Vanessa's Evaluation

Q1: In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? 

Media music video evaluation from Nessa Shepherd

Q2: How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

 Q3: What have you learned from your audience feedback?

In our feedback it was brought to our attention that we could have made our establishing shot clearer, and could have included more camera angles. We used a variety of shots during our performance, such as low-angles, close-ups, extreme close ups, mid-shots and camera movement such as zooms and panning. However this would have been hard to do whilst presenting the narrative as we chose to set it in a bedroom. As split screen was a big part of our video, we were unable to vary our camera angles as we wanted it to be symmetrical. Also this would have taken away the effect of the passing through of objects, making it very unclear as to what was going on.

We gained lots of positive feedback such as our digi-pack worked really well and had continuity across the products, liked the passing through of objects and that the narrative was clear throughout.

In our rough cut feedback there was a comment saying our music video contained ‘too much stop motion.’ Stop motion was our intention for our music video, in our opinion we thought merging live action with stop motion didn’t fit with the conventional idea of our video looking quirky and unrealistic also we thought our video would lose continuity. In hindsight, we were quite ambitious with creating the whole video in stop motion, as this was very time consuming and quite challenging, resulting in loss of time for editing. It was also mentioned to us that our cloud scene ‘didn’t work’. At this point in time when we received this comment we had only just added this footage to our rough cut so it did look odd, but we took it on board and with the colour corrector, we felt like this was a dominant, quirky part of our video that we were pleased with.  However, we were happy with our overall outcome of the stop motion, and glad we took on the challenge.

Q4: How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Presidentz Movie- Question 4
by: ness25

Final Evaluation - Luca

Q1: In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

 In our music video we have followed certain characteristics of a female artist's music video but we have also created a music video that is individual and unique, which does not follow all the characteristics of a typical music video of a similar artist. One way in which our music video demonstrates the characteristics of the genre is through the way love is portrayed between the two characters. The boy and the girl in the music video are in love and this is typical of the pop-folk genre. The video follows these two characters as they wake up, go about their morning routine. The similarities between the two characters are shown and this again follow the characteristics of the genre (innocence, love, relationships). Our music video defies the characteristics of the genre in the way it is shot, using stop motion creates a surreal, jerky effect. This is not usually afflicted with the genre we have used. However using stop motion has created a positive effect as it will appeal to our target audience. Our target audience are creative and loving so therefore they will be open to trying new things. Stop motion has created an effect which reinforces the innocence of the music video as the jerky effect gives an amateur look to the video as if the two characters portrayed have actually created it.

Shows two characters and the love theme.

Emphasises love and shows stop motion (hat appears on boys head)

We have used lip syncing in the chorus of our music video, this has created a link between the lyrics and visuals (one of Goodwin's points on analysing music videos). We see the artist, Eliza Mindel, singing the chorus which emphasises her creativity and musical talent. She is also playing the guitar at the same time which further reinforces her talent. Lip syncing follows the characteristics of the genre because most of the artists in the pop-folk genre are very real and talented. This scene is positive because its creates an emotional bond between the audience and our artist. Through the lyrics she is singing and how she is singing them the artist is portrayed as being emotional and down to earth, she is singing about a real matter which has emotionally effected her. This is typical of the genre as past experience is usually what influences most artists and is shown in their lyrics.

Artist lip syncing

In the chorus of our music video we have used a cartoon cloud background with our artist walking along, this is still shot in stop motion. This scene was added so that the audience could see the artist and therefore relate to her. The whole chorus sequence is supposed to portray a 'dream sequence' this is represented by the clouds in the background and also emphasised by the surrealism that comes with stop motion video. Our artist is represented as being the cupid between the two main characters and therefore emphasising the theme of love within our music video. This theme strongly follows the characteristics of the genre used. In this chorus scene our artist is also seen playing the guitar. This represents her as being creative and down to earth. She can play the music to accompany her songs. This is typical of the genre used and members of our target audience who play instruments can relate to this. This scene follows Goodwin's point of music following visuals, you see her playing the guitar and you can hear what she is playing. This is also emphasised on our digi-pack through the pictures of guitars we have used, it gives a theme of musical talent which is something we wanted to associate with our artist.

Artist walking amongst clouds

                       

Artist playing guitar

We have used frequent references to voyeurism  how ever we have not used camera-work that depicts the female body in a voyeuristic way. This is because that would not follow the characteristics of our specific genre and would not match the star persona we have associated with our artist. However we have used references to voyeurism with techniques such as frame within a frame, to do this we have a scene in which the actors hold up a board. This board is a green screen board, then using the effect we have added a video into the green screen. Therefore to the audience the characters are holding up their loved ones (pictured). We have also used close up of our artist which shows her eyes and also the artist looking at the camera, this emphasises the voyeuristic nature of our music video. Also we have used voyeurism in our digi-pack. The album cover has Eliza Mindel with a magnifying glass which is over her eyes, magnifying them. This is very effective in creating a link between the artist and the audience as it seems as the artist is looking through the magnifying glass at you.

