EVALUATION

This evaluation will be a final wrap up of A2 year of producing a video, digipak and advert for it. Below i will be answering four questions that will conclude my ideas and evaluate the whole process, criticizing and applauding my timeline taken to produce the final product.

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


Before we were able to commence on our video we had to take extensive periods of researching to get the full idea of what we wanted to do. We researched possible artists, possible songs of the artists, their style and personality, what they emitted into the song and how that compared to what we wanted. Deciding on Lily Allen came down to the fact that she was a fun, up to date and vintage inspired fashionable which is what young adults; our target audience are influenced by. Below are two videos that influenced us in our own video, to create the similar style that we started off in being interested in.

This is Joss Stone with one of her most recent songs, she was great inspiration because of her soul voice but womanly characteristic which we can relate to with our own artist. The quirk and difference in style also inspired us to create stylish but sweet shots of Coco Blu.
Another big similarity between this video and our video is the 'Mystery Guy', obviously a very prominent feature in our own video, and as well as in Joss Stones' video.
Only subtle features in ours such as coat, blue hat and smile are visible which compares to the hand opening a gate, or giving a flower. In a way this video is more professional and less personal like that, that it is indeed as subtle as it can be but very effective.
Another feature we can compare to is the camera work when focusing on particular points but also at very low angles, like filming the walking and shoes, which is what we have used in ours because we like the way that small features are more focused on and those are shots which matte, which show transition and continuity in the narrative.

This is one of Lily Allen’s songs; it’s called Alfie and in theory is about her younger cartoon brother. Almost instantly, we can see a similarity between its visual style and ours. There appears to be a lot of animation and we can see that in this screenshot of two blue birds, it comprises the same effect that we intended ours to hold.

Another similarity is in the area of Mise-en-scene. Lily’s costume is very much what we were trying to achieve. The vintage preppy but pretty look, we did a lot of research into these clothes and eventually finding something that works in the style and in our plan was successful. Camerawork is very important to show off these features, a lot of close ups that show glimpses of hair and accessories. We can also relate to this because our video contains a lot of extreme close ups of things like shoes when Coco is walking, close up’s of eyes to mouth when she is singing. I think these features are a demanding convention of a normal pop video. Which is really, what we’ve stuck to, we haven’t challenged the genre because that wasn’t in our plan, and it wouldn’t fit well with the characteristics we wanted our video to have.

Other artists that i looked at that fit a slightly different genre include the 'Go-Go's'. They are an all female band, i would have enjoyed covering something like this because there would be more variety in the music and the style could be modified. Especially because we're focusing on a vintage era it would be more simplified to introduce a song from an older artist.


As you see the album is very simple, girly and describes the girls how they are. It allows the audience to know who they would be buying an album of. The advert again is very fun and flirty, all the girls are very conjoined all in a group. This sort of band would attract very girly girls, probably in their teens that can relate to the band members themselves.


Another alternative genre band i looked at was Siouxsie & the Banshees, she is a 70's band with Siouxsie being the main singer. Although she is a girl band she still has that effeminate look to her. She is very quirky and wild in her own terms, just like Coco Blu but Coco is much more sugar coated. 
I like very much the alternative mode, the difference, in this way we could have been able to challenge the genre much more from turning a song that is more in the style of punk rock to pop.  This would have been a challenge, but one which could have turned good results if it had  succeeded. 

2. How effective is the combination of your main product (video) and ancillary texts (digipak and advertisement)?

In the process of having to produce my music video and my ancillary products, I thought I managed very well to link the two together. It’s obviously very important to do so because they need to be recognizable, just like in a professional music environment.

I created my advert before my digipak so I consider my advert to be more successful in linking to the video. My advert however, considered a lot of revision and right in the last minute was changed. As you can see from my mock up of the advert, I wanted a centered image in the middle, and the image was going to be of a peach. The album is called Peaches and Cream, and I considered the peach to be very attention grabbing being in the middle. Revising this later, I knew that hardly any pop artist did not use himself or herself as a front image of a poster or CD. I then changed this to an image of our artist which we had taken from a small shoot we did.

There are more or less some features which link in with the video and would allow a connection to be made between the two. Mainly would be the front image, it is of Coco Blu who people would hopefully be able to distinguish as our main character. Another one is the fonts, fonts are very important and they set out a characteristic of the artist. If the text is very simple and straight lined then the artist may be undemanding and effortless to be heard. A swirly, bubbly font like the one we have used is very interacting with the audience, fun and sweet to listen to. I have used the same fonts for both the ancillary products and the video, and it works because you have clear visual links to be able to record these small details of association.

Our target audience was roughly in between 17-23 years old, a young adult not too old to not appreciate a fun taste of music but not young enough that they wouldn’t listen to an up and coming artists outside of their own music taste of genres. So personally yes, I do think my target audience would be attracted to them. Not only because it’s quirky but because it’s attractive, it entices people with colour and propositions of a fun time. It is very simple and especially the advert, I’ve tried keeping it to a minimum so that it isn’t largely over crowded and hard to read which I think is key when seeing a poster that’s meant to be attracting an audience into their radius of support and profit-making. On the other hand, this over excitement and bubbly clouds of text could be my down-side, the general public may not be too allured by these features and my artist may become one of a niche market. 

