Evaluation.

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

For inspiration for our media product we researched into similar styled music videos through youtube and google. We looked at Hey There Delilah by the Plain White Tees, You’re Beautiful by James Blunt and James Morrison videos. We chose to look at these because they feature a male solo artist of an indie/acoustic genre and have very similar voices to Joel. Their music could be considered as easy listening and shares the same target audience that we are aiming to appeal to which is teenage males and females but could also appeal to an older generation as it isn’t offence in any way. The way his music is and how we presented him meant that it would not just be aimed at a niche audience as his style is respected and in no way too different or far out there, this is really good for marketing him as an artist as although there will be key audiences who will favour him, he could appeal to anyone.

We noticed that in these videos, they focus a lot on the artist and use very simple mid shots or close ups on the artist. They usually follow a narrative to tell the story of the song so we have followed this generic convention and done the same for our media product. We have used simple shots of the top half of Niall (as Joel) and filmed him singing to the song in front of different backgrounds. We have used black and white shots to represent Niall’s thoughts and flashbacks and to act as the narrative to the song. We did want to include a split screen shot because we saw this being used in Hey There Delilah and really like the effect, however, we’ve had lots of difficulties with our filming and after losing our work, we had a limited amount of time so stuck to a simple theme throughout.

We researched on google, the album art for James Blunt and Jason Mraz. We had originally wanted to use a hand drawn design of Joel for our front cover but found this too difficult so used an image of Joel that we took instead. We chose this image because it represents Joel as a clean cut, attractive young male and will appeal to our target audience because females could be attracted to him and males could relate to him and his style. For our ancillary tasks we wanted to maintain a similar style through all of our products so we have kept a very simple design and used black and white images of Niall for the front and back cover as well as our poster.

Some key shots in our video, show our variety in mise en scene, narrative and different camera angles. We chose just afew varied shots from our video to analyse;

We chose to do this shot because it was really clear and good lighting and we set it up so it looked more personal, Niall is singing right to the camera and it's like the camera is another person and he is telling them to "please come back tomorrow". We initially had him push the camera away to show him trying to be alone but when we watched it on the mac's it didn't look how we wanted it to and just looked like who ever was holding the camera had fallen over or something! Anyway we really like the set up of this shot, the hand held camera ties in with the memories where he is with the girl and the background looks like he is in the middle of no where on his own.

We chose to have some shots of Niall singing on the stairs because we liked having the background change and although that highlights our editing skills it was very simple camera angles, so here it is nice to look up to him. The mise en scene is also really nice because of the large window behind him, the audience will picture him sad, alone and looking out the window. The large window also helps with the lighting, because some of the inside shots can be pretty dull.

This background is my favourite I think because it is really different, it is just a photo wall and it shows good times behind him looking pretty down. We would have liked it if just the bottom right handcorner had been filled too but we ran out of time and photo's! However because it's just white it still looks good and the whole shot is a real contrast from the plain backgrounds.

I really like this shot because it is so clear with the lighting and everything, this is because it was another outside shot. We chose to use one of the walls outside Daisy's house to show even more variation in his location and the backgrounds, because even though he is singing about going nowhere the stuff around him is changing and it's like places are passing him by without him noticing.



We chose to do this shot because again it was changing the angle of the shot and was almost like a birds eye view. We wanted to do this so the video wasn't too boring and didn't just change the backgrounds. Originally we had a proper birds eye view shot of Niall singing lying down but we found when we uploaded it, it was far too dark and you could see the shadow of us filming with the camera over him. So this shot is a high angle shot to make up for not being able to use that. He is really looking up into the camera, he looks very vulnerable as high angle shots will always take away status from the person/object in the shot and we wanted him to look like this, as if he was pleading. It also is another varied background and it is on the stairs near the window so we benefited from the natural light.

This shot was really just to use another background for our editing, we chose this background because it looked a bit unusual and different to just a plain wall. There was also a spotlight above him so even though it was inside it was still plently light enough. We also wanted the spotlight to be a literal representation of him feeling as if he was in the spotlight and thats why he wants to be alone etc. It's a simple shot with him just looking pretty sad and singing the song but with the editing and cutting it was made more interesting.

