A2 Media Evaluation

By Hannah Harward
A2 Cheshunt Sixth form Candidate number- 8069

Question 1- In what ways does your media product use, develop, or challenge forms and conventions, of real media products?
Our products and genre
The genre of choice was Indie and therefore I had to research this genre and the conventions. I researched the typical clothing, band characteristics, album digipak designs and magazine advertisements and etc. Throughout the planning + researching stages, I looked at the conventions of our media product, which is a combination of a music video, magazine digipak advertisement and the digipak design.

NME was particularly useful in analysing digipaks and album advertisements. Also XFM radio station proved to be valuable, as it kept me up-todate with other Indie artists and after hearing their song, I could go home and watch their videos on YouTube.

Question 1- In what ways does your media product use, develop, or challenge forms and conventions, of real media products?
Initially I had seen Florence + the Machines What the Water gave me music video when it first came out, simply because I am a fan of her music. I realised that I could analyse this and see what the conventions of the genre were and the similarities and differences. I created this post in October 2011 and it was a great starting point helping us understand the conventions of Indie. In addition I made a PowerPoint on The Killers A Dustland Fairytale and uploaded it on Scribd, and then on my blog. I evaluated and found common themes within the genre, I also found that It fit with the concepts of our music video, as it followed similar construction and conventions. It had a strong http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=am6rAr narrative, with elements of performance based VPip8&ob=av2e This is the hyperlink to Florence and the Machines- What The footage, just like ours.
Water Gave Me. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hyrkzFRss&ob=av2e This is the hyperlink to The Killers- A Dustland Fairytale.

Question 1- In what ways does your media product use, develop, or challenge forms and conventions, of real media products?
We decided to link the visual and the lyrics, especially during the chorus Cause Blue skies are coming, because this represented a light at the end of the tunnel kind of concept, which I thought was an empowering idea in relation to the hardships of the song and also the hardships of our character. In relation to the storyline, the main character, underwent many different emotional phases, namely lust, love, desire, jealousy, loneliness, anger, and guilt. These strong emotions needed to be tamed by nature shots, the birds in particular represent the freedom and in a sense the life the character wants to lead. The contrast of the first Blue Skies are coming lyrics, was done so in this way, that we thought the darkness of the skies, represented the darkness in the main characters emotions. Towards the end of the song, when the lyrics are repeated again, the change in his emotional state is evident, in the prospect that he may have a chance with the girl of his dreams, in a sinister kidnapping way. The blue skies transforms into the beautiful blue, light perfect summers afternoon. However we also used this as a intertextual quiet and perfect before the storm.

Cause blue skies are coming

General indie video conventions

I found that indie videos tend to use some of these conventions Natural lighting Black + White Bright colours Interesting scenery, such as deserts or beaches, or simply a field. A focus on the narrative rather than being purely performance based Sometimes these videos use lots of editing, not just simple transitions, but abstract animation, such as Kasabians Days are forgotten video.

Audio & visual links.

This is a song for anyone with a
broken heart This links to the visual because the young man, is kissing his mobile phone which is displaying a picture of a girl . He Is also pacing up and down this bridge. It would lead the audience to believe that he is in some way in love with someone but this relationship is not working. This is the last song that I write, while youre even on my mind

These lyrics are paired with the image of our actor and artist casually taking some time out to have fun; in a way it represents that he may be moving on and enjoying himself.

Audio & visual links.

I dont think its the end, but I know we cant keep going. These lyrics relate to the visual because we have included lip syncing here. The image to the right hand side, appears to be a helpful hand giving back an item this girl has dropped, but in reality the meaning of the touch of the hands is far greater for the boy, who is besotted by this young girl.
Ill do anything to be happy

This is a strong emphasis and indication on the lengths this boy will go to achieve this dream.

