Media evaluation

Media evaluation  By Sarah Groves

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

Our music video is a very controversial music video that shows the typical genre characteristics of the Dance/RnB music video but has an original idea. 
To begin to create our music video we continually had group meetings in which each member of the group would get the chance to come up with any new ideas and present them to the rest of the group. We created a group on Blackberry messenger on our mobile phones in which we could communicate to speak about meeting up or any ideas that we had to put into the music video. This helped in the developing process as we were able to use the technology to communicate easily and quickly if we needed to. We gathered ideas about our music video from looking on several websites that have been developed to show the development of individuals music videos. We used these websites as an example of how we would set up our blog and the process in which we would need to follow in order to complete our music video and show all our planning. 

Once we came up with a few ideas to use for the music video we decided to greate a spider diagram on paper, a mood board of pictures on word and a word cloud using www.wordcloud.com in order to create a word cloud to sum up everything that would be in our music video. Thesee three things helped us to create visuals for what our music video would contain and what we wanted our music video to look like. 

Knowing what sort of things that we wanted within our music video we created a timeline of what scenes we thought would be in our music video. This was a really good idea as we begin to pull our music video together and think about filming and order. 

We knew that our idea for our music video was very unusual and so we wanted to do a lot of research into the idea of transgender and we found one particular video that has been released does feature the same idea as ours and so we used this to do further research. this was Window licker by Aphex Twins. 

Referring to Andrew Goodwins theory our music video doesnt have a particular main star and therefore our music video deviates from typical music videos as Goodwin states the main artist is normally shown. Contrasting to this we have stuck to Goodwins theory of what is typically shown in music videos because we have related the music to the visuals as we have edited videos to the beat of the music and have made sure that the movement they are doing on screen fits to the music. We have also related lyrics to visuals by shooting sequences with a Milkshake which is said throughout and is in fact the title of the song.

 In terms of mise en scene and camera we have followed to the conventional music video and so our music video looked professional and related to what we would normally see in a high profile music video. An example of this in our music video is close ups. We have used many close up shots in our music video. This would be one of the key factors present in a typical music video. Our music video shows the voyeuristic treatment of women that Laura Mulvey states in her theory. We have filmed close ups and tilting angles that emphasises the assets the women and men have. 
For the second part of our music video we have 
played on this and changed the women to men but still using the same camera angles and shots. This created a comedy element in our music video. 

The first half of the music video is what you would typically see in a music video and then the second half uses the same angles and shots and keeps with the voyeuristic treatment but instead it is men but the content of the video is unusual and not typically seen in a music video. For our inspiration for our music video we used the video of Windowlicker by Aphex Twins. This video is the same as our idea but the transformations run throughout the music video. The costume that we have put them in also relates to Laura Mulveys theory as they are wearing little clothing. We did this to make them look more like objects from a man’s point of view and they would typically be admired in that clothing.

Throughout the music video there are many sexual references we have made but we have done this because we want to appeal to the audience and believe that they will watch the video because they believe that the person or audience will be intrigued to watch it because they feel like they shouldnt be watching it so it makes them want to watch it more. This is one of the typical genre conventions that a music video within our genre would typically have.

Our music that we chose for our music video has a strong dance beat that we wanted to stick to. There have been many dance music videos that we have used for inspiration. We tried to stick to this as much as possible.

Our music video has strong representations of each gender. Both genders are represented in a sexual way which can often been seen as a negative representation. The women in our video are represented as beautiful and classy women.

Overall I think our music video follows the conventions of a music video within our genre but the content deviates from what is typically seen in music videos.

PLEASE VISIT MY ONLINE EVALUATION ON MY WEBSITE AT : http://www.wix.com/sarahgroves2/sarahs-site

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

Our main product has a main idea that we could use as branding elements, this is the idea of women turning into men. This means that we can relate any images that are related to our theme and then audiences will look at the images and relate to our music video. When we were making our music video we knew that we were aiming the video at a particular audience however we knew that using particular typical forms and conventions of music videos would make the music video look overall more professional. During the process of making our music video we knew we wanted the music video to have constant bright colours to meet our theme so during the editing stage of our music video we could edit the hue, saturation and brightness of each clip to make sure the video looked effective.

