My Evaluation

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

The music genre we have decided to use to help create our music video is indie rock, one of the most influential genre's in todays music industry. We agreed on using local band 'Kilimanjaro'. Generally indie rock music videos tend to be performance based where we just see the band performing the song on a stage or in a studio, however, we have decided to create a video which has a narrative and follows a storyline because we felt that the audience would find this more refreshing and interesting rather than just seeing the band perform the track and mime the words as this has become very common in videos of this type of genre. We felt that audiences would be fatigued by performance based music videos so we delibrately contradicted this idea and challenged the forms and conventions you often find in an indie music video. In our video we have tried to get across the surreal elements which are not always presented in this type of genres music videos.
In our video we see two people, one wearing a gorrila mask and the other wearing a clowns mask. At first we see a boy casualy walking around a park from a variety of different camera angles however as the song tempo picks up the boy begins to start running as he is being chased by the clown and gorilla and this is filmed using a number of different camera styles including handheld. This gives the effect that our video is quite fast paced as when the music speeds up we had our character start running. Another effect this gives is one of realism, as we haveused a handheld camera technique which gives the effect of the audience actually being in our video as we have used the handheld technique in a point-of-view angle.
I feel that our video is quite experimental as it is narrative based rather than performance based and i havnt seen many other indie rock music videos similiar to it. I also feel that the images we have used to create our c.d cover and inserts are experimental because of their simplicity in only using 3 colours and using a striking image and title. However i do feel that this simplicity is a positive thing as Kasabian's, highly succesful , album 'Kasabian' uses the same ideas. Our music video does not reflect the lyrics used in the song 'crystal clear'. This is because we were very keen on the idea of using our narrative and we felt we would have to change this in order to relate it to the lyrics of the song as the song had no real relation to our ideas used in our narrative.

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

To produce an interesting and effective video we felt that costumes and appearance were both very important so we used the idea of our characters being dressed in masks. As part of our coursework we were asked to create a c.d cover,inserts, back cover and also a magazine advert to help promote the c.d. We produced all of these using photoshop and iMovie HD on the apple macs. We decided as a group that the images we used to produce our c.d design and advert should be very similiar to the images that we see in the video so that we can create a cohesive image for the band. Whilst shooting our video we made sure that we took a number of photos at the same time so that we had a good choice of photos to choose from to use for our c.d covers and advert. We all agreed that the image showing an extreme close up of the clowns mask was the most effective in terms of catching the eye of the audience so we used this for the front cover of our c.d. We experimented using different colours on the image and we eventually came to the decision that we would take all of the colour out of it so that it was black and white and just leave certain features such as the nose and eyes red. We did the same thing for the inserts and back cover as we felt that this worked well and it showed continuity throughout.
Our c.d advert shows both characters, the gorilla and the clown, poking their heads around a tree. We used this idea so that we could print the adverts text on to the tree. We made the text red so that it would cohere with the colour that we have used throught the whole of the c.d covers and inserts. I think that this use of cohesiveness could be a good marketing technique especially if the consumer had only seen the video they would immediately be able to pick out the c.d in a shop because the images from the video cohere with those on the front cover. Also the image we have used for our front cover is so simple but at the same time very striking and this would immediately cath a customers eye if they saw it in a shop.

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

To get an overall idea of how successful we've been in creating a music video we needed to get a number of opinionsfrom a wide audience so in order to do this we created a questionnaire.
In todays music industry product feedback is very important when trying to create a successful product. When asking for feedback we made sure we got the audience to provide some constructive criticism on any aspects of our product they didnt like or thought we could improve on and any ideas they had to make our product more attractive.
It is the same for big music and film companies. Negative feedback and constructive criticism can be just as important as positive feedback if not more important as it will help them to identify specific areas which need improvement and then should help them to sell their product and effectively make the company more successful.
If a company completely ignores its audience feedback then it will not be able to achieve its goal of pleasing its target audience, which is the most important thing when trying to sell a product. Also during the marketing stage of a product, if a product is not marketed in an effective way that doest reach the target audience then the targeted audience aren't likely to know much about the product and this will mean they are less likely to go out and buy it.

We recieved both positive and negative feedback from our target audience. Many people liked the fact that we didnt use too many effects in our video as they felt this would have been inapropriate. I was surprised by this as i felt that we could have used more effects in certain parts of the video. In terms of our c.d cover, inserts and magazine advert we were surprised by the number of people that felt our clown mask was 'creepy' and 'unsettling', however they said this wouldnt put them off buying the product.

The audience gave plenty of negative feedback and constructive criticism to help us improve our product. The majority of the audience felt that we had used the 'slow-motion' effect too much in our video. We wanted to use it primarily to give our video that slightly cheesy feel to amuse the audience however they felt that we had over-used it which is probably a fair assessment and something we could definately learn from in future. The audience also felt that the first of the 2 images used for our inserts was a little 'plain' and 'boring' in comparison to the other images used and eventually we began to agree with this.


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

During the research and planning stages of our music video we used a wide variety of different media technologies to help us. First of all we used Microsoft Word to help create our target audience questionnaire and we also used the same programme to write up our results from the questionnaire.
In the research process of our project we used Myspace as it allowed us to listen to the different tracks produced by our chosen band ' Kilimanjaro'. Kilimanjaro have their own page on Myspace Music, a free site which bands of any genre can use to create a fan base and where fans can easily access recent updates on events, new tracks etc. The band have their own biography on the site and all the tracks they have produced which meant we could find out any information we needed about the band and we were also able to choose a track we thought would work well with our video.
We also used Youtube when researching other bands music video's and we also used it to upload the finished version of our own video 'crystal clear'. This is so that we could have a back up of the video if we ever lost it and we could also gan feedback from a much wider audience.
The seaarch engine 'Google' came in very useful in the research process as we could type into it anything we wanted to research and get instant access.

We used various different forms of media technology during the construction proces. The most important one was the digital camera as this enabled us to capture all of the footage we wanted to film and anything we didnt like we could easily delete. The tri-pod was also a very important piece of equipment as it meant we could film with the camera being still when we needed to and it also meant that we didn't need someone operating the camera at all times and we could all be involved in the video at the same time.
A digital camera was also a vital piece of equipment as it enabled us to take 'still photographs' for our c.d covers and magazine advert.
During the editing process of our video we found iMovie HD to be very useful as it wasa high quality piece of movie making software which had a number of key features such as creating effects on our video. Examples of these which we used include fast motion, slow motion, flash and N-square.
To actually create our blog we used the website http://www.blogger.com/home. This website has enabled all of us to keep a personal log on everything we have done so far along the whole process of making our music video. It also meant that our target audience could get easy access to questionnaires and images of our final product and so they could give any feedback they wanted to or ask any questions.