Making of video

My Evaluation

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

Think about:

·      The products you have analysed and gained inspiration from.

·      Goodwin’s points

·      Genre of product

Our media product uses lots of typical forms and convention of real media products. Examples of this would be that it has a narrative running through the length of the music video and that it has lots of close up shot (and other types) of the artist singing which is conventional in about 99% of music videos, its conventional as companies want the singer to be the main focus of the video therefore there is a lot more shots in ratio to the narrative shots. Although our music video does use a lot of conventions it also develops and challenges the forms and conventions. The major way in which are product does this is that through out the whole video it is split screen which helps to tell the narrative as well as keeping main focus on the singer, it also helps to keep the viewer constantly interested as the images are always changing in different ways and into different parts of the screen. This is a different way to show the video, as most music videos will be full screen, although there are a few videos about which use split screen it a bit more original than your conventional video’s, by using this technique it also makes it more original to our genre

Demonstrates genre characteristics

Relationship between visuals and lyrics in parts.

Relationship between music and video (quicker on the beat etc.)

Lots of close ups of the artist as the labels would demand it.

Inter-textual reference to films.

How Effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary (Magazine advert / Digi pack cover) texts?

Think about:

·      How all 3 work together as a promo package

·      What image do they create of the artist

·      How are they successful at attracting the target audience

I believe that the combination of our main product, magazine advert and digi pack work together very well. I think it works well for 3 main reasons. One, it interlinks with one another such as the colour schemes and the shot types (lots of the artist).  Two, the style in which we designed them in are inter-linking; such as the fonts we decided on and the way we dressed the artist to fit in with the conventions of our genre. And three, I believe that it would appeal to a larger target audience, as its not to gender/age specific therefore hopefully attracting more people.

The main product and ancillary texts help to create an indie feel to the artist by the effects we used on the CD cover, this also crosses over into the music as this was the kind of genre it was, so it would have been unconventional and not really appropriate to take on a different style.

What have you learnt from you feedback?

·      Feedback on initial pitch

·      On your rough cut

·      On finished product

·      Peers and teachers

We learnt a great deal from all of the feedback we received. When we were doing the initial pitch we received a lot of ideas from other classmates as well as the teacher combined with a few of our own which could be used. When we had got to the rough cut point the main feedback we got was that the video was to indecisive as we weren’t sure as to the definite style that we wanted to use as we were torn between using the split screen, no split screen or split screen for parts of the video. After most the class agreeing that split screen would look better we decided to go with this and got on with making the whole video in split screen – a significant point in the process of making our product. When we had finished the product and shown the rest of the class the overall feedback was that they had liked it and thought that the split screen worked really well and helped to keep you interested through out the whole video. There were a couple of comments where they said that there was parts of it such as shots or narrative which could be slightly improved but nothing which was a major floor.

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

·      All the software (Blogger/Photoshop/Final Cut)

·      HD cameras / stills

·      In what ways did you use these products and how did they help you to prepare and create a successful product?

Blogger was a big influence and help in the process of planning the entire product as it allowed us to jot down ideas and pictures/ videos etc. which where an influence on our product.

Photoshop was probably the programme, which was used a bit less, however it allowed us to do unique and interesting images which otherwise, would not be possible, this was key as it allowed us to link ideas in to the front cover which were in the video.

Evaluative commentary script-Paragraph 4

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

Blogger was the main resource I used as I tried to research other videos, techniques and artists in order to gain inspiration for our own video and an idea of what conventions were found in the indie/alternative genre. Blogger was also very useful when it came to the evaluation stage as all of the material we needed was kept on our blog. We always tried to use posts to give us more ideas and to keep in contact with each other as we all had different tasks but wanted to make sure we were all going in the same direction. Final cut was useful as our prior use of the resource allowed us to create a better media product. Its vast number of features meant we could create whatever theme or style we wanted with the shots we took. Photoshop was useful as it allowed us to create our ancillary product to a reasonably high standard. We often found the program to be hard to use as it had many features and completing a simple cover took a long time. Despite our problems with the software it was very useful as it allowed us to use similar colours and styles to our music video which meant we could show a relationship between the products which would mean they promote each other to the audience.

