Evaluation

1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products ? The use or challenging of typical conventions was something that we had previously thought about before we created our music promo video, as can be seen in this blogpost.
http://liveyourdaysthroughpoemsanddreams.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/influences-for-music-video.html
Locations

  

Above are three screenprints displaying the main locations/settings from the music promo video we created. The first image shows Cally and myself ,drunk, in a rural area outside an abandoned building at sunrise, and the second image shows the party happening inside the abandoned building. This sticks to typical conventions as these types of settings are common in similar music videos and other forms of media aimed at our target audience. We chose these two particular locations to film in for their urban appearence, graffiti, boarded windows, uncared for and in need of repairs etc. This sticks to conventions and makes our video realistic and appealing. The third image displays Cally persuading me to go the party. The background behind Cally is a surburban looking lane where each house has it's own private garden area and the entrance to the street is away from main roads meaning the street is quiet. We picked this location as it is often common for charcters from program such as "Skins" to come from quiet surburban areas and have family and neighbours that wouldn't expect such rebellious behaviour from them, this again sticks to conventions and will appeal to our target audience as the idea of leading a double life and having such a wild rebellious lifestyle and getting away with it offers escapism.
Props/costume

The screenshots above display the useage of props and costume in our music video. Throughout the music video people can be seen drinking bottles of alcohol, smoking cigarettes, taking drugs aswell as the floor being cluttered with empty bottles, off licence carrier bags and IPod's aswell as there being silly string. This sticks to conventions as it is common in media forms similar to ours for there to be heavy alcohol, nicotene and drug abuse and for it to be glamourised as a good lifestyle. The costume appeals to and sticks to conventions typical of our target audience. Rock music band tee's, 90's style clothing, dyed hair, plaid shirts and expanded ears are styles you would expect from a band producing music like this and the people listening to it.
Camerawork

The screenshots above display the way in which we used the camera to film our video. The footage was filmed using a handheld camera meaning all the scenes from the party are filmed from different characters points of view. We liked this idea as it meant the audience can see the party as it happens through the eyes of the people who are there and the handheld camera creates rough jerky shots adding to the chaotic effect. This challenges conventions as in most of the similar videos we looked at the camerwork was done using a fixed camera being filmed from an outlookers perspective meaning the audience are looking in on the party.
Characters

As our video has no storyline there aren't any individual characters however within the first few seconds of the video it is obvious that the people in the video are off the rail youth abusing alcohol and drugs. The screenshots above are examples of how these characters are created. The opening scene is a drunk girl lying in grass where she fell and the other screenshot taken from 00:35 seconds into the video shows a boy trying to enter the room but failing because of his intoxicated state. This is highly typical and sticks very strongly to the conventions of this particular genre as drinking excessively and taking drugs to the point your in a complete state is glamourised and seen as the norm within this genre and generation.
Special effects

We used the reverse speed effect in adobe premier pro on our video. The screenshots above are examples of clips in the video where we felt the effect worked particuarly well, these scenes are the one where Cally and myself fall backwards into the party and the one where the smoke goes back into Lewis' mouth rather than being blown out. This effect could be seen as challenging conventions as we have only come across it's use in similar videos once and we show the messy aftermath of the party and go back through to the beginning of the night where the party is being discussed as a "quiet night", in a way this shows the characters and their lifestyle in a bad light, as media aimed at our target audience tends to show the party where everyone is enjoying themselves and the alcohol and drugs have no negative effects and simply make the occasion more fun.

CD Digipack Printed tasks

2.How effective is the combination of your main product and the ancilliary task?

 

When designing and creating both our ancilliary and main tasks it was important that we made them consistent with each other and the presentation above shows the ways in which we went about doing this. We also compared our products to existing products in order to see the comparison between combinations of our products and proffesional products.

3. What have you learned from your audience feedback?
Throughout our project we have tried to gain audience feedback from both peers and tutors. We found gaining feedback to be helpful and helped us to make changes to our work for the better.
 After we had created the first drafts of our magazine advertisement and CD digipack, we felt we should gain feedback and make any amendants suggested to us, the feedback forms we received from our lecturer can be seen below.

