Alex Beale - Reflective Evaluation

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

Our media product definitely does follow and also develop the forms and conventions of previous music videos from our chosen artist and the genre of music. Most music videos include some performance; certainly our artist has performance in all of their music videos. You would expect this in a music video which is why we felt that it was important that we follow this convention because without performance a music video is not recognisable as a music video. Our artist tends to have the performance in an unrecognisable location which is usually simple and quite dark, we chose to replicate this to match the genre of music as indie/rock music video tend to be set in simple locations which are working class. Another convention that we followed was the use of narrative. Most indie/rock videos include some narrative; however our artist doesn’t use narrative in all of their videos. As you can see from the two videos ive uploaded, we have stuck quite well to the main conventions yet also added some of our own original elements. We thought it was important to include narrative as it would make the video more interesting and more developed as it would be hard to keep an audience interested for three minutes of performance. Although our band tends to avoid narrative we think this could be because most of their songs don’t have an obvious story behind them. We thought the narrative we chose would be appropriate as it sticks to the indie/rock genre of being quite dark and also controversial.

The Futureheads - Beginning of the Twist

The Killers - Mr Brightside

Question 2: How effective is the combination of your main products and ancillary texts?

Throughout the media products we have kept a clear image and theme that is appropriate for our song, artist and genre. We decided to have our main theme as a double life, with a normal life and a life of crime. The themes have been followed throughout as we wanted to make sure the CD and Webpage were recognisable as being related to the music video. Our products are well interrelated as I think that you can see that they are connected as they all have similar photos, colours, themes and text. For example we have the image of the main characters mug shots for the CD cover, which is also shown in the music video. This image is replicated on the Webpage as we have pictures of the bands mug shots as the background image. The CD and webpage are also related through the use of a QR code which is on the CD, when this is scanned with a smart phone a link to our website appears.  All three products have a main purpose, which is to make money by selling CDs. They are all also designed to promote our artist and get them noticed by more people. The CDs and Webpages are all designed to promote the artist by appealing to the target audience. For the indie genre the CDs and Webpages are designed to appeal to teenagers. This is why the images are often of the band looking serious; the images are usually quite dark and serious, unlike what you’d expect from a pop artist.

For our blog post which includes nine images that we thought we very key to showing how our music video works and also how it is integrated with the other products Click Here





Digipack Front and Back Cover



Digipack Inside Covers





Webpage


Question 3: What have you learned from your audience feedback?

We gathered audience feedback by showing our finished music video to the other students in our class. They then filled in the feedback sheet which included feedback on the performance, how professional it is, how suitable it is, the mood and feel, the shot suitabilty and variety, the actors suitability, the setting and light and the special effects used. The also picked out their favourite aspects and areas that they felt needed improvement. From this feedback we found that gernally people really enjoyed our music video as everyone felt that it held their attention and thought that it looked professional, everyone also ticked that they thought the video was suitable for the artist and song, it looks like a real music video and that we have a good variety of shots. The aspects that people generally thought we the strongest were the stop motion tie, the flashback and the overall narrative. The areas that people thought needed some improvement were firsty the performance which some said it let it down, specifically the foot tapping. However all the the groups ticked that they thought the performance was professional and suitable so this is only a minor area that could have been done better. There is a comment that states that we should of had the break in scence at night to match the song lyrics, we decided not to film this at night becuase we chose to have our character leave work earlier because he cant wait to get out so it would be odd if it was suddenly dark. We did try to darken some of the video so that there wasnt such a dramatic change from dark to light, Click Here to view this. We didnt use this in the end because we didnt think it improved the video. The final comment that was made was about our use of actors, they said that we should of maybe tried not to use all of us in the video. Although when we filmed the narrative we had two people filming and only me in it, except for one shot where all three of us are included. When filming the performance I was doing all the filming and Andrew and James were in the band, it may have been better to include maybe only one of us so that we could have two poepl filming as it would reduse the likely hood of mistakes. We do agree with some of the feedback such as maybe not including all of us in the video, however we dont feel that the performance let the film down. We were very pleased with how the performance has turned out and we don't think that we would change it. When making our film we didnt change the product to meet the audiences needs as we had planned for this in the planning stages so the only changes we really made were small changes that we thought of when making it that would improve the final video. We hadnt planned to include the flashback or the handheld shots of performance. Overall we think that this feedback is useful as the people we asked are roughly the target audience.

For our filled in group feedback sheets Click Here, and it will take you to another blog post which includes the sheets.

This is a wordle created from our feedback

This is a wordle that I have created by using wordle.net/create, this basically shows the key words that came up on our feedback sheets filled in by our class. From the wordle you can see that the words performance, narrative, professional, lip-syncing and genre came up on lots of occasions. In the feedback form most of the people thought that our performance and narrative were both strong, most people also thought that the overall feel of the music video was suitable for the band, song and genre that we chose.