Tom Jake's Evaluation

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Our media product uses the typical live performance convention of existing media products. This is due to the fact that our chosen song, Girls On T.V by Be Your Own PET, was a very heavily instrumental influenced song. The way we develop this convention is by working the narrative around the location of the live performance so both the performance and the plotline are given this sense of merging. Having a narrative also challenges the typical conventions of an instrument based band. Most instrument based bands, for example, Paramore, seem to generally produce mostly instrument based videos, focusing more on the performance of the band as opposed to any storyline that may reside within the lyrics. Having our narrative linked to the lyrics and to the live performance helps challenge the typical conventions. Our ancillary tasks, the digipak and the promotional poster, also use typical conventions. Our chosen song is an Indie song and the ancillary tasks fit in well with the typical indie conventions. The digipak contains images of Bryony and me in an alternative indie environment, i.e. the middle of the woods near a rusted out car. This is typical indie as it is edgy and different and tries to challenge the mainstream style of music. Our poster is also that of a typical indie style as again it shows both Bryony and me in the run down setting. We done this to try and keep consistency so people would recognise our products. The way our digipak develops real media products is through the use of a competition. We introduced a competition within the inside left of the digipak. This was done as a way to connect with the fans of the band as most existing bands have some kind of offer or free gift i.e. poster badges to promote the release of there new album.

How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
The combination of both our main product and ancillary texts worked well as they both complemented each other. There is a scene in our music video which contains Bryony and me running through the woods with the rusted out car in the background. We decided to use the woods and the car as a theme as it fits in with the edgy, alternative convention of the indie rock band. On both our poster and digipak we continued to use the woods and car theme. This would also be used for the benefit of our audiences. Because the theme is recurring audiences and fans would be able to see our products and instantly recognise them and associate them with the band. The recurring theme ties in with bands such as ‘Them Crooked Vultures’ who used the recurring theme of a vultures head on top of a human body. The poster also combines well with the video and digipak as the poster issues an ‘album out now’ label. This would show fans not only who we are but would direct them towards the album which also contains the actual music video. I think the recurring theme of the car and the woods would encourage people who knew of the product to buy it as they would instantly recognise it.

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?
Our audience feedback in general was very positive. However there was one issue at first which received many comments and that was on our splitscreen technique. This involved having three moving images of me on the screen at the same time. We had lined them up and timed them together very well but the issue came with the lighting. A lot of comments were about the natural lighting and how the three splits didn’t quiet match up due to the lighting. This was fixed as best as it could be through adjusting the lighting on the stills. We also received comments on the cuts. To begin with our cuts seemed slow and sloppy and were encouraged to make quick snappy shots. We done this once we had an opportunity to re-film and gain a larger variety of shots. The completed feedback received much positive feedback. Our ancillary texts also received positive feedback. A colleague of our teachers had been sent our promotional poster and commented on it saying they knew what to expect straight away. This means that our idea to create an edgy poster to promote an indie rock band was successful. Our digipak also received positive feedback. We had been told by other media students that it looked like a believable C.D cover that would be sold in shops. There was however the issue of the track listings. Some people struggled to read the font due to the colour of the actual font in contrast to the colour of the background.

How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
We used new media technologies throughout the process of creating our music video. Initially we began with the new long road media music video blog. We posted blogs recording our current process as well as using posts to inform of upcoming events such as filming, production meetings etc. We then employed the use of a phone camera and regular camera in order to take photos of the location of which we were going to film. These were later uploaded and placed on the blog. Once filming began we used a camera, a tripod and a c.d. player. The camera was used to capture footage necessary for the music video. We used the tripod in order to gather a range of angled shots, either high or low. The c.d. player was used to play our chosen song so we could easily work out timings once the footage was uploaded. This all had to be uploaded to final cut. We used final cut to cut up footage, lengthen it, shorten it etc. This time we used it to resize frames in order to fit more shots into one. We also had to cut frames in order to get the split screen effect of the three of me. For the ancillary texts we used primarily photo shop. This was used to edit pictures and layout for both our digipak and promotional posters.