Conventions and the shock element

The build up to the final scene is slow and packed full of narrative, performance and scenic images, Indie artists love to shock and Florence and the Machines videos are a great example which usually contains visually stimulating scenes, such as the Heavy in your arms one where she is dragged across the ground to represent how much she depends on this one person to look after her. In our video we similarly wanted to shock the audience, with the shooting of the girl our main character desires, during the climax. Insanity is an intriguing emotional state, and Indie music loves to show this, take for example Ed Sheerans Lego House, where Rupert Grint, pretends to be Ed sheeran for the majority of this video and only at the end you realise, Rupert is Eds crazy stalker fan and loves him so much he collected Eds dirty chewing gum from the bin and even ate it.

Conventions
To keep to the indie conventions, we often filmed outside, in vast open forest spaces. Having seen other indie music videos like Florence + the Machines, Heavy in Your Arms video where she was dragged around forests and beaches, gave us lots of inspiration. Another great aspect of this was that it was shot entirely in black and white, and we also incorporated some of this element into our video. Birdys Shelter song and Ben Howards Keep your head up also gave us lots of inspiration. The image below is the same hand movements used in Birdys video, when we was filming I thought back to the Birdy video Radhika and I made and I thought this would be a good shot. Initially I shot this spontaneously, rather than keeping entirely to the storyboard, because I knew it could be deleted if it looked bad, but it turned out to work nicely as his hand is reaching towards the sun and moving to the rhythm of the song. It was a performance based shot, as it didnt follow any narrative, however it did allow the video to take a few seconds out of the tense narrative.

Conventions in relation to performance based shots.

We had to include performance based elements otherwise it wouldnt keep the conventions of other music videos. So we included a couple of scenes of this. In the beginning of our coursework, and in our storyboard we didnt leave much time for this element, because we planned on having a really thorough narrative, however as time progressed and the more we researched other indie videos, we found that we really had to include this.

Conventions
We also included lip synching, as shown in the black and white image because we hadnt come across any videos that didnt have this, its probably because the audience want to see the artist singing their own song. The image below our actor lip syncing is Brandon Flowers lip syncing his song, Mr Brightside, from The Killers. I researched bands and artists, who used both performance shots and narrative and The Killers are a great example. The costume between The killers and our artist is also quite similar. I feel our video conformed to Indie convention, because it tackles controversial topics and many Indie artists do this. In a way we challenged the convention by not pushing the boundaries too far. In reflection I would have liked to have made our music video, in entirely black and white. Along with the advertisement campaign.

Real life vs. our video conventions

Kasabian- Days are forgotten- The costume, which consists of suits and smart clothing is similar to ours. The editing is completely different, firstly there whole video is in black and white and they have the bands instruments in white animation, which must have taken ages to edit.

The clothing and image Spector and our actor are very similar. This particular shot has been take from Spectors new song Celestine. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v =sk6TgpwlbiI&ob=av2n Ben Howards song Keep your head up uses similar foliage imagery to our video. As demonstrated to the right with a moving shot of the sun breaking behind the trees. Apart from the colouring, the images are pretty much the same.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADP65wbBUpc&ob=av2e This is Ben Howards Keep your head up link to YouTube

Conventions of the digipak + magazine advertisement

We decided to take a risk with the digipak, as I had researched Indie album covers, and drew some conclusions about style and similarities of the conventions that are typical to the genre. Firstly I found Indie album artwork, to be usually abstract and artistic. Album covers such as, Yuck, 20 Minute Loop and the Foals album Antidotes, have pushed the boundaries in regard to the traditional assumption that the artist has to be present on the front of the digipak. Therefore our digipak took a range of imagery and combined it all artistically, mostly from images I had taken on holiday, which proved to actually be a big inspiration for us all to develop. I think the digipak looks realistic and would fit easily within the Indie music market. I have also undertook some research for the design of the digipak, and the audience feedback was overwhelmingly positive, one comment relayed the good use of graphics, and the amount of thought and time that it must have taken to design this. Another person commented that It is amazing, I could definitely see that on a shelf and Id be intrigued to look at it.

Question 2-How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

This is one of two magazine advertisements

This is our digipak

This is the other magazine advertisement.

