Problems with our products that we worked through

During the making of our three products we faced many challenges that slowed us down, but we overcame them in different ways.

While attempting to film our music video footage in an 'urban' location, we found that the tunnels filled with graffiti that we were using on Newmarket Road in Cambridge were a hotspot for people riding bikes. Many times, we would be in the middle of shooting a scene for our video and a bike would come right through the middle of our shot and ruin it. To overcome this problem, we used short clips that we had managed to film before bikes came through, which worked out well in the end because we wanted our video to seem choppy, and also we had to ask a few people trying to come through the tunnel if they would mind waiting just a minute while we finished shooting a scene.

It was quite a weird experience being on full view in front of many passers by and singing along to a song in front of them while looking really overdressed, but we found that we had to just get over this problem and just go for it and act out our video dramatically, otherwise our video would have looked like we put no effort in and our acting would have been boring for viewers to watch.

While editing our video on Final Cut Express we faced technical problems such as fitting the sound up perfectly to our lip syncing so that it looked as professional as possible. We resolved this issue by using the method of marking our video clip with an 'M' where we first opened our mouth to start singing and marking our backing music with an 'M' where the lyrics we needed started and then syncing up the two 'M' markers to each other.

We also found that while creating our magazine advert on photoshop, we could not open a file of an image straight into photoshop as it would fill up the entire page and not allow us to use a background with it. To resolve this we opened the background image in photoshop first and then we opened the image that we wanted to place over the top of the background in a new photoshop file, and dragged this image across into our first photoshop file on top of our background. We then had to use the editing tools edit>transform and then hold down the shift key to resize our image so that it was the exact size we wanted it to be.

Another problem we encountered was that as half of our group maded the magazine advert while the other half made the digipak, we finished them and then realised there weren't many strong links between the two. To resolve this issue we then changed our background to use the same colour dusty blue background in our album advert as we had in our digipak, we then added in some more graffiti images into the background of our digipak as there was more images like this in our magazine advert.

Overall I think that we did well in overcoming our various problems throughout the stages of making our products and we learned from each mistake and how to correct it so that it did not happen again.