Evaulative commentary script-Paragraph 1

In what ways does your media product use, break or develop conventions found in real media products?


We needed to conform to some of the conventions so we could establish a genre within our music video. Since the genre of the music we chose was indie/alternative, we used a similar dress code to products found in the same genre and also found in our audience, since our audience is younger people we felt it would be beneficial to dress in a similar way as it would be aesthetically pleasing to the audience. We also tried to keep a cut rate that matched the tempo so we could cut on the beat. This meant the final product would look sharper which would mean it would be closer to a real media product. Since we had a theme of romance in our song, we tried to forward this impression on our video through the colour scheme. In the video, Both Finn and Amy are wearing red tops which means the audience can link the characters together due to their correlating dress sense. We developed conventions were me felt necessary as it is part of the indie genre. Most products within the genre try to have an individual theme to make it stand out. I felt setting our video apart from the rest of the market was essential as it is a very competitive industry, so we needed to have a theme or concept that would make the audience go out and buy our record as opposed to a similar one. We decided after our peer feedback that we would make our entire video split-screen as it would put across our narrative of love/breaking up well as it would provide a barrier between the two characters. It would also make out video fairly niche as it was one of a few videos in the industry to use this type of edit the whole way through. We tried not to break conventions in our video because it would mean that we would take our video outside of the genre which would mean it wouldn't look like a real media product and therefore would defeat the point of the task.

BACK cover

Lesson 13/12/11

Lesson Plan 13/12/11
In today's lesson we will complete the video documentary. 
Also stay up to date with blogger and upload remaining evaluations.

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

We used new technologies in all of the stages of the process of creating the music video. For the planning ry useful as it was the main editing tool that we used. It allowed us to chop and change about the footage that we had captured and put it in an order that we wanted it to be. It also allowed us to put effects and change the size of the footage. This was very useful while we were doing the split screen effect on our video. This is because it allowed us to put several pieces of footage in one place and crop it so that they would all fit the screen and gave the effect of split screen. Without final cut express it wouldn’t be possible to do the viup did while they were away.

New technologies such as HD cameras, final cut express, and photoshop helped throughout the construction. HD cameras helped us because they were much easier to use than the previous cameras and had much better picture/video quality so it made the video look more professional. It was also much easier to transfer the video that we had captured as it was on a memory card opposed to using a tape and a firewire and then transferring them onto the computer.

Final cut express was also very useful as it was the main editing tool that we used. It allowed us to chop and change about the footage that we had captured and put it in an order that we wanted it to be. It also allowed us to put effects and change the size of the footage. This was very useful while we were doing the split screen effect on our video. This is because it allowed us to put several pieces of footage in one place and crop it so that they would all fit the screen and gave the effect of split screen. Without final cut express it wouldn’t be possible to do the video.

Photoshop CS3 was very useful for developing our ancillary product. It allowed us to apply effects such as dispersion to our image that we used in our ancillary product. It also allowed us create a magazine advert in a similar colour scheme to the rest of our product which means it fitted in nicely with the rest of the products. It also allowed us to add extra things to our products, such as putting a QR code on our digi-pack cover and magazine advert

HD video cameras also helped with our evaluation stages; this is because we used them to film our evaluation/making of documentary/interview. HD cameras helped because record in high definition which means that it gives us good clear video, they also record very clear sounding audio which helps because it makes it easier to understand what people are saying while they’re on camera.

Final cut express also helped because it allowed us to edit our evaluation together. It allowed us to put the video clips in what ever order we wanted and allowed us to cut about and remove bits of the interview which either wasn’t useful or had a lot of pauses in it. It also allowed us edit in bit of our music video over the top of our interview. This was helpful as it allowed us to show what we were talking about when we were referring to the video e.g. split screen. It also allowed us to put the video over bits where we had cut something out, this removed the problem of the video skipping about when parts were cut out and not looking right.

Blogger helped us as well as it gave us access to the questions that we had to answer for the evaluation, it also gave us a chance to look at what we had previously done and allowed us to see how its changed and what we had previously wrote which may help us with the evaluation. It also give us a place to put all the pieces of the evaluation into one place so its easy to view.