Evaluation

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


Firstly, we gathered ideas from both previous groups videos and famous ones. We studied their ideas and how effective they look and turned them into our own. One of the main videos we looked at was Joshua Radin - I'd rather be with you, our idea wasn't based upon his although we discovered that it follows the same storyline. This helped us get a feel as to how we want to portray our video as also looked at the conventions he uses such as lighting and costume.
The enitial idea of the woodland scene and the guitar is very stereotypical for an acoustic video, however it works well for ours and we all had a similar idea when we first heard the song.
In terms of Goodwins points we looked at previous videos to see if they met the criteria, by doing this we saw what works well and what doesn't. We used voyerism in our video as the main character is dressed in a way that suits the genre (pop/rock) by doing this the audience can relate to the video better and it becomes easier to follow. We also gave the main character the most screen time, this promotes the artist and he becomes reconisable.
Furthermore, the lyrics are about a love story so we tried to link this to our video, by using flachbacks and making them desaturated we managed to distinguish the two so they are clear.

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



We tried to make all three of our products relate in some way. To do this we used either the main character or the guitar in both our digipack and magazine advert. For the digipack we used the same location as the video, this helps the audience to identify the song and the artist. Also, we featured the guitar a lot in our video so we thought it was necessary to use this object for our magazine advert. Despite this we changed the color of the guitar to a de-saturated b&w, this gave the effect that its quite a sad song and also relates to the color of the flashbacks in our video. 
The mood of both the video and ancillary texts is quite dull, we felt it would look effective to have the empty woodland in the texts as it shows how lonely the main character is, this also relates to the lyrics of the song as he has lost his 'girl'.
Furthermore, we quoted on the magazine advert that you can consume the digipack from hmv and itunes, we decided to use these as they are the most popular places for our target audience to get music.
Additionally, we labeled our video as certificate U, this is because there is no inappropriate content or scenes in our video that viewers would find disturbing. We made sure we featured this on the digipack so it is visible to our audience. 
Overall all three products relate in some way and they all include the same theme, this is recognizable to the fans and the target audience. 


What have you learnt from your audience feedback?


We felt that our audience feedback was appropriate and useful whilst we were in the process of making our video. By taking it into consideration we got a view other than our own about how it looks, this helped us improve and also notice things we may not have seen.
Firstly, we received feedback quoting that there was no lip syncing involved, at the time we had not done this however it was our plan to do it in the final cut. Also, people liked the idea of the flashbacks and how they fit in well with the lyrics, we decided to keep this idea but elaborate on it more so the flashbacks were more clear. Another quote we got was that we had a good variation of shots, at the time we weren't happy with what we filmed however this feedback influenced us to experiment even more with shot types. 
The feedback on our final video was mainly positive although most of the comments included how out of time the lip syncing and the guitar was, we found this hard to edit effectively and fit in. Despite this the other feedback suggested that people enjoyed our video and liked our idea. They commented on the flow of the story and the editing technique for the flashbacks mostly. Also, they liked the transitions and the simpleness of the overall video. 
In conclusion we found the feedback very useful especially for future preference, the one comment that stood out was that the main character wasn't enthusiastic enough, we would change this if we had the chance as we believe it would improve our video.


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


Over the entire duration of making our video we all advanced in several different programs and technologies. By using blogger to write all our research we found it easy to navigate and sort through it, we also liked the idea that we could all access the blog from different locations, this helped show that we can all have our own individual input. Other feedback was featured on here as-well so we were able to look at it in order and view who said what.
When we first got given the camera we already knew the basics, however we enjoyed looking for techniques and 'cheats' online. This research proved to be helpful as we found how to pan using an elastic band, we then used this whilst filming these shots. Also, the video quality was extremely good and this helped us make the video look effective and more professional.
When it came to editing our video we found final cut quite challenging despite having used it before. The effects we wanted to use were difficult to find and we had to render it a lot. Additionally, there were many clips which we weren't quite happy with, we found it hard to delete some of these without getting rid of the ones we wanted. Overall after we got used to the program we used it to our advantage and felt our editing techniques worked quite well.  
Furthermore, to portray a good effect on the ancillary texts we used a digital camera to take new pictures, this improved the quality of them and helped us when using photoshop. 
Luckily, everyone in our group knew how to use photoshop so we felt we done well in that part of the project.