This is a shot taken outside of me (daisy) and Niall in the car. We wanted to show a flashback of Niall arguing with a girl to show why he may be sad during the song and to represent their relationship troubles. We think this is a key shot as it creates the narrative to the song and by showing a scene where Niall is having relationship difficulties is something our target teenage audience can relate to and empathise with.

This shot is another of the flashback shots taken outside in my garden. We tried to make it look as if Niall and his girlfriend are walking along together during a happy period of their relationship. We wanted them to be holding hands to represent their closeness.

Here we have done another shot for the flashback scenes. We wanted to include a shot of me looking happy and walking along and then a shot of Niall looking sad to show the contrast in moods and make Niall seem more alone and to create sympathy from the audience to understand how he is feeling.

Here is a shot of the clock which we have focussed on at the start of the film. We have slowed down the pace of the video to represent that time is going slowly for Joel (Niall). We have entered a title of the song and the logo in the bottom right hand corner and used a simple white font to fit with the ancillary tasks. By adding this title it makes the overall video look more professional and shows the audience who the artist is and the name of the song.

Ancillary tasks, here we have evalutated our ancillary tasks - click on the picture to make it bigger :)

2. How effective is the combination of your main product and your ancillary tasks?


Script:
Hopes and main aims for how our end product would turn out.

Sadie: When we decided to do a music video we did this because we knew we could use copyright free good music, my brother - Joel Owen. We pictured it being a narrative video and to show Joel in a vulnerable light, making it a video that audiences could empathise with. We wanted our ancillary tasks to premote our video and to reflect the video in some way. We also wanted them to be eye catching yet look simple, not too quirky as it wouldn't reflect his soft style music.




What research we did and how that helped us with chosing what are tasks would look like.
Daisy: We researched similar artists to Joel, their video's and album covers etc to give us idea's of what are target audience like and what works well. We researched James Blunt, James Morrison and more accoustic male artists and saw that a lot of them have narrative video's and are really focused around the artist, by this we mean unlike some abstract video's they almost always feature the artist acting or singing rather than another storyline or something different. We used youtube, wikipedia on how video's were made, and google images to look at album covers etc. Similarly with CD covers for these artists they were often very simple and focused on showing the artist, so we knew that we would be using a photo of Joel on the front for definite.

How they worked as a campaign together.

Sadie: Originally we wanted to include more key images from our video in our ancillary tasks however, when we tried this by using the clock it didn't look right and we had to consider audiences who may be buying the CD but not have seen the video it would have looked random and it really took over the whole backcover and didn't have the effect we would have wanted. Our tasks have linked in other ways, we have used black and white clips in our video - these represent memories and flashbacks. We made our photo's on our poster and CD cover black and white cos they looked more effective and proffessional against the background but then they also linked back to our video and gave it the same theme and mood. Advise from our audience was to keep the colour scheme through out in all our ancillary tasks so all the backgrounds for the whol CD case and our poster are cream. We have used the same fonts and similar page set up. The font we chose for 'Joel Owen' is a loopey handwriting looking font, this was to look like it remsembled his signiture, it sort of adds personality to them. Where we have the other text we have used just a simple clear font, this is like the font we use in the video as the titles, this is because we are just showing information and again our whole theme is simple and more subtle.

What worked well, what might you change if you could?
Daisy: We really liked our end products as a whole and think they worked really well together, if we were to do it again though we would definitely have stuck with using Joel as he would have fitted the role of himself much better, obviously! We may have taken more varied pictures to have been more experimental, but in the end we did like it and although it was hard work making the video and ancillary tasks around Niall it worked in the end and they made a really good whole product together.

3. What have you learned from your audience feedback?
Here is an image I took of Sadie showing fellow media students our filming during editing:


Here is an image of a group of students. (Media and non media) viewing almost the whole final product.)

