Evaluation

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

The song I chose was “I need you” by the artist Jamzy. The genre of the music was hip hop. Hip hop is a genre that is similar to rap music, hip hop emerged in the 1920’s and became widely popular in the 1990’s and to the time now. The music video uses many typical conventions of a real media product. When looking at Goodwin’s points, my video relates to the points well. A relationship between the lyrics and the visuals, with the visuals illustrating, amplifying or contradicting the lyrics. In almost all music videos it is important that the song relates back to the video, in the lyrics of “I need you”, the lyrics directly come back to the video talking about the girl and goes into a memory.
The Digi pack cover and magazine I created goes quite well with the conventions of other media products. The layout of my digi pack is similar to other media products have the common features such as information on the artists list of the songs for the CD, which makes the digi pack display as a professional magazine or CD cover. The colour themes in both the digi pack and magazine advert is a typical colour range in our genres conventions as the colours are natural in the magazine and simple in the CD cover giving it specifically to target audience of the hip hop genre.

How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary task?

The combination of my main product and the ancillary task have been effective, I feel that the digi pack and the magazine relate to the video, both covers of the magazine and the CD cover are placed in the same area. the magazine also provides a genre related style of hip hop, also the magazine provides an intertextual reference to the song but also using magazine to make it look like a professional hip hop magazine. The costume, colours, font style hint the genre of the video making people who have an interest in indie/rock music have an interest in our video by the choices we have used in our magazine advert and digi pack. The font styles we have used on the digi pack and magazine advert are bold, solid and don’t have a fussy style. This style allows people to realise the genre as the fonts reinforce the kind of music the video represents.

What have you learned from audience feedback?

After creating a rough draft of the video and showing my peers, they had helped hugely to see what I can improve and add to see what people would want and expect from the video. Since the first draft of the video I had changed some aspects of the video due my peer’s feedback.
From the audience’s feedback I had found that majority had really enjoyed watching the video, majority had liked the fade transition and the fade of two scenes. So I had added a few more of the fade transitions. I felt that I had accomplished the main goal that I was aiming to achieve by making the video original and from the feedback that I had been given from my peers and some audience members telling me that it is.
Audiences who have seen the video have said, the video is good, looks like an original video and even though the finished video was good, I still would need to change a few minor problems to make the video better. From my peers who have seen the video they have said that the video would need a bit more improvements, I feel that the video overall is good if I had more time I would have added more scenes and spent a little more time trying to sort out the problem with the software that kept making the video slow down to the song.

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

The internet helped me thoroughly in my research stage, I used several different links like you tube to look at different songs from the same genre and see the different conventions they used, also to view Jamzy’s other songs to see the style he uses so we can develop that into my work. I also used the internet to look at previous years blogs to see how they presented their work and which element they used, I found it useful to analyse their work so would include everything in ours. The planning stage helped us in the long term as i followed the plans and referred back to the plans and timeline. To help me plan effectively I created a call sheet and a time line, I uploaded all of these onto the blogs and throughout the filming period I always tried referring back to them and expand on the ideas and change some ideas around a bit. For the construction of the music video and ancillary tasks I used Photoshop7. The music video was done on final cut and our video consisted of a lot of effects and transitions. I was creative in my thoughts and wanted to be unique in the way we represented our video. If I had more time I think the colour filter should’ve been done more precisely. We used the reverse shot which I thought was successful as it looked unique and worked well with the narrative. Sony Vegas pro allowed us to synchronise the music well and fit in with the lip synching and made the video look effective. Overall in our music video I think most of the effects and transitions worked well. Another media technology I used was Photoshop for our ancillary tasks. I explored Photoshop, and developed my skills and learnt new tools, I learnt how to change the background colours of images using the magic wand and the filters. I also developed some basic skills of organising the layers and the font styles. I got used to the way Photoshop works, and thought my products looked professional however if I did have more time I could have improved a lot more and focused on each part and made it look more successful.