Artist shown looking at audience

Character shown holding green screen

Q2: How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

Q3: What have you learned from your audience feedback?

"That cloud scene... didn't work with the rest of the video" This comment is referring to the scene that includes our artist, Eliza Mindel. She is pretending to walk whilst we use the effect of stop motion to move the clouds that we have cut out of paper and stuck on the blue background. This creates a cartoon type of effect which is meant to portray a dream sequence, this is emphasised by the surrealism of the scene including the cartoon background and the natural 'jerky' effect that stop motion creates.  We intentionally added this effect, to show the audience the artist so they can relate to her and recognise her. Also by showing the artist singing the chorus we have reinforced her star persona. This sequence portrays her as being innocent, creative and loving. These factors follow the conventions of the genre we have chosen for the artist. We think this scene fits in well with the rest of the music video as it gives some flow and variety to otherwise a very simple sequence. This scene helps reinforce the theme of love throughout the music video as   our artist is acting as the cupid for the two main characters of the sequence. This theme follows the characteristics of the genre.

Q4: How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Prezi question 2

Question 4

Question 4
by: semeluca

evaluation

media question 4
by: cookiemiseter123
 This is question 4
This is question 1


This is question 2

Question 3, My directors commentry.
"you don't really know who the artist is really?" this is mainly referring to the split screen and the cloud scene when the chorus is playing, we purposely added a completely different scene change and using the artist on the cloud scene we feel creates the star personna and helps you identify yourself with her. We think that not using the artist as the actor and main focal point of the story creates a effect that the artist is looking on herself doing this, and looking back on herself and the mistakes she may have made. Also this was our rough cut and we hadnt finished putting the full video together with the artists bit in. I think there was a difference between the actor and the artist and you can indentify this yourself when looking at the magazine advert and digipack. We have purposely picked a new actress to play the lover she is talking about in her lyrics because it allows the singer to sing on the chrorus and allows you to do jump cuts from the artist back to the video to make effective jump cuts and cuts on the beat. Since taking these comments on board and addressing them we have been able to make a distinct difference between the two and have made it alot more effective so hope when the audience see's the final they change their opinion.

Media Evaluation- Charlotte

Question 1- In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Mediaevaluation q1 from Charlotte Day

Question 2- How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

QUESTION 3- What have you learned from your audience feedback?

'The narrative was clear throughout'- This feedback was important to us as the narrative was very important to us as we based our video mostly around this when we came up with our initial narrative.  The fact that it is clear to our audience that the two characters are a couple and are following an everyday schedule the same even though they are not physically together was rewarding to hear as we spent a lot of time planning over our narrative. 

'We liked the passing through of objects'- This was another key factor that we were glad our audience had recognised and liked. We linked this part closely to the lyrics of our song to create an illustrative video. The lyrics in the song quoting 'our bodies fit together like a makeshift puzzle' is within the metaphor for the passing through of objects so we were happy it showed we were following the lyrics closely and linked them to our video.

'The cloud scene didnt work'- This was said in our rough cut video where we had only just included this scene therefore it was looking very out of place at this point and wasnt done to the best of our ability at that stage. However it was good to see some constructive crititsism here as this encouraged us to work harder on correcting this scene and after we had included the footage of the artist performing which was put in after our roughcut this scene looked a lot clearer and our audience then knew who our artist was and had a clearer insight to her persona with this cartoon like imagery. 

'Our ancillary products looked effective and showed clear links however there could have been more information on the digi-pack' -We tried to create a theme throughout our ancillary products of the black and white and link in the images and mise-en-scene within both such as our costume. However the issue of time was the reasoning behind the lack of information. If we had had a bit more time we would have included the information on the spine of our digi-pack with the name of the artist and digi-pack name. However overall our audience said it looked effective and showed clearly the promotion of our artist and star persona and also the genre.  

'Good angles but could have done with an establishing shot' -In our feedback it was brought to our attention that we could have made our establishing shot clearer, and could have included more camera angles. We used a variety of shots during our performance, such as low-angles, close-ups, extreme close ups, mid-shots and camera movement such as zooms and panning. However this would have been hard to do whilst presenting the narrative as we chose to set it in a bedroom. As split screen was a big part of our video, we were unable to vary our camera angles as we wanted it to be symmetrical. Also this would have taken away the effect of the passing through of objects, making it very unclear as to what was going on.