 Regarding the digipak, there were obvious pieces of information that needed to be on the digipak such as the barcode, album name, artist name, logo, release date etc. We knew that these had to be individual from looking at other digipak. Our digipak need to be bright to match out video and to stand out when put on the shelf in a shop. To create our album cover we captured certain images from the footage in our music video. Normally an artist’s album cover would not be clips from the video it would be a completely original image relating to the artist itself however we decided to promote the video itself by posting images on the album cover. The image on the front of the album of the eyes with different colours is featured in the video and we could also use this particular image as maybe merchandise or a publicity image. In relation to the magazine cover we had to include most of the relevant information that was on the album. We used the same colour and themes for the magazine and we kept to the same styles. This was to make an individual statement about the music video so that when the ideas and themes are shown they will immediately relate to the music video. Our magazine advert was the result of all three of our advert research that we conducted. Our group all conduced individual research into magazine adverts. Our research was based around albums that were advertised from our particular dance/r and b genre. We found that they were all full of colour and bright and this was something that we would incorporate into our magazine advert.

We had brain stormed many ideas for the album cover and we drew a few sketches of what ideas we had and then we decided to experiment with taking an image and edit it with photoshop to make it look more like and album cover and experiment with texts on top of the image. We uploaded all of our ideas on blogger and experimenting with photoshop helped us to decide what theme our album had and what worked and what didnt work. I think our final album cover looks good and the process of building our album cover was helped by the technology that we had available to us.

The idea of transgender is a controversial topic and often something that is shied away from in society. By bringing this idea into music we have created and interesting and original music video to the music that we chose. We wanted to make sure that our music video was different to the music videos that are around today. We knew that people are drawn to new ideas and things that are different and are very in the face of the public.

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

PLEASE VISIT MY ONLINE EVALUATION ON MY WEBSITE AT : http://www.wix.com/sarahgroves2/sarahs-site

We wanted to create a specific audience profile and so then we could arrange our music video to fit the specific target audience. We thought that our target audience would be a white British male around the late teenage age. We chose this because we thought that the comical and sexual element would most appeal to this type of person. We name him Tom Compton. Tom has many hobbies but he particularly loves to Dj. We did this to relate to our Dance genre. We wanted him to be very interested in music and so we stated that he went to music festivals on common occurrence.

 Tom goes to college and listens to Dj music such as Calvin Harris and DJ Fresh. He does watch TV but he mainly he puts on the music channels and listens to the most popular music of that time. Tom hates Christmas but he loves new year because he can party and dance to music. During his spare time Tom downloads and listens to music on his iPod. He likes many different types of genres of music but his favourite genre of music is dance/hip hop and R&B. Tom enjoys going out with his friends clubbing and the music that he listens to in the club he tends to enjoy. Tom is a very confident boy and likes to explore with more feminine songs. He likes it when a DJ takes a classic song and makes a remix that has a strong beat running through. He is a fan of female artists that explores house music. Even though we have specified an audience profile our music video will appeal to multi gender but I do think that it will stay at a young age range due to its modern content and bright colours. 

After showing our music video we wanted to collect some audience feedback to find out what our peers thought about our music video and so we handed out 10 questionairre sheet. We collected them in and put all the resulats found into a powerpoint in which involved graphs of the statistics from the results. Our peers found that they liked the comical element to the music video and laughed at the funny parts. The feedback pointed out that we needed to work on the lighting and colour of our music video and bring out the comedy more as that was the part of the music video that they liked the most. Looking back at our OCR brief I think our music video has been successful as we have conducted good research and have made an original video. The results of the questionnaire shows that our music video is heading in the correct direction to become a good music video. 

Our music video demonstrates the typical gene characteristics that would be shown within our genre and also demonstrates theories that have been established from music videos. When we came up with our idea we decided to conduct a questionnaire on our fellow piers. The questionnaire would find out what our classmates thought of our music video. The results of the questionnaire found that the class generally liked our idea and they thought that the general genre of our music video would be dance. This is the kind of result that we hoped for and it showed that we had started with a strong idea and we were heading in the correct direction to make a good music video. 

Another audience feedback excercise that we conducted for feedback was showing the class a rough cut of what we had so far for our music video in the process of completion. Our peers viewed our rough cut and we gave them a comment sheet in which they commented and wrote any improvements on. One of the comments that was made was "Needs more close ups of Luke and Jack in the car scene". We took this comment and hired out the camera exquipment and filmed closer shots of both the boys at the car wash scene. This comment prooved extreamly useful and once we had added those shots in then we realised how much better the music video looked as a whole. Lots of the other comments made also prooved useful.

