Evaluation (Cassie)

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Our media product has a variety of different forms and conventions. We did a lot of research and we got most of our inspiration from other music videos. From our research, we managed to find out the different form and conventions of what a typical love song should include. We used this to plan and produce our own music video. A typical love song has lots of close ups of the artist and couple. Our music video has a narrative about a typical couple meeting and falling in love. we used locations that were seen to be everyday locations, this made the video more realistic and conventional. Normally in a love song, the video will be directly linked to the lyrics. The pace of the song should match the pace of the video and this is what we did with ours. The pace of the music video is slow and conforms to a long song. We use a variety of shots and locations to make the video more interesting and to keep the video from getting boring. The use of different shots and lighting sets the mood for the love song and sets the emotion. The song that we chose was Way Back into love by Haley Bennett which is thought of as a typical love song. The song is a duet by Hugh Grant and the lyrics talk about finding love. The video was simple to plan and produce as the genre of the song is well known and there is many ideas that we could use and devlop. Bad Day by Daniel Powter was an inspiration for what we wanted for our music video and we got many ideas from it. No air by Jordin Sparks and Chris Brown helped us to piece together our narrative as well as giving us ideas for editing. We used split screens and slow motion shots which they use in their videos and we thought this was a very good idea. The song we chose, Way back into Love, didn’t have an original music video apart from the movie that it is in, we found it harder to come up with ideas as we had no starting point. we found this challenging as that meant we couldnt get ideas from the origional music video. Our music video contains the romantic couple and they meet and fall in love. This is our narrative. Its suits teh lyrics very well. We have used lots of shots of the artist with a range of lip synching. This is used in other music videos as it makes a signature for the artist. We made our video for all audiences by making it suitable for everyone. We really liked the piano playing from Bad Day by Daniel Powter and thought it would make a good opening sequence. In my own opinion i feel that our music video conforms to the typical conventions of a love song.

How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
Our digi-pack was mostly influenced by our music video, song and research of other products. It was made to sell the artist, along with the song and our products had colours that show the colours of love. the products are simple, however they keep the audience interested and wanting to buy the video. we used silhouttes to show the artist but keep her a mystery, this was to keep the audience keen and interested. Our poster gives a new image to the artist showing her as a new star. The silhouette was our main way of doing this. The background was to put the impression accross of the artist being unique and individual. Our DVD cover gives the audience an insight to what the song is about, it has girly images and colours, to show that she is the main singer. The objects we used were things such as roses and hearts. We wanted to attract people to the artist, we did this by using an image of her face but distorting it, keeping that mysterious context. A clear link between our ancillary task and music video was really important. All of our products flow together and this makes the digi pack more interesting and buyable. The main reason for making them all connect is to keep the audience interested in buying the products, if they didnt flow then the buyer would get confused and wouldnt be interested.

What have you learnt from your audience feed back?
All feedback received was taking into consideration and recorded on our blog. We reffered back to it all when it came to our final editing. We took everything said into consideration as we found it very useful in making our video successful. We focused on the feed back when we went out to do more filming. People said that the couple in our msuic video were uncomfortable together, therefore, we filmed most parts again to make sure the couple looked interested, this kept the flow of the video. Also people said that we didnt have a clear narrative, this meant that we had to re think what we had already done and go over it so we had a clear narrative to stop the audience getting confused in what was happening. We filmed a lot of the parts again to keep the continuity. Another suggestion was that we needed more footage of the artist singing this was suggested by Tanya, so we refilmed lots of different angles of the whole song with both artists singing together and separately. We also re filmed the piano part as the piano looked very unprofessional. The change in feedback from out rough cut to our final piece was a big improvement and we took all comments into consideration. Feedback was really helpful as it enabled us to hear what people thought of our music video.
We also had feedback on our ancillary task which was positive. The group liked the simplicity of the products. Overall, our feedback played a big part in the succes of our music video.

How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research planning and evaluation stages?
You tube and access to the internet played an important role in our planning and research. The internet enabled us to gather inspiration for our video. We used blogger on a regular basis to keep a track of whatwe were planning and every stage of our filming, this was to look back at and help us to improve our initial ideas and produce the final piece. We needed itunes to play our song as we filmed and this was important so when it came to editing we would be able to match the lip syncing to the origional song, this was just an easier way and made things more efficient when it came to editing. We also found that a tripod helps a great deal when filming, when we filmed out test footage the camera was wonky and this meant that when we came to do the split screens, the shots didnt match up, this was obviously a big deal when it came to the final piece as everything has to match up or the video looks bad.
We used final cut for all our editing as this is a really godo and easy way of editing a music video, it helped us a lot in the production of our final products.
The rest of our tasks were done on photoshop as we could plave any picture into it and edit it to what we wanted, i think it played an important role in the making of our prducts.
In my opinion , without the new media technologies, we would not be able to produce the things that we did, they are very important when making the products that we did.