Evaluation
In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
We put in a lot of effort in order to make our product authentic and like a real media product. Simple things we did such as add logos and codes on the ancillary tasks help to add to this and the ways we used colour schemes and fonts, and how we edited the photos, helps to make them resemble real media products. For the main product, we think that the music video does resemble a proper music video, especially those of new bands, just to introduce the band and show their personalities. It challenges forms and conventions of real media products because some of the clips are not of the highest quality. Also we did not do lip-syncing or anything like dance routines. Overall I think that our media product does use forms and conventions of real media products, especially those from new, young bands, though there are some things we did differently that may challenge these forms and conventions.
How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
We decided early on to use a consistent theme and colour scheme throughout the project. I believe that the combination is very effective. The costumes are very similar in both the photo shoot and the music video, and we think that the images we chose for the digipak and magazine advertisement are effective as they let the audience know what is expected from us, such as our personalities and the theme of the band, which are shown in the same way in the music video. It fits together nicely. Also the fact that we used the same location for both makes it consistent. Our intended theme was colourful, happy and young and for the video we wanted to do a relaxed, amateur style, which we think we succeeded in. Also in the video we are seen writing our ‘band names’ in the sand, and these are included in one of the images in the digipak, so this adds consistency in the style of the band. We are ultimately very happy with the combination of our main product and ancillary texts.
What have you learned from your audience feedback?
We have had feedback from various different people with similar results. There have been a lot of compliments; we were told that the clips fit well with the lyrics and it looks quite professional, and also that we have achieved the fun atmosphere that we were going for. They also liked the setting and costume we used and thought it fit well with our digipak and magazine advertisement. However, there were criticisms – several people told us we should have done lip-syncing. There are several reasons why we didn’t – I think that it would take away the casual, fun effect of the video and look quite forced and staged. Also, it is very time-consuming and difficult and we think that doing an amateur style improvised type of video it is ultimately more effective.
How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
We used several different computer programs to create this project. We used fairly good quality digital cameras to take the photos and film the video and we are happy with the quality of our images and clips. For the planning, we started out using Microsoft Office OneNote, and then later switched to blogger.com as this is easier to use and able to be accessed away from school. We have since used this. I used the internet to find secondary research such as images and to create my music video questionnaire (primary research) I simply used Microsoft Paint. In the construction of the digipak and magazine advertisement we used Adobe Photoshop and fonts from dafont.com. To edit the video itself we used the program iMovie on an Apple Macbook. Microsoft Word was also used for much of the writing involved. The editing of images and creation of the digipak was perhaps the most time-consuming, and creating the video was the most challenging, but it was an enjoyable task and I have definitely build my skills in using media technologies throughout this project. Overall we think that we used different media technologies well in the creation of this media product.
