Written Evaluation

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

Our music video fell into the Rap/Hip hop genre. This is because our song is used to discuss personal, social and also political issues. Goodwins points back up the genre. The use of explicit swearing in our song lyrics also makes it this genre because other than rock music, not many genres of songs such as classical or indie use this way of representing music. An element of mise-en-scene is the location. Our original location was going to be in Cambridge, but we didn't really think about the time we had and also the hassle of getting everyone there at the same time. Instead, we chose the College. Filming in College or a school isn't really a convention of a hip hop video. It would usually be filmed in the streets with posh clubs or a bar or a massive house. Choosing the college could make it appeal to an even younger audience who are at school. The person in the video is at the college and other people could relate to it as it is in a familiar environment. When researching other artists and bands in the same category we found they all promoted one specific artist/main character and all had a certain story to tell in their videos. We also found that the artist or band talks directly to the audience through the use of the camera and in time to the beat or the rhythm. Another convention of the genre is that the singer is usually a 'youth' or a young person. Having a geek as our main person, we are portraying someone who is still in school. When considering our music video however, we researched similar artists such as Lil Wayne, Eminem and 50 Cent and decided we wanted to go against the genre of someone being serious and 'bad'. Usually in videos of the same genre for example, 50 Cent (and specifically in his music video 'Candy Shop', he is portrayed as a sex symbol with a lot of money and uses women (that are objectified), flash cars and posh houses to prove the richness. We decided to completely go against that idea and make a usually 'cool' character into a Geek who instead had a poor dress sense, clothes and also a sense of 'uncoolness'. We decided on this to make the genre a little less different than what it is portrayed to be. I think it worked because it makes the genre varied. The video may seem more interesting and different and even attract a different audience to the usual. This is challenging the genre because its going against a stereotypical video for that choice of song. However, the song has a very upbeat and happy characteristic about it. In our video, we decided to brighten up the brightness and change the contrast to make the colors stand out more. The point of this was to stick with the happy atmosphere the song is supposed to create. Another effect we used was to attach some special effects into the footage to make some scenes spin off to allow the next scene to flow through. This made our video look more professional and also was similar to already produced media products. A similar artist to ours is Kanye West. His music video 'Good Life' reminds me of our own. He uses cartoon effects and 'unrealistic' objects to promote the theme and atmosphere of his video. I'm pleased the our video follows the genre conventions correctly.

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

Our finished DVD cover and poster look very effective and had pleasing comments from the group. When discussing the DVD cover and the poster, They both link together so that the audience knows that they are from the same artist. They both display the main character of the geek on the front of each. He has been made out to be the focal point as he stars in the video the most. We made the two pictures of him however different because we didn't want it to seem as if they had been repeated and the same image used can sometimes get boring. Therefore we tried to make them more exciting by showing him in different poses. This proved a good idea because we can now distinguish between the two. Looking at other artists Digi Packs, they had also done the same thing so we thought it would look more professional if we followed the same idea. On the DVD cover, the background is a brick wall effect. This adds to the 'geeky school boy' effect and also giving an insight to the audience of what the video is about. We wanted to put some grafitti on the wall, but this couldn't be achieved due to lack of time and also the skills on how we would achieve this effect on Photo Shop. Looking back at our DVD cover i think we could have added more to it and thought about the placing of the objects but generally i think it looks good. I really like the way the music video, poster and DVD cover share a link. If they music video didn't like to the other pieces, they would look out of place. They most definitely have to correspond to each other to show they are part of the same Digi Pack in order to keep continuity and promote the artist. We did have a comment from a group saying they liked the way we had incorporated the same font of the song onto each piece of work. The aim of this was to almost make it symbolize the band and that at first glance this could be linked and the audience would think the artist was actually Lyrics Born. The audience our video is targeted at our young people. The music is someone they would listen to. You wouldn't really see an old person listening to rap music because that isn't what they are interested in and it isn't aimed at them. Usually the age of the artist is around the age of the audience it is targeting. The Digi Pack definitely shows it is aimed at a young audience because its very colorful, bold and eye catching. Another music genre, for instance Classical would use something very plain and different. The font would be very small and curly and the pictures or picture would probably be very dull. Classical music would never feature the bold 'out now!' font because it wouldn't fit and represent the genre. I don't even think they would use the words 'out now' because it is slang. You can really tell who our audience is in both the magazine and the DVD. Our Advert tells us where we can buy the DVD and also that it is out for people to purchase. If the DVD and Advert were placed next to each other it is very certain they are they same artist. I think the Advert successfully advertises the DVD in a very simple way.

