Evaluation part 1

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

While conducting our research on the bands that were associated with the rock genre such as; Paramore, 30 seconds to Mars and Big Delusion we noticed certain aspects of the videos that related to the rock genre. These were; atmospheric locations and dramatic performances. Our music video challenges these conventions of the rock genre as we have incorporated a highly detailed narrative to accompany the performance side of the video. This narrative is a highly important part of our video as it allows us to link lyrics and visuals together. A narrative is slightly common in music videos but it is the way we have presented ours that is unique to normal media conventions. Our narrative sequence uses a form of imaging where a person is filmed twice to seem to be two separate people. In this case a black t-shirt and a white t-shirt were used to connote the idea of one good side to the person and one bad side. They then confront each other in the climax.
However in contrast to us challenging the conventions of real media products we have also incorporated the characteristics normally seen in rock music videos as well to relate to the genre. We selected our filming locations very carefully in order to relate them to the rock genre. we used lighting and shading in these areas to our advantage as it allowed us to get the atmospheric result we wanted. we also used colour to relater to the rock genre. the colours red and black were ultimately a theme throughout as we used them to connote with the rock genre and in some ways to relate with the title of the song 'Bloody Hands'.

This video illustrates how Paramore uses common conventions of media products in their published work.




Q2 - How did you use media technologies in construction, research, planning and evaluation changes?

The computer programme 'Final Cut Express was used in the additional construction of the music video. This programme allowed us to put our footage together and add the appropriate effects for our video to be able to apply to the conventions of a rock video. These were effects such as saturate and colour corrector. The most commonly used media technology in this project is our blog This was the base of our whole music video project as everything we did was put on there including treatment, initial ideas, textural analysis and clips of our footage. This blog is a vital part of our coursework as without it we would get no credit for the work we did or any of the accompanying marks for the coursework. We used a standard DV format to construct our music video. We used the Microsoft word programme throughout our research and planning stages where we found it necessary.

Q3. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
During the manufacture of our product we had to complete cettain design tasks to create the full product. one of these was a digipak. The digipak was a CD case and CD of the song we created the video for. it included pictures of our band taken from our own video, the name of the song, the length of the song, and the band name. These are requirements used on all produced CD's sold as a mode of advertising the product to the public. The combination of our main product and ancillary text is very important during the selling stages of our product as if we make our digipak more attractive to the target audience we develop after our music video has been published then the overall success of our product. to create this effect of lasting popularity we needed to create a highly noticeable link between the digipak and the main product. We did this in many ways, the colour scheme and layout were the first things we considered while trying to create this link. the layout and colour scheme had to be linked to the rock genre as this was what our product is. we used a red and black colour for our digipak as these were seen commonly in our video and are colours highly associtated with the rock genre. The layout we used was chosen for our digipak was bold and eye-catching and also in a contrasting colour to our background which will help the product be overly more appealing when it is sold. Another form of creating a link between our ancillary texts and our main product was incorporating the images from our video onto the digipak. the images we used were of the band members and they were used as a way of advertising the band to those who may wish to purchase the CD.

4. What have your learnt from your audience feedback?
in the research and planning stages, one of the requirements that had to be included in the work was audience feedback either in questionnaires or comments from our audience while watching our product. Before we had completed the video we conducted an audience questionnaire in which we asked a random sample of people to complete a survey to find out information such as what gender they were, what age, what types of music they listend to and as rock was our chosen genre, what they expected to see in our finished video. From this audience questionnaire we were able to create a target audience profile from information we recieved from our survey. The target audience profile is as follows; the target audience was both male and female orientated and are between the ages of 16-21. They had high interest in a varied genre of music but the rock genre was always rated highly by the people we asked and the features they most expected to see in a rock video were musical insturments, dark colours, atmospheric locations and dramtic settings. We incorpoated these features into our music video to make it successful to the audience when it was published. After our product we uploaded it onto www.youtube.com to get audience feedback about what was good and what was bad about it from the audiences point of view. This process of collecting feedback after production may not have been quite as successful yet but our video will be a constant fixture on the site and monitoring will continue on our video and the comments we are sure to recieve about it.