Evaluation- Conventions

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

Throughout all of our planning and construction stages we have constantly thought about conventions. How to meet, develop and challenge them.

In our CD booklet, we tried to meet the normal conventions within our booklet, however we challeneged the conventions when doing our front cover.


Most front covers in today's charts have pictures of themselves on the front so people are aware of who that CD is about and can notice them quicker, however we challenged this and made ours a prop, an easel. We decided to do this so it made the cover alittle different to the charts examples and so it fitted more with our 'indie' style. We wanted to it be different, as we tried to make our video different by adding the animation.


















Inside our booklet however we tried to stick to the typical conventions, small writing, double page spreads of images and simple colour schemes.















With are poster, i believe it fitted with most conventions however the majority of music posters have the singer on a plain background however we have included the green background to follow the outside theme we have going.

Evaluation - Main product and ancillary texts

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

I felt that our main product and ancillary texts worked well together due to the fact that we based it all on one setting. In our film we included alot of a 'field' scene, which is where we took our photos for our ancillary texts aswell.
We liked this perticular scene in our video and thought it would work well with the ancillary texts aswell, the easel for example. It was bright, colourful and a lovely view.
We ensured that our singer 'Sophia' was dressed in a similiar way during the ancillary and main text to maintain the same image that we were trying to show across. This was also so it related more to our target audience, a 'hippy, indie' style.
We tried to use the same colours throughout both our CD Cover and poster by using the eyedropper tool on photoshop. This allowed us to create the same colour on both showing more of a stronger connection between them.



Ancillary task's.

This is to show how alot of 'indie' CD covers do not have there artists on, like ours and our music poster to show how it relates to our CD cover. The green colours and outside views consistant throughout both.

I dont think the ancillary task's relate much to our main product, the video, however this seems to be conventional between most albums and video's. This is because the album is not based around the one song we have made the video for, but every song on that album.
Our CD cover may have a prop from our video in, however this is just a background setting that worked well and fitted into our genre of our songs in the album. So i think this fits in well.

Evaluation - Feedback

What have you learned from your audience feedback?


The use of Web 2.0 has been very benificial to gain our feedback.
As well as asking people questionnaire's and thier opinions, we posted our video on youtube and created a group for our video on facebook.
We didnt get detailed comments on these however so we created a google document so it allowed people to write more detailed answers that we were trying to recieve.

The majority of comments were positive, however the comments to improve were very similiar so it was very easy to see what we needed to improve on.
"it was jumpy and the animation could have worked better with the beat of the song"
The first time we used final cut express we just edited in our footage and sync'd the music with it, so when we first asked for feedback from the people in our class it was only from one scene and didnt have no narrative scenes in.

A few people said that some of the shots lasted too long, so we chopped and changed our video to make the shots shorter and faster, however from some of the comments from our final video we can see that we may have gone too fast with some scenes as people called the video "jumpy".
As we had no other scenes it was quite a boring video at that time with no narrative so people commented on that, but due to it being our first attempt at using final cut express that was expected.
When looking at the comparison video from the feedback "Incomplete Lullaby" people stated that the lights on the black background looked good and made it look more professional. From the comments we both wanted to recreate the lights on the background, however we found it too difficult to try and do on final cut express so we just left it as it was.
While recieving comments from our class mates throughout the process of making the video i think we improved alot of what they were saying needed looking at. We included much more narrative scenes, also while including outside scenes to make the video look more colourful.

I believe if we didnt have these feedback comments i think we would have left it with just the black scenes, it wasnt untill we had another persons perspective on the video that we noticed how bland the video was looking.

Due to posting the video on facebook and youtube, i think we recieved alot of useful feedback that we couldnt have gathered together just through word of mouth.
I think alot of people also liked to comment on our video on the Google Document due to that fact that it was anomonous so people could be thierselves and really tell us the honest opinion they had.

I think if we had more time to improve our video we would have sorted out the animation to make it fit in with the beat more, as alot of peoples comments were about that.
Also we would have changed the scenes so they didnt seem jumpy and to make some of the shots last longer, so they seemed smoother.

Evaluation - Feedback from Facebook

Feedback from Facebook group

Results being :

Majority vote on 'what would you say needs improving on it?' was =

"Maybe try and sync the frames with the music"

Majority vote on 'do you think it showed the lyrics well?' was =

"Yes"

Majority vote from 'what do you like most about it?' was=

"Sophia's smiles as she sings!"

Majority vote from 'what do you think of the music video' was=

"Very Good"

Evaluation - Feedback from Google Docs

Summaries of feedback from the google document:

What do you think of the video honestly?

I liked the story of teenage love, trying to find love when your alone.
It worked well with the song.
I really enjoyed the animation bits, it made the video a bit different from others!Made me smile! I understood what it was about but the bench scene was a bit vague and slightly out of focus. Apart from that it was good.The video was very good, it incorporated may good visual effects for the transitions between the different shots.
It made me feel happy and intrigued to watch more

What could we have done to improve the video?

Perhaps make the animation more in time with the music.For a first attempt, it was good but the scenes were, at times a little jerky and came and went too fast in a couple of bitsNot much to be honest, nearly all aspects of the video were done to a good and professional standard.Just made the film flow better rather than the images jump too many times in a short time.I think everything is perfect except the black scene at around 1.52 between the two green shots is a bit short.maybe not switch the views so often so stay a bit longer at each different view.



On a scale of 1- 10 how well do you think the video suits the lyrics?

