Evaluation

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

 I believe our music video complies with real media products as we have considered and featured all of Andrew Goodwins points. Our song choice 'Jessica Simpson - Angels' is a Pop Ballad and I think we have achieved to aim our music video and ancillary products to target a wide general audience. Keeping to our genre characteristics we've included cut-ins of the artist singing in between the narrative that we created to maintain the viewers interest and indicate that she is the artist. We also used a black and white effect on our ancillary products for a simple approach without going into age or gender specifics. We chose to take an amplifying approach to the relationship between the lyrics and visuals by having an angel doing every day things, we thought this was a more creative idea rather than following the lyrics literally. The majority of our transitions fall in beat with the music and some actions in the video follow this too, an example being when Holly kicks the bench in time with the symbol being hit in the song. Holly's lipsynching was really successful and in time with the lyrics although she found it difficult to use the piano as she has never played before, but we felt it would be more interesting than her just singing. Thinking about the demands of the Record company we selected (eleveneleven) we featured a close up on the artists face for the digipak front cover and using the cut-ins of Holly singing with the piano we establish that she is the artist. The visual image we wanted to create for the artist was an angelic innocence. Voyeurism is a key concept in our video as the audience feel like they are watching the angel while she is oblivious and to build up tension her face isn't isn't shown until 25 seconds in. The use of hand held tracking aids the voyeuristic features as we used this method whilst filming Holly over the shoulder as she walks through town, making the viewer feel as if they're following her. Enhancing the voyeurism more with little details like close up of her hands on the coffee cup and a close up of her feet as she kicks off her shoes - these shots gives the effect of the viewer glancing at her. I think we've managed to show the artist as a natural and beautiful girl without objectifying her, but instead observing her. Our video has similarities towards the Lynx 'excite' advert for men's deodorant, the slogan in their advert is 'even angels will fall' as in the ad angels fall from the sky into various places in what was an every day situation. We gained inspiration from Ellie Golding's music video 'Your Song' as it contains various shots of Ellie in different locations with cut-ins of her playing the piano. With our ancillary products we have included the traditional conventions such as the Title of the ablum and Artists name on both the Digipak and Magazine Advert; on our magazine advert we have used the same simple font throughout except for the ablum name 'angels' which looks like handwriting to stand out from the rest of the text. Within the advert we have also included a review from The Sun because we felt it was a relevant judge of the Video and the newspaper is aimed at a wide range of people. On both ancillary products we have added websites where the viewer find out more information about the artist or album.

2. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancilliary texts?

We've chosen a subtle angelic theme for our video and ancillary texts and the digipak and magazine ad both work really well as supporting products to our video; the artist is portrayed as very innocent with a natural appearance. This angelic view of her is carried over into our ancillary texts. We wanted the digipak not only to link to the video, but to give a general theme of the album as a whole of showing the artist as angelic, this theme could work across other releases from that album. In both the video and photoshoots we opted for Holly to have a very natural look with casual clothes to relate to the audience as a regular girl with an incredible talent. Using close ups of her face for the front outside and inside cover of the digipak promotes an intimate feel to it. To prevent the digipak from appearing plain and un original, and also to link to our video, we've used a shot for the back outside cover of Holly standing, arms slightly raised outwards, with wings created from light. This links to our video through the use of angel wings, but we haven't extracted the exact feature as in our video we used a real prop, so to generalise the concept of 'angelic' we used torches and an extended shutter speed on the camera to create the light effect which worked even better than we planned and the first picture we took we ended up using. For the CD holder on the right inside cover we used the same effect of the wings made of light but blacked out Holly in the photo so the wings made a circle that outlines where the CD would go. Following the angelic approach, the magazine ad is very natural as we've shown the artist in a casual pose where she is slightly laughing. The bright white back ground glows around her body as we raised the contrast in photoshop. Having all the ancillary products black and white applies a simple atmosphere to the product as a whole and backs up the subtle theme within the video.

3. What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

Our original idea and pitch was the song 'sitting waiting wishing' by jack johnson and the video was to feature a girl going to meet a boy who forgets to show but he runs to her house and ends up at her doorstep with cut-ins of the artist singing in various positions on bench. this song choice was also pitched by three other groups, all with a simlilar concept to ours, the feedback we recieved was that the idea came across as un orginal and cliched. with this in mind we chose Jessica Simpsons cover of 'Angels' with the idea of an angel doing every day things such as making tea, shopping, having lunch etc. We felt this was a very original concept and recieved good comments.

For our rough cut feedback we were given good remarks over our strong use of voyeurism, the relationship between lyrics and visuals aswell as music and visuals, the steady pace of the clips, continuity editing and creativity of using istop motion. We also recieved criticism over the use of basic cut transitions, random use of istop motion, no vocalist and an unclear narrative. We found this criticism useful and decided to take out the use of istop motion and replace the clips with cut-ins of Holly singing in black and white, which would help indicate to the audience who the artist was and break down the narrative.

The majority of feedback we were given for our Final music video were positive comments including; how the black and white effect separates the cut-ins from the narrative, found the concept comical and entertaining, variety of shots and angles that build up a professionalism within the video. Although it was realised that Holly couldn't actually play the piano and another felt we could have used more exciting clips where there were peaks in the song.

We received feedback on our ancillary texts that we shouldn't base our digipak and magazine ad entirely on our video, but go with a lighter concept of an Angelic appearance and we did this by, following our teachers suggestions, taking close up shots of the artists face - which worked really well to link the digipak as a whole.

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

Blogger.com was incredibly useful to us as we were able to embed videos and pictures for research and blog on our progress, problems and plans either at college or at home and i was even able to create and post a blog post using my phone as the website is highly accessible. Blogger helped us a lot with organizing and planning.
Final Cut Express was very easy to use and organize clips as there is a separate box in the corner for all clips to be stored, a time line to move the clips around and a box to add or change filters to the clips. The downside to Final Cut Express is the rendering process which took up alot of time as we had many filters on.
Although we didn't end up using our istop motion clips we still really enjoyed the process of making them, but they took a lot longer to create than we'd planned for them. It was a little difficult to make the clips smooth but fortunately istop featured a transparent picture over the top of the viewing frame to show what picture had previously been taken. Overall it wasted a huge amount of time as we fitted the clips into the video and had to render everything only to have to take them all out again.
Using Photoshop enabled us to edit our pictures for the ancillary products with ease and also allowed us to create mood boards for research.
All the camera equiptment was really light and portable making it more manageable to film in public, we used a dolly to film the clip of holly shopping (3.45 minutes into the video) and the tripod made alot of our footage smoother. With our photoshoot we were able to extend the shutter speed so more light could filter in and using torches we were able to play around with different effects from the light.
All of these Media technologies were exceedingly useful and each contributes towards the making of our video and ancillary products.