Evaluation

1) In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
in order for us to show comparatives with the forms and conventions of our own product with others in its genre, it was pivotal that we first identified what those characteristics were and we did this during the research stage of production. The music video production conforms to the conventions of other pop/indie/ alternative music video's in several ways. We used the common format of song titles, album name, name of artist at the beginning of our music video as to keep with the forms of professional productions and also included a music channel broadcaster logo in the top left corner similar to those used on the television.The hybrid format of performance and narrative is a common convention of the genre and is something we chose to implement in our own production.In some ways this hybrid was adapted for our song specifically as our narrative has a vagueness or mysteriousness about it and is only understandablee through understanding of the song lyrics, this is slightly different to the traditional narratives of music videos that are usually clear. we chose to do it this way because it represented a distorted memory of the artist. this bring me to my next point. We use flashbacks throughout and conformed to the conventions of flashback by chose making the images back and white.
furthermore, I think our range of shots medium, close up, long shot etc. also showed parallels with contemporary music videos. However, in some elements of our production we subvert the stereotypical conventions of indie/alternative's. for example other productions in our genre are relatively simplistic and include very little image manipulation. in this sense we did challenge the forms to a degree as we used layering several times and increased the speed of clips to create passing of time. These affects which we created in the editing stages, we had not come across them previously when studying our genre. However, we felt that it worked well for our particular song choice.
The next stage of our coursework was to produce two print artefact's for our song album. the first of these artefact's was the CD cover.
Before producing the CD cover as shown on the right; we first analysed a range of Cd covers not only in our own genre but across the music industry. From this we identified that the most common format of CD covers involved the Album name and artist on the front and a track listing on the back along with the copyright information and record company details. This seemed to be common practise for every CD cover we analysed and for this reason we opted to conform with the conventional layout.however not all of the elements conformed to the conventions of CD covers for music in our pop/alternative/ indie genre. Other covers we looked at were very simplistic in the layout, colour and central images used in comparison with other genres, particularly heavy metal and rock. These two genre seemed to very elaborate and abstract, with many subliminal messages. in this sense we chose to combine elements of the two contrasting styles in order to develop our own unique style. For example the central image we used for the front cover, is a shot taken from the video. We manipulated it so that it emphasised contrast between the light and dark. the song artist is dark, we cannot see his face and he is looking out onto the world which is light. We thought this would we metaphoric for the story of our video. The artist is in a dark place reminiscing about happy/bright/happy times, whilst feeling sad/dark because of the relationship breakdown. The positioning of the Album name and Artist also subverts the stereotypical positioning of the genre which we identified as traditionally being centred, with the Artist name being much more dominant. In contrast ours focuses more on the Album name and is positioned off centre. We did this because we wanted the focus to be on the story behind the central image. Finally, our track listing develops the common conventions. We identified that it traditionally reads downwards and includes a numbered listing along with track lengths. However we felt that this was too simplistic for our own CD cover and so we used our editing skills to produce a track listing that appeared to look like writing on a scrap piece of paper. We then took and image from our video that made it look like the artist was looking at the tracks. Furthermore, we decided not to include track numbers as we felt that it tells listeners that they should listen to the album in a particular order.
After this lengthy process came the creation of a magazine advertisement to promote the release of the album. first we identified a distributor that would traditionally sell music in our genre. in this sense we followed conventions. We chose HMV as the store to promote our album and analysed several of their existing adverts.
This is the advert for the stone roses.We identified the large central image, combined with the HMV logo, song lyrics and album cover. This same juxtoposition and elements appeared throughout all of their contemporary Magazine adverts and so we chose to include several of these in our own. Our own advert included several of the elements such as; the use of song lyrics, the HMV logo and the CD cover. However unlike the conventional adverts our CD cover appears as the centtral image. We chose to manipulate the image so that it looked like it was an advert on a billboard in time square (New York). We chose to manipulate the conventions by doing this as we thought the clever use of photoshop gave our advert its own flavour and set it apart from the 'norm'. This is a bit like the song itself as it does not follow the conventions of a traditional genre.

2) How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary text?
I believe that the combination of our main product alongside our ancillary texts has been highly effective as a product to be consumed and enjoyed. I think that the work we have produced shows a consistent level of quality and parallels with the target audience we identified in the early research stages. I also feel that each product we have produced shares a relationship with the others. for example: our CD cover uses screen shots taken from the main product. It tells people who see the CD cover on a shop shelf the story behind the sons and the tone of the main product before they even see it or hear it. Similarly, when audiences do engage in the music video they recognise shots from the CD cover and this helps them gain a sense of involvement (they've seen/felt/experienced this story or scene before) and the combination of the CD cover and music video does this well.the screenshot we chose to include certainly helped make it an effective marketing campaign. The image we used had a mysteriousness about it and followed the greyscale colour scheme as some parts of our music video. This acted as a powerful luring device to captivate people who saw the CD cover on a shelf and this was only made possible because of the relationship between the cover and the main product. However, all this would be in vain if the target audience did not know about the release of the album and had not seen the music video. This is why it is so important for the advertising campaign to be well rounded. A magazine advert is an effective way of targeting specific segments/demographics. E.G. gossip magazines appeal to young women and therefore advertising in one of these magazines would help an organisation reach this segment. Our magazine advert recognised the importance of capturing and persuading its audience.People need to be told alot of information in a quick and easy way and the decision to use our CD cover as part of the central image did this as people immediately identified what exactly was people advertised to them. It contained elements of both the CD cover and also of the music video. It displayed a shot from the video and a central image of the CD cover, this was the best example of all three products working in tandem to create a single more powerful product and advertising campaign. It kept a consistent high quality and subtle use of media manipulation and effects similar to the main product, which contained subtle effects that were actually very difficult to produce such as the layering effects and music titles.
With all this said, I think it is clear that the relationship between all three of the products I have produced help create a powerful production piece, with a consistent high quality and targeting of the target demographic.