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

I like the idea of getting some audience feedback of our idea. Getting peoples opinions from the same age group allows us to focus on what we should be improving on to make our idea even better. More opinions help because we can then incorporate everyone's ideas into one and then make it our own. We received some criticism within our feedback, however taking this as constructive criticism can actually improve and develop everything. When we reviewed comments from our first Pitch we realized that maybe it wasn't possible to get everyone to the set location at the same time, so therefore we decided it would be easier to film in college. At first this was a problem because we weren't sticking to what we wanted, however we agreed in the end that our video would look better in a college rather than in the streets of Cambridge as the character is a Geek so he is being stereotypically represented in a school. When we received feedback from our Rough Cut a comment mentioned was that the artist in the video was singing the part of a women. We liked the idea of this because it made our idea experimental and someone more extraordinary that our whole idea is based on. We decided to keep this idea and still make him sing the main part of 'Stop Complaining' because even if other people didn't agree with it , we liked it ourselves. Something we did realize from the feedback was that we didn't have many variety of shots. We thought we definitely could improve on this so we added more Close Ups and Long shots to make it more exciting. We were pleased we got this feedback because it helped us to make our Final video look as best as it possibly could. Most of our comments were positive from the DigiPack. People liked our ideas and approach to creating our video. A negative comment we did receive was that we didn't include any parental advisory or age rating certificate on the DVD cover. This is a massive problem because obviously due to swearing this cannot be heard by everyone of all ages. Being as the DVD cover is completed now, unfortunately we couldn't do anything about it but at least we know what we are missing and why we most probably would be marked down for this mistake. Another mistake we encountered was that we didn't inform the audience who gave us the four stars on the front cover. This was just another general mistake that still cannot be changed. We were also criticized about the continuous brick wall background of the DVD cover however i still believed this is effective for the genre of our music video and still continues the continuity of all out media products we have produced. I believe this was criticized because they audience didn't really see the link and the appeal of it. It was just random. Throughout the task we had received feedback from all the other groups which definitely helped us develop and make our ideas even better. I believe the more opinions that are taken into account, the better a finished product will turn out to be.

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

When informing about our thoughts, ideas, planning and development stages we used the blogger on the blog of Long Road Media. The blog is a simple and online process of writing and then publishing. This helped with our planning because it was all in front of us on one page, and if we changed our minds we could add or edit it to what we want. Writing on the blog is so much easier than writing information on paper. It made it easy access and viewing. When talking about the development stage of making our product, I felt quite confident in using the camera to film our product. As I'm the only person in our group who didn't star in the actual video, i used the camera quite a bit to film the other people. Using the camera last year in Media, i knew all the basics about recording, stopping, forwarding and rewinding which is all we needed to know to film. We used a dolly a lot to film because we needed a lot of shots that the camera followed smoothly. We hadn't used the dolly before but the camera easily just slotted into it and tightened to prevent it falling off. This was a very useful bit of equipment as we couldn't of done it hand held due to the shaky movements that wouldn't achieve the effect that we wanted.

Once all out footage was ready to be edited we used Final Cut, a very advanced piece of software developed by Apple, which allowed us to upload the footage and then proceed to add any effects or cut anything we didn't want to be viewed. Final Cut Express looks like a very complicated program to use, but when explained it becomes easier the more you use it. It has a time line that can be edited to make a sequence making your footage run smoothly directly after each scene has been cut. The main screen of Final Cut is the Interface that has all the tools and viewer and browser within. The main view of Final Cut is the Canvas. The canvas enables you to preview what you have produced already giving you and overview of what your finished piece will look like. The Browser is where all the imported footage is. You can drag all these onto the time line and use them however you want too.

To create our ancillary products we used a program called Photo Shop by Abdobe. Photo Shop allows you to edit graphics, add one any groovy text to create your own images or personalized products. Photo Shop is more complicated to use i feel because of the use of the layers. If you have a lot of layers it gets very confusing and complicated. One reason for this is that we didn't label the layers and ended up having too many with no names on so it took more time to find the one we were looking for. I feel i know the basics of Photo Shop but there is a lot i have to learn. I found i had to ask for help to achieve the effects i wanted in our work. I feel i have improved since doing our original preliminary task. It is very important a wide variety of shots are included and that edits and fades all flow together appropriately. At AS we did use photo Shop but only for something smaller. I feel that my knowledge from the last year has definitely been carried over to this year to progress and expand on how to create a good piece of work.