There is a clear link between the video and the magazine advert, as you can see below. The clothing and use of instrument, is key in establishing an indie genre, and this is something we have kept consistent.

This is one of two designs created for the magazine advert. We feel we have included everything that you would normally find in an advert. Take for example, where you can buy the album from in this case we have suggested buying it from HMV or iTunes, which are arguably the biggest online music providers. In addition we have a logo for our fictional record company, Riddle Records and we have come up with a great R and upside down R as the logo; which we wanted to incorporate across all of our platforms. We have also included a review from NME, a leading magazine specialising in indie and rock music, which is perfect in fitting with our indie audience. Also the most obvious piece to include in a magazine advert for a digipak release is the date, and this has been included in bold red lettering, which stands out on white background.

This is footage from the video, that I have selected to show the similar background that we used for the digipak and the video. We took the video and shots for the digipak on the same day, because the lighting and location was perfect. We found tree stumps and trees broken on the ground and I suggested this would be a great location for taking the imagery.

From Indie to Pop music.

The current mainstream market, is sort the opposite of who were trying to appeal to, as the music isnt varied and the song we have developed the narrative around, is only played on certain radio stations such as Radio 1 and XFM. However I would acknowledge that there has been a shift in trends in the past 2-3 years, in terms of the quality of the song rather than the image presented by the artist and a great example of this is Ed Sheeran. He doesnt represent the typical pop music boy, like the ones presented on the right. Ed has a laid back attitude and doesnt pay much attention to fashion trends. This is the type of image we wanted to achieve with our artist, although our artist leans a little more towards a classic smart, clean cut boy, with suits and ties.

Linking our Record company across platforms.

When presenting our artist, I used a title effect, on the bottom left hand side of the screen; this was called Splash- Lower Third on Final cut pro. Noah and the Whale also had a title page, and it was presented in a slightly different way, as seen to the right.

We put a lot of thought into keeping our three products consistent and upholding the continuity of the pieces. The logo has been unchanged throughout each product, because we wanted to keep every design looking realistic.

Question 3 - What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

Great choice in clothing and character I understood the themes of the music video, throughout

The gun looked a little fake

I loved the editing

There was a lot of suspense, it made me intrigued. The stalking part was pulled off really well.

We used some quantitative data, such as age categories, a mark out of 10 for our music video and general female or male numerical statistical data. We collected more qualitative data, because of the rich interview information we received, from questionnaires, and general feedback of improvements and successes. This is some of the data is received and put into pie charts.

Q1. Did you think the choice of settings in the video were appropriate?
Yes No

Q2. How successful was the video in satisfying the conventions of the genre?

Very successful Good Satisfying Poor

Q3: How successful is the editing?

Q4: How successful were the choice of camera angles and movement?

Very good Poor Good Bad

Q5: Did the narrative of the music video suit the song overall?

Q6: Was the In the video easy to follow?

Yes

Yes
No

No

Q7: Were you entertained throughout the video?

Yes
No

Q10: What mark out of 10 would you give this?

10 9 8

7
6

Feedback
We had been listening to audience feedback throughout the construction of our 3 tasks. We generally got our feedback from teachers, other pupils in our class, along with friends and family. The largest amount of feedback we received, was taken during our showcase evening on the 19th April. Our group decided to spilt the feedback forms evenly and evaluate, then share with the group the results. We had so many positive feedback forms and also some helpful tips to improve a couple of areas.

Audience feedback

Feedback
The questionnaire given to the audience on this evening, was devised of around 9-10 questions, ranging from Did you think the choice of setting was appropriate? to What could we do to improve the video?. We found this a great help, as it gave us the opinion of people who had never seen this before. In addition we was able to show a year 7 + 8 English class our video, and they filled out the questionnaire.

The questions that received high levels of encouragement were the choice of setting, the narrative of the video in fitting with the song, the editing was also something that a number of people highlighted as excellent and the use of camera angles.