3)What have you learned from your audience feedback?
Our audience feedback was very productive and gave us useful information and ideas that we as the creators, did not recognise and overlooked.
It provided very useful information particularly for our ancillary texts. The majority of our feedback was very positive. People seemed to like the colour schemes, the professional finish and general creativity surrounding both the CD cover and the magazine advertisement. However, they id highlight a very important issue which was the inability to distinguish between the name of the song and the name of the album. The first CD cover we produced is shown to the right>
People recognised that the front of the album cover contained the song name 'everything you wanted' which was the song we used for our music video. However on the reverse of the cover the album name is 'The boxer' which is the actual name of Kele' album. This was dramatically un-conventional and had highlighted a flaw which we had not intended to include during the construction of the cover. In response to this I went back into photoshop and edited the cover so that the correct album name 'The Boxer' now appeared on the front cover.The new cover after feedback is posted below.
However this was not just a simple case of changing the CD cover. As our advertisement also included the CD cover it meant re-editing our magazine advert to show continuity with the CD cover. The new advert after feedback is posted below.
There were also other things that we learnt from our feedback regarding the CD cover. The majority of our feedback suggested that our colour scheme worked well withe the back and white images on both the front and back. However, there were some who felt that it lacked that little bit of colour to make it stand out a little more. Although we took this on board, we decided not to make adjustments to the colour scheme as we felt it would compromise the general tone and feeling of the cover. I have however, learned that just because I think my product work well there are others who do not agree and can see flaws with my ideas.
Our music video also received feedback, during the production stages it was mentioned to us that our video contained very few varied shots such as close ups and long shots. After then analysing what we had produced so far, we agreed that we should go out and shoot more footage, particularly focusing on close up shots, one of which I included in Question 1. Other feedback we received identified parts of our video where, the artist was out of sync with the music. Again we agreed with the feedback, took it on board and made the relevant corrections.
the biggest thing I have Learned from my feedback is that it easy to over look errors and flaws in your own work when you are personally involved with its creation from start to beginning. I have learned that it is important to take a step back and allow others to offer their opinions and advice on how to improve my work.

4) How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
The first use of media technology occurred when creating an online blog, to record the process' and development of my media product.To do this I had to use the Internet and a website called 'blogger.com' where i entered my details and chose a domain which was templated by the course tutor, making it easy for everyone to find each others blog. I then went into the advanced settings tab and personalised my blog; choosing the colour scheme, fonts, background and layout.Below is a screen grab that shows the tabs in the template designer.
The internet was also a useful resource for the research stages as I used search engines such as Google and Bing to find useful resources and existing media products that I could view. I then absorbed this information and recorded it directly online via blog posts similar to this one posted below.
It acts sort of like an online diary that friends can access and view, via the internet.
Another use of media technology in the planning stage was, embedding video's from sites such as youtube.com and vimeo.com. To do this I had to access the websites from home as the college computers do not give access to the websites. I then copied and pasted the embed link into blog posts so that the video appears on my blog.
The next stage was construction. We used several different media products to film the actual footage for our video.

Samsung video recorders
camera tri-pods
Mini DV cassettes: images captured on mini DV had to be logged and captured in apple macs final cut pro in order to be edited and manipulated.


To log and capture we used a process in final cut pro that involves finding the required images on the tape and uploading them onto the video tab for editing.I've posted a screen grab of this process below.


Final Cut pro was in instrumental tool in producing our music video as it allowed us to edit our footage to a professional standard. It has several ways of manipulating footage, some of which we utilised in our product. We used cropping and blurring tools to create layering, the effects tab to create stop motion blur and by Right clicking footage we could ajust the speed of clips to create slow motion effects. We also changed images to black and white using the colour adjustment tab located under 'edit'.
Another pivotal piece of software was Adobe Photoshop which allowed us to create the back ground for our music title that occur at the beginning and end of the music video.
Below I have included a screen grab of the background as it was during construction in photoshop.
We also had to media technologies to upload the MP3 files for our video. To do this we extracted tracks from the original album using windows music player. I saved the file directly onto my USB stick which I inserted into the mac computer and extracted via Final Cut pro.
I am currently using media technology to write up my evaluation. I write and upload directly into my Blog, using the blogs post spell check to check for errors and uploading screengrabs which I have saved throughout the project.