Final Evaluation

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

Our media product was of the alternate rock genre, and we took forms of other similar products, for example we were heavily influence by Blink 182 and Sum 41. We took characteristics from select videos, and portrayed them in our own. From studying 'Goodwin's Theory of Analysis', we were able to relate genre characteristics from other videos and adapt them into ours. A typical form we used from rock videos was: performance, and we used this for half of our product. And the other half was: lifestyle, we put this in for extra entertainment value to the audience, as the footage is quite comical. Our locations were conventional, as we used some band rehearsal rooms and a stage at Sawston Village College. By using these locations and then the town centre we were able to easily fit our footage around our genre specifics. I don't think we really challenged our genre, although the clip of us all climbing from the same box could be considered as uncharacteristic. We added this though for pure entertainment value as we wanted to reflect our personalities in the video, and we felt that alternative rock allowed us to do this. Otherwise we stuck to guidelines from our area, like the use of band mise en scene like instruments, and stage settings. The close ups of the artist, and complete artist focus, makes the band easily remembered. Through the comedy element of our video, we promoted the band with the comedic and relaxed atmosphere. By not having a crazed feel to the footage and transitions, we could draw the audience in to just enjoy the comedy without having to think too much. I would consider myself to be a member of our video’s target audience, and I think it’s attractive to watch because of its entertainment value. It vaguely represents shows like jackass, as it’s a fun and laid back viewing to give the audience a feel good viewing. We developed two sides of the video throughout, the performance and lifestyle sides, adding different clips from each side as the video progressed. There isn't an area where too many clips from the same side are stacked next to each other; we felt this would have the potential to bore the audience. The two real media products we based our video on were 'Rock Show' and 'In Too Deep'.
How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary tasks?

I personally felt we could have done a lot better on our ancillary tasks, but if nothing else we did get the element of continuity between them, and between them both and our video. We used pictures from a shoot we did at The Junction to promote the band members, like we had done throughout the video. We chose this location as it’s a popular venue in Cambridge, which directly relates to our genre and promotes it; a lot of upcoming and popular bands play there. We kept to a basic background on both the DVD cover and magazine cover to vocalise the band, this way you'd easily be able to identify our ancillary tasks with the video. We also used the flaming A which is the bands signature, if the audience knew the band this would have appealed to them in particular. The products do however work together to promote one another, again through the same colour choices and continuity of the A and band photos. The advert doesn’t promote the DVD as strongly as it could have done, as we included tour dates also, which takes the sting out of the advert. But it does have reference for when the DVD is available, and the DVD then promotes the band by use of pictures that will be recognisable to the audience. We decided to go for a simple colour scheme quite simply because we didn’t have the right skills to get what we wanted into photo shop. I think we would have gone for a more elaborate, stand out background if we had the choice to show the extrovert sense to the band. The tasks do promote the same feel as the video also, that being relaxed and band focussed by being photographs of the band in their everyday lifestyle. The magazine article promotes the record label by visually aiding it on the décor. These adverts would appeal to a new audience as they promote the band and album in a way that would make the audience recognise the genre through the design and to listen to their music.

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

Primarily we had to pitch for our song to the rest of the group, and our feedback from the pitch was pretty positive. They thought that the research we had done towards our locations and mise en scene would help in the future filming we would have to do. Although they did also say we would have to develop a stronger plot for our video, as our main ideas were a little bit scatty. Our feedback was mainly from members of the group, and Holly (media teacher). Although not all of them were relevant for our target audience, to study media we have had to learn to fit ourselves into any audience to be able to evaluate products more efficiently. We have all done a video preliminary so their knowledge was valuable to us. From our rough-cut feedback we gained a lot of welcomed knowledge. People thought we’d hit the nail on the head when shooting for our genre, and the amount of research we had done on location and props really helped the outcome of our video. But from the first lot of feedback we had also been given areas to improve on, and this was mainly to prioritise band members with close ups, and to only use long shots when they were really needed. To add to that we needed more lip syncing footage our vocals, we took all of these things into consideration when we went for our second footage shoot. The feedback we got was really helpful in order for us to make progress and produce our final piece. From our ancillary task we got feedback we expected, the other groups correctly analysed the problems with our pack that we knew were there but had no time to change. It was overall disappointing that we didn’t have time to change the things highlighted to us. If we were to do our main video again, we might get more valuable shots from the stage performance sides, as we looked a little unprepared and we were lucky to get the mise en scene there that was necessary.

