Evaluation.

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

Our media product that we have created has been inspired in different ways by real media products. Quite a big influence was that of the music videos by 'Noah and the Whale'. Their videos have a hazy effect over their footage, which was the same effect that we wanted to create.
With the genre of the music we neeed to make sure everything matched that style. the music is quite upbeat and happy so we needed to make sure that this was the message that our whole media product gave. We chose a summer picnic/food fight was we thought that this fitted in with the genre of the song. We didnt really show any visual/lyrics match but the visuals were very much at the same pace as the music, this made it all flow nicely together. The lip syncing we did was done effectively and worked well with the rest of the footage as the singer had food thrown at her, keeping the same theme all the way through the music video.

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

I think that all three products work very well as a promotional package. We also decided to add a fourth part to the promotional package, so we have; a music video, DVD case, a magazine advert and the tour dates poster.
The DVD case and tour poster have a picnic/food theme due to us using screen shots from our music video. The shots we have used give the impression of a relaxed atmosphere, fun with friends, nice summer days, etc. They are the main concepts that we were trying to create.
The magazine advert has gone with more of a food theme, due to the video being about a food fight. We took photographs of food that was used in the video to add a bit of continuity to the advert. We then changed the branding to information about the song like release date, website, artist and song, etc. This worked well as the image fitted in with the theme across all the promotional packages.
Our promotional package works to the audience that we are trying to attract. This is of young teenagers to young adults. The themes of our products appeal more to this kind of audience rather than the older generation.
We are pleased with our digipak but I feel there was room for improvement on it. To start with we spent a lot of time on the magazine advert, which took a lot of editing. This meant that when we got to the other products we didn't have as much time. Therefore they could've been better than they are.

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

We didn't get the original song that we pitched for as there were 3 groups pitching and our idea was too obvious and not very imaginative. This inspired and pushed us to think of a really good idea for our second pitch. We have then since expanded on the picnic/food fight idea to create our final product.
It was a bit hard with the feedback we got from our rough cut because we hadn't got a lot of the footage edited. Once we had tough we got some good feedback about the video. People liked the idea of the food fight and how we had edited it. Our teacher said that we needed to add more close up footage to get a bit more shot variation. We needed to add colour corrector over the clips too, which will make the video look more professional and less home made.
With colour corrector added over the top of the clips to give that hazy effect and a few more close up footage, we got a good response from our peers and teacher. The video looked a lot better with colour corrector over the top but would've liked a few more close up shots or reaction shots. We were also told how the singing fits well with the main footage, as food was being poured on the singer so it linked in with the other video footage.


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

The software that we have used to create the video and the promotional package are Final Cut and Photoshop. We then recorded all our research onto our group blog on blogger.com. Our video was captured on a HD handheld video camera and we took photographs for our magazine advert using a stills camera.
Final Cut was used to edit the video, which felt fairly easy due to havi used Final Cut a lot in the past year. Final Cut had everything that we wanted to do to our music video, some of which we had to be shown like the rewinding effect. Once we knew how to do it we were able to use the effect well with our music video.
Photoshop was used for the promotional pack, helping us edit the images to give them certain styles and to add text. It gave us the look that we wanted our pack to have and allowed us to achieve this fairly easily.
Blogger.com is nice and simple to use, allowing us to record our research when we wanted.