Olivia's Evaluation

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

General conventions of a music video consist of the artist lip syncing, the genre of the music being reflected in mise-en-scene, themes, performance, camera work and editing styles. Creating a music video is a good way of promoting the artist and helping to sell the single. Our music video is in the genre of “alternative folk” and typical conventions and forms of this genre is things such as the artist singing, possibly playing instruments, summer time fun and sun. It is quite a feel good happy genre and this would be reflected in the music video. We liked the range of footage of the scenery in Nelly Furtardo’s video for “I’m Like a Bird” and we wanted to achieve this happy summery feel on our music video. We have used most of these conventions in creating our music video. I was the artist in our media product and throughout our music video there is footage of me singing the song. We have edited in a sunny feel to the video, as in an ideal world we would have wanted to film in the summer in some lovely weather. We have created a happy feel to the music video with the whole love story and footage of simple things like smiling.
Our media product has used and developed many forms and conventions of a real media product. The way our music video has been edited uses many forms and conventions of music videos. Lip syncing is a convention that we used whilst filming our video for the single “Daffodils”. We used many different locations in our music video which developed a convention of a real media product. We filmed in Orwell and got a range of beautiful footage of the countryside, we also filmed in the city centre including a pub. In the pub footage we challenged the forms and conventions of music videos as we used iStop motion, this is a technique that is not used very often but is featured in music videos such as Kate Nash’s “Foundations”. This technique is rarely used so I think we developed this well.
The techniques we used whilst editing our music video used many forms and conventions of a real music video, for example the artist singing to the music, the way we had a narrative and how we cut away to little shots of something else throughout the video. Both of our magazine advert and our album cover had logos on like real media products of this kind would. The album cover is complete with a bar code and the magazine advert had a release date and a quote, like real media products would.



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

I believe the combination of our music video and ancillary texts is very strong. They are all well related and have a constant theme throughout. This theme is daffodils, flowers, wildlife, nature, including beautiful blue skies. The theme of ‘fairytale’ is hinted at in both our main media product and the ancillary texts. The music video has a fairytale like feel to it with the couple in love, the fairy lights in the countryside and the effects we edited in of “dazzle” and “glow”. The front cover of our album again has a fairy like feel with a little version of me looking up into a huge daffodil. The same font has been used throughout each media product, which links in really well with each other and therefore creates an effective combination. There is a theme of yellow throughout our entire project. In the music video I am were a yellow dress as the colour yellow represents the title of the song which is “daffodils” and daffodils are of course yellow. The theme of yellow was then brought in to our music video album cover and magazine advert. Daffodils appeared on both of our ancillary texts as well as yellow font for the track listings on the back of the album cover. The same logos are used on the album cover and the magazine advert and this creates good continuity. In both the music video and ancillary texts the artist is being presented in a certain way, which add a strong effect to the combination of both music video, album cover and magazine advert. The artist is seen as kind and loving in the music video, this is helped along with the lyrics in the song but also the artist is dressed in a nice and presentable manner. The mannerisms and facial expressions are all caring and therefore the audience can see the artist is a nice young girl. In the ancillary texts there is a theme of flowers and countryside and this is generally associated with kind and caring people and therefore the artist is again being presented in this way. This makes the connection between our main product and our ancillary texts powerful.
If we were to actually sell our dig pack and release our music video we believe that people of the world would be able to see the comparison of all three products we have created, and this would make it easy for the customers to find our media product and even buy it.

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

We have been given feedback from our class mates and teacher throughout the entire project, this has been really helpful as we could change and edit things differently. Our ‘rough cut feedback’ was the most useful as this gave us a chance to get our music video perfect. Our audience said they we needed more close-ups on me singing and so we edited more of these shots in. Our teacher told us that we needed to edit ‘through’ the lines instead of just cutting at the end of each lyric. We took this feedback and did exactly what she had told us.
From our audience feedback of the final video we have learnt that our music video was a success and that everybody liked it. Our audience believed that our music video had a great connection to our “alterative folk” theme, which was fantastic news. The audience enjoyed how we had included the countryside, public pathways and fairy lights. Our audience also enjoyed the city scenes including the bikes in the city and the pub, and they thought it was also a good link to the genre. The connection between lyrics and visuals was well received from the audience, as they liked how Derek and I interacted with each other. We learnt that the audience noticed a contradiction at the end of the song, the lyrics was “wakey wakey, rise and shine” when the footage of the video was set in the nighttime. The audience said that is was not an unwelcome contradiction as it created interest and variation. The lyric could possible wakey wakey as in start thinking instead of physically waking up from sleep. The audience liked the link between to music and visuals as they matched together well, the tempo of the song fitted with the pace of the visuals. Overall our audience liked our music video as it was clean and clear, well edited, fitted well with the genre and was pretty.
We learnt that our audience approved of out ancillary texts. They really liked the DVD album cover to “Daffodils” as they thought it was very innovative. They thought the composition was really good and the use of layering was very effect. Our audience believed the foreground of the album front cover was especially good as it stood our and did not detract from any other layer and complemented the other layers. The colours of the album were eye-catching and coordinated with the theme. Our audience thought that all of our covers and the poster were consistant and the pictures the title of the singles names. Overall our audience believed our ancillary texts looked like professional products, which I am really happy about.

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

In all the stages of making our music video and ancillary texts we used many different new media technologies. The first media technology we used was the media studies beautiful Apple Macs. This was what our group used to do all of our planning, research, editing and evaluating. We used iTunes to listen to a CD that the media staff gave to everyone so we could listen and choose a music track that we wanted to edit a video for. We then used PowerPoint to make a presentation for the rest of the class and our teacher, on possible ideas we could achieve with our song choice. We used Blogger basically every lesson. This is a website where we presented all of our ideas in individual posts. In these posts we also put all of our research and planning. Towards the end of the project we posted our final outcomes of both of music video and ancillary texts. We used YouTube quite often and was very popular with all students. On this site we could do a lot of research as we could look at all kinds of music videos. Here we could get loads of ideas and inspiration for our music video. We also used YouTube to post our final music video and our commentary. We used a video camera to capture all of our footage of our music video and a stills camera to take photos throughout the entice process. We took photos of test footage of using different coloured lights in the video, and photos of filming which were posted on to our blog. We took photos of me in the college field for our album, which is on the front cover. We used Final Cut Express to edit our music video and also our commentary. On this programme we could do anything we wanted to our music video from cutting footage to adding amazing effects to enhance the video. We used PhotoShop to edit our ancillary texts of the album cover and the magazine advert. We used search engines on the internet such as Google and Ask to find information and pictures for research for our final products.
This modern technology makes it very easy for people to create music videos or films than it used to be. Having access to all of the new media technologies is very lucky for amateur film makers as with a camera and a programme like Final Cut Express you can create a reasonable video and upload it to YouTube, like we have done, and it is visible for the rest of the world to see.