Janna's Evaluation

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

Our music video, more than anything else, challenges forms and conventions of other media products. We wanted our product to be really unique, and an artist who really inspired us with this was Ellie Goulding. The video for her song ‘Starry Eyed’ had effects that we thought would work really well with the genre of our song. We used an effect which made the water in the pond shot look like it was sparkling, and it really added a sense of mystery to our video, and this really complimented the mysterious genre of Indie-Pop that our track ‘XV Wondaland’ is.

Throughout our video we tried to include all of Goodwin’s points, including visuals fitting with the lyrics of the song. I really believe that we did this justice for the duration of the video. Lines such as ‘take me back to wonderland’ we would get our artist to use hand gestures and body language to imply that she was being taken to wonderland, then having a cut to a different, more relaxed location, it would take the audience to the wonderland with her.

For inspiration on our digi-pack we looked at more artists’ album covers and magazine adds who had inspired us. Rihanna’s album cover had a sense of innocence to it, yet still attracted people. This is the type of effect we wanted our cover to have, therefore we took some of the conventions she had used (soft colours) and added them into our own.

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

I think that our music video, digi-pak and magazine advert all really complement each other in the indie-pop genre. We really wanted our target audience to understand and like the genre we have to work with, therefore we decided to make sure the album cover was one that wouldn’t bore people.

We did many photo shoots to make sure we had a photo which would best sell our artist as an innocent, but fun, person. As our song is very laid back and easy to listen to, we used very picturesque and quiet locations for taking the photos. Hopefully this would allow the audience to see straight away what type of songs they would be expecting to hear on this album. I think this really did us justice, from feedback we’ve had from our peers (the age of our target audience) we were able to see that the innocent feel we had been trying to get across had worked. Our magazine advert also proved to get the right message across, there are no gimmicks or quirkiness on it and this is what people were noticing straight away. This really made us feel satisfied with all the hard work that had gone into it.

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?


Our constant feedback throughout the making of this product is what has shaped it to be how it is now. We’ve taken any advice and criticisms on board and worked them into all three of our products. The feedback that we had on our rough cut was mainly that we needed to make sure that all of our lipsyncing was perfect, as sometimes it was slightly out of time. As a group we hadn’t noticed that some parts were the tiniest out of time, however when it was pointed out to us it’s all we could notice. After sorting this out, our final piece was finished. We’ve had really positive feedback, such as the video really fits with the genre, and the visuals really fit with the lyrics. However, we were told that some of the lipsyncing was still out of time, and we could've added  in a few more close up shots. The main need for close up shots was because the viewers felt that they weren't seeing enough of the artist's face, therefore not promoting her quite as much as we could have. In all, everyone commented on how smooth flowing the video was to watch as a viewer, and we were really happy with this.
After looking at our final video compared to the ideas from our initial pitch, we can see that most of the ideas that we first wante to include in our video we did incorperate. As our teachers seemed to like our first ideas and seemed to think they would work well with our genre, we really wanted to make sure that we didn't change too many of our ideas. Our main teacher seemed really pleased with our final product, and throughout the whole making of our video she never really gave us too harsher criticisms.

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

Without final cut, photoshop and blogger, our promotional package would not be to the standard that it is. All the effects on final cut really helped us shape the video that we had pictured in our head right from the start of this project. The HD cameras allowed our video to be to the best quality it could be, and the stills cameras allowed us to have really clear photos for our magazine aadvert, and the cover of our album. Once we had shot the footage for our video, we uploaded it to final cut and began to edit it and add in effects. The dissolve effect between cuts was our most used. It gave our video a really soft flowing feel, where as if we'd had a jump cut between shots it may have added unwanted pace to our video that didn't fit with the song or genre. We also used an effect on our shot of the pond, it allowed the water to look like it was magically glistening, and this really complimented the quirkiness of the indie-pop genre. Photoshop allowed us to make the photo for the album cover our own. We added a black and white effect, and this portrayed that our artist is completely stripped back, and it is just her voice we're trying to sell, not what she's wearing or what make up she's got on.
However, we thought this looked slightly too boring. We decided to turn the scarf that our artist was wearing back to it's origional colour (pink). This was when we knew that this picture was to be the album cover. We also edited the photo for our magazine advert on photoshop, however this was a much simpler edit. Changing the saturation and contrast gave the photo a soft yet colourful tome. The high contrast made our artist really stand out, and I really think it will attract our target audience of teenagers. Without these technologies none of this would've been possible, and we are so grateful that we got the chance to use them and learn more skills for future use in media.