Evaluation Question 2

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

I think my music video, digi-pack and magazine advert work in sync together as they all have similar theme. I like to think that I've have made my genre clear through my three products.

For my digi-pack and magazine designs, I chose to use the same font to link to the two together. Using the same font for both the magazine and cd cover will hopefully make my target audience recognise the band I've chosen, therefor, allowing more publicity and selling of their products.










































After researching other alobum covers, artists such as The Gorillas, The Beatles, Owl City and Fireflight all seem to have a rather a simple font for their album covers but is just as recognisable as something more extreme. The popularity of these bands is proof enough that you dont have to have an amazing font for your album or magazine advert. They do however make up for this for their interesting take of their music videos, an example of this is Owl City's video for FireFlies, whilst the video in itself is rather simple, the content does bring a smile to your face with its childlike nature



I wanted to use this in my music video because I wanted the audience to focus on the story more than the graphics.

I've taken inspiration for my album cover from The Beatles. I really liked the idea of having all four band members on the front cover but with them doing their own thing with the added element of different colours to match their personalities. Also, because they are an indie band, I wanted them to have a querky style to them that would be recognised for my target audience.

The combination of my products has hopefully established the genre of music and style of the band is. I used bright colours against black to make them stand out and show the band members which will hopefully attract people to buy their album.

Evaluation Question 1

In what ways does your video use/develop or challenge the forms and conventions of real media products?



I think that my video followed most of the conventions in real media products. To get inspiration for my video, I looked at artists such as Saosin, Jessie Mcartney, Fireflight and Owl City. I used these to my advantage and was able to create a video with a mix of ideas from these artists.
My biggest inspiration for my video was Jessie Mcartneys, Just So You Know video, the narrative involves a love triangle where Jessie is in love with his friend’s girlfriend but he can’t show it but he wants her to know his feelings. The video has a happy ending where the girlfriend and Jessie are shown hugging, This helped me to design my own narrative for the song I’ve chosen, from what I’d gathered from the lyrics, a couple are having problems with their relationship and ends up in the girlfriend leaving and the boyfriend is reminiscing their time together.

















My video ends in the girlfriend returning to the boyfriend but rather than having a happy ending for two, I decided to end the video with the boyfriend looking at girlfriend.















One of goodwins 6 points is a relationship between lyrics and visuals, I have done this in my video to help the narrative have more flow, an example of this is when the line says ‘Let me know how you’re feeling, while we’re alone in this place’, I’d filmed my couple in the park to simulate them being alone and having Victoria pushing Craig away when it appears that he’s asking how she’s feeling.

However, for the scenes where my band is playing, I have someone different singing the song, this differs from conventional music videos as normally the actor in the narrative would sing the song as well. I had to use someone else because Craig was at work all weekend and it was too difficult to do it after school so I was able to film a friend’s band to fill in the gaps.

















The costumes in my video are simple. Seeing as most indie bands have a simple clothing style, I felt I should follow these conventions. The locations of my video were at Arnold park, Lodgefarm lane and my bedroom. As the song is called Main Street, I felt that there should be at least one shot of Craig walking down a street to fit with the title of the song, the park was used because most couples would visit somewhere like that whilst on a date and the bedroom shots were used to connect with my target audience of teenagers who spend most of their time in the rooms.
Most of the shots used in my video focus on the boyfriend as he is left with the memories of his girlfriend, to simulate the memories, I put a black and white filter on them, this proved popular in one of my feedback quotes as they said that it separates the past memories to the present in a subtle way.

Overall, I feel that my video has followed the conventions of real music videos but also has my own twist on it to make it slightly unique in the music video world.

Evaluation Question 3

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

My audience feedback has been a great in help in producing the final cut to my video. Most of the critical feed back focused on the fact that there were little to none shots of the band in the first few rough cuts, however, they did like how I edited the narrative but that too also needed more editing to make it more entertaining.

Whilst they enjoyed the first cut, I was told to add more memory shots of Craig and Victoria when they were still together. I also needed more shots of Craig when he was dealing with the breakup to match the subtle sadness of the song despite its fast beat pace. Also, during the part of the song where the line 'I wake up screaming your name' is playing, I originally had the shots change from good memories to bad memories on each verse, this recieved positive feedback at first but later found it a bit slow and not fitting with the beat of the song. Now the shots change on prominent drum beats.

The band shots were hard to edit and I recieved some critisism that you could tell that they werent singing the song playing, however, after some editing and carefully watching Sam singing, I was able to edit to a point where it seems that he is singing the song. Thankfully, I was able to to place the instrumental shots at the right times in the song, I recieved positive critism that these were good.

Overall, the final version of my video recieved a lot of positive feedback from classmates and friends outside school, one comment said that they didnt get bored whilst watching the video and that for me is a big compliment as I feared that video was boring.

Evaluation Question 4

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

As in my AS project of making the begininning of a thriller, I used iMovie on the mac computers. This proved easy to do as I've used this softwear before.

For researching different music video's, I mainly focused on watching these via Youtube as it is well known for uploading music videos from all kinds of artists. I was orginally going to watch music channels but none of the videos that were played didnt link to my genre of music. Youtube was also a lot easier to use and I was able to post an embed code onto my blog. I was also able to post my final music video onto the website to improve the quality of it.

Blogger was a big help in journaling my research and showing the stages I went through and where I ended up. However, this website has been a pain on numerous occasions, varying from me being unable to post any posts to the most recent being that the entire website crashed on the 12th march 2011 and was down until the late evening of Friday (13th, coincidence?) Whilst the website was eventually restored, any posts posted the night before were deleted and had to be done again.

For filming my footage, I used a digital panasonic camera. The quality from this camera was very good but I found that zooming in made the footage too blurry so I tried to avoid from doing this too much.

For my digipack, I used a mix of windows live movie maker and paint on my laptop, I was originally going to use Paintshop Pro to add effects to front cover/inside/back cover/cd design etc more striking and effective but it was no longer available. I used Windows Live Movie Maker to make the lyrics video for my song and I also used it for the animatic of my band.

Finally, for my evaluation stage, I simply used the webcam on my laptop and uploaded the footage to Youtube and then published it to blogger.