Individual Evaluation - James

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

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

What have you learnt from audience feedback? -+

How did you use new media technologies in the construction, research, planning and evaluation stages?
Throughout the production of our Music product we have used various  types of new media technology, such as the obvious; blogger of which has helped us publish our project in a professional manner shown through the incorporation of both images and videos which have the ability for us to easily convey our desired effect and explain/ analyse easily, professionally and efficiently. Also the ease of use such as the ability to edit, add and access from any browser in the world. Finalcut has been a superb tool in both planning and research as well as the completion of our final video, and the directors cut version also, firstly final cut was taken advantage of in the initial research for the blog post on fillers, as well as lip-syncing with both the words to the music as well as the actual lip movement, this maximised our confidence for the editing for our final cut which we feel is also successful, as it enabled us to successfully convey the desired effect, shown through the use of fillers, fades and emphasis on certain sections portrayed through the on screen lyrics. Google Streetview was in fact also a help shown in the blog post for our location recce, the way in which this helped was it enabled us to show our ideas and scout for ideal locations a lot quicker and efficiently opposed to manually doing, especially when the weather was against us. Photoshop was a further form of digital technology that we took advantage of shown with our digipack and magazine advert which allowed us to take seemingly plain and simple images and manipulate them in such a way which successfully conveyed the desired and professional image.

Joe Scott - Evaluation Questions

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

When creating our media product, we aimed to conform to the typical conventions of real media products, this is because we waned something that is instantly recognizable by audiences of our genre, rather than risking unpopularity by unsuccessfully challenging these forms and conventions, to achieve a seamless integration with this genre we studied other music videos to find common themes and noted them down for use in the design stages of production.
    To test these new themes we created a draft product and as a first attempt at replicated common genre characteristics we feel this was achieved, Finally using what we learnt from our draft we we're able to produce in our opinion a high quality, instantly recognizable and memorable music video.

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





What have you learnt from audience feedback?


When we created our final product it was given to a test audience, all of whom produced feedback on what they thought about it and possible changes to make which they felt it required to be successful.

They felt we followed the conventions of our genre effectively they also we're impressed by the editing and did not make any bad comments, however some felt the lip syncing was not 100% accurate in places which overall we agree with.

Our peers also felt the jump cuts and words we're timed well with the beat of the song and matched the on screen actions, we were told it was slightly abstract and harder to read at times, however this was intentional to keep the audience interested and on their toes.


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


We have used new media technologies right from concept, through to planning and to production,
there is a wide range of technologies used including in the use of PC's and the Internet to carry our research on other bands and typical conventions of our genre, to produce our drafts and final product we used the Apple software 'Final Cut Express' and finally to evaluate each others work and receive a final mark we used 'Youtube' to upload our video so it can be watched anywhere.

Individual Evaluation - Dom

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

To answer this question, I first needed to identify what genre of music our song choice would be classed as. This will help me in order to choose a similar song of the same genre and pinpoint the individual conventions used in that video and the conventions used in our video.
The genre I believe our song could be categorised into is the 'pop rock' genre. I feel our song is too soft to be classed as a full on rock song however it uses many instruments and is therefore not entirely poppy. A band that plays a similar sort of music to ours I would say is a band called 'McFly'. After extensive research through many of McFly's music videos I was able to identify some conventions and a video that portrays all of these conventions. (Shown Below)

This song, '5 colours in her hair' shows all the conventions that should be used in a music video of 'pop rock' genre. These are: Performance Footage, Bright Colours, extensive editing and Story-line. 

Performance Footage

In this video, there is a lot of performance footage showing the band members, this includes instruments and lip syncing. In some ways our video does use this convention as we have a lot of lip syncing. However, we also challenge this convention as we have no use of instruments in our video. This is not done intentionally. Originally we set out to use many instruments such as a piano for the music intro at the start of the video but a lack of planning meant we couldn't find anyone that could play the piano. Below are screen grabs of the use of performance in McFly's video and ours as well. 

Bright Colours

In a lot of McFly's videos there is extensive use of bright colours, coming in many different forms. The clothing is all very bright, so is the general style of editing. Our video challenges this conventions as we adopt a dark style of editing and as you can see in the pictures above, there is a huge difference in clothing we are wearing. I believe we adopted this style as our song, in contrast to many of McFly's, has quite a dark meaning and story behind it whereas McFly's lyrics and stories are quite upbeat and happy. 

Extensive Editing

Editing is a very broad subject there are two aspects of editing that I need to focus on in order to analyse editing. There are filters and effects applied to our video that make it look dark such as the saturation effect and de-saturation effect. But there is also editing techniques that change the size of the video and make it appear in different areas of the screen. This is used in both our video and McFly's video. Examples are shown below. 

Storyline

In both McFly' video and our video, there is a storyline and performance footage, therefore showing that we are using this convention, a convention that I believed we used quite well.

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

After researching many videos and ancillary products (eg DigiPaks) I approached the ultimate conclusion that the most successful DigiPaks were ones that included reminders that can be seen in the particular video. So we decided this would be a convention that we would try and incorporate in our digipak. Obviously, the pink in the DigiPak reminds the audience of 'The Pink Spiders'

Individual Evaluation - Ben

Our main product as a package, i feel is very effective and could easily be seen as a real, genuine music video, album and magazine cover.

This is our final album cover which i feel is very effective as the contrasting colours of the pink and grey merge well together and seeing as the band is called 'The Pink Spiders', the pink obviously goes in relation to the name of the band.

However our music video doesn't have pink in it because we wanted to have contrapuntal feel to the video where the music is a lot more up beat and lively than the performance seen on screen which we wanted to be similar the Architects - 'Heartburn'

We as a band wanted the mood on screen to be quite like the video above with the slow walking down a street and walking through fields and woods.

Individual Evaluation - Ben

Our media product - music video- I say would be the genre of 'pop rock' with the similar conventions to such bands as Mcfly and their song 'party girl'. As we both have live performances, theirs' being a live performance in a darkly lit room which is happening at the same time as the story line which sees the band arriving at a large manor on some sort of trip which then ends up with them fighting off partying girls who turn out to be vampires. However we both have an accurate story line in relation to the meaning of the lyrics which shows ours having emily storm off on her seventeenth birthday as she feels she is too old for gift and party and how she just wants to be portrayed as an adult.  However our song could be considered to be a bit more 'punk' than anything else but its all about different peoples opinions. This can also be said about mcfly and how their genre has changed over the years.

In our performance we wanted to include and show the band as much as possible as i feel this is a good way of attracting our target audience because it feels more personal to the fans. the same with Mcfly, it shows a lot of the band, either performing or in the story which again would attract more of an audience.

Mcfly's music video, 'party girl' conveys a group of girls turn into vampires as soon as the sun goes down attacking the band which could be in relation to their 'blood sucking' female fans and how they can get enough of the band and how maybe their fans are portrayed as 'party girls'.