin park wrote a song called “what I've done” which was about all the bad things humanity have done to the world. The video showed the exact picture of what the song wanted to be. It showed bombs falling, the Nazi party, nuclear warheads, Africans dying, the world basically being torn apart. This is supposed to portray a message to the world telling them to stop what they are doing, and I believe it’s worked slightly.
Viral marketing – this method of marketing is quite discreet and very deceitful in my opinion, but nevertheless effective. Many of the viral marketing today is either posted on you tube or posted into your emails. Above as you’ve seen is “will it blend” which is a very successful viral marketing sequence.
Friday 5 February 2010
Evaluation for the finished music video
Looking back at the music video today I have realised that as much as I thought that it wasn’t going to work, I was severely mistaken.
During the production I had doubts, Mike and Tom weren’t taking things as seriously as I was, and this angered me. All Mike wanted to do was prat around and Tom didn’t seem to have the will to stop him, in the end I started to loose my temper, and started telling Mike that if he didn’t get his act together, then he wouldn’t receive full marks because to be quite frank, apart from act, Mike had not taken any form of role in pre-production, the Work he completed was not to the standard I thought it would have been so I decided to (stupidly) redo all of the work myself to achieve my own grades, this has proved to be my undoing as I've handed the work in late and so Im not sure how my tutors will act on this. In the end I took on most of the roles, I was mostly director and editor with a lot of my own pre-production thrown in, tom was cameraman and mike was (supposed to be) pre-production. After we shot the footage and came back to college to start editing, we were greeted with an extreme annoyance. The camera lens on the days we filmed must have been dirty because the footage was all pixilated which meant we had dodgy footage. We were all rather annoyed at this and were all thinking about giving up due to the fact that it meant that we would all have to reshoot. I showed the footage to my tutor who commented saying that it was not a disaster and that the pixilation was good because it made us look more like we were turning into the game, the game of course being assassins creed, has many areas when the game pixilates and glitches, which we thought about for a minute and then realised that he was right and that in a really twisted way, it worked!
In the end once the video was completely edited Mike lost his tape. This meant that we could log our clips and put them into log sheets. I was very annoyed at mike and made him sit in front of the Mac and log the clips from the raw footage on the mac. Mike didn’t take kindly to this and hardly spoke to me before I left. Also Tom tried to take part in a lot of the work, but constantly asked me for help when doing the paperwork because he didn’t know what he was doing and to be honest we had both given up on mike because he had hardly done anything and seemed to always be pratting around with Perry.
In the end once the video was completely edited we saw instantly that the unintentional pixilation worked very well. It seriously made us look like we were turning into assassin’s creed and I Loved it so much, it gave our video the independence that it needed and it was perfect and I couldn’t have asked for more.
Also I Love the way I edited it with the stunts that the assassin pulled off in the video and used my imagination to combine them with the shots of me and mike running around looking like idiots. The only problem which occurred was the fact that we didn’t have second assassin’s creed video which if we had done then it would have had more contrast because the video is set in the evening in Venice, which would have given more depth, also if would have meant we would have had to shoot at night and now I look back at it I wish we had. If we were to do it again I think that I would do just that and include more footage of the assassin and give more feel into the video also, I would lengthen the music with some more fills and maybe try and think of some lyrics that would go with it.
Below is the assassin’s creed 2 opening video to show what we could have achieved if we had though of it at the time.
During the production I had doubts, Mike and Tom weren’t taking things as seriously as I was, and this angered me. All Mike wanted to do was prat around and Tom didn’t seem to have the will to stop him, in the end I started to loose my temper, and started telling Mike that if he didn’t get his act together, then he wouldn’t receive full marks because to be quite frank, apart from act, Mike had not taken any form of role in pre-production, the Work he completed was not to the standard I thought it would have been so I decided to (stupidly) redo all of the work myself to achieve my own grades, this has proved to be my undoing as I've handed the work in late and so Im not sure how my tutors will act on this. In the end I took on most of the roles, I was mostly director and editor with a lot of my own pre-production thrown in, tom was cameraman and mike was (supposed to be) pre-production. After we shot the footage and came back to college to start editing, we were greeted with an extreme annoyance. The camera lens on the days we filmed must have been dirty because the footage was all pixilated which meant we had dodgy footage. We were all rather annoyed at this and were all thinking about giving up due to the fact that it meant that we would all have to reshoot. I showed the footage to my tutor who commented saying that it was not a disaster and that the pixilation was good because it made us look more like we were turning into the game, the game of course being assassins creed, has many areas when the game pixilates and glitches, which we thought about for a minute and then realised that he was right and that in a really twisted way, it worked!
In the end once the video was completely edited Mike lost his tape. This meant that we could log our clips and put them into log sheets. I was very annoyed at mike and made him sit in front of the Mac and log the clips from the raw footage on the mac. Mike didn’t take kindly to this and hardly spoke to me before I left. Also Tom tried to take part in a lot of the work, but constantly asked me for help when doing the paperwork because he didn’t know what he was doing and to be honest we had both given up on mike because he had hardly done anything and seemed to always be pratting around with Perry.
In the end once the video was completely edited we saw instantly that the unintentional pixilation worked very well. It seriously made us look like we were turning into assassin’s creed and I Loved it so much, it gave our video the independence that it needed and it was perfect and I couldn’t have asked for more.
Also I Love the way I edited it with the stunts that the assassin pulled off in the video and used my imagination to combine them with the shots of me and mike running around looking like idiots. The only problem which occurred was the fact that we didn’t have second assassin’s creed video which if we had done then it would have had more contrast because the video is set in the evening in Venice, which would have given more depth, also if would have meant we would have had to shoot at night and now I look back at it I wish we had. If we were to do it again I think that I would do just that and include more footage of the assassin and give more feel into the video also, I would lengthen the music with some more fills and maybe try and think of some lyrics that would go with it.
Below is the assassin’s creed 2 opening video to show what we could have achieved if we had though of it at the time.
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