Lukes Evaluation

Media Evaluation Essay

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

One way in which conventions are challenged in our music video is that the locations of the video change quite frequently and seemingly at random. I think this is unusual to most music videos including rock. In the video we ‘the group’ performed the roles of different band members. We did not look as though we should really be in the video because it’s a rock genre; you would expect the band to be wearing dark clothes, gothic, punky styled. We were not wearing clothes anything like this, our everyday clothes were worn (jeans, normal t-shirt, hoodies etc).

Each band member was shot separately in different locations. These were the two guitarists, drummer and singer. This is not the usual way as far as rock music videos go. Many rock music videos were watched during our project for inspiration and ideas; I didn’t see one video that didn’t have a shot of the whole band together at one point, and very rarely would you see one band member on their own for too longer time. In our video you never saw the whole band together playing at the same time, you would only see the band members playing on there own in different locations. This means our video is very different in this way in comparison to the majority of music videos in the same or similar genre.

From our video you would think the target audience would be anyone from the ages of roughly 13 to 25 maybe 30 years of age. If you just listened to the music you would predict that the video to it would be in your face, dark and gothic. This would follow the normal forms of rock genre music videos unlike ours and would target the same sort of aged audience except maybe a bit older than 13, probably 15 years would be the youngest of the target audience.

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

Our digipack goes very well with the video and song. From the lyrics we could make out, understand and make sense of someone was very angry, preparing for a fight or confrontation of some sort. For example some of the lyrics are ‘break free flight fight tonight’. This is represented well with the red, orange and yellow flames all around the digipack. It shows aggression, passion and anger as does the lyrics and tone of the song.

The front cover of the digipack is very simplistic with just an image of a face, a pair of hands and a flame. Its very uncomplicated but in its simplicity extremely good. Inspiration for the digipack was other rock album cover such as ACDC – Those about to rock and Pink Floyd – The Wall.

The darkness of the digipack compliments the main product. The song has a dark gothic feel to it but also anger, passion and emotion. I think a fiery flame with a black background is the perfect way to get all these sorts of feelings across.

On the other if you were to see the digipack before seeing the video you would expect a different type of video. You would expect an in your face, aggressive performance based video which is very different to what ours is.

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

There was very little feedback from the audience but what they did say was that the video was good, well edited and followed the conventions well. We basically learnt from this that we could edit clips to make a reasonable video and follow the conventions of the rock genre. I would have to disagree with the comment of we followed the conventions well in some ways we followed the conventions but I think that we didn’t follow the conventions in more ways.

The audience also said that the digipack was excellent and followed the conventions perfectly. I think that from this comment you can learn that you can promote a music video well to fit the conventions with good ancillary products alongside the main product. This could help attract people who are into the genre but haven’t heard the music to buy the product.

One comment of feedback we received was that the locations could have been changed to places outside of the college or our homes to a different place to fit the conventions more. For example we could have set the video in a cemetery or church. From this I can learn that to make your video more interesting and fit the typical conventions you could be more adventurous and creative with locations for the video.

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

Our whole video was edited and put together in Final Cut Express. All the different long clips of performance and narrative were cut up and mixed together to make a more fluent, interesting, and watchable video. If we couldn’t cut each shot up the video would be much more boring and longwinded and much less interesting to watch. We also experimented with different effects such as green screening, slow motion, black and white cartoon and distorted effect. All of these effects worked well but didn’t make our video fit the conventions of a rock genre any more and just would have looked a bit odd.

We also used the internet a lot during our project. We created a blog to record what we done each lesson. Also our ideas, inspirations and effects experiments were recorded in our blog so that you could see how we got to our final piece of work. Problems and how we overcame them were also recorded on the blog.

We also used Photoshop to create our digipack. On the programme you can get a stencil plan of a fold out digipack which was very useful and much easier to play about with different pictures and make it as easy on the eye as possible. We also used Photoshop to try out different effects you could put on pictures to make them fit the genre conventions. However the one we attempted were very hard to do and didn’t work as well as we hoped.