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

The main resources for the planning and research elements were the blog the media groups used and ‘You tube.’ These sites were of particular importance as they gave us a source for finding previous music video’s done at the college, and real existing ones. The blog was the entity of the project though, as this is where we published all of our planning, research, and anything else that came to mind in the lead up to our final product. Being able to see and talk about other videos whilst not in the classroom really helped us adapt our own ideas. With these sites as well, I was able to upload a video of me teaching the guitar parts to our group, so we could re-enact them better in our video. This proved helpful, as Scott isn’t able to actually play guitar. Another program that was essential for us to make any advance on our project was ‘Final Cut.’ This is a program that allowed us to merge, cut and add effects to the footage we had caught on our shoots. Our abilities using the program had been progressing as we continually used it in media, and this helped when chopping up long clips we had captured, most of which we didn’t use. A specific thing that has developed for me from AS is the use of markers in effect so you can get exactly what you want from it. The program we used for our ancillary task is called: ‘Photoshop’ this program was ill favoured throughout the group, as our ability to use this it wasn’t high. But from the experience I think we gained experience on how to use if we are ever called to again. Although it wasn’t our favourite piece of new media technology, it was essential to amalgamate our DVD and magazine add effectively. Last year, we did a preliminary task where we a short music video. This really prepared us for the main task, as it showed us just how much footage we needed to create our product. I think we advanced from the preliminary task as we used much more lip-syncing, and we related our music to visuals more effectively.

Evaluation

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

Our media product was of the alternate rock genre, and we took forms of other similar products, for example we were heavily influence by Blink 182 and Sum 41. We took characteristics from select videos, and portrait them into our own. From studying 'Goodwin's Theory of Analysis', we were able to relate genre characteristics from other video's and adapt them into ours. A typical form we used from rock videos was: performance, and we used this for half of our product. And the other half was: lifestyle, we put this in for extra entertainment value to the audience, as the footage is quite comical. I don't think we really challenged our genre, although the clip of us all climbing from the same box could be considered as uncharacteristic. We added this though for pure entertainment value as we wanted to reflect our personalities in the video, and we felt that alternative rock allowed us to do this. Otherwise we stuck to guidelines from our area. We developed two sides of the video throughout, the performance and lifestyle sides, adding different clips from each side as the video progressed. There isn't an area where too many clips from the same side are stacked next to each other, we felt this would have the potential to bore the audience. The two real media products we based our video on were 'Rock Show' and 'In Too Deep'

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

I personally felt we could have done a lot better on our ancillary tasks, but if nothing else we did get the element of continuity between them, and between them both and our video. We used pictures from a shoot we did at The Junction to promote the band members, like we had done throughout the video. We chose this location as its a popular venue in Cambridge, which directly relates to our genre and promotes it; a lot of upcoming and popular bands play there. We kept to a basic background on both the DVD cover and magazine cover to vocalise the band, this way you'd easily be able to identify our ancillary tasks with the video. We also used the flaming A which is the bands signature, If the audience knew the band this would have appealed to them in particular.

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

From our rough cut feedback we gained a lot of welcomed knowledge. People thought we’d hit the nail on the head when shooting for our genre, and the amount of research we had done on location and props really helped the outcome of our video. But from the first lot of feedback we had also been given areas to improve on, and this was mainly to prioritise band members with close ups, and to only use long shots when they were really needed. To add to that we needed more lip syncing footage our vocals, we took all of these things into consideration when we went for our second footage shoot. The feedback we got was really helpful in order for us to make progress and produce our final piece. From our ancillary task we got feedback we expected, the other groups correctly analysed the problems with our pack that we knew were there but had no time to change. It was overall disappointing that we didn’t have time to change the things highlighted to us.

