EVALUATION QUESTION FOUR:

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

For construction of planning, it mainly came down to the use of the internet to research our chosen genre of music. The internet browser was Internet Explorer and we used such websites as Google, Wikipedia, Youtube and Blogger to research the chosen genre, and upload it to an available place where it may be publically viewed. However, to add things such as the story boards to the blog, the use of a scanner was required in order to get it onto the compurter, and ultimately onto my group and I's blogs.

For the construction of the music video itself, there were more technologies that needed to be used in order to get our final product (The sticks 'n' stones music video) up to the group's standards. For the filming, we used a Sony Digital Camera and filmed everything shot by shot. We also used a group member's camera in order to take the pictures for our advertisment and digi-pak. This was the easy part, but the real challenge came in the editing. For the music video, we used a program called "Adobe Premiere", which was used on our group member's MacBook. The editing of the photos was also done on both the MacBook and one of the college Dell PCs.

For the editing of the photos, we needed to use adobe photoshop, and even at some points we experimented with filters usuing online websites that had photo editing capability. An example of this would be Picnik.

As for the evalutation, some members of the group meant for the evaluation to be uploaded as a Microsoft PowerPoint Presentation. I however decided to type everything up on word, as to asure my spelling and punctuation were correct and uploaded them straight to my blog.

In a conclustion, these new media technologies were very esential for the creating, prodcuing and even presenting our product. All in all, it was a very fun experiance.

EVALUATION QUESTION THREE:

Question 3: What have you learnt from your audience feedback? 


To get audience feedback from things such as questions about what people would want to see in a music video and such, we relied on conducting interviews with other members of the college and posted a few questions onto surveymonkey.com, which we then posted on facebook to get feedback from.To receive our audience feedback with our video, we posted our video onto youtube.com and again, shared the link via facebook.

Over all, only some of the audience feedback proved any use to us at all. The main comments which we received seemed to be ones complementing cast members, or approving when certain people were pushed over in the video.

But we did gain good feedback from people during our surveys (shown in past posts) where we were looking for main things which people like to see in a music video/certain conventions found in their favored music genre. This helped us to make the music video into what it was with the proper costumes and settings. However the feedback giving post production didn't show to be as useful. Yet still quite humorous.

EVALUATION QUESTION TWO:

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


During the project, my group and I decided that we wanted the album to reflect to the song's attitude, centering around the themes of rebellion and colour. We decided to interlink them together with the theme of graffiti (one of the main themes of rebellion) and the 3 major colours of orange, white blue and black. All 3 products, these being the digi-pack, advertisement and the music video itself all link together with each other mainly down to the themes previously discussed. For examples; our actors are wearing the same outfits in the all media products produced, mainly so when the target audience views the product, they can relate to the chosen costume the main character of the music video (and in fact album) wears. Other themes such as the graffiti are also referenced to one another in the media products, such as the background to the album art and the advertisement being in the background of the music video in the first scene.

The main reasons of doing this is to re-enforce the image of the main character being seen as a rebellious teenager, running away from society's laws, taking what colour he has with him. This is again shown with a filter being applied in every running scene he is in, relating to the main 4 colours that make up the album art.

We feel that this will help to product sell due to the way the character of the rebellious teen can relate to many people living in England today, and with the album and advertisement art looking similar, it is very easy to locate the album and recognize the persons on it.

EVALUATION QUESTION ONE:

Question 1: In what way does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

For our music video choice, my group and I decided to go for the song “Sticks ‘n’ Stones” by Jamie T, choosing two other songs to compare the similarities and differences between all 3 videos, picking out the main conventions, they all had for this similar genre of music, being British Indie/Rock. So, for the first part of my answer (Split into 3 separate categories; music video, digi-pak and advertisement) I’ll be discussing the music video.

In every video my group and I watched, we noticed one major convention found in almost every single music video, and all videos we researched  was that the lead singer of the band in the music video was actually lip syncing in the song, obviously to show his status of him/her as lead singer of the band. There were also the inclusion of shots of the band members playing their musical instruments. Again, something we saw in many of the music videos we saw. This was one convention that we decided not to go with, as it would make our video like the many other music videos out there. Instead the purpose of the video was to create a short story with added humour elements. We thought that having too much footage of the band playing, or the lead singer singing, would seem out of place and disjoint the action in the video. The actual setting of the video seems to keep to the genre’s conventions, on the other hand. In the British Indie music videos that my group and I researched, we saw how the videos were mainly set on cloudy days in busy British streets, keeping the setting of the genre close to home. So we also went for shooting in the streets of places such as York and such, so fans of the genre, who are most likely to be Brits, will be familiar with the videos feel and setting.  

The digi-pak in itself seems to keep to the basic design that we have researched. It is a traditional 6 sided digi-pak that is designed to take two discs; these being the album CD and the extra content CD. The digi-pak also contains track listings on the back and information about what is on the discs themselves, such as live content, music videos etc. We didn’t want to take any risks with how the digi-pak was laid out and all thought that the simple 6 sided digi-pak was a simple one yet effective. The design of the digi-pak links into the theme of the music video and the title, being full of graffiti and includes pictures of the two main characters of the music video, also being the two members of the people who made the album.

For our advertisement, my group and I decided to stick with the theme that the digi-pak had and adapted it into an advertising campaign. We noticed that in every advert we had researched, things like the text of the advert were all kept bold and straight, but also stuck to the theme of the album they were releasing. This is used so that if the audience wants to go out and purchase the album, they can instantly recognize it by what they saw on the advert. The colours, the text and the images that were on the album. So in this case, we also kept to conventions, for the purpose of audience practicality. Having images from the album art also on the advert, and having the graffiti like text being the text of the advert too. Things such as quotes from music reviewers and star ratings from magazines were also included, as well as the record label. These features are again present in all the adverts we researched, and so we kept with this convention, as it is a great way of promoting an album.

Digi Pak Inside

Digi Pak, back cover

Feedback from music video: