Evaluation

1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
The genre of our music video was pop/alternative, as the song was unique, romantic and acoustic. We incorporated the conventions of a romantic music video into our own, such as using a narrative - the story of a couple. We also showed the artist a lot playing his guitar and used him as the male lead in the story of the couple, similar to Enrique Inglesias' video for 'Hero', where he was the male lead in the narrative. We also looked at Adele's 'Someone Like You' video for inspiration and used the idea of black and white to portray a melancholic feeling. However, for the happy memory scenes we used a pink, golden hue, also inspired by Enrique's 'Hero' video. The locations we used were also typical of romantic music videos and films, such as the park and homes. We got the idea for using the bicycles and the park from the film The Notebook, and also from Katy Perry's 'Thinking of You' video. Both of these used the idea of cycling together and going to the park, typical romantic ideas. Our shots are also quite long and slow to match the pace of the song, rather than fast cuts as that would fit more with a dance/hip-hop video. Our magazine advert really sells the artist and also carries on our visual themes of love, black and white vs colour and love letters. We used an image of a rose and a letter in both our magazine ad and digipak - traditional images of romance. We were inspired by the digipak of 'Roxy music - An Evening With Roxy Music' with the use of a letter on the back page for our track list on our digipak as it fits in well with our theme of love letters.

2. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
Our main product and ancillary texts work well together as a promotional package as they all incorporate our visual themes of love, black and white vs colour and love letters. We were trying to highlight the main theme of love of the alum throughout all of our media products, using the colour red and the traditional romantic image of a rose in our ancillary products, and golden, pink hues in our video. They create a very sensitive, romantic image of the artist which would successfully attract a target audience of women of all ages, as he would be the image of a perfect lover.

3. What have you learnt from your audience feedback?
The feedback we have received has always been very helpful to us in creating the right kind of music video. The feedback of our initial ideas helped us be a bit more realistic, as we wanted to use a 1940s theme, linking us more directly to The Notebook, and we wanted to end the video in the rain. Our feedback supported our ideas for the love story, but said the 1940s theme and ending in the rain would be unrealistic and hard to do. We agreed with this so decided to not use those ideas as they would take up lots of time and money which we did not have. Again, the feedback for our rough cut was very positive and successful. The audience said that the narrative was easy to understand and the slow pace fitted in with the genre and the performance of the characters were convincing and "adorable". They did say that some lyrics could be highlighted more, so we changed and added some more shots to highlight certain lyrics, such as when the lyrics are "I'll always love you" it's a shot of the female lead. They also said we could use more effects, so we added more fades and a vignette filter around the home videos to highlight the home movies more. We also added more noise to highlight the home video, old effect. They also suggested an alternative ending of the female lead dying before seeing the male lead, yet we felt this was very overdramatic and could not be done because of time constraints.
The feedback of our final cut was very positive. They said there was a good use of dark and light colours and lighting to highlight the different emotions which is what we intended to do. They also said the handheld camera was very effective and natural and that the lyrics and visuals relationship was stronger, for example when he was singing about being alone and he is actually shown alone in his house. This shows that our reaction to the rough cut's feedback worked well, as we changed some shots to amplify the lyrics more. Overall our feedback has always been very positive.

4. How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
The software we used really helped to amplify the story of our music video. FInal Cut Express helped us make a productive, romantic music video as we used effects such as the vignette filter and fading to add a sensitive, soft atmosphere. Photoshop was also valuable in making our ancillary products. We used many layers in our magazine advert and digipak, of letters and roses to also create the feeling of love to highlight the theme of the entire album. Using Blogger was also really helpful in organising our ideas and research as well as our feedback. The HD cameras were also a great bonus to creating our music video as they made everything a lot sharper and realistic. All of these products helped enable us to be creative and to push our ideas even further.