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

The main resources for the planning and research elements were the blog the media groups used and ‘You tube.’ These sites were of particular importance as they gave us a source for finding previous music video’s done at the college, and real existing ones. The blog was the entity of the project though, as this is where we published all of our planning, research, and anything else that came to mind in the lead up to our final product. Being able to see and talk about other videos whilst not in the classroom really helped us adapt our own ideas. Another program that was essential for us to make any advance on our project was ‘Final Cut.’ This is a program that allowed us to merge, cut and add effects to the footage we had caught on our shoots. Our abilities using the program had been progressing as we continually used it in media, and this helped when chopping up long clips we had captured, most of which we didn’t use. With these sites as well, I was able to upload a video of me teaching the guitar parts to our group, so we could re-enact them better in our video. This proved helpful as Scott isn’t able to actually play guitar. The program we used for our ancillary task is called: ‘Photoshop’ this program was ill favoured throughout the group, as our ability to use this it wasn’t so. But from the experience I think we gained experience on how to use if we are ever called to again. Although it wasn’t our favourite piece of new media technology, it was essential to amalgamate our DVD and magazine add effectively.

Evaluation 'POA'

Today it is up to us to create a plan of action for the production of our music video's commentary. We have this lesson to plan it, next lesson to film it and then two more lessons to edit the piece. Below is our plan of action.
We plan to have the four of us introduced individually, we plan to do this by having a short clip of each of us talking (a sentence or two about the music video) with our name on screen, then the clip will to all the four of us together in a room and we will answer the questions for the evaluation in a casual group discussion similar to a group interview.

Q 1: In what ways does the media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
- Talk about 'Blink 182s' influence from their video 'Rock Show'
- Audience for alternative rock videos
- performance and lifestyle element of video
- we stuck to genre conventions
- how choices we made led to our final media product
- Goodwins theory and points that we used

Q 2: How effective is the combination of our ancillary task and our main product?
- how mise-en-scene was key to getting the photos relative
- our opinions on the DVD and Magazine covers
- representation and selling of artists

Q 3: What have you leant from audience feedback?
- open for discussion, talk about our camera work (Lack of close ups) etc.
- ability to communicate
- how we overcame these problems

Q 4: How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research planning and in the evaluation stages?
- how we have developed skills on final cut, photoshop and blog use
- how we uploaded examples of our genre from existing products via 'youtube' etc
- camerawork

Digi-Pack turn out

I think the roundabout feeling within the group is a little disappointed. The outcome of our digi-packs really aren't what they had the potential to be, due to lack of time we had left ourselves to hit the deadline. None of us really were that successful in trying to overcome photo shop either which helped slow us down a considerable ammount whilst frantically trying to put our advert and cover together. All in all the final hurdle was a bit of a let down and if we had planned our time better we would have seen some better results.

Filming prep (late post)

This is a photo of the lighting from when we filmed at the lockup. We stood each band member against a wall and then filmed them playing the whole song and extracted parts to put in the main video. You can see from the positioning we were aiming to get close up and med shots of each member.