'Too much stop Motion' - In our rough cut feedback there was a comment saying our music video contained ‘too much stop motion.’ Stop motion was our intention for our music video, in our opinion we thought merging live action with stop motion didn’t fit with the conventional idea of our video looking quirky and unrealistic also we thought our video would lose continuity. In hindsight, we were quite ambitious with creating the whole video in stop motion, as this was very time consuming and quite challenging, resulting in loss of time for editing. However, we were happy with our overall outcome of the stop motion, and glad we took on the challenge. 

(unfortunately we were unable to upload our vox-pop but these were the comments made)

QUESTION 4 - How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Final Cut- We used final cut for the editing process of our video. We used many techniques within this process such as green screen, split screen, transitions and layering. With the green screen we overcame a few challenges such as the green card as the image moved so we had to try and move the image going on the card to sync this and whether the image on the card would fit and look clear and professional enough to use. We used the motion key tool and the marker to show exactly where we needed to move the image to, to get the positioning precise. We also had to create a black background behind the image, as when the green card moved a shadow of the image was shown as the lighting was perhaps too bright. However after doing a test run on this before attempting the real thing we knew this would be possible and overall it looked effective. We used split screen throughout the verses of our video. This was to fit with the narrative of our music video with the male a female sequences beside each other and keeping them as in sync as we could with each other. The obsticle we had was trying to get both sequences in time, especially when the objects were being passed through, however by simply taking out a few frames in certain parts we got near perfect to the timing we had wanted and that was possible within our footage. With the split screen we had to crop the two images so they were the same size however the positioning of the bed posts at the beginning isnt as exact as we had hoped and this was because we had to enlarge one side of the footage in order for it to look the same size and this meant the proportions had changed and the whole image would look distorted if we had moved it to line up with the other bed post exact. The layering looked effective whist the artist footage used in the chorus of our video. To layer we moved the two pieces of footage on top if each other and used to fading tool to fade the capacity of the dominant image on top. This performance footage was layered with images of the artist playing her guitar as the performance, overlayed with different camera shots, such as close ups of the guitars to connote the genre of the artist/song clearly, close up shot of the artist herself to show identification to her audience and mid-long shots to show this performance, show her body language and outfit also for this identification. We also used colour corrector throughout to highlight the lighting and to make the video more professional. Our aim was to edit the colour to almost look cartoon like and we enhanced the high key lighting when our artist was performing to follow our persona.

Blog- We used our blog to record all of our planning and research we did throughout our music video process. The blog is easily accessible to media convergence and can display media platforms such as videos, images, and web research all which was useful and needed throughout this planning period. We were able to upload YouTube videos that related or inspired some of our ideas and decisions used throughout, then we were able to analyse and explain what our final thoughts were. The blog was also useful in order to correlate our work as a group, we used this especially through the editing process when taking screen grabs of exactly our progress as a group and how we managed to achieve these editing techniques and test runs and footage to see whether these techniques would work and were achievable. Blogging is such as easy way to show your journey of planning and research as a portfolio and to look back at your initial ideas and how they have changed and progressed throughout.

Photoshop- We used photoshop through editing out photographs taken for our digi-pack and magazine advert. We used the magic want tool for our advert to erase the background and get the outline for our image. We then multiplied the image and reversed it so we had two of the same images facing the same way. We then changed the brightness and contrast of the image to create a further glowing effect then edited in the black and white effect to show continuity with the digi-pack theme. We also showed continuity by downloading our font and writing the information for the advert then cropping and editing colour to show further the connections with our digi-pack. We then edited all our images for our digi-pack through photoshop. We choose 3 images of guitars to connote the genre then 3 images of the artist to show the artist herself. There is continuity with the magnified glass prop to show voyeurism to her audience and identification. We used these as our front and back cover. With the front image we choose to blur further the image of the artist through the glass to connote a mystery and we also blurred the font of the writing to carry on this effect. With the images of the guitar, for one we highlighted the colour of pink and kept the rest of the image coloured black and white. 

by: CharDaay

Evaluative points

"That cloud scene... didn't work with the rest of the video" This comment is referring to the scene that includes our artist, Eliza Mindel. She is pretending to walk whilst we use the effect of stop motion to move the clouds that we have cut out of paper and stuck on the blue background. This creates a cartoon type of effect which is meant to portray a dream sequence, this is emphasised by the surrealism of the scene including the cartoon background and the natural 'jerky' effect that stop motion creates.  We intentionally added this effect, to show the audience the artist so they can relate to her and recognise her. Also by showing the artist singing the chorus we have reinforced her star persona. This sequence portrays her as being innocent, creative and loving. These factors follow the conventions of the genre we have chosen for the artist. We think this scene fits in well with the rest of the music video as it gives some flow and variety to otherwise a very simple sequence. This scene helps reinforce the theme of love throughout the music video as   our artist is acting as the cupid for the two main characters of the sequence. This theme follows the characteristics of the genre.