Evaluation Questions

In what ways does your media product, use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
- Our media product challenges conventions of real media products as we decided that we did want to show a sterotypical summer time music video, but we wanted to push it one step further and allow the viewers to be shocked by the video and leaves them wanting to watch it again, and again. This was the reason we used 'food fights' as a theme, by showing the singer of the band in a regular location, singing whilst having many different foods thrown at her gives a surreal effect to the video.

We have used conventions by researching into other music videos of the same genre and taking inspiration from them. In specific, videos by 'Noah And The Whale' inspired us as a group heavily, we made note of conventions we liked and would fit well in our video but changed them to fit around our theme. For example the hazy effect in many of their videos went down well with our group, so we used this as a filter on our video but made it slightly brighter to represent a summers day. The Genre of our product is 'Pop' to allow us to work around the correct conventions of Pop videos, we researched the sterotypical things used in a Pop video.

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

I would say that they were very effective as the theme stays clear through out, lots of things join them together for example, the font, the editing and the fact that 'food and fun' is brought into all of the products. We wanted our artist to appear fun and quirky, which I think we acheived. We added details to the products which makes the artist appear to be original and hopefully would appeal to our target audience which is both male and female teeangers. We felt this target audience was appropriate as the album was based on a teenage summer time which this target audience could relate to.

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

Our feedback from our inital pitch wasn't great as we originally had chosen a completely different song, bu after receiving feedback from that it came clear that we had taken the wrong route. After hearing 'We're From Barcelona' our whole group decided that was the song for us, and we all had crazy, quirky ideas for our video! Once we made our pitch for that song and receiving good feedback, it gave us the motivation to go ahead with that song.

Our feedback on our rough cut wasn't great either, as a group we felt that it was very rushed and we didn't have enough time to place it all together. Most people, both peers and teachers said our idea was great but we needed to work on certain areas, for example the editing. We also didn't include any singing which was a big problem, but after getting this feedback we knew that singing was a must have.

The feedback on our final cut was really good, we were told that it was a great improvement and that the idea was very original and worked well. The singing peiced the video together as it was something to cut away from but also fitted into the theme of the video.

Overall I have learnt that the whole point of a product is to appeal to your audience and if your audience doesn't like it then it won't sell. You need to have this is mind when producing a music video.

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

Before this task I knew the basics of how to use different softwares such as Final Cut and Photoshop. But after acheiving a complex music video, using all different techniques that our video did, it allowed me to develop those skills. As a group we all taught eachother how to use the different softwares so we all had an equal chance of developing our skills on them.

Final Cut especially allowed us to be creative as any thing you want to do to your music video, you can do! iI found it amazing how simple it was to speed up, slow down and reverse clips. I also thought it was great to be able to apply a filter to the whole video at once, without selecting every clip which would have taken a lot longer!