During the research stage of developing our music video we researched into different music video channels. We looked into what music channels would be best for our genre of music that we have chose. We listed a number of appropriatemusic video channels. This gave us a stronger focus for the music video because we knew the types of music videos that those channels play and so we were aiming to fit the criteria we would imagine for tose particular videos.

Overall I think that our music video is very eye catching as we have made the colours bright and vibrant to fit our theme and would receive lots of attention. Our posters and album cover consists of the same bright colours and we believe that it would stand out when put on the shelf of a shop. I think that we have edited our music video well and kept everything in time to the beat of the music. We did this by putting in markers for music change. This really helped contribute to the overall quality of the music video. I think that our music videos unique selling point is the comical element that is introduced halfway in our music video. If we had the opportunity to make spin off merchandising, then I think that we would use a picture of a milkshake glass as our significant image and change and adapt it in different ways.

PLEASE VISIT MY ONLINE EVALUATION ON MY WEBSITE AT : http://www.wix.com/sarahgroves2/sarahs-site

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

During our research stage of our music video we originally decided to use the computer to look up different interesting music videos and see what they contained. We made a list of the typical genre characteristics that were shown in the music videos of a similar genre to our music video. These were bright contrasting colours, sexual innuendo, money, and jewellery and lady dancers. The main site we used in order to look at music videos was www.youtube.com. We used blogger.com to post up any of the research that we made. 


During the research stage we looked alot at current music videos and what ideas they contained and we tried to interpret these ideas into our own music video. e.g. Lady Gaga's Bad Romance features the artist in which her eyes have been edited (picture).

During the planning stage we used different site on the internet to search for certain props and costume that we could possibly use. For costume we looked up certain items on www.ebay.com which gave us a good idea of what we were looking for. If we were making a professional video we would obviously purchase our costumes however we knew that we already could get hold of certain items that fit the items we found online. For our props such as the milkshake, part popper, silly string, umbrella, food colouring etc. We went out to our local shops and bought the appropriate items.

For the filming part of our music video production we used a Sanyo HD camera, tripod and a portable light in order to make certain scenes brighter. When we first got hold of the camera we decided to do certain testers at school and take it in turn to use the camera and made sure that we knew how to use the camera. I thought that the camera was fairly easy to work out however we needed to keep the camera on the tripod in order to maintain a steady image however certain angles that we wanted we couldn’t get on the tripod and so we had to use the camera hand held and keep the camera as steady as possible which was hard especially when trying to pan or tilt. Another issue with the camera was making sure the colour was correct and the white balance was set up for every filming session. We also had to make sure that the image we were filming were in complete focus otherwise everything that we had filmed that was out of focus would not be any use to us. A massive issue that we faced during filming was the brightness of the image and the loss of light. As we shot during winter time then the light would go very quickly and because we wanted all of our images to be bright and clear we would film before the sun went down and we would carry a portable light with us in case we needed extra light or colour. Even thought we tried to film in bright conditions during the editing stage we brightened our images even more to get a full effect. On one particular filming session we only could smash a certain number of milkshake glasses but we wanted to film a number of angles of this. To overcome this issue we took out two lots of what we usually shot and set them up in different angles and so we could capture the same falling milkshake glass but at two different angles. This worked out well during the editing stage and looked extremely effective in the end.  

For the editing stage of our music video we used the mac computers available at school and use the programme final cut express to edit the footage that we had shot. I had never used Final cut express as we used a different programme last year but however I felt that I picked it up well and took good control as one of the main editors of our music video. Editing on final cut express seemed to be the part in which I seemed to find my part in the group. The editing really helped with mimicking the bright colour genre characteristic of a dance music video. The editing was easy and went well for our group and we got everything edited nicely and in time. For one particular part of the video in which we needed to change the colours of the eye we used Photoshop on the same image but just changed the eye colour. For the album cover and magazine advert we used Photoshop to edit the images so that they looked professional.

PLEASE VISIT MY ONLINE EVALUATION ON MY WEBSITE AT : http://www.wix.com/sarahgroves2/sarahs-site