Evaluation Questions

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

Our media product fits into a convention of a love song. As part of our music video, we have taken ideas from romantic films such as ‘the notebook’ and looked at other different types of romantic videos to give us some sort of inspiration. From looking at these different types of videos such as Enrique’s video ‘Hero’ we have taken a few ideas such as the lighting and colour, and put these into our own media product. The name of our song was called ‘Letters’. One way of which we met the conventions of a real media product is that our group successfully managed to fit our lyrics with the visuals and music, which looked really effective and pieced the song together well. Our opening sequence for our music video shows a shot of the girl reading the love letter smiling, from this you can clearly tell that our music video will be based on happiness and love as she is smiling whilst reading it. We decided to create montages of the couple together and create a hand held camera style for our video. The memories of the couple are in colour to create happiness and we have used effects on final cut to make them look home made. We made the lonely and sad clips of both of the couple into black and white. From the colour scheme we have used in our video, the audience can see that it’s obviously about a couple going through a bad time missing each other. We have made this look effective by using a range of shots of the boy and girl individually such as close ups to really catch that emotion. One effect that we are extremely pleased with when editing our video on final cut, is that we managed to fade out our lead singer slightly whilst showing a memory of the couple riding their bikes. We feel that this effect looked really effective as it is clear to the audience that he is thinking about the memories they had together. In one way in which we have challenged a convention of our media product was to think of another alternative ending. Instead of a happy romantic ending, we were suggested another ending which would be killing off the female character towards the end, to trick our audience thinking she would return to our main artist. This was an idea we considered but however we had lack of time to do this and also our group were very happy with the ending we had chosen for the final video.

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

I feel that the combination of our main product and our ancillary texts have turned out very effective. From all of the combinations I feel as if we have established our artist well as being a love artist, to suit our mainly female audience. All three products work well as a promotional package due to the use of colour they all share and the text fonts we have used. In our music video we have used soft and darker colours which we have included in our products. Our main song we used for our music video was named ‘Letters’. As the album is based on romance, we wanted to create old fashioned letter effect by placing an old fashioned effect of writing faded in the background. All three products also incorporate visual themes of love. We used a symbol of a red rose in our digi pack and our magazine cover. We chose to add a sensitive close up image of our main artist to attract our female audience.

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

Our audience feedback has been a great help for us as we now know areas in which we could improve on. We received positive feedback as well as negatives and our audience commented on how they thought our music video was effective and a good idea to represent a love song. Our audience also liked the use of our hand held camera effect we were going for and commented on how the colours we had used were effective. One negative comment we received was that our music video came across more of a film scene than a music video which we had to try and avoid. From our rough cut we received comments which helped us improve our final music video. We took all the comments into consideration and worked our best on trying to create our music video at the best advantage we could. The audience were pleased with our colour choice and liked the idea of the colours representing the mood of the video. Our negative feedback we received was to do with our editing skills. We were told to shorten some clips as the viewer found it went on for too long and felt slightly uncomfortable watching it. We were then advised to work on our montages involving finding certain techniques to try and make them look like a hand held movie. This made the movie look much more vintage and appealing to watch. Receiving this kind of feed back really helped our group as we could work on ways to improve our music video.

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

The main technology we used to edit our music video was final cut express. All of our group were familiar to this programme as we all used it previously last year. Using final cut was a success to our group as we could all work efficiently and fast, and also learning to add effects and flirters that we had never learnt how to do before. Whilst we edited on final cut, we also wrote down our ideas and about the techniques we used on the blog to show our audience. When working on the digi pack we had to use the programme photoshop. Our group succeeded in this well as three of the members in our group including me, are photography students and use this programme a lot. This benefited us a lot as we could work fast and edit the main image we wanted to use well to stand out, being more creative. Overall I am pleased with the outcome of our editing skills on all programmes as we worked well as a group contributing our ideas together and editing on the programmes to make our products look professional.