Thursday 1 December 2011

Jack's Evaluation


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

Our media product, a music video for JLS song "Strange" along with the ancillary tasks which were the Digi-pack cover and magazine advert are consistent and conventional to the pop music genre. After studying various videos, digi-packs and magazine adverts for artists from rap, pop, indie and metal including similar artists like Boyzone, The Wanted and Take That and comparing these to the Goodwin's Points we decided to employ similar themes and conventions from these digi-packs and use them for our own media products. For example our music video contains traditional boyband motifs such as miming, air grabs, over-dramatic acting in a well executed way so not to make our video look like a spoof. Relating to Goodwin's points our video is well edited to the music and features lots of close up shots of the band and of the individuals which is meeting the demands of the record label. This is consistent to the digi-pack and magazine where the band, as a whole, and individual shots are included. Though our video contains these typical features our video does slightly challenge this by adding a less serious note to the video where we included some shots of the boys playing around during the filming. This develops our video into something more exciting and less conventional with the aim of keeping the viewers interested.

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

Our main product and ancillary tasks work well as a full promotional package as they feature consistent themes throughout. The magazine advert is a more simplistic view of the artist and is fully black and white (bar an amazon.com logo) which I aimed for consumers to become more intrigued about our product by looking at the advert. The relevance of black and white is that black and white monochrome features at the beginning and the end of our video and as the magazine advert is the most likely first item that consumers will look at and become aware of our product from it made sense for me to make this ancillary black and white. The magazine advert and the digi-pack use stills from the video and still pictures from the same locations in which the video was shot creating more consistency and making the promotional package more recognisable for the consumers. The ancillary tasks and video I feel radiate a cool, modern and fun image of the artist as well as being a tight friendly unit. This bodes well for the artists sales and will also please the record label. The friendly, modern, cool image is something that is typical of modern day boybands such as One Direction and The Wanted and even JLS. The product is successful in attracting the target audience as the main target audience is females between 11-17 and the video and ancillaries contain images of the boyband which will attract them (the target audience) to the products heightening the success of the artist. The emotive acting in the video as well as the close ups will also lure in excessive screaming teenage fans!

What have you learnt from audience feedback?

Audience feedback has been a very important tool for us in all of our creative processes to maximise the success of our video as well as ancillary tasks. After pitching the initial ideas for the concept of our video it was evident that we needed to be more inventive and think of more ideas as well as capitalising on the good ideas that we already had. It was obvious that we would be over-exaggerating the acting and lip syncing and we had an idea of what to wear on the days of filming to look like a boyband. We also had a vague storyline that didn't seem to make sense, which proved the feedback that we needed to be more inventive. Having tried to revise our storyline and the girls filming a minimalistic amount for the storyline we decided to scrap our storyline (much to the disgust of some group members) because it did not make sense only having one small segment of narrative in video focused mostly on a boyband. We all learnt that a lot more in-depth creative processes are required before filming can take place when shooting a music video.
     Feedback from our rough cut was most useful as this opened our eyes to what our peers thought of our music video which at this stage was not fantastic so we were told.  The feedback that we received was vital to the success of our final video. Changes to our video needed were more shot variation, more effects and a change of locations. It was at this stage that it was highlighted that what we had of a storyline was irrelevant. Although it wasn't all negative, we were commended for our acting and lip syncing which is now the strongest, most effective part of our video along with the edit being extremely effective.
    Our final peer feedback was very positive and complimentary towards our video, saying that our visual effects, filters and lip syncing were fantastic. However the only negative was that we should of dressed more like a boyband which was the least of our worries by the final stage, we were just glad to have a finished video after various stressful situations.

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

The media technologies that we used during all the production stages are programmes that i am more than familiar with, which helped us massively. Having used the technologies more i have become more proficient in using these programmes. The most important software that we used in the construction process was Final Cut Express on the iMac. Final Cut is a very good programme and it allowed us to add all the necessary filters, transitions and effects that we needed to create a successful video as well as being able to edit our director’s commentary. Effects such as dissolves, split screens, monochrome and fade-in/fade-outs. Final Cut is a complex programme however using the programme extensively before I was able to make full use of it during my time editing.
The most important hardware we used was the HD video cameras. The video cameras (combined with a tripod) enabled us to shoot clear effective footage from various angles such as high/low, tracking shots, pans and close/medium/long shots.
Photoshop is a programme that we had all used before but most of us were unconfident in using it so I took it upon myself to create the magazine advert whilst the others concentrated on the digi-pack and I volunteered ideas where I could. Photoshop is a very technical programme however it provided the key features such as blurring, cropping, smudging, text, cropping and re-sizing that allowed us to create an effective digi-pack cover and magazine advert.
Though overlooked, just as important we used a lot of the internet and the website blogger (of which I’m using both now!). The internet allowed us to conduct our research as well as gain information on new techniques and other videos similar to what we were trying to create. Blogger has allowed us to effectively record what we have done, what we have found out and the processes and steps we have taken to create a successful video.

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