Evaluation - Sheridan

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
The media product that our group created was based around the song, Way Back into Love, we created a generic music video and two ancillary texts for this love song. The music video and ancillary texts demonstrate typical characteristics of the love song genre for example the young couple performing a duet is very romantic. We had the characters singing to each other is very typical in a love song, a music video that follows similar characteristics is No Air by Jordin Sparks. This video has the two performing artists singing directly to each other for a lot of the video. It is important to promote the artist so we included a lot of lip syncing, performing and close-ups as well as creating a narrative structure throughout. The lyrics are about two people wanting to fall in love and this gave us a lot of inspiration for the visuals, for example we presented the characters on the day that they met for the first time and gradually built up a relationship between them. The fact that the couple both woke up alone is very significant in our video because this shows that they need to find love to save them from being lonely. I really like the way our lyrics and visuals interact as it amplifies the meaning and significance of them.
The music and visuals interact very well as the pace of the music is quite slow which is why we made our shots last for quite a long time. I also think that because we let the shots last for a while longer the image of the performer is improved and the impact is heightened as the audience see her lip-synching for longer. The piano at the beginning directly links to what is happening with the music because at the beginning of the song there is a piano solo and we used a piano to open our video. We chose to include this in our video because it makes the performer look talented which will attract an audience, it also sets a mellow tone for the duration of the video. I think that we have created an interesting visual style; all of the colours in our shots are ‘girly’ and mellow, this includes the costumes that the female performer is wearing. The tone that is created by these colours brings out love and loneliness as a theme, we help this along by hinting towards love in some of the shots. We did this by including a cardboard heart which re-occurs throughout; we did this because we wanted to create a motif that would distinguish our video from any other typical love song videos.
We did not make our music video voyeuristic in any way because not only was the music video intended for audiences of all ages but we think that the love and lust was equal between the male and female characters and we wanted to show that the attraction was mutual. We showed the attraction between the two by the motion of the characters looking into each others eyes. We also showed emotion by having close-ups of the character singing into the camera I think this made the video very interesting. Way Back into Love is a song from the film Music and Lyrics however we chose not to have ant intertextual reference to this in our music video because we wanted to include fresh ideas which we created ourselves. Altogether I think that we created a music video that includes the genre characteristics of a love song which means that we achieved what we were aiming for.


How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
Our main product and ancillary texts all interrelate, they work well together to promote the artist and entice the consumer. All of our products represent the artist because of the colours and pictures. For example on the front of the digi-pak cover we have pictures of Hayley Bennett that we have edited to look quite abstract and modern. The digi-pak cover that we created on Photoshop was very ‘girly’ and mellow in that the colours were popular ‘girls’ colour. For example we used a lot of purple and baby blue to in the background; I think that this attracts women of all ages because the colours and pictures are subtle. We chose to add hearts along with pictures of the artist because it represents love which represents the song and the video directly. The magazine advert that we created was different to our other products because of the vibrant colours and bold pattern. We chose to make this different because we wanted to attract the audience with the bright colours, red, orange and green. This product still links in with the other two products because it has a silhouette of the artist and it is also quite feminine like the digi-pak and video. I do think that the package as a whole would see well together and apart, I could see all of our products being genuine and professional which is the look we were going for. All of our products represent the artist because of the colours and pictures. For example on the front of the digi-pak cover we have pictures of Hayley Bennett that we have edited to look quite abstract and modern.

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?
We have received a range of audience feedback which not only influence our work but taught us how we could have improved. The first feedback that we received was by our peers and was an analysis of our rough-cut. This was important because we had a chance to edit our video if they pointed out any faults or new ideas; we also had a chance to do some more filming. For this we were analysed on the videos cinematography, editing, mise-en-scene and genre conventions. For cinematography we were told that we had a good variation of shot types and lengths, they expressed that they enjoyed the split screens. However they said that our shots got a bit boring towards the end because they drag on too much. This helped up when we went to film again because we got some more shots so that we could cut down the lengths of the shots. We were then analysed on the editing which we had not yet finished as it was the rough-cut this was very helpful because we had a lot of time to adapt and edit. They said that our synching was very accurate, they also liked the order of shots and the range of transition types. However they said that we had too many fades at the end of our shots, they said that the shots were two long and could use some variation. We took all of this on board and cut down the shots and added some new shots. We did not reduce the amount of fades because personally we liked this effect and thought that our video suited this well.
The other groups also commented on our mise-en-scene saying that the costumes were good and that we had a nice use of location. They said however that we should not use the college in our video. We improved this by filming more away from college making it look more professional. They said that we followed all the genre conventions because it was a typical love song and it was very focused on both the characters. They also liked the hearts in the background of the shots. However they thought that there was no chemistry between the characters which was disappointing so when we re-filmed we tried to improve the chemistry between the characters by making them closer and more intimate. We receive some other feedback on our final video however it was not very detailed. They basically just said that our final product was good and that it had improved since the rough-cut. They liked all of the new shots; they said the piano was very appropriate, they also said that the chemistry had improved to a certain extent. This gave us confidence in our video that we didn’t have before which was needed.

How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
We used many new technologies to create our video and ancillary texts. Internet was played a big part in the planning of our video. We used the website www.blogger.com to record all of our planning, this helped us to gather a lot of information together in one place and really express our ideas to each other. An essential website that we used was www.youtube.com this gave us a lot of inspiration and ideas during our planning stages because we had the opportunity to look at other music videos of the same genre. This was also a useful programme because we posted our music video on here which is nice because we are able to see what the public think of the video we created. The internet in general was useful for our research as we wanted to find our more about the artist and we also wanted to send her a message to tell her that we were creating a video for her song. We did not get a reply which would have been very interesting. Sometimes you can not rely on the internet because it is created by every one and some parts might not be true.
We used the cameras which were quite easy to use however the tripod was quite irritating because it was wonky and we had to find a way around this because we could not film with a wonky camera, we got around this by making on of the legs lower it then turned out we. We used final cut for all of our editing, it is a very sophisticated programme which takes time to get used to but we worked out all of the different techniques and special effects that we needed for our video, so we found a way to make final cut work in our favour and without final cut our video would not have been such a good quality and it would not have been very interesting. We used Photoshop to create our ancillary texts we worked really we with this programme because it helped to create a lot of interesting effects, it made our digi-pak and magazine advert look professional and visually appealing. To communicate with each other we used mobile phones which were very important because we needed to contact each other about filming dates and times and also deadline dates and times. Altogether new technology and equipment was essential in creating our music video.