Evaluation

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

When creating our media products we knew as a group we wanted everything to pop out from the crowd. Coco blu to me is not just any typical pop artist, yes she does have some normal conventions of any other female pop singer. But when developing her in our head we envisage something different from the rest but still relateable to her fans. we always knew we would keep our story line basic but wanted to breathe life into it with clever editing and animation.

I thought animation would be a creative and interesting element to include to our video. We spent many hours trying to come up with a way of how we could achieve this. In the end after experimenting with the software available, we processed individual drawings with transparent backgrounds and placed them on top of our own recorded video images. Even though we all had a go at drawing each frame by hand. Only my fellow group member holly was the most successful in doing so. Before we found the right song for our video we watched a range of different style's of videos which we drew inspiration from which influenced our own production.


The main artist that stood out to me personally was Kate Nash- pumpkin soup video. I feel her as an artist is a great comparison to what Coco blu style would reflect. I also felt the video had a Disney like feel to it. The opening of the video includes types of animation which we wanted to have in ours. The bubbles which appear in her video is somewhat the same of what we had near Coco blu head in our video

 We used these speech bubbles as a fun interesting way to insulate speech without taking the attention away from the song.

Another video that influenced me was the Joss stone - super love.



In this video again the background is so interesting and captivating, The moving sky is somewhat of a time lapse which is similar to what we include in our video .This drew our attention straight away as our song 'Mr blue sky' had a lot of long instrumentals parts to it that we thought our time lapse along with animation would cleverly fill the gaps.

Here is one of Lily Allen's 1st ever song released by her, as an artist i find her extremely talented and unique  which i think helped us in the end pick a song covered by her. Mr blue sky which she didn't release a video for. As there was no original video for the song we choose it meant we could start from scratch and not have the pressure of a comparison.  In Lily Allen's - smile video we drew influence for an interaction scene, where she is in the cafe kind of day dreaming while her boyfriend is trying to tell her a story of his day. 

We include a scene similar but in an outside environment. I particularly liked the camera work of this clip as it has nice over the shoulder camerawork and point of view shots. which i feel are very important when filming a conversation between two people.

A close up of feet shot that we included in our video.

When it comes to our video i felt we didn't really challenge many music conventions which isn't a bad thing. Our story line is a simple and effective for a fun light hearted pop song. Girl spots guy, Guy spots girl, Guy and girl meet and then live happy ever after. But the one thing i did think we did differently is that unlike pop artist today especial, black female UK pop stars is with her clothing. These days stars like Rhianna or Alexandra Burke are all dressed borderline half naked in there latest videos. But with Coco we wanted her costumes to be well styled sexy but classy. We challenge what most people expect from an artist and gave them something much more liberating and empowering.

When it came to design my digipak and advertisement i wanted it to reflect  our artist, i wanted it to be fun and inviting.

I found the Glee soundtrack cover very interesting. As its got that fun feel to it. The colour scheme is some what similar to mines. Also even though the images are small still are very attention grabbing. 

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


When creating my music video and ancillary products I always tried to have a conscious thought of how they will all connect together. For example our video was filmed in bright and sunshine weather and I knew I wanted my digipak to be  bright vibrant colours.  As I feel showing a clear link between  both products hugely important for a professional look

When creating my digi pak I had many inspirations, in the video below I show examples of a few and briefly explain the things I loved about them .

When creating my digipak and advertisement I knew I needed it to be attention grabbing. That’s why I purposely put a clear happy image of Coco blu at the front of my CD and advertisement. Even though my mock up and final choice differ a little I am ultimately happy with the outcome.  The album is called peaches and  cream , I cleverly placed the album name text through Coco Blu’s arm which at 1^st I was worried about but the use of the right colour made it look rather  attractive. When it came to my CD I wanted to have a countious theme throughout, so that’s why i choose the same background colour and the blue diagonal line between each pannel. At first I did consider having a picture of coco blu’s shoes in the CD holding pannel as I thought this would again show another visual link to our video, especially the opening. But I deiced against it as I thought the broader looked much superior with the album title.

Throughout my production of my ancillary products I made sure there were some clear visual links between them. I feel I have done this well enough for my audience to recognize them and also be attracted to them. The visual links i made are the images of our animations, as a group we created these ourselves so they are unique which is a bonus.  Also i kept the Coco Blu in the same outfit throughout all my products which i consciously did so my target audience would notice.



