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

Untitled from Ollie Sandles on Vimeo.

Evaluation Question 2: How effective was the combination of your main product and ancillary task?

For our Media Product to be a success and something that we could market, we had to make sure that our music video and ancillary task related to each other and as a whole created a strong product.

After establishing audience needs in terms of genre, we created a music video that fit into the category of heavy rock. We illustrated this through the 4 micro features, mise-en-scene, and cinematography, sound and editing. Through the mise-en-scene we used costume to relate to our target audience. Clothing is a big part of any genre; a genre connotes a certain style so we used clothing and colour to meet a big audience need, we did this by using a lot of dark colours on the clothing including leather jackets, hoodies and skinny jeans.

Themes that ran through the music video were of rebelliousness, anarchy and being against society. We didn’t want to insult our audience by putting across the message that these themes were wrong, we were supporting them in many ways by showing our protagonist doing these things in the first place. We didn’t end the video with a message of ‘Obey by the rules’, we ended it with the audience deciding what happens next. Ricky clearly has his independence in the video as he walks off into the sunset alone, and our target audience won’t take from the video that they should rebel; it’s more a message about independence which is what the audience of this genre wants.

As the message of our video connoted being against the paradigm that is society, we used breaking the law as a constant theme throughout our video, and so we used it on our ancillary task.

We didn’t want to take just a still image from the video for our digipack and magazine advert, we took a picture that wasn’t related to our video but wasn’t in it. We took pictures of our protagonist doing graffiti which is against the law, so this relates to shoplifting, which was in our video. For the Digipack we used the picture of Ricky doing graffiti as the front cover and we edited it so that he was writing the band name and song title. The magazine cover was a close up of the spray can from a different angle with the information this time printed on the can. At the bottom of each part of the digipack is the record company ‘RoadRunner Records’. We thought this was an appropriate institution as all of the bands on the label are of a alternative/metal/rock genre and the audience of the bands on the label already fall under our target audience as well. The combination of our video and ancillary task would appeal to ‘RoadRunner’ because of the constant themes throughout both that are relevant to each other and to the genre. Overall the combination of our Music video and ancillary task was very effective down to the overall theme running through both.

Evaluation Question 3: What have you learned from your audience feedback?

After we had completed the main product (music video), we thought it would be necessary to receive audience feedback to ensure that the text would be a success amongst its target audience. In order to do this, we posted the video on the the evolving social networking website, Facebook. This allowed our target audience to comment on the video, and express their personal opinion of it. Here are some quotations demonstrating the feedback that we have received and a screen shot of our video on Facebook:

>'Overall i really liked the music video, i think the story really followed the lyrics of the song and they both fitted really well together, i particularly liked the band shots. the use of costumes and setting were appropriate for the song. the transitions between the band and the rest of the video worked really well i thought and kept you interested during the video. the content of the video was appropriate for my age group and was thought provoking.'

>'The video shows an excellent visual presentation to accompany the theme of the song'

>'I love the underlying thematic representation of rebelliousness reflected by the grittiness and quick cuts of the shots which impairs the clarity to the audience. the playful interchanging colour saturations kept me visually stimulated and satisfied my needs as the audience.'

>'I liked:

The various different camera angles used.

The effects used.

The locations used'

>'A really good music video. You can really see the emotion of the character through the imagery of the video and the lyrics in the song.'

I felt this was posistive feedback, which suggests that we met the needs of our target audience through our music video. Our feedback suggested that we strongly matched the theme and lyrics of the song to the video, which was our intention as we felt it the two would make a strong overall product and our feedback suggested this was the case. Comments about strong micro features such as mise-en-scene in the form of costumes and editing for instance transisitions were also encouraging. From our audience feedback I feel that we have met the needs of our target audience throught our media product due to the video fitting in with the theme and lyrics of the song.

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

Untitled from Ollie Sandles on Vimeo.

Evaluation Question 1 Update

Using the information I blogged a few weeks ago we wrote a script and turned our answer into a video. We downloaded music videos of the same genre and spliced clips of them in with out own footage to show how we used, developed and challanged the conventions of real media prodcuts. We are very pleased with the outcome and will upload the video tomorrow.

Evaluation Question 3 & 4

For evaluation question 3 & 4 Charlie, Ollie and I have written a script so that we can use different forms of medium to evaluate our product. We will be doing a commentary over our video as well for question 1. For question 4 we will film ourselves evaluating our video using clips of real media products to strenghten our points.