Evaluation

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

Music Video

Our Music video both conforms and contrast the conventions of Music videos in the same genre. If we look at other videos we can clearly see what is the same and what is different.

We have tried to keep it similar to the origninal (shown above) as we need to keep a similar fun feel to the video. Videos in this genre, and by Fountains of Wayne tend to put in jokes in their music video, and make the audience smile.

But we didn't want to just copy these videos, we wanted to add our own twist to the video. One of the main examples we did was to use an air band, an idea we got off the comedy Scrubs which is different to every music video we have seen, this is shown below:

Digipak and Magazine Advert

In terms of the digipak and the advert, we didn't really go against any of usual conventions of existing products similar. As you can see in the pictures, we designed and created the cover and advert according to what our product research told us.

I feel the digipak cover is a mixture of the Hairspray and 17 Again:

The advert uses a lot of conventions that Razorlight does:

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

From the questionnaire we saw that we would need to include as much of the song story as we can, and not have the song focused all on the band.

Our target audience also all seem to agree that the video is fast paced and never gets boring, which we can make happen quite simpley with bright colours, varied locations, comedy, and also a confident performance in both band and storyline, shown below:

I think we did this very well, putting in the things the audience want will always make an effective product.

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

This is one of the most important things, whether or not the audience like the video. After posting it on youtube.com and putting links on facebook.com, we got some very positive feedback as well as some constructive criticism.

Our video managed to get a very pleasing 847 views and an overall rating of 5.0 stars.

Some positive comments:

1. this is awesome! :) whole video is really good especially like the band bits with the green screen :D
2. cool stuff! music corresponds to the video well
3. genius. the air instrument is a real good idea

But we also learned how we could have made it better with some help constructive criticism:

"oh wow!! this is mint!! feedback...critically...the foot tappin at the beginning was not in beat with the music, nor was the initial drumming. also, i was a little confused as to whether the girl in the video was meant to be "stacey" or "stacey's mum" - i think u need a person with distinguishable age differences to play each. i dont want all that to sound harsh by the way coz i think the way you've put all the scenes together with different parts of the song is amazing."

Overall i think our music video has been effective as everyone seems to really like it, and also we have found out how we could have made it better as well.

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

I used many technologies during the process of this promotional package.

During the actual construction of the music video, digipak, and magazine advert, we used a lot of technologies. These included:

Cameras - we used both a video camera for the video itself, repeating many shots (safety shots), and using many angles and shots, while we also used a digital camera to take pictures for the advert and the digipak.

Premiere Pro - We used Adobe Premiere Pro to edit the video. This was a new technology to me, and it took a couple of lessons to get used to it, but then it worked quite well, adding some fades and slow-motion.

Photoshop - We used Adobe Photoshop to create the magzine advert and digipak. This is not a new technology but I have developed my skills from last year.

Blog - I used this blogging website blogger.com for the first time to present my research, my planning, my product and then my evaluation. Although sometimes the blog wouldn't show my work, pictures or my links.

Social Networking Sites - I used some social networking sites such as facebook and youtube.com to post my music video so I could get some effective feedback from my target audience which i could then have put in my evaluation.

Internet - This is not a new technology but I used the internet for the main source of my research, looking at genres, other videos etc, so we could create an effective promotional package for the song "Stacy's Mom".