A2 MEDIA EVALUATION

By Jack Walters

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

Editing on the beat - for example: the shots fitting the pace of the song or quick paced shots on a quick paced drum beat which we used in our own piece. This helped enable an overall better impact on the rest of the video with sharp shots which continued to meet the pace of the song.

Lip synching - The actor we've used throughout the piece mimes the words to the song which is a common convention used in modern music videos.

Continued…

Narrative - This includes the storyline of the song, for example: throughout our video we make references between the past and present with the main character and the bear as well as how their relationship weakens over a period of time. The main feature in the piece is the storyline of how the bear leaves the main character.

The music video challenges media conventions by the fact we haven't shown the actual band performing its all lip synching from the main character.

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

The most important factor linking the main product and ancillary products is the bear that features in the video. People recognise the bear as a "strange" aspect to the piece so recognise it easily on the ancillary products. We used the bear on our CD covers and poster designs being a special feature/ representation of the band.

Another example of this could be the Jenga blocks which feature in the video as like the picture you've just seen of the CD cover design you can see the blocks shown at the side which is a key representation of that chosen song (Remember this, Remember that). As a whole the idea of synergy was used looking at using the same images for all three of our products.

Continued…The actual item used to represent or portray the band/ video can also be used for advertising etc as the target audience would view the item and link it to 'Up Carey Street'.

Continued…As a group we valued the idea of having a specific item (in this case the bear) to represent the band or the video itself which would make the song or video more recognisable to the target audience. As I've mentioned the stranger the item the easier it is to make reference to the actual piece.

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Firstly, audience feedback is always useful in media as it enables you to see what the audience or target audience feels about your piece or work or what you can improve so this shows how important audience feedback is.

We used plenty of audience feedback at the planning stage as we'd created numerous designs such as net designs for the CD cover, the outside and inside cover of the digipak and the poster design as we unsure ourselves which would be the most suitable. As you've already seen the poster and CD design the majority of that was a combination of other designs as some people liked certain parts of some designs in which we combined them to make our final design.

Continued…An example of audience feedback is from our net designs where we were unsure as a group on which net to use.

The most effective part of audience feedback we used was for song choice. Before we used the style of music to create a target audience we felt would be most suitable to see whether we were heading in the right direction. We held the opinion of a 16-24 age range baring in the mind the actual genre. Using different age ranges this confirmed our theory with people amongst out own age enjoying the song in comparison to much younger and older people we had asked.

How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages.In the construction and planning stages we had used : www.creativecommons.org.uk, www. podsafe.com and www.myspace.com all to help us find the right song for our final piece. In the end it was through MySpace we found an up and coming Sheffield band known as 'Up Carey Street'. By using You Tube also we were looking at examples of Media conventions in music videos to help us gain extra knowledge on the topic and how it would help us in the future.

Continued…For the planning and evaluation stages we looked at different technologies to which would best suit our piece. Firstly we experimented with green screening but we thought that this wouldn't really benefit or improve our work so we left it aside. For filming we used an AV camera which was great in terms of quality with no problems whatsoever. For editing we used imovie on the Macs which for me was a new experience as well as the rest of the group with this being the first time we'd used them with the new update. Again, we had no problems with this, just being down to time management, The standard of editing as you may of seen after watching the video was fantastic making the effectiveness of the video greater to the audience. Finally for my evaluation I used an advanced presentation website known as prezi.com allowing me to make this. Again this was a new experience for me using a more modern presentation programme enhancing my skills with media technologies.