Music Video Evaluation

How effectively is the combination of your media product and ancillary texts?
 I think that our media product and our ancillary products work really well together, in our media our favourite type of editing was using the splitscreen effect for the whistles. We used this same feature on our DVD cover and promotion poster, splitting different pictures up. The pictures used in both the poster and the DVD cover are stills from our music video. We also used the same font on both of the ancillary products to get the same feeling throughout our digipack. Our reasons for using the softening of the images and the black background was to make our DVD cover easily recogniseable if you had seen the poster beforehand. The pictures were picked for a reason, the reason being that the band we choose; "Everything Everything" are a very random and odd band, although they are slightly different from the DVD case and the poster they do both have the same feel about them so this works really well. The lyrics were very unusual so i felt that by using random images it tied in with the band really well. The four band members don't feature on the DVD cover or the poster, as i think they are quite a mysterious band and aren't all about the publicity so we didn't use them on the ancillary products.

In what ways does your media product use, develope or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
We followed Goodwins theory in the making process of our music video, firstly the clothes that we wore really suited the genre which was Indie, we wore clothes such as jumpers, cardigans, chinos, large coats.. etc. By wearing the same sort of clothes it sells the artists quite well as it makes them look really like a band, we also tried to give each band member their own unique personality, however im not sure that we did this to the best of our ability, we also didn't really have a lead singer in the video and this is something we would look to improve given more time. Our video features lots of shots of a rural area with plenty of people moving round, this suited the song as its a very fast and pacey song, we also used this to show happiness and a certain amount of love between the band members which worked really well in terms of selling the artist. There was only one piece of intertextuality in our video and it was the symbol, we didn't really want to include a massive amount of brands in our video as Indie music is quite untainted by the major brands and makes so we tried to continue this theme throughout our video. One of the major conventions is how the lyrics and the video fits together, we used very random shots in the video and cut on the beat to make it fit in well with the pacey song. We used close-ups, longshots, wideshots, high and low angle shots. We also used zooming in and out effectively. My favourite piece of editing is the bit with the 4 telephone boxes where we filmed 4 different clips of each of the band members in different telephone boxes and we came out of them and went back in, this looked really good we came to editing it together. The lyrics we had didn't really offer us a narrative so we did just use random shots but i think this looked really good in the end.

What have you learnt from the audience feedback?
In all 3 stages of our work we were given feedback by our peers in the class, we always tried to listen to what the class had to say about our work as the class are in our target audience so their opinion definitely matters. The feedback from our class was really appreciated and although they thought that we needed to add a bit more commitment to the singing as they thought the words were too fast for the effort on the faces of the singers. They also thought that some of the shots were a bit shakey but i think that the reason for our shots being shakey was so that it looked like the band mates were just having a good time so we removed some poorly placed shakey shots but did leave some in as we really thought they worked. I think that the feedback was really useful as it allowed us to correct some errors that we had not been able to pick up on due to us being slightly biased towards our own work. One piece of feedback was that the telephone box shot was too long, the reason for the length of the telephone box shot was because we felt that the piece of music didnt have any lyrics for around 30 seconds and it was a very slow beat so we didnt want to cut in loads of shots so instead we just put one base shot up to play throughout the sequence. When making our ancillary products we recieved feedback from our teachers, they told us how they thought that we should keep the splitscreen theme running through the ancillary products as the splitscreens are the main features of our video. We listened to this as we knew they had more of an idea about what needed to be in our digipack than we did.

How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
For the construction process of our media video we used FinalCutPro on the Macbooks at college, this programme was really good and suited our level of editing ability, there are more advanced programmes but i think it would take us too long to figure out how to use it and we wouldn't actually be able to create work as good as the work we have now. To get the footage for our music video we used HD cameras, these were a big improvement on the non-HD cameras we had used previously in AS. We did write to Everything Everything on their Facebook page and they sent us a reply telling us to watch a video where they discuss their album and talk about each song indepth, including Schoolin', this was really helpful during the research stage. We also reviewed Rizzle Kicks as we thought they were quite a hip indie/rap band, we screen grabbed the image of their album cover and we then reviewed it on Blogger.
Finally we used Blogger to record all of the feedback we recieved from our class mates, it was a really good place in which to type it up.
When making our ancillary products we found using Abode Photoshop was quite difficult as we had been only using Final Cut express before hand for a very long period of time so switching onto a new programme which we all knew relatively little about was quite challenging. We did eventually get used to using it and produced our DVD and poster to a standard which we thought was quite good.