Evaluation

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

Overall, I think that all of the elements of our final production were very good. The way that ideas were generated in the planning and research stage, set an extremely good foundation for the rest of the production and I feel that this was then strengthened by the group’s teamwork and interpersonal skills. These aspects of our performance then really helped us to complete the production work, which at times could be quite complicated, so the advantage of having a group where everyone worked together and shared ideas really paid off. Also in the editing stage of the production, we once again worked efficiently to finish the product to a high standard.

Due to the level of research that we conducted (which had been greatly improved since our AS level production), I feel that our final media product clearly uses conventions which are used in professional music videos. On many occasions the group would share ideas that they had discovered in professional music videos and this ranged from camera shots to the mise-en-scene and even to editing techniques.

Some of the conventions that were very strong throughout the whole production included youth and money. These conventions are often seen in professional products, which is one of the reasons that I feel that our music video has the potential to contend and challenge real media products. In my opinion one of the reasons that these conventions are rife within music videos is because it has proved very popular with audiences, and this fits in with the Hypodermic Needle Model, which explains the how media ‘injects’ values and ideas into the audience.

To develop the conventions of our media product I noticed that many professional products have a strong theme of narrative running throughout the entire video, so I noted that it would be very important to do this in our video in order to contend. As our product was a music video for a rap song it didn’t really fit in with many conventional narrative theorists such as Vladimir Propp’s theory of narrative or TzvetenTodorov’s theory of narrative. So to find a suitable narrative we had to do lots of research into existing videos before coming up with the theme of wealth and progression through life (which we showed through a the artists journey).

However I think to successfully challenge real media products we would need to improve on a few aspects of the video. Firstly the quality of the recording isn’t particularly good as we were only using a hand held camera, compared to HD camera’s that are now used professionally. Another aspect that could be improved is some of the camera movements, which occasionally jolt when preforming a tracking shot and this could be solved by loosening up some of the tripod components. Furthermore in a small amount of shots the lip syncing is slightly out of time and this is something that is not seen in professional videos.

2. How effective is the combination of you main product and ancillary texts?

I think that the combination of our main product (the music video) and the ancillary texts (the CD cover and the magazine advert) are quite effective. From the start of the production we decided on a strong theme of wealth and this is shown in all three products.

Firstly the CD cover clearly shows the wealth theme by having an image of a rich upper class city on the front, and on the back there is a contrasting image of poor inner city area (the poor image was put on the back as it makes it feel like this area has been left behind). These images defiantly fit in with the narrative on the video which shows the artist starting at school, moving to an estate ,to an affluent area of Oxford and then to stage performance with lots of fans.

However I think that the CD cover could still have supported the video better. One of the ways that it could have done this could have been to show that it was a rap album, and this could have been done by doing something simple such as adding a review that mentioned that it was a rap video. Another way to improve on the CD cover could have been to advertise the video, and this could have been done by adding text saying something like; ‘Including the excellent Never Let The Party Stop Music Video’.

The magazine advert that was created also looks quite good, and personally I think that parts of it look professional. It contains many of the conventions of magazine adverts that we researched, and most importantly it advertises the CD and it shows a picture of it which would help people to find it in shops (and it is also black and white which fits in with the CD cover). One of the weaknesses of the advert is that it does look a bit cramped, so in the future to improve in this I think that I would remove some of the information to make it look a bit clearer which in turn, would emphasize the most important information. As well as this I think that it also needs to advertise the music video, as after all this is the main product which would help to boost CD sales.

3. How have you learnt from your audience feedback?

Audience feedback is a very important part of any media production, because if the audience doesn’t like the product then they won’t buy it, which would reduce the money made. As Abercrombie (1996, 140) stated ‘Audiences are not blank sheets of paper on which media messages can be written; members of an audience will have prior attitudes and beliefs which will determine how effective media messages are’. This shows that the audience will know what they want to see in a media text, and that the producer should not try to tell them what they want. One of the biggest things that I learnt from the feedback that we received was how important the lip syncing was. I think that this is because it’s one of the first things that the untrained eye of any media consumer can easily pick up. After receiving this feedback, the group and I all knew that this was where one of the main areas of focus needed to be throughout the whole production.

Another think that I learnt from the audience feedback that we revived was how we need to keep the keep the video flowing and interesting, because in one of the first drafts of the video, there were many similar shot of the artist walking through the different areas. To improve on this we decided to insert many more reoccurring shots such as the studio recording scene, and I think that this really helped to strengthen the story and keep the viewers attention.

