Evaluation Questions

Evaluation Questions

1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Our media product uses several conventions of real media products. For example, we use bright colours and modern clothing, things that are often used in indie-rock style music videos such as ours. Many artists have a particular trademark item of clothing or instrument that they use. We have given our main character (John) a hat that you see him wearing in most shots. We challenge the convention of the more serious music video though. We wanted our video to be more fun and quirky to watch and, although it does tell a story throughout, it is also interesting and funny to watch.

When we initially discussed our idea we talked about how best to use conventions of music videos in our own project. A common music video convention is that there is a relationship between lyrics and visuals. By listening to the song we wanted to use we found particular lines that would be good to link, for example, on the line, “I had my first beer too” we had a shot of our main character drinking beer.

Another music video convention is that there will be lots of close-up shots of the artist, often including a particular visual style or item that the artist is associated with. In our music video we made sure that there were several shots where you only saw our main character singing without anything going on in the background. This meant that the audience had to focus in on the character making our artist more recognisable as a result.

We did the same for both our ancillary tasks. The magazine advert shows a side-on view of our main character where, although you can’t actually see his face, you see his trademark hat. The digipak features a front-on shot of our main character (as usual wearing the hat) so that this visual link continues to be made and so that the artist become more recognisable to people.

A further music video convention is the convention of looking through or at something. We used this in both our music video and in the ancillary task. In our music video we have used it when our main character was looking in the mirror. We placed the camera so that we could see John’s reflected face in the mirror while he sang the lyrics. In the magazine advert we also used the notion of looking. In the picture John is looking away from the camera and it almost looks like he is actually looking at the, “Too Famous to get Fully Dressed” title. As the audience you find yourself drawn into looking along his line of sight.

A convention of magazine adverts and digipaks is that they grab the attention of people who are just browsing through a magazine or along a row of CDs. We have done this by having large, bold titles on both of our products each in a particular colour – red and white. This reflects the red in the t-shirt worn by our main character and crates a further link between the character and the advertising for the artist.


2. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
I think that the combination of our main product and ancillary texts is very effective. Both clearly link as both feature pictures of John wearing the same clothes he wore in the music video including his hat, a key theme that I discussed in the previous question.

For our ancillary tasks we went out with the stills camera and did a photo shoot as we realised that if we tried to use screen grabs then the pictures would be really bad quality. Ironically most of the pictures that we actually used were ones that we took accidentally. For example, the image on the front cover of our Digipak was supposed to be John leaning against a post, however, the post fell over when he leaned on it leading to this picture. We thought it looked quite lively and interesting and had much more ‘soul’ than any of the staged pictures we had done. This we thought would catch the eye of people looking to buy the digipak as it is a fun image that keeps with the unpredictable nature of our video. This also represents our artist as a fun; modern and interesting person and helps people connect the artist with the indie genre that he performs in. Similarly, the image we used for our magazine advert was a ‘mess-about’ one taken as we were getting used to using the camera. Again, however, we felt it looked more natural and interesting than any of the staged photographs. The back cover of the digipak is designed as a play on the, “Too Famous to Get Fully Dressed” title.

The other images that we used on the back cover of the digipak are screen grabs from the music video so that people can see some of the content they will be buying and can get a feel for the music video. We choose these images for a couple of reasons. The image of John drinking is because it is an image linked to the lyrics of the song (“I had my first beer too”). The other two images are there to future connect the audience to the main character who is, as always, wearing his trademark hat. This would help our audience (15-23 year olds) connect with the character, as the audience would be able to see the character taking part in activities such as drinking or playing the guitar that people within our target audience would commonly do.

We linked all three products by making sure that all of them featured the hat that John wore in the music video. This means that people can link all the products together with the same artist and the hat can act as a trademark for the artist. Furthermore, by using modern, stylish clothes such as the hat and t-shirt we felt that our music video and ancillary products would connect well with our target audience of 15-23 year olds.

We have represented the artist as a stylish, happy-go-lucky type of person; again something that we feel would help enhance his appeal to our target audience as they would feel better able to connect with him than if he wore, for example, a leather jacket and cowboy hat. We have made sure that people know who the artist is because, apart from him, there are only a couple of extras in the video. He is the main character and does all the lip-synching showing the audience that he is the artist.


3. What have you learnt from your audience feedback?
After uploading our music video roughcut onto the blog we showed it to other people within our media class. They all watched the video and wrote some feedback on our blog for us to read, comment on and film when we filmed the additional material we needed. We showed it to people in our class because everyone is our class is aged 17-18 years old and therefore are the exact age of our target audience meaning that any feedback that they give would be exceptionally valuable to us as it would be, “from the horses’ mouth” and really up-to-date meaning that we could make our product genuinely interesting and attractive to people within our target age group.

From the audience feedback I learnt that we need to focus more on lip-synching than we had originally done. We realised that when doing lip-synching it is advisable to exaggerate the words you are singing because otherwise you can’t really see what is happening.

We also learnt that you need to keep the audience interested by varying the location or the story slightly so that it never gets too boring or predictable for the audience.

