Evaluation Question 4

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

Throughout the media coursework we have come across many new technologies that we have had to use to produce our work. The first and probably the most unfamiliar technology is this website www.blogger.com it is where we have had to record all work we have done by posting it onto our own personal blog.

To begin with this site was very complicated and it was rather difficult to get to grips with having to post work as it was being done. As I have never come across blogs before I had no clue how it works or how to use it and for the first couple of weeks using it was very confusing but eventually I managed to understand it fully without and problems.It is quite simple really its just a matter of typing information needed and clicking the 'post' button.

Now that all work has to be done online it is much simpler as everything is in one place, you do not need to move from place to place to find work and it cant be lost. Another good reason for always having to work on the internet constantly is that all research can easily be performed at the the same time in a different tab on the internet.

The internet is an extremely useful source for all the work and research. There are many sites which I used for research and help to complete the coursework some include:

• www.youtube.com
• www.mediasupport.org.uk
• www.kerrang.com
• www.metrolyrics.com
• www.google.com

Things that I used for research I often posted on my blog such as videos and pictures this is done using a separate tab on the blog when writing a post these pictures show this.

To upload a video to a video to my blog you must edit the html and copy and paste a embed code from a video into it and it will then be shown on the blog.

The second most unfamiliar technology is Final Cut Express I have never come across this before either, however I knew that I would become familiar with this in the A2 course so I knew about the program and what it does.

No-one in our group had ever used Final Cut before so we were all complete beginners because of this we all had a go at trying to edit some raw footage to try to work out and get to grips with the program. I found it very easy to understand how to work the program to edit some footage in order and to the song I also found this quite enjoyable. Jake also seemed to get some good work done.

For the rest of the coursework I did the majority of the editing and Ifeel that this is one technology that i have learnt most from and about.

One thing that I didn't quite understand to begin with was the few different tracks that the footage could sit in.

However, I managed to work out how and why they are used, it makes face paced editing much easier without fiddly movements.

I also added some effects to the video such as some cross dissolves in the slower part of the song at the end and I also added some effects to the whole video to make it look more professional. I created the effect by adjusting the saturation and contrast and some other toggles.This shows the exact adjustments.

Some other technologies which I used during the course work was a handheld video camera I had used one for a small amount of time before to create a very short film so i knew the basics and how to use one but I definitely had more to learn. During the filming of our video for this work I did a fair amount of filming and I now feel I have had a lot of experience using a camera. I would now be confident enough to film alone to create something of my own.

Photoshop is a program which often is used in media studies I was very familiar with this technology and any extra work like our ancillary task is just extra practice for not just the subject but also my own personal gain this the same with all the other technologies.

To create our digipak and advert photoshop was very useful both pieces were entirely created on it. Using many different effects which we have learnt throughout doing this subject. example of some effects used are:

• drop shadows
• inner glow + outer glow
• saturation
• clone stamp
• gradient

As well as using these simple effects we also adjusted these very accurately too to give a very good final product.

Overall I believe that my skills and knowledge about all these things, using the blog, final cut, using cameras and photoshop has hugely increased and i am much better at the things I already knew and i am now good at programs i did not know. I also feel generally more comfortable using computers.

Evaluation Question 3

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Audience feedback is a hugely important part of the construction of any product.

It is important to find out what other people think about the product not just yourself and members of your group they will do this by telling you what they thought was good and what you did well but more importantly they let you know what they thought were negatives about the video. However, everything said negatively should be taken as constructive criticism to help improve the product.

We carried out some audience feedback by simply asking some friends, some who do media studies as a subject and some who do not so we could get some very different views. We also asked some unknown people therefore they will not give biased views.

Here is some examples of feedback Jake carried out it shows some feed back from 3 media students and one non-media student. They have written 'likes' and 'dislikes'. We collected up a large amount of feedback from different people. We read through them all and found the most common dislikes and then I set about changing it often I replaced it with something that people liked most.

Some common dislikes were often comments such like "There are some shots which are to long" and "there is too much use of strange angles". These were easily changeable and makes the video look so much better. These are also things that I did not notice and neither did the rest of he group this must be because we are watching the video so much and we also find it hard to criticise ourselves.

This all shows that the audience feedback is a very useful process.

The main problem that we seemed to have which most people picked up on was that there were a lot of shots from weird and obscure angles. There is nothing wrong with these shots as they make the video more interesting it is just that they are used too much throughout the video and it does not often break away to something more straight forward. many people said that more shots are needed at a neutral level and needs more shots of the whole band playing together.

