Evaluation

Evaluation

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

I think that our music video is a good one for the indie genre. This is because it is different to the typical indie music video as they normally are based around a performance, with a bit of a storyline going on in the background. However we thought we could contrast this and did our music video based around the performance, with a bit of performance in there as well. We thought of an idea which was fairly similar to the Lily Allen video of ‘LDN’. However, instead of the one main character walking around with everything changing around them we would show a change in a nerdy boys life as to what set of clothes he is wearing. So for example when he is dressed in one set of clothes he would be the nerdy kid with the ordinary life. But when his clothes change he turns into the popular, trendy kid who people like. The video emphasises the change in one boys life when he is the normal/nerdy kid he has an uninteresting life and isn’t seemed as being ‘cool’. But when he is in the change of clothes and has the hat on, he becomes cool and is seen to be a famous singer who people want to be. This challenges the typical conventions of indie genre music videos as they normally consist of performance or a storyline based around being at a party or being in trouble etc. The ‘nerdy’ character also challenges the typical look in an indie music video. This is because he is seen in ‘uncool’ clothes, drives a moped and plays on guitar hero. Whereas the other side of him dresses cool, drives a car and can sing and actually play guitar which is the stereotypical appearance in a video for this genre of song. When we edited our video we added in colour filters, so when it was the ‘nerdy’ character we made it darker and for the cool side we made the colours brighter and more vibrant. We did this because people who did not know the storyline which we had planned might not have understood what was going on if we hadn’t and might’ve just seen it as a mixed up story with no real plot going on in it. For our Digipak and magazine advert we decided to just use the normal, expected type of content, this was because if people were to see the magazine advert with a quirky picture on it, they would not understand what type of music it was and they would maybe not want to buy it quite so much. So we played a bit safe on this side of our project and just made sure we could make something that is seen as a typical product.

How effective is your main product and ancillary texts?

For our two ancillary tasks we had to complete both a DVD Digipak and a magazine advert which was related to our video and worked well with it. We created the products in a group, but me and Marvin designed the magazine advert while Alex made the Digipak for the tasks.
The combination of our music video and our ancillary tasks worked quite well and you would easily be able to see that they were from the same piece of work. This would be obvious because we just showed our main character in our magazine advert which is the only character which appears in the video. This was so it would easily be indentified to our video and people would be able to see the connection. The magazine advert also showed the name of the artist and the song name clearly on the page. We did this so that it was the first thing which you saw on the page and noticed. This is similar to what we did on our Digipak, where we just had a main character on the front with the artist name and the track name. However, on the back of the case we showed information about the bonus features which we put in our pack. Also on the back cover of the pack we showed some small screenshots from our actual video. This was so that people could get a glimpse at what our video would be like and be able to see a link between the video and the DVD for it. We thought about using screenshots from our initial music video, but then we thought that they would be too blurry and they would not give the right image that we wanted. So we decided to take a camera out from college and take separate pictures using that, which were separate and matched what images we wanted for our magazine advert and our Digipak. Overall I thought that our work all was clearly connected with each other and I think that they worked well together and effectively.

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

We received various feedback from both our teachers and other pupils in the class during this project. Most of the feedback which we have received has been mainly useful and we have taken advice as to what they’ve said and made an improvement in some way. The first piece of feedback which we received was at the very beginning of our project. This was when we were doing our pitch to the whole class. Andrea (our teacher) said that our idea was a good one and if we managed to pull it off it would look well and would be different to everything else that is typically in the indie genre. An example of a good bit of feedback was from Andrea where she said that the initial colour filters which we had on our video would not be obvious enough to people watching the video and did not know the plan of the story which we had thought of. We all thought that this was a valid point and could see where she was coming from. So me and Marvin then changed it to make it obvious to other people by making one side in black and white and emphasise the colours in the other. Another relevant piece of good feedback which we received was from other people in our class who said that we had not included that much lip syncing in our video. This was true and we thought that it would definitely improve the quality of our video and make it a bit less story line based. So, in the next lesson we had we decided to take a camera out at college again and just focus on getting more footage of me singing the song and lip syncing it. We are grateful for that piece of feedback as our video would have been very boring and all would have been the same if we did not shoot this extra bit of footage for our video. Another good piece of feedback we received was the one from Andrea regarding the shot of the 2 people chasing the main character down the street. She said that we should completely remove it. We thought about this idea and thought we could play on the comedy factor of the shot. So we thought that we would speed the shot up a lot and make it seem more of a comedy shot on purpose than a shot which just looked stupid by accident. However, we did receive some feedback which we didn’t feel was correct or relevant as such. Some people in our class had said that the trilby hat which we used was not relevant to the lyrics which say ‘ski cap’ but we had changed the initial idea of the ski cap and we thought we could use the trilby hat instead to emphasise the change in characters and it would not be worth reshooting our whole video to just please one group.

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

In the research stages of our project we mainly used the internet to look through similar videos of the same genre to have a look at what has been done and what has worked well for others. We also used other magazine adverts and DVD’s when we were creating our ancillary tasks. We were given these to look at by our teacher. I found these useful because I was initially confused as to what we were supposed to make, and seeing an example of what we were supposed to do was inspiring as it gave me a clue as to what was needed. In the construction stage of our project, the first and most import piece of technology which we used was the video camera. Without this we would not have been able to film our work. The equipment was good because all our video was clear and when we used the tripod with the camera all the shots were steady and they looked good. Another piece of technology which we used in the construction stage was Final Cut. This was also a very good product to use as it made us able to edit the footage which we had captured and then put it in the order which we wanted it to be in. This programme also made it able for us to edit all of our footage. This was very important in our video as we used a lot of colour filters in our video and without them our video would not have made sense. During the planning stage of the project we mainly just spoke to each other and to our teacher so that we could arrange things. However we also used our blog to quite a lot of detail and found it good so that we had written records of when we had planned to do things and what we had done so far. Finally, during the evaluation stages I used Word so that I could process all my work and so that it could spell check for me etc as well. And then I uploaded it all to the blog onto the internet. Overall I would say that the most useful piece of technology which we used was the Final Cut project. This was because our work would not be half as good as it is without the use of editing and filters etc that we got from Final Cut. But also, if we did not have the use of the internet we would not have been able to do as much work either because we couldn’t have found our research or we wouldn’t have been able to put all our work in one place (blogger).

John Kendall