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