It was suggested to us that although we had a good understanding of our target audience through costume used in the image an the overall layout of the magazine advertisement, and had a well created image we could make the image more controversial through larger use of props and body language. We agreed with this and felt that the front cover could be improvd on vastly. This aswell as losing a group member we decided that rather than make small amedants we would just redesign it completely.  We feel that this was a good decision and improved our digipack greatly. The improvements that we made once gaining this feedback can be seen below.

Once we had improved on our Front Cover we also decided to improve our magazine advertisement bringing it up to the same standards. We added in reviews of the CD from a popular magazine and added endoresements from popular companies. Although these changes are small we feel they improved the overall look and proffesionalism of the product.

After we had made all neccasary changes and improvements to all our printed tasks and we were happy to call the work we had produced our complete and final draft. We printed out the final drafts individually and stuck them to paper and asked some people from our class to give us feedback on them. The written peer feedback we gained on the printed tasks can be seen below.

In order to gain peer feedback on our music promo video we showed it to a group of people within the age group of our target audience and asked them to give positive feedback and comment on things they liked on pink post-it notes, and provide criticism and tell us what they didn't like on yellow post-it notes. This feedback can be seen below.

We feel that we learnt a lot from our audience feedback and gaining it was very useful for us as it helped us to make tweaks that made our product turn out as well as we feel it did. Our target audience felt that we created products that appealed to them and we were succesful in creating realistic representations. Both our target audience and our lecturer felt that we succesfully created products that worked well together. If we were to produce something similar to this in the future we have learnt that we used a good variety of shot types, had good ideas and applied conventions correctly however, we could improve on the continuity and editing of the video, aswell as recording dialogue seperately in order to create a video of proffesional standards.

4. How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
During each stage of our project, the research and planning, the actual construction of the products and the evaluation we used a range of new media technologies, these were both on the form of software such as Blogger or Adobe Premier Pro, and hardware in the form of a camera.  
Blogger

Equipment

Construction of printed tasks and music video

Gaining Feedback

Music Promo Video Peer Feedback

To gain feedback from our peers we showed the music video to the whole class and asked them to give us anonymous written feedback. Pink post-it notes were the positive comments and things they liked, and the yellow post-it notes were criticisms or areas they thought we could improve on.

Common positive feedback we recieved was that reverse effect we used was a good idea and unique, the handheld camera and point of view shots we used were effective, the choice of music was relevant and our video had similarities to the likes of skins. Receiving this positive feedback about our video made us pleased as we were wanting to create a project similar to skins with relevant music appealing to the target audience and intended for the camera shots and effects to be received the way they were.

Common criticisms we recieved were the very end of the video with the dialogue had a few editing mistakes and the dialogue could have been clearer. These were factors we were already aware of and agreed with, we had tried to fix them as best as we could during the editing process and unfortunately due to timing issues we couldn't amend them completely. Another common criticism that we received we're that some scenes lasted to long. We were aware this could be a problem however we had to pick the best clips from the hours of footage we had taken and a lot was unusable, and where there are clips that last a lot longer than the others this was because they were the most useable. For example in order to get the correct length on the video we needed to fill out a few more seconds but there were no more useable little clips and it was a toss up between more footage of someone urinating into a toilet or more footage of someone blowing smoke, so we went with the blowing smoke scene to extend. A few people also said they didn't understand the storyline and it made no sense, this is due to the fact as a group we didn't introduce the video properly and only people who were friends with or worked near us in the classroom understood the ideas behind our project.

We also uploaded the video onto YouTube and Tumblr, two popular social networking sites specifically amongst our target audience. This allowed us to ensure that our video reached the audience it was intended to and to gain feedback from people who may not have during the feedback session in class, such as online friends and friends from different schools etc.

