Evaluation Questions

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

Our media product is very realistic in the fact that in confroms to Goodwins theory and has information from other music videos to again make it like a real media text. It also confroms to genre characteristics, the song we chose, Jessica Simpson- Angels, is a pop ballard, i think that our video illustrates this through the use of a slow cut rate mostly and some black and white clips, we also decided to soften the colour on most of the clips to give the video an edge and make it seem like a lonely place for the angel character. We conformed to all of Goodwins points, for instance we played to the notion of looking, but for a different effect than usual, we decided that although most videos have the artists looking into the camera to create an audience relationship, we wanted to have all the clips from a different perspective, with the artist never looking directly into the camera, this choice supported the narrative of the angel being lonely and not really connecting with anyone except her dog, this point is portrayed through the use of a point of view shot where she looks back at the camera as the dog in the house. The idea of her not looking at the camera creates an artist identity, making her seem innocent and just another member of the public but a little bit different, this is the demand of the record label. We considered the demands of the record label in our digi-pack as well. the use of bright whites and black and white is often associated with innocence, similarly the image of the artist looking into the distance, smiling, again gives the artist a happy personality. There is also a sense of voyuerism as we are shown the Angels daily routine at home and through the day which we as a veiwer wouldnt normally see. In editing we ensured that there was a strong relationsip between music and visuals as the cuts of the clips happened on the beats in the music, similarly the cut rate increases as the tempo does, we also faded the final clip and the audio out at the same time. We tried to make the lyrics and visuals link fairly abstractly, by only making one word the main focus of the video, 'Angels'. However in the rough cut the visuals were more illustrative because we made use of stopmotion, which were short clips of various lyrics throughout the song. By contrast to Goowins theory we decided not to use intertextuality because we felt that references to other media texts would not add anything to the video. We did our own research into other artists before filming our video and making our products. We looked into videos by ellie goulding to inpire our ballard pop theme,and a video by Train for inspiration on using stop motion in our video. We also looked at previous student work t get an idea on how to structure our digipack and what features to include.

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

As a whole i think our promotional package is very effective because it is all subtely linked, because although we havent used any clips, props or costumes in both the video and digipack, it is still clear that they have a relationship through the use of the wing images and the artist photo. The concept of our package was to most importantly give the artist a good image, while always pivoting on the idea of innocence and a happy smile, but keeping it loosely tied to the video. Although we wanted 'angels' o be the name of the album we knew not to focus too much n this for the artwork, so we went out and did two more photoshoots, one to create an interesting angel image using torches- which again links to another of the songs on the track list, 'lights'. The second shoot was bearing in mind the demands of the record label so we set out to shoot some simplistic images of the artist for use on the album and magazine, we remembered to make space in the photographs, with the use of a plain white background to add text on top without obscuring the image. We also utilised the notion of looking in our digipack as we decided to place our text in the artists eyeline in the image. our target audience was mostly teenagers upwards, because we thought that this was who the song was aimed at so we created the promotional package accordingly athough i feel our audience would be mostly female i believe our digipack is appealing to both genders as it is very simple and depicts the artist as the main focus so that people will recognise her from the videoi think the audience is attracted and engaged through a wide range of shots and an interesting narratve.

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

The feedback that we got throughout the process definately shaped our final product,, for instance our initial idea was a video for a different song, however people thought it had been done before and felt it wasnt a strong enough pitch, so we scrapped it all together and came up with this new and original idea for Angels. Our teachers felt that this idea was far stronger so we developed it further until we came up with the narrativeof an angel going through every day life not being noticed by the public as different at all. The next piece of vital feedback came after the rough cut, the teachers said that the angles and variety of shots were good however the brigh colours in the clips detracted from the narrative of the video, they suggested we add an effect over the top to make them duller and link to the meaning of the song. We also had feedback from our classmates, they had lots of compliments, although they found the narrative hard to understand and felt that the stopmotion clips werent placed very well, they also suggested that we have clips of a vocalist between shots. we took note of this feedback and made changes to our video, firstly by taking the stopmotion clips out of the video completely, adding an effect ove all the clips to match the narrative and genre and we also did extra filming of the artist singing and playing the piano, which we made black and white to give an impression of a different time. finally we had feedback of our final cut, overall they said that the video was great and the variety of shots made it interesting and professional, with a good narrative concept, however that felt that the music and lyrics werent synched very well and didnt have a strong enough relationship.

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

Blogger was the first technology vital to our planning process, as we used it to upload video and images from the internet along with analysis'. The most importnat thing for the construction of our video was final cut, whereas we used photoshop to create our promotional package. we used a HD video camera to film our video, along with a digital still camera to take photos for our photoshoot, we used the slowest shutter speed on this camera to create the Angel image with the torches in the dark.