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.

Target audience

Now we have nearly clompleted the video and the ancilery tasks we must think about who our target audience are so we know who to aim our product at and which magazines the advert should be put in and which sections of a shop to sell the digi pack in to achive maximum sales.
For example Foo Fighters have appeared on the front cover of 'Kerrang!' magazine 27 times in the past (www.fooarchive.com) this is more than any other music magazine so the readers of this magazine must enjoy listening to this band and would like to purcase thier digi pack so this would be a ideal magazine to advertise in
The target audience of this magazine is 16-25 year olds and specific towards rock music fans. However, in recent years, the age of the audience has dropped and it is more 14-17 year olds who tend to buy and read it due to its featured bands being more 'poppy'. (Elliot minor, We Are
The Ocean, 30 Seconds to Mars etc). So will be similar to the audience for our video and other parts.
As the band Foo Fighters are a rock band and the majority of thier fans are male so the target audience will be male 16-25 year old rock music fans.

Rough Cut

After spending hours of my time we have finished a rough cut, it takes up the whole length of the song but has many mistakes and parts which not not look too good. I will go back over the video to perfect it and add more shots as parts of the video have too long shots.

We have carried out some audience research by obtaining their feedback after watching our rough cut. We will ask them to tell us what they thought was good about the video but more importantly what they thought was bad and how it could be improved. This we will then use to create the final cut of the video. But not only using our audience feedback we will also use more of our own ideas and thoughts again.

Editing

No-one in our group had done any editing on final cut so we began by each having a chance at editing some of the video to start with. As i had already edited some of the footage before i already had some experience so the rest of the group had a go.

I was keen to get back to edit as i enjoy this part of the work. Throughout the whole time of editing i spent a large amount of my time working on it i have spent and will continue to spend hours after school some days to complete this video.

Quick practice advert

Here is a very quick Possible magazine advert, it is just a rough design I just used some techniques and effects that could be used for the real advert and digi pack.

Looking at the footage of the 5th day

Looking at the film it was instantly noticeable that it was better than any previous footage and now there is certainly enough to complete the video.

I looked through the whole of our footage and placed markers (using this button ) on the video to show where there was some good shots and the main parts of the song as there is a lot of footage that is very repetitive and so the markers make it easier to find good shots rather than watching through all the footage every time a new shot is needed.

Digi pack and advert mood board

Here i have created a Mood board for our new idea of the ancillery task which is to use close up picture's of the instruments of the band.

This should give us ideas and angles to take the pictures at.