My advertisement with a small image of the Coco Blu album cover from my Digipak.

My album cover from my Digipak with again the Coco Blu banner from my music video

My album cover from my Digipak 'Peaches & Cream' album title is the same font on my advertisement.

My album cover has the same image of the sunshine which is from our animation in our music video.

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




From the very begining of this media project media technologies where used in many different ways. The most important part of this project to me was the planning and research process.  I used many different types of media technology resources to help me with this part of my project. One of the very first thing we did indivually was to research  different female singers and to suss out the main contenders in the music industry.  One of the main search engines i used was google which without it i would have struggled as this search engine just makes finding information much easier then any others.

One of the very first website i used was wikipedia, I used wikipedia to search for female British artists i came across a whole page dedicated to this.



From this page i selected artists that i thought were still current to my target audience, and also artists who music was at least vaguely acquainted with.

As soon as i created a shortlist of artist that i wanted to research in detail i used YouTube to find music videos. I could access a large range of different types of videos. I used this website for song ideas from different genrs also. I also used this site to generate some ideas for our music video once we sleeted our song.

another part of our planning and research process was recording some of the information we found. We did this by using the site Blogger.com. On my blog i recorded my findings in mostly text , image and video forms. I found that providing links to videos that we wanted to look at most useful as it saved us time by not having to search it all the time.  
Another reason why i found blogger website useful is that we could upload individually but our group could still access it in their own time.

I also used the blog to look a previous years blogs which i found useful.

when it came to the production of our music video we were lucky enough to have access to a brilliant brand new camera, which was state of the art . which used a great memory card storage system. Which allowed us to record digitally on to SD card.which was a very convenient way as we then would use the usb card reader to transfer the files to any computer we needed to use.

The camera had a small digital screen where we could view our footage and also delete any clips we thought we wouldn't need. You could also choose to attach a bigger microphone if the internal mic wasn't picking up enough sound. But we didn't need to use this function. It also had manual zoom which was a handy tool when our auto focus wouldn't work to our liking. As many shots needed this tool.

Another programme we used was Final cut pro. Final cut pro is one of the best editing tools in my opinon and it helped us create our own personal master piece. In final cut pro we uploaded our video footage from our camera. We named each clip so that we knew what was what, and also helped us organise what we didn't use.



Final cut pro has little browsers which shows the clips you select this was very useful in helping us access the clips we needed to view quickly. We could also use these little browsers to arrange our lip syncing perfectly.

We then dragged the clips we wanted to edited on to our timeline. This is an example of our time line. The green bar is our music soundtrack of our song. If you look closely the red markers is what we used to match our lipsynching.

The marker tool was very useful to us. As we used the makers as a guide where we used the razor tool, which enabled me to shorten the length of clips and also separate. This tool allowed us to do this in a very precise way. This tool was most handy when we had to cut our time lapse as it didn't look right. So we had to cut the clip into even smaller clips then had to change the clips speed individually so it would flow right. Final cut pro also gave us the opportunity to add special effects. Now we didn't use many special effects, but we did add a cross dissolve in our opening scene.
 Once our video was completed we converted the file into a quick time file and it was ready to upload. Below is a video of me briefly explaning some of the main tools i used on photoshop





This video is also our groups animantic storybord our group created back in the planning stages using final cut pro, pictures taken with a digital camera and our sound tract.




4) What have you learned from your audince feedback?

Overall i received very positive feedback from my audience especial target audience. Which i was pleased about as that was the most important thing. Below are a couple of clips from our target audience with their feedback .






I valued both of these audience feedback as its what an artist needs to learn from. I was very glad that my audience picked up on that fact that Coco blu was very different in the way she was dressed. which i think that made her stand out. I'm also glad that the audience enjoyed the short love story line and that the found it was illstrated very well. Im glad our animation came across well as we spent quiet awhile perfecting them.


Here is some more audience feedback where i asked the general question of what the audience think they would want to change if they had a chance






I also recored some audience feedback of my digipak and advertisment.




Im glad my audience like the images of Coco and also the bright colours. When it comes to my advert i wouldn't change anything as i really like the look of it. Maybe my digipak i would add a thank you panel Below is a video where i address the audience feedback and i also discuss what i have learned from the whole experience.