Digi pack example

This example of Bloc Party's album: Weekend in the city shows us some ideas that we could use on our own digi-pack. Although the genre of music is different we could at least take from the layout of the album cover and side.
Our ideas are more band focused than this though and it should achieve public promotion through the band picture on the front, not only will the audience enjoy the music but they will also know each member and who they are listening too. Of course another possible idea would be to put out a logo that would be recognizable among fans like Lostprophets do on their cover of "Liberation Transmission"These ideas we could fit onto a DVD cover as well, but you'd expect to see more things such like tour dates and ratings from separate publications written on the back, and on the inside covers. here's an example of a DVD cover that will vaguely relate to ours.
The title on this DVD cover gives us more examples of what we could do with ours, maybe create a font that is band specific. After looking for the band A's pictures we can see the pattern of text that we can try and imitate on our own digi-pack.Even though the Flaming A is not really to our taste imitating would be our best idea to make the digi-pack look professional. And in fact as you can see, this front cover is pretty much what we are going for with ours apart from we don't want to have the effect they do. We want the images to be naturalistic so the members are easily seen. But we have a lot of ideas to contend with when creating our digi-pack, and we also have some photos to take.
Another thing we have to think about is special features here's an example of special features from another DVD

We could have things like:
-Band Commentary
-The shooting of the video
-Lyric sing along
-Pre-Production
These are all things we can consider when producing the back of our DVD.

A photo like this is what we'd be going for for our digi pack. We wont be using this one as we want to have a proper photo shoot with a better camera, but something that catches all the band, without instruments, behaving how they would in everyday life, but we might experiment with posing pictures also.

The Loveable Rascals present 'Pacific Ocean Blue'

Filming at the "Secret Location"

We went to take some test footage on site to gain some ideas of what we could do extra on hen we next filmed at "The Lock Up" and we stumbled upon a secret location. Here we managed to get some photo idea's for our digi pack, and we also took some footage that we may include in our music video of us all climbing from a box. The footage will only be a few seconds long but it adds an extra bit to the band lifestyle section of the video.
we made it look as if we were all climbing out of the same medium sized box by choosing when to stop and roll the camera, and by using this technique we were able to make it look as if we had all started in the same area.

Final Cut Progress

This is what our video looks like in the editing process right now. We have a lot of out of place footage and a lot of unused sound, although when we convert it to quick time this wont cause any problem. We need to sought out all the footage that we're using add effects and lap over only when we need to.

Test Footage 2 (scott wrote this)

After evaluating our existing footage and our feedback from our teacher and other groups, we felt it necessary to obtain more band shots and close ups. Consequently we ventured around long road and found a secluded location and set to filming.
We feel these shots may be used to fill some of our gaps and will help to build our band image and could be evolved in our digi pack. Our footage includes us walking down a set of stairs (leaving the stage) at several different angles which evolves continuity. And a continuous shot of all four band members climbing out of a box as if we were all in there together.

Contradictions

From our feedback from Holly, and other groups we have had contradictory views on our locations and shots. Some say we have to many locations, and other think the contrary. Also some think that we have a wide variety of shots, but upon looking closer i think most would agree that most of our shots are long and medium. So to overcome this we have decided to edit some of the street footage in final cut, to zoom in on the faces of band members, or just edit them so they appear as close ups on the final version. We also are going back to the lockup to get more closeups of each band member to add to the video.
With these things put into action we hope the overall result will look a little more professional, and contain more variety.

Very Very Rough Cut

Obviously we have a lot of work to do, as we had to just put in some footage at the end as we didnt have enough time in lesson to complete it. We also need to capture more footage to have a wider shot variety, and more close ups of the vocalist to try and sekk the artist. We really just need more close ups all together.

First day of editing

We've come to start editing our footage, which we have over 30 minutes of at the moment. We plan to cut each different scene into pieces before we start deleting footage we don't need, or moving it around. We're going have a lot of work to do before we have our footage in a good order in which we'll all agree with. We're going to have a lot to work to lip sync certain parts and to fit the dance routines in with suitable parts of the song.

