Sophie's Evaluation

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

Our music video follows most of the conventions that are required to make the video the best it can be. Goodwin’s theory helped largely as it gave us the main conventions to follow for example, matching the visuals with the lyrics and filming lots of the artist to help the record label promote that particular artist. We have analysed other music videos for example Ellie Goulding’s because of her unique style of music and styling. She is really different to what people what could the norm and that’s what we really liked about her so we tried to create a similar effect. Another artist that we looked at was Rihanna and we really liked her album cover as she uses soft colours and the whole atmosphere of the front cover was seemed really natural. Our video uses a mixture of conventions from many different genre’s due to the song being a mixture of many for example its indie, soul and R & B all put together, so we had to have a little of each genre put into our video. We had the soft and natural setting for the soul side, we then used the costume to create the indie feel and finally we used some of the posing and camera positioning to create the R&B feel to the video. All of this put together I think has created a great product. 

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

Our media products as a package work effectively together a group because you can clearly see that there is continuous theme seen throughout the video, digi-pak and magazine advert.  The theme of pinks, greens and natural surrounding is clearly shown in all products. The video tries to portray an innocent girl stuck in a dream land and we did this by creating a bubbly and fun character. This helps to attract our target audience of 9-20 year olds of both sexes.  Both pictures displayed on the album are of the artist in mid shot with her not looking directly at the camera this shows that she’s quite a reserved and shy character who focuses on the music. It also shows that the artist doesn’t need to be theatricalised and have all the special affects to make her big, she can do the basic and get away with it. And the colours of pink and green also help to attract that teenage audience and that mature audience to. 

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

The feedback that our group received for our rough cut was all very helpful towards making our final video better. We had some very good comments for example the mise-en-scene was used to a great standard. However we did have some criticisms for example we needed to make our video seem dreamier and having more effects would help to improve this. We then added these effects into our video by making the water sparkle and making the setting around the artist sparkly too, this helped to make the video seem more wonderland way. They also said that the video had a great flow to it and matched with the music which worked really well. We also got told that more close-ups of the artist would have benefited the video a lot more. But our video breaks that convention because we are trying to portray a shy character so we didn’t want a lot of close-ups. Our teachers said that our editing was really good and we had established a pattern. They also said it was great improvement from the rough cut to the final video with lip syncing better than what it was before and our added special effects.

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

The software that we used to create our music video was final cut and we had used this programme before so we were familiar with the software which meant we had knowledge and understanding of the basic’s but as we developed our video more our skill base increased which meant the quality of the video was a lot better than predicted.  The programme allowed us as a group to be able to play with the footage that we had and try many different things to make the video great.  Photoshop is another programme that we used but this was for our digi-pak and magazine advert. This software allowed us to be able to edit images that we had taken on our photo shoots and edit photos taken on the shooting of the video. The programme let edit out pictures in many different ways, for example changing the colour of pictures to black and white, adding on logo and being able to have writing on top of the pictures in our own style.  We have also used Blogger to help with our planning, everything that have done including, film footage, photo shoots, research on other artists, research of locations and Costumes. By putting all of this information onto blogger in enable us to look back and get organised to create a successful music video, it also helped us to see what was needed to be done and what has already been done. Some of the equipment that we had was HD Video Camera to film our music video this was good to help capture the natural surrounding that we used and it helped to show the detail that surrounded the artist.  We also had HD Still Camera that we used for our photo shoot and this did the same thing to show a lot more detail on the artist for our album cover and magazine advert. This really helped to show the artist as a natural character. All three media technologies were helped our group to develop our skills that we already head and improved them a whole lot more. They enabled us to create the music video that we had imagined.