evaluation

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

The video we created sticks to the conventions of most music videos in this genre. We have the band scene, which conforms to the videos we researched including the actual video for Bring Me To Life by Evanescence. The story line we used is similar to the one used in the Bring me to life video where she is also in a dream world. The long, elaborate story is also similar to videos such as the Tool videos and Michael Jacksons’ Thriller.

Parts of our video switch between the band scene and Alice’s nightmare. This conforms to other media products that will often switch between an artist and the action.

We are also in our own video which is popular amongst most artists and only very few videos do not feature the artist in them. In this sense we conformed to the conventions.

We challenge the conventions by using a title screen and introducing our song in similar way too a film. This is rarely seen and the music videos are usually introduced by subtitling on the television.

The bulk of our video is of Alice’s dream world which is not usual for videos as they usually have flashes of the band in short intervals of the storyline although we decided we would have the main part of our video being the dream world instead as we felt it was more interesting for the viewer.

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

We felt that for our ancillary tasks, the digi pak and Website, we needed to keep a common theme amongst them in order to show that we can create product recognition and that when people saw our website or digi pak it would be linked with our video.

In our music video we used a title screen in a cream colour to keep the effective gothic look. In order to keep the same look we decided to use cream card and make it look old fashioned in a similar way to the video. We also used blue ribbon to match with the blue of Alice’s dress. The artwork on the digi pak is also matched to the music video. It’s also related to the original Alice in Wonderland drawings.

The booklet in the digi pak is also old-fashioned looking and is actually tea stained to give the right effect. I t contains the lyrics to the music video and our thank yous.

Our website is again following the blue Alice theme and sticks to the same gothic conventions as our music video. It also has our video on and pictures of when we were filming and screen shots of the actual finished video.

3. What have you learned from your audience feedback?

We posted our video on YouTube, Vimeo and Facebook in order to gain audience feed back. It was also passed around the school via teachers and a showing we did in an assembly. The feedback we received has been mainly good and the comments on YouTube have all been positive. Although its nice to hear that your work is good its also difficult to improve as constructive criticism would of helped us change our video for the better.

The only bad feedback we received was a dislike on YouTube, this doesn’t help us though as its anonymous and no comment was left.

This meant that we had to criticise our own work, which isn’t always easy as we created it and found it hard to find faults with our work.

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

For our research we used the Macs to access the Internet using YouTube and other websites such as artist sites and Google.

To find a song to use and video ideas we used band websites and YouTube to find examples of their work to find what style we could take ideas from.

We drew our storyboards by hand then scanned them onto the Macs and added them to Blogger in order to follow them wherever we where as we had access to mobile internet.

When we started to film we used a HD camera to shoot as the quality was better than the cameras we used last year when HD was not available to the public easily. We also used an IPod to get the lip sync in time while we were filming. We plugged in the instruments we used into amps just in case it was visible on camera.

When we edited our film we used iMovie and Garage Band to add the music and change things we needed to change. We also had to cut out things and re-arrange them, as things aren’t filmed in order and to cut it down to the right time.

We used Facebook, YouTube, Blogger and Vimeo to post our video on the Internet and get some audience feedback.

I also used Blogger to post my blogs of the full duration of our media project.