Evaluation

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

Here are six examples of how we have used real media texts to influence and inspire us in our own work. We wanted to create a typical 'Pop' music video therefore we used many techniques which we have seen within existing, professional work. As you can see the main artists videos that have influence our work are; Pixie Lott, The Black Eyed Peas and of course, our chosen artist, Jordin Sparks. We were particularly inspired by the original video for the song we chose as it also gave a clear narrative and followed the lyrics in the song, visually. Overall we believe that we have given a successful representation of the song and the genre that we chose.

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

As part of our coursework we had to produce a number of products, we wanted to ensure that each product showed clear similarity so it was certain to audience what we were trying to represent. Throughout our video it is clear that there is a dominant female character, we wanted to ensure this in our print work also. We did this by focusing specifically on the character alone, experimenting with a range of clothing and make up for each individual image, this allowed us to represent and portray the personality of the character. As a group we feel our ancillary tasks compliment our main product very well as they reflect clearly what the song is about, with the use of print we were able to clearly represent the switch in character personality and create this specific post feminist role model we were aiming for. The use of video helped us to tell the story and represent the issues and difficulties the character is faced with, and how she manages to turn it around to gain her own way.

The print work alone is a strong representation of the genre of the music video, the background of the images is mainly dark, but covered with a spread of deep pink colour, the focal point of the images being the female character is a lot brighter and takes of the majority of the image. Along with various effects from photoshop and specific lighting we were able to represent a sense of glamour and pop.

The song is about relationships, promiscuity and lust for the opposite sex we were able to represent this through minor effects and symbolic details, such as the use of deep pink lipstick to represent a sense of love or lust within the character and the use of large false eye lashes covering most of the face, this give the subject a blank expression but creates this sense of a threat and power from within the subjects face. Overall we think all three aspects of our project have worked well in creating a successful outcome.

3. What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

er our rough cut, we got some of our peers to comment on how they thought our video looked so far. Most of the comments where positive so we were happy to carry on editing as we had been. Laura however pointed out that the lighting at the beginning of our video was poor as it was shot at night time, to justify this we did aim for our video to look dark and grungy to contrast with later shots in the video at the party. Also with the night settings and the train station as our location the audience automatically can see the story starting and setting a narrative, as the girls are all dressed up and look ready to party. The shadows that are created within the settings I believe give a mysterious aura around the characters.

Many people commented on how our video ended, saying that it was their favourite section to the 3 minute video. We tried to follow the stereotypical film within a video which was a treat we found when researching and planning. The comical and humorous ending to the video left the audience with a feel good, girl power type feeling and tied up loose ends in the narrative.

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

When constructing our coursework we used various types of programs to help us. The main programs that we used we Adobe Premiere and Photoshop.

<----- Using Premiere

We used Premiere for the basic construction and editing of the music video. We also took advantage of this equipment to take our video a step further, using the effects tools to create our effects in our video coursework.

Here are a couple of examples;

We also used photoshop to create our print work for our coursework. (CD advertisement poster and digipack) We used many different techniques with the program and used it to its full potential.