Filming: Day Three

In todays filming we managed to accomplish all the necessary shots to form a collage of performance footage with the clips we've got from other days of filming. The dolly proved itself useful and we captured some great movements which really promote the artists and give a professional edge to the music video. However, there were some major problems with todays filming. Firstly, the tripod didn't fit the dolly! This made capturing the movement shots particularly difficult and required two cameramen as a posed to one. Unfortunately this wasted valuable time from the recording process and overall less was achieved in todays filming. Another problem we faced today was that the battery for the camera was empty when we came to film. We were expecting to do some additional shots besides the filming at Sawston Village College. We had arrived at a river an hour before we were expected at Sawston and we were going to film Scott and George jumping into a river which was going to be our final shot. However when we got there the battery on the camera was out of battery and we couldnt film anything. As well as this the equipment available to us at Sawston was a lot less than we had hoped for for example there were no microphones, no guitars and we had to find drum sticks and symbols for the drums. It would have been helpful for us to know a bit more information before we had gone for the shooting day, as it could have looked a lot more proffessional.
Our next shooting is of the band. It will take place on the Long Road Sixth Form College site and we will use the pictures obtained to produce our digipack. We need to arrange a day and time for this shoot.


Before arriving on site, all group members had to be 'briefed' with the sites Health and Safety Procedure, which is pictured below. Also, the hier had to sign and date the lettings agreement which show my complience with the regulations and obligations within the college site.

Guitar parts

Ok guys pretty much i learnt our song, thought it may bear some relevance to the cause. So heres a video of it we can use it later or whatever you fancy.

Story Board

These are our story board in two halfs, we will use this when we go out and film for our rough guideline of where we want each shot and what kind of shots we want for each part of the Video. The illustrations show our ideas and at what point of the video we want them to take place. They are a rough guideline which we are very inclined to stray from if we feel we need to.

Video's We've Taken Inspirtaion from

This has both performance elements we want to include in our video, a stage performance and one in a garage, as it suites the music label. The Sum41 video also shows the lifestyle side we want to include of having the band and other members messing around. We want to take these same elements to amalgamate our video.

Mise~EnScene

In our music video production we plan to have a recognizable sense of band Mise-En-Scene, we have established that we will be using the conventional Mise-en-scene expected in an Alternative rock music video. For Example:-
- Instruments

The Instruments we will be using during the performance parts of our video are:-
- Full Drum Kit
- Electric Guitar
- Bass Guitar
- Mic
However while we were filming at SVC we were unable to use a mic as we did not have one so to cover this we simply had minimal close up shots of JJ singing and when we did it would be from behind with bright lights in the background (silhouette shots) so it is noticeable but you have to be looking for it.

- Stage

- Expected costumes

- Speakers

- Stage lighting

Contacting the Band

This is a copy of the email sent to Jason Perry, lead singer of 'Pacific Ocean Blue'. He was also the song writer and record producer for A. We wrote to him ask permission to use this track in our music video.
Dear Mr J. Perry
We, in order of importance (George Baglin, Scott Lansdale, Karl Lambourne, Josef James) are writing are writing to seek permission to use the track "Pacific Ocean Blue" by the band 'A' for our advanced media Production Project here at Long Road Sixth Form College, Cambridge. As part of our course we have been instructed to plan/film/edit and produce a music video from a selection of songs from different music genres. Consequently, we chose Pacific Ocean Blue as our track and therefore would appreciate your approval in using this song.
Long Road Media: Group 48

This is Jason Perry's response.

Magazine Adverts

All these adverts differentiate from each other and give us an idea of just how broader range of magazine adverts they can be, and how they each can achieve different things.
For example the darker colours on the first poster could reflect the genre or meaning behind the album. its not particularly eye catching but the illustrations are definitely the vocal point of the poster, and could attract current fans.
This is in complete contrast to the last poster which is bright and quite bold, its definately eye catching and the illustration would entertain the audience. the text is quite bold noting the tour dates so you could say the text is the vocal point.
These adverts give us ideas of what we could do with ours when we come to make it and what different techniques could achieve different things to make it attractive to the audience.
Our ideas for the magazine advert would be to have the picture as the vocal of the piece. We would carry this out onto our dvd cover as well for a running theme easily recognized. The photo will be memorable or just funny again so the audience wont forget it in a hurry. We aim to use brighter colours for the magazine advert but we are undesided for the DVD cover at the moment.