Audience feedback
A lot of feedback referred to the change in the main characters appearance, as he cut his hair. We couldn't control the fact that our actor decided to cut his hair, it was his individual choice and we understand this may have looked unrealistic, however it's quite clearly the same boy. Some comments suggested we needed a more isolated area for the main kidnapping scene; some felt the park was too open. This was definitely a fair point; however we may have corrected this issue, from editing this scene afterwards, because we took on the feedback and wanted to change this. We re-arranged the shots and showed more of the characters facial expressions during this scene rather than the surroundings, so that the audience was focused more on this element. I would also argue that in Florence + the Machines Heavy in your arms video, they were quite clearly in the open forest, and our videos are similar in the aspect that, it was in the open but in our defence their was no one around.
Negative feedback

Audience Feedback
Some people didnt manage to understand the concept of the narrative, but its fair to say from the feedback the majority of people did. Overall when evaluating all feedback forms, including those of the other members of my group, I found that the younger individuals that we asked to evaluate the piece didnt seem to understand the themes of the narrative, as much as older individuals. We asked a class of year sevens and eights to answer the feedback form, and this age group seemed to be the ones struggling with the themes of the narrative. However seen as the target audience was mainly 15-30 year olds, and indie music lovers, we wasn't too concerned about their lack of understanding for mature themes.

 We used technologies, such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Blogger to link audience feedback. This was easy to use and it generated a lot of feedback. Facebook in particular really helped us generate audience feedback, interactivity and it allowed us to test whether our target market of 15-30 year olds, who regularly listened to indie music actually liked the final video. This has helped with the evaluation stages.

13 comments + 10 comments, along with 6 likes and over 50 YouTube hits so far.

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

By Hannah Harward

Blogger
This is our first year of using a blog for our media work. Previously at AS level, our class used a different exam board and we had to produce tasks on Microsoft word, Fireworks, as well as iMovie. Weve found it exciting to use, and also at times challenging, for example, getting to understand the format of blogger in the beginning can be quite tricky, but our teacher gave us a helping hand with the initial set up. However I really enjoyed using blogger and I would definitely use it again in the future. A real advantage of blogger is its simplicity to use, anytime and anywhere. Although I must admit, I got the new iPhone 4s towards the end of the coursework and if I had it before hand I would have used the free blogger app, to post whilst on location. Blogger has been a help to our coursework because we no longer have a million Microsoft word files hanging around on our computers, and our posts can all be found under labels in the side bar of our blogs. Having our research, planning, evaluation, and up-to-date blogging in one place, has made life a lot more simple. Aside for the great qualities about blogger that I have stated, I think the best thing about having a blog is that it actually generates an audience. On my blog I have so far had audiences from Russia, USA, Ukraine, Germany, Brazil, Latvia, Thailand, Japan, Colombia, Australia, South Korea, Malaysia, and India. In addition I found it quite strange to work with HTML codes because it was new to me, but I managed to pick it up quite quickly and I was soon embedding codes from YouTube and placing music videos on my blog. The sharing and interactivity aspect about a blog, is the best thing about it. I found that I change my template many times on blogger, because it was so easy to do. Towards the end of our coursework blogger decided (or the company that makes blogger) to change their whole format. Some of my posts changed and the writing had no space, gaps which was very strange, my friends also found that some of their posts had turned into drafts. This was quite annoying seen as we were at the end of our research + planning stages and moving onto the evaluation, and we really didnt want anything to be deleted. Thankfully this didnt happen and it didnt take me long to get used to the new format.

This is my blog, I decided to go with a simple design, that reflected the song we had produced for our music video task. The actual name was Blue Skies, By Noah + the Whale and we changed this to Nights of Broken Sleep By Oliver Fox. In my opinion it looks quite indie, with the birds and pale blue background and script writing for the name of the blog. I decided to include the page views in the side bar, at the top of the blog, to see how many view the the blog has generated. In addition I have included a subscription feed and NME feed, along with a YouTube video bar, with labels such as indie music, so that these videos are suggested.

