Tom's Final Evaluation

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




We looked throught songs we knew on the internet to get inspiration for our piece, one music video that we used was Booty Call by Midnight Beast. It was inspiring to us because of the different ways in which it presents some of the lyrics. There were a few shots we also liked from the video and it looked low budgeted which was something we had to take into consideration when making our music video. All the band members are dressed in random clothes and all the props where easy, they were just household items, just like in ours where the random costume of a cow and the easy props of just phones and photos. Our video relates to there's because they are both funky and have a fun vibe.

One of Goodwin's points was the link between visuals and lyrics, for this we used some props which related to what lyrics where being sung at the time. The strongest example of this is when it says 'Never got enough attention as a child' and whilst this line is being sung one of the band members shows a picture of her as a child. Also midway through our piece the lyrics come up on the screen as the words are being sung and we use a variety of fonts.  This is another strong link between lyrics and visuals. Our inspiration for using this technique comes from the video 'All of the lights' by Kayne West and Rhianna.

The genre of our product was a 80's retro, electric fuck vibe, we showed this by the use of bright colours that we used throughout the piece and from the costumes used.

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

All the items in our promotional package fit together well, in all of them at least one of the band members feature in it and the colours used throughout are bright vibrant ones. Through our promotional package we try to give the impression that Chromeo are a small band and that are trying to get bigger. We did this by putting a list of tour dates on the inside of our CD cover, we also put the links for Facebook and Twitter on the front of the case, hoping to improve the amount of fans.

The promotional package creates the image of the band as funky electro, this impression is given out through all the bright colours used in the costumes and the editing techniques used throughout the trio. The concepts we used in our promotional package would be successful at attracting our target audience of 16-30 because of the link in technology we used, we used things like Twitter and Facebook to communicate with the fans, these kind of technologies are generally used by people in the age range of 14 to 35 almost perfectly fitting our target audience.

What have you learnt from your audience feedback? 


The most important feedback was that given to us about our rough cut, feedback we got from it was generally postive about our quick paced editing and a good quality of different editing techniques used to make clips look better. But we only had around 50 seconds of our rough cut to hand in and therefore a lot of the feedback contained people writing should be longer. All the negative feedback we got from the video we tried to improve the bit that people didn't like or we replaced it with a new clip, all the positives we tried to leave in our video.

Feedback on our final piece was a lot different, there was a lot of positives about how we kept to Goodwin's points well. One example of our feedback was that the music and visuals were clearly linked and very effective in the quick editing of our video, and the timing between some of the cuts and the beat of the song we perfectly timed.
The camera work was positively reviewed and the only negative was about the footage being blurry at one point, but that effect was meant to be given because of the darkness in the room and the lights it was meant to give across the feel of the audience being there at the 'party'. The one piece of feedback which is very important to us is the some of the lip sync in the footage was slightly out of time but seeing as not everyone noticed it shouldn't be to much of a problem

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


We used many new technical programs on the computer to design all of our products, the most important one was final cut express which allowed us to import all of our footage and then cut it down to this bits we wanted. It allowed us to lay out all of our footage in a timeline so we can easily see where each of the clips are when we come to edit them. We used some of the editing techniques available on final cut like the ability to adapt the speed of the piece and the use of colour corrector so we could edit the colours to make it more appealing, we also were able to change the green screen into the colour background of our choice which is a huge part of our video.  We used Photoshop when it came to our CD case and magazine ad because its the easiest to use to edit items and has the widest variety of editing tools. This variety came in handy when it came to the colours for our CD case and the effects on the front tittle font.

We used the internet loads to get inspirations, first of all we looked at music videos that we know about to get some ideas, when then researched all about Chromeo so that we knew what kind of music genre they are. The main site we used on the internet was Blogger, this was really helpful because we could blog all our work so when we are at home we can see what has been done and what hasn't. We can also use it as a way of communication in the group because if someone posts what props we need for filming then we can all access it from home so we can come prepared.

We used HD cameras which gave a good quality to our video so that the audience get the best possible view of the band, at one point in the dark room when the lights go on and off the camera shot is slightly blurred which is the feel we wanted to get across because its meant to feel like the audience are in the club with them. We used the tripod for the camera so that all of our shots were still and not ruined by hand movement, the tripod allowed us to get good steady shots from a range of angles, distances and heights.