Evaluation

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

My media product defiantly uses and develops forms and conventions of real media products in many different ways. My group tried to stick with the normal conventions of a real music video, which includes the artist having mostly performance shots of him or herself singing and a narrative to help mix up the performance shots. In my music video we have done exactly this as the artist is seen mostly performing in a couple of different locations. As director, for the narrative I wanted to be able to tell a story as to how the artist got in that state. I was unable to do this, however, narrative has been included and I am quite pleased with the outcome of it as it keeps the viewer guessing how he got like that. When watching the music video the song can almost be told by listening to the lyrics as a large majority of the footage follows the lyrics.

Another music video convention that we have included in our video is the use of dark clothing to make the artist stand out from the background which in one of our setting is white. This can be seen in many music videos today and is used to help highlight the artist and make him the centre focus of the shot.

In a way you could say that my music video does challenge the forms and conventions of a real media product to a certain extent. Most music videos tend to have a storyline behind the narrative shots and the viewer can easily work out what is going on in the video and why it is happening. However, with my music video there is almost a lack of narrative, creating a sense of enigma as the viewer does not know why the man in our video is all roughed up drinking to down his sorrows.

2. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

I would say that the combination of our main product and ancillary texts works in some areas and others not. We have tried to keep similarities there in the album cover as in the music video itself. My group have done this by using mostly screenshots from our video to create the different sides for the Digi-pack. However, there a lot of areas that are not so similar. For example there is no use of neon lighting within the music video itself and yet this could be said is one of the key features of the digi-pack itself. Even though the neon lighting has not been incorporated in the music video at all, I feel that there is actually no need to have it in there though because I feel that it would distract the viewers eye away from the artist, which is not what we want to happen.

3. What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

Our audience feedback was essential in our media project because it let us know what people want to see and like in music videos and the other content involved in the project such as the digi-pack. The first bit of audience feedback we received was when we handed out the questionnaires to find out what people like in music videos and their general opinions on them. This helped me greatly because I was then able to start storyboarding the music video after I knew what people wanted to see in it.
The next type of feedback is what we received while in the editing suite. The feedback was mainly from teachers and other media students. However it definitely helped as everyone has different views and suggestions as to what worked and what didn’t. we took onboard some of the ideas that were put forward to us and are grateful for them as we believe they have made our final video better than what it would have been without them.

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

In every step of research, planning, and evaluation there was always a chance to use media technologies to help us. In the research stage media technologies such as the internet came in very handy and this was used to go websites such as Youtube to find a song that we wanted to create a music video to. The internet was also used for information on existing artists, lyrics, pictures and much more.

During the production stage a video camera was used to capture our footage and this was by far the most important piece of technology used at this stage. Digital cameras were used to take pictures of the artist which has been used several times throughout the project.

From the editors point of view the technology used for post production work was by far the most important as this covers all the programmes and software used that allowed us to piece together all of our individual shots. Using software such as Adobe After Effects and Premiere it gave us the chance to add some special effects to the music video, and without this half of the shots we needed would not have been produced.