We have shown our work throughout every stage to our class to receive feedback on what they think works and what changes we should make. We have listened to their feedback and made any changes necessary and it has been a great help to know what appeals to our target teenage audience. We have shown them our ancillary tasks and asked them to chose between different images so we could find the perfect one and in the last stages of designing our album cover and poster, we asked fellow students from media to chose which ones they preferred and adjusted the image and text on the poster to get it perfect. We followed the advise about colour schemes and used the photo's that the class preferred.

Throughout filming and editing our main product we have shown it to the class and received their feedback on what shots they think we should include and whether they thought our idea worked and fit with the genre of music. Overall we received really positive feedback and after showing our final product to friends and other media students, they have really liked the idea of having Niall sing in front of different backgrounds and many have said how good the editing is between shots to get the timing perfect. They also said they like the idea of using black and white shots to represent Niall’s thoughts and that it works well to convey the narrative of the song.

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

Here are some images of us working on our editing using iMovie:

We've created links to the technology that we used and written about how they helped;

Originally we were using the VLE it’s learning to blog, and this is the site we used last year but we transferred our blogs onto blogger and it has been much easier to work and present all our work. On blogger you’re able to have comments, share your work with more people and set it out with video’s and photo’s in an interesting and clear way. We can also add links and attachments to other websites and it’s easier to navigate around.

We uploaded our music onto itunes from Joel's album and then selected the track and cut it to the length we wanted as we didn't use the very end of the song because it was the chorus being repeated lots of times and it made the song really long so we cut it to the legth we wanted with just the chorus once at the end. We then took the track from itunes to put onto imovie.

We uploaded all our filming onto imovie where we were able to edit all our clips and put them together with the track into the music video. We used the time line to get the editing and lip syncing in time. It allowed us to put effects on our filming such as slowing down and speeding up clips and also making some black and white.

Throughout working on our products, media technologies have been a great help to us. We used google and youtube to research into generic conventions of our indie styled music video aswell as wikipedia to research into the artists for extra information. By using the internet for help and inspiration, it gave us some really good and useful ideas into what we could do for our own product and has helped us to appeal to our target audience by following these similar styles.

Wikipedia was really helpful as there was information on how video's were created and cost's, planning etc so we followed typical rules and generic conventions from the information we found.
We used slide share to upload or powerpoint on planning and research when we first started this was a really good piece of technology as it enabled us to actually have the slideshow on our blog and looked better then people reading our blog don't have to open up the file or look at it one slide at a time.

We have used photoshop for all of our ancillary tasks and to be able to use the software included has helped us to create a final product which is to professional quality. Through the use of the software on photoshop we have been able to make quick changes to any area necessary aswell as use the effect software on texts and images to enhance our products and make them more exciting and appealing to our target audience.

Without the access to all these techonologies our media would have really suffered, especially without imovie and photoshop. These were the most important programmes and how we created all our tasks. The other websites provided us with research and images and video examples. Without these we may have not made our video suitable for our target audience or have fitted in with generic conventions of acoustic music video's.

Overall product analysis.

We were very pleased in the end with our final product, although we've had toubles and worried about it, it turned out okay and we were able to get it all done and finished in time. If we were to re do it we would have got all our filming done earlier so we could have had more time to re do shots so the editing would have been perfect. However we are glad that we didn't get all our filming for our original idea's finished because we prefer it now and we have spent much more time on it and our idea's and shot's have got better every time we have filmed. Our ancillary tasks did look better with the pictures of Joel on before but that is because his style and look suit our theme because our theme was created around him, but saying that I think we made them look as good and as close to how we wanted them as possible with our pictures of Niall. Our products worked really well together and when completed look like a successful marketing campaign. We had the background of a lot of research to work on and help us with our making of our products and that helped with deciding what worked and what didn't. Our blogs were always kept up to date and have been a successful way of keeping track of the whole process of making our final music video. Overall we are pleased with our work and after changing our mind a fair few times all our products have turned out how we'd hoped if not better.

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