1 - 0 - 0%
2 - 0 - 0%
3 - 0 - 0%
4 - 1 - 6%
5 - 0 - 0%
6 - 0 - 0%
7 - 1 - 6%
8 - 8 - 44%
9 - 3 - 17%
10 -5 - 28%






On a scale of 1-10 how well do you think the video was filmed and edited?


1 - 1- 6%
2 - 0 - 0%
3 - 0 - 0%
4 - 0 - 0%
5- 0 - 0%
6 -0- 0%
7- 3 - 17%
8 - 3 - 17%
9 - 6 - 33%
10 -5 - 28%





Did you enjoy watching the music video?

Very much so -12 - 67%
Yes -5 - 28%
It was okay -0 - 0%
No -1 - 6%

Evaluation - Technologies.

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

The devolpment of web 2.0 has allowed us to easily find resources into researching and planning our video, and ancillary task's.

Research and planning:
During the research and planning stages we used mainly youtube to research other examples of the genre of video and to also see what other students doing a level media had produced.
We got alot of inspiration from different video's for example an AS video recreating the same song we have made, The professional video to our song and some songs that were in the same genre of this song, Incomplete Lullaby was our inspriation for our stop motion and Neopolitan Dreams was our inspiration for the outside scenes.
We also used Google, to look at examples of CD booklets, and posters. Also we had already looked at some from our own collection of CD's, the variety on Google was much more accessible to find.






Construction:
While making our music video, CD cover and poster we used quite alot of technology that has only recently been created.
To record our footage we used many different camera's, we used a video camera, a still camera and a camera phone. Before this project i had never used a video camera within a project for school, so i had never learnt the full details into creating a good movie. However throughout the year i learnt how to connect it to a tri-pod, how to use a dolly with the video camera and which angles work well, as before i would simply point the video camera at my subject and press record. I now feel very confident that i could create great clips on a video camera.
The still camera i had previously used in the last years coursework when creating my music magazine. I used the still camera to get the poster and CD booklet pictures for, and also to create the animation.
The mobile phone camera was used to take location shots due to not having a camera on us at the time. However the mobile phone also acted as our music when we didnt have a louder speaker around us to record our video.

Once we had all our video footage we began to edit it.
To begin with we started to upload and edit our footage on imovie as it was simple and we both had some knowledge how to use it. However when we wanted to do more detailed editing we learnt about final cut express. Final cut express allowed us to cut and edit our footage in sync with our music so it looked more professional and was more easier for us to edit in. Before we hadnt used final cut express so it was brand new to us, we made a few mistakes at the beginning by un-sync'ing parts and by cutting in the wrong place, but once we had sorted out our mistakes we learnt from them and it became easy. Untill the end we experiences problems with the programme, for example the clips needed rendering all the time and it regualary came out of sync but we managed to sort it all out in time.

Due to all our of animation pieces being hundrends of photos we couldnt just upload it on imovie so we had to upload it first on iphoto. As i dont own a mac, and are not used to them, i had never used this programmes before but it were easy to pick up and we had no problems with it. Due to mac's being quite new still they are not as well known yet- people still could have never seen a mac and still use a normal PC. However they are being more popular as are the programmes, iphoto and imovie.
To create our CD booklet and poster, we mainly used photoshop. I am very familiar with this software due to using it alot last year and from previous outside experience. So this wasnt too difficult for me to do and i mananged to do it quite quickly.

An example of editing a photo we took on a still camera through Photoshop.

Evaluation:
To gather feedback from our video, we used all the technology avaiable to us teenagers, i uploaded it onto youtube, and then from youtube i linked it to facebook, this way letting my friends see it. However people weren't commenting so i created a facebook page just the video and created 'polls' for my friends to answer once they had watched the video. It worked quite well i got a few responses, however they lacked detail so i created a google document, and wrote questions which would make people write more detail into there answers.
I shared my google document link by facebook, email, text messages and through word of mouth. This worked very well and i have now recieved lots of detailed feedback that will help me.

While creating my Video, CD Cover and Poster i wrote down all the stages of my work and displayed them on blogger, this is a easy website which allows you to add new posts and write down all the information, add photo's, embedd video's and link websites on. Its really easy to use and displays the information in a professional, simple way.

Animation scenes that went into final video

The reason we wanted to use animation was due to the fact that we wanted to play on the lyrics 1,2,3,4. We had seen other examples and decided that it made the video different and original. It was also the easiest way to make the animation work well by relating them to the lyrics.


Paper Hearts

The heart shape is a connotation for love which we would like to be a recognisable theme throughout our video.
We used a lot of pictures so that the clip would run smoothly, and we are really pleased with the outcome. We edited the photos together to create a video clip using iMovie which worked brilliantly.

Clock

The clock has connotations of waiting for love and time passing by which are along the main themes of our video.
It was also easy to change the clock hands to be on 1,2,3,4 to fit in with the video.
We took quite a lot of pictures on a still camera, from previous experience we noted that we needed to take hundrend of photos to make the animiation look as smooth as possible.
We took a photo every 5 minutes as the large hand moved around the clock, the results hopefully being a smooth speeded up hour on the clock.
The clock hands moved too fast, although we tried to alter the duration of speed many times and it really didn’t work with the beat of the song, looking out of place and jumpy.
Due to this we ended up taking out this animation and just replacing it with screen shots of the two lyrics that we needed 1 o'clock and 2 o'clock.

Changing clothes.

The changing clothes represents the changing of her life.
Disrupting her and the feelings she would have been going through, a mixed up mind.