To fix this problem I began to use two levels on final cut which gave me the ability to work wider and not in very small spaces.

Here is an example of me filming one of these strange angles, this one being very low. These are the type of shots we needed much less of.

Once we understood what we needed to do to our video there was no 'hanging around' I set straight at re editing the rough cut to what our audience feedback said. After changing the video to what everyone said there should be no major mistakes. minor things that are not very noticeable can be spotted and changed by our group.

Evaluation Question 2

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

We managed to create a very effective combination of our main product and ancillary texts we did this by thinking ahead about the digipak and advert and possibilities of what they could look like and one idea we talked about as a group was to have the actually band performing on them both so Tom used his photography skills and while we were filming he was wasting no time and taking photos of the band in different positions and layouts giving us many choices of what to use for our ancillary texts. pictures like the photo on the right for example.

We also individually took pictures of the band members and their instruments including the mic.

By using the same object's and setting in the ancillary tasks as the video it will show a clear resemblance between each piece of work as people will recognise things from the advert when they see the video and also the same any other way round.

For the digipak the main focus on the cover is of the lead singers guitar edited on photoshop to highly saturate the colour to create an extremely bright red which helps the cover stand out. This is an object from the video which is easily recognisable, the background is a soft focus picture of the band in black and white. The rest of the Digipack is just like this and the advert has the upbove cover featured on it so they are both very obviously related.

Other ways to make these products an effective combination was to use very similar or the same colours, effects, text and font this gave a very subtle similarity. We experimented with many different fonts and effects

We used the same text throughout the tasks.

The colour scheme we used throughout the ancillary tasks was red and black. I attempted to create this theme of red and black in the primary task by adjusting controls on final cut. I did not manage to create a simply red and black look but did get it close, with a red tint and darkened contrast. This is defiantly an improvement that could be made to the product.

Throughout creating all of these products we have been thinking about the target audience to help us make it suitable and appealing to the target which is 14 - 25 year olds who are interested in rock music. I feel that we have created our products to be attractive and eye catching for our target audience. For example the bright outstanding guitar will catch any guitar enthusiasts eye instantly.

In all I think we have created a very effective combination of our main product and ancillary texts with some faults and improvements that could be made for a better combination.

Evaluation Question 1

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

Firstly before setting out on creating our media product we had to thourrly research into other existing media product of the same and similar products to fully understand how to go about making a very alike product.

I began looking at other existing digipaks, adverts and videos all in the same genre being rock, this gave many thoughts of forms and conventions to be used.

Different genres of music have some very different conventions for example a hip-hop video are always narritive, through research I did not find one hip-hop video that wasnt narritive. But on the other hand Rock and Metal videos are highly concentrated on the band, instuments and performance often with narritive to complement the video. We decided on creating a video of a performace of the band. After deciding this I did some further research discovering more and different forms and conventions a main point being that the majority of rock videos are shot using the camera handheld this is used mostly for faster paced songs which ours is.

This photo shows myself filming using the camera handheld. The Idea of using a camera handheld without a tripod in sight is that is adds movement to the film, making it feel faster and more exiting stopping viewers from getting bored. Using a camera handheld does not mean you must deliberately shake the camera which we discovered after the first day of filming by doing this the footage by doing this the footage looks very amature. Instead of this the best way to do it is to hold the camera how it feels natural and hold it as still as possible.

A second convention which must be taken into account in all music videos no matter what the genre is the lighting. The lighting is a huge factor in making a piece of film.

We carefully placed some large flood lights at our set to try and light the set and the band with as little amount of shadows as possible. The lighting was important to make the video look professional we purposely over lit the set as we were planning to darken the footage on final cut which would give it a different effect.

Many other videos such as 'Foo Fighters - All My Life' which is also a video of a performance. In this video the creators have clearly thought about the mise-en-scene for this video. This most obvious is a huge sheet or flag as a back drop On this back drop is the logo of the album the song is from 'One by One' and throught the song it changes with the pace of the song. When planning our video we thought about mise-en-scene however there was nothing major that we thought we could add to the video, but we did remove objects from the set and kept some that looked goo such like the large speakers in the background.

For our filming we spent a large amount of time planning shots and practicing them. The different types of shots and angles is an important convention when creating a music video. I created a mood board of shots in videos that i liked and which i wanted to use for the video. Once again there are different types of shots and angles differ between genres.