Evaluation

Evaluation
1.In what ways does the media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
The video uses many forms and conventions often found in typical videos of a similar genre, our video contrains a shot of me almost identical to that of Pete Doherty in the video 'For Lovers'

We felt that using shots from previous music videos of a similar genre would gave a feel that we wanted for a slow acoustic song. The video For Lovers is also shot with minimal colour. We wanted to gave the video a similar feel, and so we using the settings on Adobe Premier Pro, and reduced the Saturation and Hue of the video. [picture of Premier Pro]
We also filmed part of the video in black and white, for example this scene filmed in a Wigan Cafe.

The video contains a narrative, reminiscent of only a few videos in the same genre, arguably challenging the conventions of the genre. One video that incorporates a loose narrative is Broken Love song by Pete Doherty, which can be viewed below.

This video's narrative relates to the general lyrics of the song, incorporating 'Broken Love' as the main character played by Doherty, waits for a woman to return, in a room whilst it is raining outside, and begins to get frustrated whilst waiting. This video, shares the common feature with our video, in the sense that the video generally follows the lyrics in the song, which is relatively uncommon to videos in the genre. For example, the film features a drugs scene, as shown here

which follows the part of the lyrics which state "All the...drugs...we shared together."
We decided to use the conventions of the genre, by using the NME TV logo in the top left corner of the screen throughout the video, to give the look of the video being played on a music channel. We also used a title similar to that of NME, giving the song name, band name, and album, at the beginning of the video.
We attempted to challenge the conventions of a music video with a narrative by rejecting the idea of portraying events in chronological order. We began the video with part of events which happened at the end.

This is in the low colour. The rest of the music video shows events which happened after the break up, which is shown above, cluminating in the female character becoming intoxicated. The shots in black white represent memories supposedly from the happier days of the relationship. The contrast colour and between black and white highlights the sharp difference between the past and the present.
The digipack, generally conforms to the conventions of the genre. It features, on the front cover a red, white and blue theme, covering the text and the colour change of the graffiti, which is reminscent of punk album cover such as the sex pistols album shown below.

The back of the album features a picture of Levi, and the names of songs which would be on the album. It also features a barcode and gives the band's website, and copyright information in small print. This is to make the album appear as though it would be, if sold in shops etc. Most of the digipack is in black and white, and particular on the back cover , only Levi's hair is in colour.

Some other album covers similar to our digpiack are below.

2. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts.
The combination of main product an ancillary texts is effective in my opinion. As the video aims to sell a single, from the album from which we made the digipack, and the poster hopes to promote the album, they are naturally all very closely related. The main product the video features Me and Levi, as the characters. Whilst i feature with 2 other males as part of the 'band' on the poster, Levi is on the digipack on the front and back cover. The picture on the poster was taken during the same photoshoot from which many of the pictures inside the digipack, most notably the pictures on the panel which contains the disc, were taken.
Here are some other photos from the photoshoot and the panel which would contain the CD.


We used many of the same techniques for both the video, and for the poster and digipack. One of these techniques was to use post-production to alter the colour contrast of the texts. The pictures below show us doing this and highlight how this was done.

As the video aims to sell a single, from the album from which we made the digipack, and the poster hopes to promote the album, they are naturally all very closely related.

3. What have you learned from your audience feedback?
During the production process we released a rough cut of our video, which can be seen below.

We asked people to give feedback of this rough video, so we could add improvements to the finished article. This included feeback from pupils and also from fellow students, one example of which is:

Very good, professional Rough Cut. A lot more film needs to be added to fill in the blank bits the first cut screen needs adding to and the lip syncing my need a little touch up but the video fits the song very well, the cuts are in the right places and overall looks really good.
This allowed us to see what improvements could me made to the rough video, and implimnents these for the end product. The feedback we recieved after releasing the completed video included:
Rose Williams:
I was very impressed with the how the song and the video fitted together, the story was interesting and i liked the use of effects. The characters were clearly defined, but perhaps the girl's point of view could be portrayed slightly more The video was perhaps a little short, but this was dictated by the length of the song, overall a good, professional music video.
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Stephen Rigby:
The video was well constructed and professionally put together. Although I don't like the song, the video allowed me to get into it more. There is too many scenes of the pair (repetitive) I like the reference to drugs, very rock and roll.
4. How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
During the research stage, our group benefited greatly from Internet technologies. We used websites such as YouTube to gain a feel of real media texts which gave us ideas about the genre, and how to create a professional text.

This video of Arctic Monkeys- When the Sun Goes Down uses very similar colours to that of our video. Although this wasn't the inspiration for this aspect of our video we thought it highlighted how this manipulation of colour could be used well. We also used search sites such as google images to find pictures of posters and album covers but also general posters of bands, to help with ideas for our poster and digipack. Some of the posters we took ideas from included:

During the planning stage we used the high quality cameras to get some rough ideas of our project, and what would be suitable as a photo shoot.

Here are pictures of some of the equipment we used during out project.

We also used the programs photoshop and Premiere Pro in post production to make our raw material into viable media products. Below are some screenshots of us working in these programs.

This is a screenshot of how we used Premiere Pro to create the split screen effect, which was surprisingly easy as we were able to just drag the screens on the top right pane around to manipulate sizes etc.

We used Photoshop to manipulate the picture for the poster also. This including changing the colours, and manipulating the overall brightness of the poster to get the effect we wanted, a dingy punk look.

I was able to use the radio studio to construct a general evaluation of reflections of the video, with some interests facts and things in relation to filming.