Evaluation

In what way does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Our music video contains many typical conventions of a real media product. When looking at Goodwin’s points, our video relates to the points well.
Our video uses intertextuality as part of our video is inspired by the music videos of The Midnight Beast and Tim Minchen.This makes our video meet the conventions of a realistic music video.
Voyeurism is used in our video as you watch our spoof political party as they make an election video using a variety of shots and transitions that give you an insite into the characters whilst keeping in relation to the music and lyrics. I intentionally picked 'house party' as it had an upbeat fast paced rhythm which is extremely popular and can be easily marketed in the current enviroment. we are constantly bringing the lyrics and the video together through the choice of shots used in time with the lyrics as we are literally preforming the lyrics in the video. with have done this also with the music not just the lyrics for example in our close up shot of our hands clapping it is perfectly intime with the claps in the music. doing this makes the music video more visually intresting as the audience will watch the video and be able to understand the lyrics i believe this shows great understanding of how linking the lyrics and music to the visuals is. The genre characteristics we have used have stuck by the common genre characteristics of indie/rock. We have used an urban landscape for some parts of the video which is a usual to see in some indie/rock videos. Other aspects such as the instruments and effects used are what is expected to be seen in a indie/rock video. Therefore we have followed the conventions tightly. We have sold the group in the particular way in that it goes against a usual convention of indie/rock music videos as we’ve made the whole group the main focus not just one main singer in particualar.
Furthermore, we have sold the group in a quirky way to make it attract the target audience which is normal in an indie/rock video as this style is familiar in this of genre therefore it’s realistic to the conventions. we also challenge the conventions as our video doesn’t contain gig footage or backstage footage which is sometimes expected in this genre, we didn’t do this as we felt it wasn’t necessary and didn’t stop making our video obvious it was an indie/rock song.
Our Digi pack cover and magazine advert also fits quite well with the conventions of other media products. I feel the layout of our digi pack is similar to usual media products as we have the common aspects such as age certificate, release date, record label company, etc which makes the digi pack appear as professional and gives information any other similar media products would. The colour themes in both the digi pack and magazine advert is a typical colour range in our genres conventions as they’re bold and fairly masculine making it specific to the usual target audience of a alternative rock genre.

How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary tasks?

We have used different ideas to combine our products together so they take effect as a while. All the products have matching colours as the theme colour of the digi pack, magazine advert and music video all use oranges, green, black and white as the music video has some footage which is in black and white. Doing this made it easy for viewer’s to realise they come in a set and all relate. The images on digi pack and magazine advert strongly relate to the video as they show the two main members of the group who are heavily featured. This emphasises to viewers that they are the main focus as the digi pack and magazine advert, they are what the video focus around. Having pictures of footage from the band in the music video on the back of the digi pack, allows viewers to have insight on what’s in the video and what they’d be watching in the video. It also gives people an idea of what genre the video is by the costumes and surroundings in the pictures.
It also provides intertextuality as the pictures we have used are mirror images of pictures that the party leaders have used in there elcetion campaignes. Furthermore, the titles of the artist’s name and the name of the song on both the digi pack and magazine advert are fairly large which gives emphasis to them to make people recognise the artist easily and strike out to viewers. This also makes him memorable which therefore sells the artist better.
On all three products we have the group wearing the same costume; this makes the artists recognisable to viewers and sells all the products as a whole and usually the most noticeable thing on these products is the artists therefore people observe them first so people can easily see the three products come as a set. Our products working together attract the same audience as the style of all three is similar. The costume, colours, font style hint the genre of the video making people who have an interest in indie/rock music have an interest in our video by the choices we have used in our magazine advert and digi pack. The font styles we have used on the digi pack and magazine advert are bold, solid and don’t have a fussy style. This style allows people to realise the genre as the fonts reinforce the kind of music the video represents.

What have you learnt from audience feedback?

Having an audience give us feedback on our video after the rough draft helped us majorly to see what people wanted to see and what they expected and helped us see what we needed to change to improve. We changed quite a few things since the rough cut which was mainly down to the audience feedback.
From the feedback we received, we discovered people enjoyed our transitions, 'transitions between scenes were well done and the effects we used to slow and speed up the video in time with the music'
After the rough cut I feel we felt motivated to keep our smooth transitions standard up when we continued editing after the rough cut feedback. Another aspect I learnt from the audience feedback was how important it was to keep the audience entertained throughout. When we started filming we made sure we had used a variety of locations which was fairly simple as we had the artist walking through several streets but when it came to editing we made sure it cut through all the locations we used and had the footage move quickly so people were occupied throughout. The audience emphasised to us that the video needed to engaging and keep them entertained so we added as many cuts, transitions, footage layouts as possible without it getting too fussy and complicated. I felt that had a good amount to keep the audience amused without the video becoming overly busy. Our audience told us that we sold the artist well, ‘The artist looked like he belonged in the video.’ This made us realise that we accomplished what we wanted of people understanding the style and personality of the main artist that we wanted to portray. This taught me that getting the costume, style, movement and what we made the main artist do in the video and helped us show the artist exactly how we wanted to get across the genre. This made me realise that we made our idea of the representation of the artist work.
Overall, I learnt that re filming areas we need to improve on helped us develop our work to make it appreciated by the audience and re filming makes you realise how much you can actually advance your video.

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

I used a number of different media technologies during the whole process of creating our media products. I used Windows Live Movie Maker to edit all our music video. Once I had roughly edited the video to make sure I had each clip in the right place with the right timing I tried out some effects to try and make the video look more professional and visually interesting. including a cinematic introduction feature the groups name and the song title. I added some fades to some of the clips to try and make them run smoother to fit with the timings. Also, I put more than one piece of footage on a clip to make a change in the video so people don’t watch the same continuous pattern of footage. Doing this helped liven up the video so there was variety in what people watch. We used the speed control on final cut to speed up some of the footage in some areas to give the video an upbeat and rapid feel which is usual in an indie/rock themed song.
We used Photoshop on the construction of our digi pack and magazine advert. Firstly, for the pictures of the group on these products we had to wear the same outfit from the music video. We changed the colour theme of orange, green, black and white on the magazine advert and digi pack which we edited on Photoshop to get the same style from the music video.i was already familar with this technology after using it is my photography AS level course.
We used blogger to record all our research, ideas, inspirations, etc which allowed us to blog to keep track of our development and to communicate all the ideas we had with our research. This became very useful because it helped us when it came to editing our video as well. For example, on the blog we posted things like our storyboard, call lists and shot lists which helped when we came to edit because we were able to organise our shots in to the right order so it made it simpler when we came to filming. We posted a few videos and screen shots of music videos that we then analysed on the blog which helped us research ideas and how to evaluate videos so we could take them into consideration for our video.