Evaluation

EVALUATION

Q1: In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Our Music video ‘Your Love’ follows a lot of the conventions of a typical female, pop music video. I achieved this by researching and investigating into Andrew Goodwin’s theory (In terms of a music video) finding out what all/ most conventions artists follow for their music video. I alsothen watched many music videos produced by female artists such as Rihanna, Leona Lewis, Pink, Katy Perry etc so that I could get an idea of what female artists include in the video, what they wear, where its set and how they act. I found that most of the time the female is the main focus of the entire video, that costume plays a big part in making them fit the ‘ideal’of a pop star (glamorous, materialistic, stylish) and that the lyrics have a strong connection with the theme of the video. When we started planning for filming we knew that we wanted a video that would fit and follow the conventions of a music video from Goodwin’s theory. We did this because we wanted our artist to fit the ideal and seem like a realistic popstar who is similar to female singers in the charts at the moment.

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This is a still taken from our music video, Personally I think that the mise en scene including the chandelier, wall paper and outfit allows our video to demonstrate the genre characteristics. A chandelier usually represents wealth and a glamorous lifestyle, I would also say the silver, patterned wallpaper does this. Female artists are usually very materialistic within their videos, whether that’s in terms of costume, location/setting or props, and with this shot we tried to imitate this aspect of a star. 

This screen grab is taken when she sing ‘Like a flame that flickers in, come on light my fire’ the candles allow there to be a relationship between the lyrics and the visuals; the second point to Goodwin’s theory. By putting the candles in a heart shape we were also able to relate the main theme of the song, love. During most of the song we asked her to mime the words so we could lip-sync the video to the lyrics, again reinforcing the relationship between the lyrics and visuals, this can also be related to Goodwin’s third point of a relationship between the music and visuals. We Cut on the beat to enable us to do this too, mainly to make the video look professional and to make the video flow a lot more easily.

We overlapped 2 clips, one of the light shining on the chandelier (out of focus) and the other of our artist singing. We changed the opacity of the chandelier layer to a low percentage while the artist sang, and then changed it back to 100%, creating a relationship between the music and visuals.

We again, followed Goodwin’s 4^th point of the demands of the record company including lots of close ups. We did this not to follow the convention but to allow the audience to identify with our artist and for her to create an image of herself. By the audience identifying with our artist, they are more likely to connect with her/ the song therefore making the artist more recognisable.

We tried to get our artist to hold a lot of eye contact with the camera to create voyeurism, this is meant to make our artist seem more attractive especially to men and let them see her as a sexual object. Although this may not seem like a nice thing, it is a common theme among female artists as young girls want to be more like them and men want to see more of the artist, giving them more attention and therefore a fan base. Some of our camera movements also help create voyeurism for example we moved the camera along her body to show her legs and main body.

This is our Album cover photo, we decided to follow the conventions for a female popstar album, for example having the artist in the centre. By positioning her here the focus of the cover is completely on her. We used quite a simple thin font for the text as we found after researching into many female artist album covers, that this font was most common amongst them. We used this costume for our magazine advert to create continuity between the products, allowing her to build a star persona and also to make her recognisable. The dress creates voyeurism and allows her to be seen as a sexual object by men as the dress is short and puts emphasis of her chest, which is a popular look for females.

We edited this photo into our magazine advert, we chose this photo because we felt it represented a female star well as her whole look in this is very glamorous e.g. her make up. We chose not to follow the usual convention of using the album cover as the main photo because we believed that by using a different image it would further her star image and make her more recognisable.

The information we included on the advert were aimed especially for young female adults, for example saying that the CD also includes an interview with Alexa’s stylist and giving reviews from glamour and OK magazine. This would interest readers as they would recognise that the album would be suitable for them.

Q2: How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

 

 

 

 

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

Q4: How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

The technologies I have used and will be discussing includes blogger.com, final cut and Photoshop. I will talk about how to use blogger.com to plan for a video, digipak and magazine advert, how to put together a music video with Final cut and how to edit photos for ancillary products in Photoshop.

To plan for my music video and ancillary products I used blogger.com, here I was able to record all my research into artists, videos, target audience etc. I would record this in a form of a blog post, I labelled each post with my name and gave it a title to establish what the post would be about.
I used Blogger.com to present all my research, feedback and progress for my music video project. It was easy to use in terms of posting new reports on my progress and was easy to look back over work, due to its simple layout and name tags (to differentiate posts between our group members). By being able to see my blogging progress I was able to look back at my research especially when it came audience feedback, so that collecting ideas was clearer and easier, allowing us to work more efficiently and working appropriately for our target audience.

Using Final Cut allowed me to edit all of my video clips I had previously filmed with my group together to form the final music video. This technology was just for the stage of creating the music video, though we did use it for planning after we had filmed our test footage, to see how we could edit clip together and to get an idea of how colour correcting worked. We used certain features of final cut, for example we used the cutting tool to shorted clips, the marker tool to mark the beat and places to edit/cut, the fade tool and colour correct along with a few others. By using colour correct we were able to create contrast between elements within a frame, make the artist stand out more or just blend the background so that it was smooth. At a few points in the video we controlled and modified the speed of a clip in final cut, usually to make it flower, an example of when we used this was at the point when we overlaid two clips and changed the speed of the top clip to 16% so that it would appear less shaky and more controlled.

Photoshop is the third technology we used mainly for creating the digipak and magazine advert, though we did also use it for planning. We aimed to use Photoshop to edit the images we wanted to use for our ancillary products, we tried not to edit the images too much because we wanted the artist to look natural, also most female artists tend to be over edited. We used the sponge tool to saturate certain colours e.g. her pink lipstick, the dodge tool to lighten areas such as her face, the burn tool to darken areas like the background, the text tool to add text, the spot healer tool to hide blemishes, we also added a blur filter on our cover photo etc. Photoshop allows you to create the look you want easily, as we have proven, though we did face some difficulties though these only occurred during our planning for the cover photo. I edited a few photos using tutorials online just as a tester to get an idea of what we wanted, at times Photoshop’s layout can be confusing making it easy to make mistakes.

All of the technologies were useful though I would say without final cut we would not have been able to produce a video to the best of our ability. Final cut allowed us to reach our goal of creating a successful music video for a female artist through its easy, straightforward and clear tools and layout. Photoshop was also essential for allowing us to edit our photos for both the digipack and the magazine advert, it ensured that we could professionally create the ancillary products and add the logos, text and images needed in the right format and in the correct places. All the technologies we used were digital though we did make notes, collect feedback and draw our storyboard manually by hand.

Question 4 conclusion
by: annahumphriesfamily