Being able to use our class as a sample group was a great opportunity. As I said in the last question, our target audience is 15-23 year olds. Most of the people in our class are 17-18 years old so well within our target range. This meant that we could get direct feedback from the type of people who would bee listening too, and watching, our music video and who would actually read our magazine advert and potentially buy the digipak.

Some specific peer feedback that we got was that we needed to film in more locations. From this we learnt that although our character might be doing different things, the audience would quickly get bored if the environment stayed the same. To remedy this, when we next went out filming we used different, new locations so that we would have more locations to use in our final version of the music video.

Another piece of feedback that we received was saying that instead of an all-male cast we could have had some females. From this we realised that maybe by having an all-male cast some females might feel like they couldn’t connect to the music video or the artist and that we were potentially alienating some people who could otherwise be fans of the artist. We tried to remedy this but unfortunately were not able to get a female cast member to re-film any scenes that meant that we had to leave the video as an all-male production.

A further piece of peer feedback that we received was that, “There are to many shots with the hat which did not link with the lyrics i.e its not a ski cap.” Although we already had made several lyrics to visual connections (the drinking beers and, “nothing better to do” scenes) the audience wanted more. We were tempted to re-film parts of the music video, however, as we had already established the trilby hat as our artist’s trademark we decided that it would be too confusing for the audience if he kept swapping hats every 20 seconds and the link between the main character and the trilby hat would fade away, something we didn’t want to happen.

We did, however, get a lot of positive feedback about how we had represented the indie genre well though our main character. Many of the reviews said that the way our main character was dressed, the way he acted, and the props he had (such as the guitar) fitted in perfectly with what they saw as the indie genre. This really pleased us as it showed that people in our target audience connected with the music video much better than we had actually hoped.


4. How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
In the planning and research stages we used the Internet to research real-life music videos, bands, digipaks, CDs and magazine adverts so that we could get some ideas for our own product and for the ancillary tasks. We used ‘Blogger’ to record any new ideas we had, to analysis music videos we had seen and liked so that we could help ourselves gain an overall idea of what we wanted in our own music video and other products. We also used blogger to keep people updated with our progress and most lessons we would upload something or at least make a short post saying what we had done that day and often what he were planning to do in the next lesson.

In the construction stage we used several new media technologies. First of all we used film and stills cameras to shoot our music video and to take pictures for the ancillary tasks. We used the computer programme “Finalcut” to edit our music video, to add the film to the soundtrack and we used things such as colour filters and screen transition effects to alter the appearance of our video and to make it different and interesting rather than just one long boring roll of film. We also used “Photoshop” on the Mac to design and make our ancillary tasks. We used the features on Photoshop to do things like give our text it’s own unique style (an inner and outer colour), too add coloured borders onto the screen grabs and to add effects such as picture distortion to the images again to give our digipak and magazine advert an original and interesting feeling.

For the evaluation stage we used blogger again to allow other people to see our finished projects and to comment on them. We used a film camera to make a short film where we answered all of our evaluation questions that we then uploaded onto the computer and are using Finalcut to make it into a proper short film that we can then upload onto blogger for other people to see and evaluate.

The most useful new media technology that we used was undoubtedly the Internet. We used the Internet in almost every stage of production. This went from right at the beginning of the project when we used the Internet to look at other music videos and post them on our blog (Lily Allen’s ‘LDN’ for example) and using the Internet to look up the lyrics to our song so that we could actually mime it in the video. We then used the Internet to research magazine adverts and digipaks again so that we could formulate ideas about how to make our own magazine advert and digipak. We used the internet to store all he information about our project in our blog which included pictures, youtube videos, analysis of music videos by us and developing our own ideas in print.

We went right on through to at the very end where we now have our final music video and both ancillary tasks uploaded onto our blog. Without the internet we would have had to have spent a lot more time doing research as, for example, we would have needed to go to places like HMV to compare different digipaks in real life instead of just doing a ‘google search’ for them and comparing them in the media classroom.

We used several different website when we were on the Internet for our product. One of the first we used was ‘wikipedia’ which we used to find out about the actual artist – Butch Walker – and find out some more information about the indie genre and the conventions of music videos, magazine adverts and digipaks in general. This had a significant impact on our project as it gave us some “guidelines” to work to so that we would conform to some of the music video conventions.

We extensively used the website ‘youtube’ to watch real-life music videos of all sorts of different genres. This helped give us more ideas for our project, some of which we posted on our blog (the Lily Allen ‘LDN’ video for example) and allowed us to compare our ideas, and later our actual video, with the real thing.

We used the search engine ‘Google’ to search for general information about different music videos, bands, music genres and the like. We used it to find the websites for real artists in the indie genre like Razorlight and Feeder. From these real band websites we were able to look at music videos of the same genre as our own and compare how they conformed (or didn’t conform) to the music video conventions in Goodwin’s music video analysis rules.

Without the internet we probably would not have seen nearly as many examples of different music videos, digipaks and magazine adverts that in turn would have meant that our own products were not as developed and would not be as realistic as they are now.

Alex Rootes