Evaluation

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

I believe that our video represents the elements of the hard life, which is shown in the original video, although in our video it was toned down to a different level, where it was left as a dream than reality. Our video was inspired from the Snoop Dogg – Vato video, this was mentioned in our research on our discovery to this idea, this song is in the same genre as our music video, another video which was particularly inspiring to our own music video was on of The Game’s other music video’s ‘Hate it or Love it’, this came as inspiring to us. With that song we came to a conclusion with The Game’s song ‘Dreams’. The concept of our video was to illustrate the character having a ‘Dream’, although our main goal was to make the Dream make sense but later on changed our minds to make it confusing, this is because Dreams are not meant to be understood but give a general idea of what is happening. Our video broke away from the original video by using new effects the original did not consist of. Our video also includes exterior shots of rooftops, street alleyways and a church. This was different from the original, as it did not consist most of these shots.

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

Our video connotes the main character in a dream that he can not get out of .The dream shows quiet a dark side to life where people are in trouble with others due to drugs, money or rivalry gangs. In our Cd cover we decided to follow the theme of a darkness and mystery by making our cd background black and then to show the troubles that could be happening in the video we used a flame effect on the cd title. We followed the same theme in our poster with the flames and the black background to continue showing the dark maybe painful feeling behind our video. The cd cover also has a picture of the main character on it blended into the darkness to suggest that the song isn’t all dark and there is some of it in the light. This is also a marketing strategy to sell the star to the people who like this genre of music that would see him as an iconic figure. The advert is our main item that would help us to sell the product, as it is what the majority of people would see first to let them no about the music video. On the advert we have told people where they would be able to get the song and when it when it will be out, so people are clear on when it will be available to them. The advert would go up in all town centres around the country and on the internet so a lot of people see the advertisments therefore the advertisement campaign would be a success and the product would sell very well .

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

We learnt a lot from our audience, as they praised us on aspects of our music video such as the effects and camera shots we had. They enjoyed the use of green screen effects which made our video seem different from other as it had different aspects of effects and editing used. However the criticism we got from the audience feedback was that the end of our video did not create enough tension as the rest of the story did and also that our lip sync in some parts was a little off. Changes could not be made to our video as it was already handed in but, the criticism helped us see what changes we would have to make for our music video.

How did you use media technologies in the construction, research, planing and evalution stages?

Before attempting to do anything else we first had to research which type of song we would like to attempt to emulate. We had decided that we had either wanted to do a song in the Hip Hop or Rnb industry, as we felt that we knew more about these two industries then others, as these were two types of music that we all mainly listened to. To research we mainly used the internet and mainstream websites such as www.youtube.com and www.muzu.tv, to explore different types of music, genres and artists. We also researched various music magazines such as “Q Magazine”, “The Wire Magazine”, to further research which song we were going to do.

In the planning stages of our we further used the internet to research the type of music videos were created in the Hip-Hop industry, and made various written pieces such as a storyboard, shot-list, storyline. In the construction stages of our video we attempted to use a diverse range of media technologies. This involved using various different camera techniques to give our video a unique outlook, and to create a video masterpiece that would stand out for the viewing audience.

Throughout the construction stage we constantly altered what we had originally decided to film as we thought of innovative ideas to improve our video. We alternated between different camera shots as we didn’t want our media piece to appear boring and repetitive. It involved us using a variety of shots including long shots, medium shots, close ups, extreme close ups, both high and low angles etc. At times throughout the video we also used equipment we had available from the college (tripod and dolly), to prevent us creating an amateurish video. The tripod helped us greatly as it helped us with the high and low angle shots whilst also maintaining a stable camera. Filming the whole song in the green screen room with a white backdrop was one of the first things we did, we filmed from three different positions and alternated between the three when filming, so that when we would start editing we would have more footage to work with. Most of our time consisted of us editing the video although we had thought filming would take up most of our time. Using final cut pro, we used many different transitions and filters. We decided that we wanted the whole video in black and white, therefore used desaturate to take the colour out. We also used many other effects whilst editing our video such as speeding it up, fading in and out using flash etc, as we wanted it to stand out (see below for older posts of screenshot of the timeline). Following the completion of our video we began with the CD covers and magazine cover. For this we used photoshop. The concept was to create a catchy photo so the CD is easily recognized or noticed by the viewing audience so we created a flame type effect on the text and on the whole cover itself.

The main part of our evaluation stage was the blog that we were constantly updating, it became like a diary and we constantly tried to talk about what we had done in that lesson. The evaluative questions that we all have done, has helped us to explain what we have done in this process and how we did it.