Throughout the process, we would ask for feedback from our media studies peers, and I think that this was a really good idea because they were also familiar with more advanced media terminology, so were able to spot some of the less obvious issues with the video, CD cover and magazine advert. Whilst receiving this feedback we were able to discuss the points brought up and come to a suitable conclusion, which helped improve the final products. The only downfall of when we receive this feedback was that I don’t feel that we recorded some of the information as well as we could have done, which meant that small amounts were forgotten.

In the future, to improve my learning from audience feedback the major change that I would make would be to get a lot more of it. I feel that getting much more audience feedback could really help any project improve significantly. In addition to this, with an increase in audience feedback, it would be important to get feedback from a wider range of people (e.g. age groups, gender, social class etc) as this would make probably give back more accurate results.

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

Throughout the production, technology was the key to creating a successful product, and I feel that without it, our project would have been made to a significantly lower level. Probably one of the most important technologies that we used was a site called ‘blogger.com’ as this was where we up loaded all of our work to, and it would have been impossible for us to this if it hadn’t been for the introduction of web 2.0. The blogging site was extremely important to us, as all of our work could be put into chorological order, video and photos could be up loaded, comments of posts could be received, opinion polls could be included, our peers blogs could be viewed and links to other sites could be included.

Even though the internet is not brand new, it is still relatively new, and I don’t think that the research and planning stages could have been completed without it. By using the internet and utilising search engines such as ‘google.co.uk’, information could be quickly found and learnt from. Furthermore a lot of our inspiration was gained from watching music videos on the internet, and this was mainly done through ‘youtube.com’. YouTube has a huge collection of music videos, so practically any video that we wanted to look at could be found here and embedded into our blogs. The only downfall of using YouTube was that we weren’t able to access it from school, which meant that the research was slowed down slightly.

In the planning stage were able to upload pictures of locations from digital cameras, and this was very quick. Another feature that could be used was the scanner that we had at our disposal and this allowed is to get images that we had drawn up by hand onto the computer, and then be saved as images. However one of the downfalls of this method was that not all of the thin pencil lines were picked up, so some of the items scanned were not to a particularly high standard.

In the construction stages of the project many technologies were used to develop the final products. To create the CD covers and the magazine advert we used a program called ‘Adobe Photoshop’. Photoshop is one of the best products on the market to create designs and it is widely used in the professional industry. One of the most useful features in Photoshop was the layering system, which meant that each separate item could have its own layer, meaning that it they be moved individually and have effects added to it. An example of this was when we were creating the CD cover. We wanted the background to be black and white but the text to be different colours, so we were able to add the effect only onto the background layer. An example of Photoshop’s usability when creating the poster was when we had multiple items of text we were able to move them separately and make fine adjustments of the positioning with the arrow keys.

Photoshop did have its disadvantages though, with the main one being that it could be quite complicated to use at times, which meant that it could be time consuming to work around of overcome any problems that occurred. Also some members of the group were unfamiliar to the program which meant that they only had a basic knowledge of how to use it, and we had to devote some of our time to teach them how to use it effectively.

To upload and edit the video we had to use Windows Movie Maker as it was the only program, that we had available to us. At first we had reservations about using it because we were unsure of the quality that we would be able to produce from it. However after creating a short clip we could see that the quality was good enough and we were still able to add many effects such as fades, text overlays and transitions. The program also enabled us to crop down the length of certain clips, change the order and times of them and insert music over the top.

However there were also downfalls of using Windows Movie Maker, for example; it often froze when we tried to save the file and this meant that we sometimes lost unsaved work, which we would then have to redo and this slowed the editing process down considerably. In addition to this, uploading videos to the program was quite slow, which also slowed the process down. Another negative of the program was that it could be quite hard to move video clips fractions of seconds either forward or backwards. In the future I think that I would use a more advanced video editing suite such as Adobe Premier’. This program would give us all of the basic features that we had in Movie Maker, but with the addition of more advanced options, and I also feel that now that we have learnt the foundations of editing, we would be able to use the technology effectively.

In the evaluation stage of the project the internet was probably the main technology that was used. One of the main things that it allowed us to do was to find appropriate theorists that we could use to analyse the final projects, for example when we looked up Goodwin’s theory of analysis. Facebook also helped us to receive feedback from our friends after we uploaded the products to our profiles, and as this was in an informal environment were able to receive honest feedback.

This is some of the feedback that we received after posting the final video on Facebook:

In conclusion I think that our group worked well together in all stages of the project and I think that this was reflected in the quality of our final product and the ancillary materials. The issues faced were solved in a logical manner and this was very useful when dealing with the problems faced when filming and editing. If I were to repeat the project, the main thing that I would change would be the software used to edit the footage as I feel that this could help us to create a higher quality product.