 Prezi is a free online mind map presentation site. It enables its members to create great looking presentations, in a sort of slide show kind of way, however I found that it is extremely time consuming and because you are virtually allowed unlimited space to construct this presentation; it made me spend far too much time, making a huge presentation. However I was really impressed that I could upload a YouTube video into the mind map and this was very simple to do. Moving on, YouTube was a device we used constantly, especially when Radhika and I were out filming our one minuet extract, and had to keep referring to the original video.

This is my Prezi for Web 2.0

 Ive used Scribd to upload two of my presentations so far, and I found it easy to use. I was also surprised by the amount of views I had straight away. I decided to include a link to my blog on Scribd because of the amount of views I had received through this site.Having looked at my blogger statistics, and the traffic sources, I found that this worked because people had looked at my blog through Scribd. I am also going to upload this presentation onto scribd and then to my blog.

These are examples of what we could do with just Microsoft word.

Digipak adverts

Above is the final digipak template. As you can see we took a very artistic and abstract approach, because we wanted to make something that one unique and also fitting within the indie genre.
This is the front panel of the digipak, which has been changed into black and white, with strips of colour in the final design.

Apple macs and final cut pro

Having used iMovie for editing last year, we was expecting to use the same software again, however our teacher decided it would be best for us to use Final cut Pro, a much more professional editing software. However none of our class had a clue how to use it, and so our teacher arranged for a workshop for us at a local college with a teacher who specialises in Final Cut Pro (FCP). Only Radhika and I turned up for the lesson, but we found this so helpful and instrumental in our understanding of the system and I feel like if I hadnt had the training that I did, I still wouldnt have the foggiest idea how to use this system. We used lots of different functions in the editing stage on Final Cut Pro, some of these include, transitions and filters, such as the one we used for the title page, and the credits. We also synchronised the music to the footage of the actor singing. In this part we also used colour corrector to make it black and white. In addition I took some footage of a candle and then added a blurred effect on this, so that the image was distorted and the candle blew out; we thought this worked really well with the flow of the piece, it also indicated that the events were not going to turn out as planned by the ,ain character of the boy. This shot could also be interpreted as the death of the girl and the fire blowing out inside her.

Editing on Final Cut Pro

Radhika + I actually did all of the editing. So Ive decided to list all of the elements we used to construct the video. From the beginning I designed the title page, which was the effect Splash- Lower Third HD, from sequence 1. This looked really good, with the black splash on the white title along with the footage in the background. It was fun to use and this effect was quite simple to use, however it was a case of going through every effect and seeing which one fit the best with the genre and video. Secondly we turned our actor lip syncing into black and white, we done this by using colour corrector 3- way. Once this was up we turned the saturation down, along with the black limit effect and we also brought the white limit effect up to create this image. Radhika also used the same process above to her images of the chess pieces. We thought this would be a great idea, because it represented the queen falling down, just like the girl did. I filmed a candle being blown out, one cold morning. I then took this footage into school and used an Echo effect on this. From the audience feedback, a lot of comments praised this technique and the overall effect it gave. For the end credits I used the bad film effect along with a title sequence.

We wanted to transmit the overwhelming emotion state this character was in, and one way in which we achieved this was by showing one of his dreams.

This was a white washed Glow + Light rays effect that I used. I included in the video to show his dreams and fantasies of what it would be like to be with this girl and this is also partly what the boy expects to happen. I thought this worked well and the feedback received at the showcase evening was very positive towards the editing and in particular, when I asked a family friend what editing they felt was the most successful, they replied with this and the candle.

We used a brand new HD, Sony Bloggie for our filming and I am going to summarise some of the good and bad points about using this device. The positives The lightness in weight of the camera made it easy to put in our pockets and get it out quickly when we saw a good shot. The uncomplicatedness of extracting footage from the recorder onto the Macs, by just popping open the USB lead on the device itself. Quite reasonable in price. Simple design, easy to understand, even without reading the manual. Lasted quite long in battery life. The negativesImage quality.

HD BLOGGIE

Towards the end of filming, we started using my HD 24 optical zoom camera, more and more often. The image quality on this is great, take a look at some examples of pictures I took at a Florence + the Machine concert on this camera.