Music Promo Video - Final edit

Now that we had created our first draft and organised the clips a way we were happy with we had to add the soundtrack and effects. To do this we uploaded the video to Adobe Premier Pro and changed the settings to reverse speed meaning the video would play backwards, allowing the video to go backwards through the party starting with the "morning after" scenes. The final scenes of the video play forwards but with audible dialogue rather than music. We added on the video clips with the dialogue of Cally asking if I will be coming to the party. Once all the video clips were placed in the correct order and had the correct effect on them we then added the song We Are Rockstars by Does It Offend You, Yeah?. We lowered the volume of the song over the clips containing dialogue so that it could be clearly heard.
We are very pleased with the outcome of the video. It turned out the way we envisioned it and it is pretty similar to the initial storyboard ideas we came up with. There are a few errors in the editing such as quick jolts or pausing, however we tried to fix these during the editing process and fixed it to the best we could. Other than a few errors we feel we used the editing software quite efficiently and the overall outcome was quite proffesional. The quality of the camera is slightly grainy as we didn't realise till during the editing process that we had HD turned off. Although at first this seemed a problem once we had seen the finished product we feel it adds to the effect and works well.
We feel we portrayed the theme of chaotic and wild youth well, created a realistic party and reached the target audience via conventions. We also feel the video is consistent with the CD digipack and poster.

Music Promo Video - First Draft

The idea behind our music video is that it will be played reverse and start showing you the morning after, aftermath of an all night lock in, in a disused bulding and go backwards through the night. In order for this to work we first had to work out what order to place the individual clips we had in so that once the video was put in reverse it would look cohesiant.

Above is the first draft of the video, for which we used Adobe Premier Pro to create, without any effects or soundtrack displaying the correct order of the clips from beginning of the night to the morning after.

The video begins with Cally knocking on a friends (my) door to ask if they are going out that night, after being told it will only be a quiet night I agree to go out. The video the skips to the party thats being held by our group of friends in a disused buidling and the party is shown via a series of small few second clips from the night. The clips jump from one another at a fast pace and the shots are taken on a handheld camera meaning they can be quite shaky which emphasies the chaotic and rough attitudes of the teenagers and the time they are having. Two of the band members (Cally and myself) can then be seen falling out of a door, down the steps out of the buidling and walking through a forested area and ends with Cally falling in the grass.

We are very pleased with the way the clips went together and how well they flow when played through and the ideas we had in our heads and on paper have definately come to life and once placed in reverse we feel we will have created a video that would indeed be appealing to our target audience, meet generic conventions and is a lifelike representation of the type of footage being produced by similar artists.

Music Promo Video Chosen Loaction (Original Images)

As we wanted to use a derelict building/run down warehouse as the main setting for our video this provided us with a slight problem. There we're a lot of problems with using an actual derelict building/warehouse, although we had access to a few around our area we had to think about Health and Safety and the legal implications that could come from using these so we had to chose a safe location that provided us with the appearance of being an empty derelict building. We chose to use the outhouse of one of the group members as once cleared out of the equipment being stored in it it would be a perfect location.

In order for it to appear that the party had been held in a disused building we will have to film the morning after scenes around an actual disused building at dusk. We picked a disused building in our local complex that we think will look convincingly like the outside of the location in which we will film the main part of our video.

We will also be filming a scene containing dialogue where Cally will persuade me to go out that night. We have decided this will be filmed in my backyard as my steps have lots of room around them which gives the opportunity for different camera shots and angles, I have a switch controlled yard light should we need an extra light source and the street in the background has a very suburban look. 

Music promo video props and equipment

To acheive the controversial effect we hope our video to have and to ensure our video fits the theme of party, we will have to use a variety of props. Below are some images that we collected from the internet containing conventional props that we have seen appear in many music videos and images of teenage parties.

As a group we sat and discussed what props we think we should have on our music video, these are;

Water guns

Cans of silly sting/spraypaint

Food, for use in a food fight/fingerfood 

Balloons

Streamers

Fancy dress/strange clothes/onesies 

Cigarettes

Alcohol real and fake, empty bottles,  

Confetti

Vegetable soup to use as fake sick

Music promo video, full storyboard and shot types

We have planned the opening and end scenes of our music video fully and have decided on where we will film them and what shot types we will use to film these particular parts of the music video. However for the actual main part of the video in which the party takes place we are creating a fast paced montage of clips that will be cut down from footage filmed during the party. There are a few party scenes that have we planned and know we definately want as part of the video, such as people drinking alcohol, people kissing, and drunken behaviour, these can be seen above in the storyboard. These are scenes we know we definately want and will film first, the rest of the scenes will be filmed throughout the night randomly.