Ella's Evaluation

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

Our media products in some way follow the conventions of real media products, for example we have used a conventional filming style for the main aspect of our video. Long shots of the characters, mid shots of certain characters, close up of different props i.e retro phone and telephone box. These shots are all found in real media products and by using them we have followed some of Goodwin's points. By having long shots as well as mid shots of the different characters, we followed Goodwin's point of selling the artist.
We have followed editing conventions of real media products as we have incorporated fast cuts and jump cuts, which are clear throughout as the shots change frequently. This keeps the audience's attention and gives them a lot to look at.

I feel that our media products all convey the genre of funky electro. This is the theme that we were trying to capture all throughout this task and I feel that we have achieved this but in doing so have created a unique style of our own. I think that our unique style comes from the funness and quirkiness of our music video. We've included many shots of many different things which when bought together create a fun style and theme for our video. When doing the research into other artists music videos, we were mainly influenced by Midnight Beast. We loved the quirky style of their video and how the randomness worked.

We have also challenged the conventions of real media products by portraying the characters in our video as relateable as they are seen to be normal people having fun. In many examples of artist, they are portrayed as untouchable, a prime example being Lady Ga Ga.

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

The combination of our main product and our ancillary tasks are very effective as they all use the idea of the vibe and genre we wanted to created in our digipack. Throughout the ancillary tasks, we have studied and explored different styles of this and different ways to convey our ideas. We've looked at different themes, different video styles, different digipack styles and all of this has contributed in the finalisation of our main product. Our ideas combined along with the knowledge we gained from doing ancillary tasks have proved effective as they all have a common factor which has come together to create our final piece. In ancillary tasks we used bright colours and bright, bold images to represent our band. This was the whole idea from the start of this project and by using our ideas throughout, we were able to expand and develop them in order to create a better product. Overall, the combination of the music video with the ancillary tasks has proved effective as they all use the same main factors. They focus on funkiness and boldness and they follow a simplistic look. This combination makes them effective as a promotional package.

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

We gained feedback mainly from our target audience as well as people close to our target audience to help us in the creation of all our media products; our music video, digi-pack cover and magazine advert. The audience feedback that we got given was really helpful. At the beginning of the project we done a pitch to our class about our initial ideas. The class were really intrigued and said that they really liked the main ideas behind our pitch such as the incorporation of bright bold colours and the writing of different lyrics. We then created our roughcut piece which wasn't the best and my whole group was aware of this. The feedback however was very positive, they said that we needed to develop on the video and also incorporate more stronger images in relation to our song. We took all the criticisms into account along with the positives and redone our music video. The feedback for our final music video was very positive. Our audience said that they loved how the visuals linked with the lyrics and they also said they liked the use of jump cuts as they related to the upbeat feel of the song. All of the feedback our audience gave us was very good as the points they made such as the use of bright colours, the performance side of the video etc. were things that we wanted to put across in our video and they said that we done this very well.

Overall the feedback that we received from our audience was extremely helpful as we were able to receive they're ideas and criticisms which enabled us to make alterations to our piece in order to make it better.

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

By using many different types of media technologies we created many opportunities to design, create and improve our media products.
In the research stages our main resource was the Internet, especially websites such as 'Youtube' and 'Google images', to gain background ideas on Chromeo and different techniques other artists used within their digipacks and how music videos follow different conventions when made for different styles of music. By using these types of websites, alongside our class work, we identified the main conventions of a music video. In the planning stage we used digital cameras to capture all our written ideas and our shot ideas. These photographs were then put on the blog so we could see all our planning in one place.

To film the main aspect of our video we used a HD camera, this would give us a high definition video for the end product meaning that the footage would be a lot clearer than footage from an ordinary camera.

To create our music video we used Final Cut Express. It allowed us to use different tools in order to create cuts, changes in colour, changes in speed etc. By using Final Cut Express we learnt how to change a green screen which is something that in my previous work I've never done. Altering the green screen enabled us to use different coloured backgrounds which developed the main theme of our music video. We used many other techniques in Final Cut Express which made our video a lot more innovative and interesting.

We used Photo Shop to create both our ancillary tasks. We experimented with many different images available in our video as we weren't sure which ones were best for our digipack. We played around with the contrast of different images as well as the colours. We uploaded our images which we wanted to use and from there we were able to have a play around with the different tools available such as colour corrector. From using the different tools, we were able to altar the colour of our different images along with the contrast. We also altered the whole look of our images, as seen in our magazine advert. This enabled us the chance to use an image from our video yet change it so that it wasn't that recognisable to the audience. Photoshop allowed us to incorporate text into our images. We played around with the location and stance of different texts.

We are so happy with the final outcome of our digipack. We think that all of the images display our wanted theme and many of the ideas which have been current throughout this task have been displayed in the construction of our piece.