 

 

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

 

In this day and age no music video is made with a hand-held camera, a tape and if your lucky a tripod; so it’s not so shaky. Although it would be much simpler, I don’t think the same effect or quality would be achieved. So for this 21^st century music video project, we not only used state of the art cameras and hard drives to store this mass memory, we used every possible program to tweak, adjust, soften and merge to produce this lovely creation of a Coco Blu video.

Apple Macs being our main source of help contained all programs and aids to help us through our main construction, using Final Cut Pro to make the video. In addition, we had an option of Photoshop or Quark for the formation of our digipak and advert. Both of these would have been successful, depending on a persons needs and abilities to work with either or. The work done on Final Cut Pro was a make or break deed, we could not have survived without the particular program being in our hands. Since it is a complete up-top professional piece of software, we felt even more pressurized but armed with more ancillaries to be able to succeed in the development. We didn’t choose to use a lot of effects, partially because it didn’t go with our video and its particular style. I don’t consider that to be an act of laziness, but there’s no point making a big mixture of image effects just to say you used them, when they’re actually not serving any real purpose in the video.

Effects on Final Cut

 

Before we were even able to get our eager hands over Final Cut Pro or any specialist software, we had to start on another piece of technology, the online diary: Blogger. Www.blogger.com has been the aid of our record keeping, to show what we have learnt, made mistakes in and our successions. It definitely shows our research, planning, construction, and now this very second; evaluating. Blogger is a very smart program allowing you to detail to the world your day, teaching and humoring or neither. It acts as base camp; keeping everything up to record is very important in the time keeping.

The Internet is without doubt very high up in the importance factor. Without the Internet, the pedestal of the video wouldn’t exist. Research was all done on the Internet, using some obvious sites such as YouTube and Google, but in more depth, certain fashion magazine websites were used for the research made for our age group. Another important research done was the fonts, which we thought would be more original getting them from elsewhere other than Word. Therefore, we used a provider that would let us sample our words in the particular fonts they provided.

Personally, I used Photoshop for my entire advert. I do not regret this; I consider you can do most of the same stuff on Quark Express. As my ability is quite poor on Photoshop and even worse on Quark, I decided to stick to one program and figure it out as much as I could. I used Quark for no part of work and don’t think peoples’ work that did; look much different with features that stand out much more than mine. Photoshop is a sort of software that you need to take your time to learn with it but when you know how to press the right buttons it really does produce realistic products.

Obviously, we could introduce within our group media technologies that would bring something new or aid us in doing a better job. Something our group did use even thought it wasn’t offered at college was a Tablet Bar. Used to connect to any computer, draw on and produce drawings similar to drawing on a piece of paper, except it travels straight onto the screen. With this, we produced our animation characters, by drawing a few then merging them so that they seemed to be moving in time to the music.

We also used IPods and portable speakers; this was for when we were filming. This allowed our artist to be able to sing in time to the music, and the sheer size of it made the experience much lighter. 

Using Final Cut pro was very important for producing our movies and played a big role in getting everything together. It was useful as I've said to place all shots together, add sound, cancel out unwanted sections, etc. I found it very complicated too use and felt more comfortable using Photo Shop to produce my ancillary products.

4. What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Listening to audience feedback is very important because as we all know, you learn from your mistakes. Audience are who we made our products (video) for, so they more than anyone can tell you their preferences and improvements for your video. After the cinema we did ask for immediate reactions but because of their short time extent and the exhilaration of previously being cooped in for two hours. So because i don't think they're the best reviews i decided to interview a class friend on what she thought in more detail the video to be like.

Audience feedback received straight after a viewing had its negatives and positives. Positives being people may be able to remember small details from your video that they normally wouldn’t. They will have a lot to say because of the exhilaration of being filmed. Negatives include, they will say anything to hurry the filming up so they can go film their friends for their own work. They can be very broad on the subject and not give you enough detailed answers or answers that can apply to every one of the 50 viewings of videos. It can be too noisy, too busy, too distracting.

The feedback's we did manage to get from the cinema were exactly as I described in my negative points, some people didn’t even remember the video anymore. However, the audience who did; a crucial point they kept mentioning was the animation. They had out of everything enjoyed the animation and thought it a very unique point that no one else had.

Another form of receiving feedback that I considered quite impractical was Vimeo; this is a website where we put everyone’s video online. Supposedly everyone Internet based would be able to see these videos, but because our server has set the website to private, only the producers of the videos are able to see and rate these videos. Which they don’t; we have had 7 viewings which show an interest in our work. These sites are actually a very good idea, similar to YouTube, up and coming artists can put their music out there and get reviews, comments; public evaluation is what it comes down to, all for no expense.

Screen shot of our video placed in Vimeo with the Views box totaling to a sum of 29

Below are two videos of feedback from class analysis and apart from the good things, they mentioned improvements which is something I was looking for because it helps if there was time for further improvement. Nether the less some of the improvements were to have taken more time to polish up my work. Some photographs used on both my advert and digipak are rather jagged and could have been done with more time and precision to ensure a better final piece. This would definitely be one of the things I would care to change if could still do so. I consider imagery to be very important and the fact they didn’t work so well in my work I am not very pleased. This does teach me for future references, be more precise and direct, take time and do not rush detailed work.

For the group video the feedback i got of improvement was to work on camera angles used and styles. There could have been a wider variation of this sort of work and improvement on the ones we did use. Myself i thought we managed to broaden our angles, but to an audience if they don't see this then i guess there should be changed made and theres room for improving.