Student Evaluation

1. Our product is mainly convention following, going by Goodwin's points we fulfilled most of the typical conventions of music videos. For example, our music video related to the lyrics by featuring an angel as the protagonist, while at the same time we interpreted them amplifying as the song isn't actually about an angel being alone but more from another person's perspective while our music video showed it all from the angel's point of view. Angels is a ballad and one common convention of a ballad is the artist shots feature them playing an appropriate instrument, in our case a piano.
We used regular close ups to help identify the artist, another of Goodwin's points and we kept her alone to make sure she is perceived as an individual, this was also a key theme of the song.
One point we did semi-challenge was the relationship between music and visuals as, although we often cut on the beat, our video didn't do anything special during the peaks of the song.

2. Our digi-pak also featured most conventions of it's media. We used a CD as our base product and used the theme of being angelic throughout. To show this theme we used close ups from higher angles and with a slow shutter speed drew angel wings in the sky behind Holly. We used the same theme across on our magazine advert.
Our advert and CD shared conventions with many others, both student and real, such as the use of artist face shots to let the audience know who they're looking at. Also our artist name stood out a lot on our advert, getting attention of any readers.
As an artist we wanted to create an angelic image, a sort of happy-sad sweet but not in an overly cutesy kinda way, as we thought that a friendly face is the best way to attract our target audience, pre-teen girls, we used this theme across our three products to keep them linked. We thought this would be the most successful technique for attracting that audience because they are also the target for Disney based artists, who often use either the cute or independent-woman images. Ours was a combination of both, which we portrayed using angelic close ups to make her seem cute but also kept her alone and separate from everyone else, thus making her independent. I think that as a whole the 3 products worked well, as they're linked without looking identical and helped to complement each other.

3. Our initial pitch feedback proved useless, our original plan was to use Sitting, Watching, Waiting but we were rejected  as our idea was far too narrative heavy and cliché. So instead we moved to Angels and again we found that our initial idea was too narrative but we built on it to change that.
Our rough cut was reasonably well received in terms of camerawork and editing however, we lacked artist shots, some clips were too long and got boring and out stopmotion clips, although well done, didn't fit the mood and was eventually scrapped.
Our final cut was much better, we used a "tremendous amount of shots", often played on voyeurism and was put together well, playing on the subject of a lone angel walking around going unnoticed by the general public. However, there were still a couple of problems.
Firstly the song had powerful peaks but our video never really acknowledged them and stayed rather slow, calm and somewhat boring instead of having an epic shot of someone falling to their knees and flinging their arms above their their heads in a sudden epiphany-ish moment. Secondly another issue was how we still had very few artist shots, which arguably made the video too narrative based, ideally, with more time this is one thing we'd have changed of given more time.

4. The HD camera's were a great asset as they allowed for us to capture good quality footage with ease paired with a tripod and dolly they allowed for smooth tracking and panning shots, such as the sideways scroll in the shop.
We also used the editing software, Final Cut many times in the past which, having grown used to it, is more or less easy to use and gave us a vast selection of effects and filters, Final Cut was a useful tool, especially when it came to adding the noise and black and white filters to clips. However, the annoyingly long rendering put real time pressure on our already limited time frame. Blogger was a useful asset to show our theory of the subject and gave us credit for analysing past work . Photoshop was, although a powerful tool, also a large hassle and awkward to use for someone used to different things.
However, once got to grips with it allowed us to effectively make our digi-pak and magazine ad into professional looking products and helped us to use a black and white effect, much like the one from our video this aiding us in linking the products to each other better.