Media Evaluation

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

-In music videos there is always a clear link between the lyrics and the video, sometimes they are expressed through props and the setting, and sometime the artist expresses them through their facial expression and the way they move their body-In my video I use the artist to put across the lyrics, by having her smile, and look sad when it fits with the lyrics.-In faster paced songs a shaky camera movement can fit, but in this one I had to be careful when I was filming and make sure every short flowed smoothly without shaking where I didn’t want it. I made use of high and low angles to show in the song when the artist was feeling happy about being single or feeling sad and small.

-The genre of my video is country/pop, this genre is usually portrayed by the artist on their own, or with few other people singing their song with the main instrument used. -I have replicated this in my video and have my artist playing the guitar in some shots, and the others of her singing/acting out the lyrics.-The video was edited to be at a slow pace to suit the genre and song but a wide variety of shots were used so I could show both the country and pop genre and create a balance between the two.-Like most slow country songs I have edited my video to a slow pace to suit the song, this was harder to make the lip syncing in time with the lyrics, but with carful timing I managed to put it in time. Jewel’s video for this song was also edited to a similar pace and I wanted to keep this element in the video.

This clips shows the artist taking a sip from a cup of coffee with her hands around the mug as if she if taking its warmth, this clip goes with the lyric “consoled a cup of coffee but it didn’t want to talk”

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

• The combination of my main product and the ancillary texts are very important, as they all support each other, and if one were not used the overall product would fail, or not do as well as the artist needs a video to promote herself as the artist, an album with an attractive cover to gain popularity with her music, and a poster to attract the audience to buy her album

• In my CD cover I have a screenshot from one of the clips I decided not to use, but thought that it would look better as the cover, it wasn’t heavily edited, only lengthened at the top and had text added to it to display the name of the artist and the song, I have used an image of the artist to promote her look and to create a style that would be associated with her.

• The advert was created in a similar way, but the photo was taken while I was filming and there are similar shots in the music video as it was taken at the same time, I then reflected the picture to look as if she were sitting by the water side and added the shop logo where it could be bought and the release date.

• The magazine advert is important as magazines are often looked through again and again then passed on to friends, making this an effective form of advertising.

• Magazines are also very popular with the age range I am targeting – young adult women, early 20’s as they

prefer softer music, magazines like Kerrang and NME probably wont find as many of their readers eager to buy this album, so putting it in women's magazines like Look and New would probably promote this artist better and find a good fan base that will support this music.

My magazine advert is set out as a half page advert. This is an advert sample I have taken from Nme that displays how my advert will be presented.

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

• From looking through the feedback I have received from my friends I realized what I already knew, I couldn’t make my music video, album cover and advert all perfect, all I could do was create something that was my own, using a song and a video camera.

• I also learned that if I were to do this video again there are many things I would do differently, The first being managing my time better so that I could fit more filming in and have more shots to choose through, the second being that I filmed in more locations and used more props to accentuate to lyrics more.

• The feedback I received from my peers is very helpful as I am aiming the music video at an age group similar to my own, getting help from them tells me what they are looking for or if there is something they don’t like about my video and as they are essentially the consumers of the product it is their opinion that matters the most

• I have taken all the feedback seriously and made necessary changes where I needed too, such as the lip syncing being out. Other mistakes that I was not able to mend at this point in my production I will remember for any future projects I will engage in and make sure they do not occur again.

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

In my video I have made use of new technologies that have helped advance my production.The camera I used for this project was better than cameras I have previously used as it was more

compact and the footage was stored on an SD card which made it easier to upload and saved time.

To create the Magazine advert and the CD cover I used two new programs called Luna pic and Fotoflexer, I had never used either of these before but I got a good handle on them really quickly and was able to try out different effect on lots of different pictures, such as black and white or adding color to one part and leaving the other part in black and white, this helped me to produce many different advert and album prototypes to choose from.

I used Fotoflexer and Microsoft word to produce different examples of fonts for the text on my album

cover and advert.

To edit my video I used imovie, this program I found very easy to use and effective in creating the effects I wanted to complete my video, it allowed me to change the speed to fit the music and had a full choice of effects, of which I chose black and white to connote the dark mood the songs lyrics portray.

The sample highlighted in black is the one I chose, It stood out to me because the elegant swirling of the letters make it seem both extravagant and graceful at the same time. This fits the name of the artist well as a jewel is both extravagantly beautiful and graceful it also looks delicate, although jewels are often the opposite of this.

Fotoflexer and my finished advert /\