Gavin's Evaluation

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

Music videos can be characterised by three broad categories performance, narrative and concept driven. Our video is a combination of two styles, performance and narrative. For example blink 182 “Adam song” uses both a complex narrative and concept to engage their, challenging the normal conventions of rock videos. In our video we use such conventions, yet reach new standards of new rock videos. This way the audience can relate our music video to famous rock videos as it has aspects of new material out today. This is good because in some aspects it separates the band from other rock bands such as “Linkin Park”. A combination of performance and narrative is a good balance, as it shows footage of the band performing and their performance skills, also shows what the song is about by showing narrative clips.

To help the audience understand the song and video more, we created a relationship between the both. By the lyrics of the song, we were able to create a story which linked our song and human issues which some people could relate to. This helps the audience understand the song easier. In our case the issue was domestic violence, we learnt this through the song lyrics “she don’t sing no more, left on that kitchen floor, husband went through that door, he left her for that, fucking whore”. So we based our story on a couple where the relationship is dominated by the male by using abusive language and action. This resulted in the woman being depressed and eventually leaving the man.

Camera work and editing was very important in our media product as it was a way to capture our audience eye, also small minor details added to our finish product to make it different from others. Our performance clips created a live band performance feel, so people can see the quality of the band and their music. We wanted to create an edgy feel so we used many different angled shots and close ups to create a concert based relationship between the band and the audience. We used different lighting colours which created a bizarre effect. Our narrative clips used normal lighting because we didn’t want confuse the audience too much with the performance, we wanted both conventions to stand out. How ever we did use some effects which would surprise the audience, we were able to create an effect of making our lead singer seem like a ghost and having our female actress bee in the same room but not seeing the lead singer. Little effects like this created our end product. For example Eminem – Stan, this video is also about violence and abuse, this video created a dark and lonely effect, this was created by effects such as lightning, dark lighting and rain noises. Then at the en shot, with Eminem sitting by the window, every time the lightning stroke, a reflection of Stan appeared. We used a similar effect to portray a ghost effect.

Our media product also includes a digipack which includes a DVD of the music video, the DVD front cover and an magazine advert. By research we have gain knowledge of the conventions in album covers and magazine adverts. We wanted to present the DVD cover by focusing on the band, so we used images from a professional photo shoot to portray this. Our magazine advert was a little different however it still had a link to the band. By using dark and sharp colours were able to create an advert which was simple yet eye-catching effect.

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

Alongside of the music video, the Digi-Pak helps us portray a certain image of the band towards the public. The magazine advert is more focused on the band single “No More”. The song is about a couple with corruption in their relationship, which leads to domestic violence. We tried to show a dark but eye capturing affect. So we decided to use roses to portray this image. Rose can symbolise love, but a dead rose can symbolise dead love, this links to the relationship between the couple as the love between them is dead. We used very dark colours to create a lonely effect to show the emotions of the female.

The DVD cover was different from the magazine advert because we focused more on the band than the single. We used an image of the band which included all the members to show the audience who they are listening to. Also it has in bold letters “Tarantula” which is the band name. We used clear and straight forward methods to present the DVD cover because we didn’t want to create anything complex which would confuse the audience.

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

We surveyed a sample of our target audience aged 16-20 both male and female to gain insight into the positives of the video and also any criticism in order to improve the overall material before wider exposure. Asking peoples opinions in different parts of the production stage allowed the constant development of the project. One of our peers believed that a few more effects would have made the video look better and taking that into account we would have done so if we were to film again.

Our target audience’s feedback was generally very good. We received a good response from the production blending and also in good narration of the music video. People also expressed interest in the design and colour scheme of the print production.
From our audience feedback as a group we decided not to change as much as previously discussed due to the overall positive feedback. We did not learn very much from the feedback however it has played a great role in giving us an insight as to how to go about making video and ancillary texts.

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

Our main source of research was secondary research; the internet was used the most. Search engines came in hand when research was carried out. We used popular search engines such as Google. This gave us a wide arrange of information as it is the most used search engine in the world, however it had its downfalls, because Google was so popular, the search field was too big and caused confusion. Youtube was also a very helpful source, it allowed us to watch professional music videos and see how things are done in the industry. Youtube helped us analyse music videos and compare them to others. Youtube allowed us to stop, play and pause the clips which made it easier to analyse them.

We used the Canon XM2 Digital Video Camera for filming our music video. This camera had many features which were able to help us create a professional media product. The camera had 20x optical zoom and super low light performance.
We used Final Cut Pro to edit our product, this was a major advantage as the software was a new and updated software and we could easily adapt to the software’s features. Final Cut Pro was running on a highly generated Apple Macintosh which was only recently introduced to the college.

To create the digipack we used Adobe Photoshop. This allowed us to improve the quality of the images being presented to our audience. This also introduce new effects that were not commonly known to us to help create a better product overall. Photoshop gives a more professional approach to our product, for example our magazine advert was majorly influenced by features on Photoshop. We took an image of a rose from the internet, however it didn’t blend very well with the band name on the advert, so Photoshop helped us to create colour effects which made the advert easy to the eye.

To gain audience feedback we used Youtube and Facebook. Youtube was very useful as it is a popular online streaming site providing users with a platform to share media, allowing an audience of millions to view and also provide feedback on a video of any production scale. Facebook provided service to share the video amongst our friends and contacts. During our production stage were uploaded our documentation onto a blog. The blog allows the audience to see our production stages and view the types of information were receiving during our research process.

During the production stage of this project, I have learnt many things in the media industry and how thing are done professionally, also on the way I have picked up many skills which would help me in the near future.