Evaluation(Written Version)

Evaluation



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

The song I chose was called ‘Hounds of Love’ by an indie rock band called The Futureheads. Kate Bush originally sang the song and The
Futureheads covered it in 2005.

When thinking how to go about my video and what to include, I had to think hard because the obvious concept would be canines fornicating. I thought outside the box trying to bring together a pitch that made perfect sense yet wasn’t too cheesy. The idea I eventually came up with was a love story with a twist and wanted to also include some parts of the band playing so that I could follow the conventions of a indie rock music video, including a variety of narrative and band shots.

I wanted my video to be amplification as it would still retain a link to the song but the storyline doesn’t fit exactly to the lyrics. I challenged the forms and conventions of my genre as the typical video would include both narrative and meek shots of the band. My video included more narrative and I also linked the playing of the band into the narrative to be more creative.

There is a few parts in my video that do actually link directly to the lyrics, for example; I referred the line “I’ve always been a coward” to the boy in the narrative being too afraid to ask the girl out who he likes although she blatantly likes him back.

My music video uses conventions of real media as I tried to stick as closely to an Indie rock video as possible and my song was this genre. My actors and actress wore indie style clothing, which would consist of things like skinny jeans, shirts or tight t-shirts. My actors also had longish scraggy hair, which is a concept of indie style media.





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

My ancillary tasks consisted of a CD/DVD digipak, and either a web page, which would be designed on dreamweaver, or a magazine advertisement.

I tried to replicate a real CD/DVD Digipak by getting a few example digipaks together and taking some ideas from them to keep it realistic and sticking to the conventions of the genre. It has a main picture of the artist, or in my case, the lead singer. It also contains a logo, and I stuck to the same font throughout, this font is a downloaded font from “Dafont.com” and I chose this font as I believe this is a nice font that goes well for the genre of my song.

I then tried to make my magazine advertisement as close to the digipak as possible, keeping the same colour scheme and font. The background colour is the same and the pictures I have used for my ancillaries were stills from the video to keep a strong link between the three products. I then edited them in Photoshop so that they would be more effective and easy on the eye, it also blended the pictures to the background a bit more.

3. What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

The feedback I got from my audience was really helpful as the stuff they said was just helping me to make my music video that extra bit better. many people said that the scene in the school where the teacher gives a detention, that I should’ve used an actual teacher instead of one of the school kids acting as it didn’t look very realistic. I tried to change this although I was unsuccessful in getting a teacher in the short space of time I had left. Also I was told that the lip-synching wasn’t all that great, but this was because my actor was not as enthusiastic as I had hoped. By the time I had gotten this feedback I was unable to go back and change this as I was behind schedule anyway so this feedback I was getting was just so I knew my positives and negatives of the video.

The feedback I received that I consider positive were the fact that my storyline worked well with the song, some of the locations I chose to shoot were good, such as the street where the lead actor was walking to school, and the school corridoors.

The feedback I received of which was negative were things such as bad acting for the school teacher, and lip synching which I have already mentioned, the placement of the band as there was lots of artistic pictures in the background so it didn’t seem as real, and also the cutting out of scenes too quickly, which I was able to sort out. From the feedback I realized that I should’ve put more effort into the actors and the locations. I also think I could of used a place that had better lighting for some of my shots, because some of them were either too dark or too light.

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

The first piece of technology I used was for my research and planning, this was blogger.com. I collated all of my work together on a blog so that it could be seen by my teachers and it made it easier for me to get to my work at home if I needed to catch up with some work. I edited the settings on my blog so that it was more aesthetically pleasing and didn’t look just thrown on in any old place.

Once my research and planning was over with came my video. To create my music video I obviously needed to film so a tripod and a camera were used. Seeing as though I didn’t finish all of my filming in one shoot, I ended up using more than one type of camera. One was a Canon mini DV, MD216, and the other was a Sony HDV 1080i. When I had finished filming for my video I had to use a firewire, which gives a quick way of uploading the footage. The footage was placed into iMovie where I could edit and cut down the parts I didn’t need and then I imported it into a programme that I had never used before which is very complex, “Final Cut Express”. In Final Cut I put my music video together using markers which give a really accurate mark of which bits I needed and if I made a mistake I could cut the video down using the razor blade tool. I was also able to add effects on Final Cut by using the effects bar at the top and then going to either “Video Transitions” or “Video Filters”.

To create my ancillaries I used a programme called Photoshop and I made them on my own laptop, as I do not like the elements version that is on the Apple Mac’s. I already had an understanding of how to use Photoshop but when creating my ancillary tasks I developed further skills by just playing about trying to make them look that little bit better.