Evaluation Questions

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

By carrying interviews at the begging of the project we saw what the potential audience would like to see in a music video. By documenting what they wanted to see we were able to collate what specific needs the video needed. We had a theme love/Heartache which dominated our work. Most videos today tend to have a specific them to do with the lyrics of song. We maintained this trait, as we found professional media products do this.  We had no spending budget so making the video meant we had to use the resources available to us without cost e.g. Park, street, train station. Our video’s main priority was to portray the emotion of the song; this again agrees with conventions of real media products.

 I believe our video still challenges modern day videos because in many ways it is still similar, lip-syncing, special effects, motifs/themes all of which outline the song more in detail. Compared to mainstream music videos we see that our video may not be as advanced or well-rehearsed, we learnt this through the process f progression we realised the amount of work and planning that has to go in.  Present day videos can sometimes cost $4 million dollars, are budget was nothing so we had to make do with what we had.

However, our video still gives off the same vibe/feeling that real media products produce due to carrying out the same conventions.

2. How effective is the combination of your main products and ancillary texts?

To ensure and outline the professional quality of our project every aspect had to be perfected and suitable. We ensured this by making sure the Music Video, Website and Digipak CD cover, had the same house style this meant that a theme was needed consisting of colour schemes and fonts etc. Our video took place in a park, we wanted to outline this through the rest of the project so for the album artwork, and images were taken of the park which was also our set. The website also had the same colour scheme as the leaves in the album cover.  This gave the user the ability to recognise the song and associate it with the rest of the project.

3. What have you learned from your audience feedback?

We found that the audience enjoyed the music video, we see that it gave off the sad heartbreak vibe that the song’s lyrics are portraying we found this to be a great success as this is what we aimed for. Our main worry was that the audience may not understand the narrative the video is telling. However this wasn’t the case as the audience learned the characters they were viewing and were able to comprehend what is going on.

We had made two sections to the audience feedback the first being interviews which were made to find out what we needed to include in our music video, find out the music genre that the majority of people preferred, the different motifs that they liked to see within music  videos etc.

The second section was the test audience, they were to ensure the final finished product was up to standard and fulfilled the vibe we wanted to give off from the song and video. We have successfully portrayed the original intentions of this song throughout its production.

4. How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

MAC Computer
This enabled us to edit and store clips of our music video and was the main function of creating our music video as it included software that we needed to carry out our project

·         Adobe Premiere

·         Adobe Photoshop

·         Celtx

·         PowerPoint

·         Word Processor

The Camcorder
We used my own Sony CX-115E camcorder to record the music video we had created. The camera is capable of full HD and records in a AVCHD format. Due to the files of AVCHD format being a very compressed format (record format). I had to to convert the files into 'MPEG-2' as this meant Adobe Premiere could read the files without potential lag which can cause inconsistensy when in the editing process.

The Camera
We used my Canon D20 SLR, to take pictures for the Digipak and for the website. The camera takes pictures using an 8Megapixel lense. We used the pictures taken and edited them in Photoshop for use on the website and the Digipak. We also used the camera to take pictures for the storyboard.

The Tripod
We used a standard tripod that i owned, we used this for the camcorder and the camera in order to keep it  steady for specific shots and techniques in order to keep the production of our video looking professional.

All these factors enabled us to make an effective video, considering we had no budget to spend we used what we had readily available to use. Without any of the above mentioned not of our project could have been made as they are all key. For the evaluation we made an “MTV-Type” mock up TV show where we take a look into the video and the band itself.