Mark Nunn - Media Evaluation

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

My group made a music video for the song “Mayday” by the German band Tenbucks. I believe our video is a very effective fit for the song, and done to a relatively high standard. We had a collective idea of what we wanted to be included in our video from the moment that we heard the song, but also spent a large amount of time searching the internet for other inspiration along the same lines as our original idea. Our original idea was based on the very cliché music videos that the public are subjected to daily, I believe that to be the reason we all had such similar ideas for the video. Whilst searching, we found a video by the artist Joshua Radin, whose video was very similar to our concept, enabling us to gather our ideas and visualise what our video could potentially share a theme with. I believe the woodland setting of our video; although cliché and very common for acoustic songs worked very well for our song, and was the obvious choice amongst the group. The idea for our music video was to create a love story to match the sombre tale told by the lyrics. For this, we used two members of our group as the couple, and filmed the pair of them in romantic and “cute” situations (Such as playing in the woods, and at a pub). From this, we also filmed clips of the couple arguing to show the other side of the relationship that the lyrics convey, we included these clips throughout as flashbacks. As mentioned above, our music video and products may have embraced many conventions used in the past by real artists, but we believe we have also added our own touch by including the flashback scenes etc.

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

I believe that the ancillary products that our group created – The Digipack case and the poster – match our music video very well, both in terms of mood and style, for example, the poster highlights the genre by using a guitar as a main focal point of the image. Not only that, both the Digipack cover and the poster showed the environment that the video is set in, illustrating the location and mood of the video. I believe that these features are very effective at attracting a target audience as it is easily noticeable what sound the group have. Our ancillary products also have extra depth to them that we believe, as a group really add to the solemn sound of the track, for instance; the DVD cover shows the lead character of the video (Used to represent the lead vocalist of Tenbucks)  standing alone in the woods. The front of the Digipack shows the singer facing the camera, with the dark woods behind him, seemingly endless. This image is reversed on the rear of the video, where the singer is standing in the same position, just from the back, showing the other 180 degrees of environment – still empty woodland. The effect of having the singer isolated in this dark, somewhat dreary environment is that it shows just how alone he really is, to match the lyrics which show his sorrow at losing his love interest. As for the poster/advert that we created for the video, the group came up with the idea to use the guitar as the main focus, to really show those who see the poster what type of genre and sound the band have without even listening to the music.

In my opinion, all of the products that we created link very well together as a package, all of them complimenting each other and showing the public/audience what the band sounds like, and what their music is all about.

What have you learnt from audience feedback?

There are numerous lessons that we have learnt from feedback over the period of making the music video, almost all of it very helpful and constructive, helping us to improve the piece drastically. The feedback on the initial idea was overall very positive and showed that the class were very interested to see the product that we had envisioned and shared. The only issue that the class raised was “How are the night time scenes going to be lit?” This issue was evaded in the final product since the group decided against using the night scenes as we agreed that we couldn’t make them fit well in the storyline. Once our first cut was produced and shown to the class for feedback, the overall response was, again, very positive. We did understandably receive some creative criticism, with some saying that parts of the flashbacks were too bright, which mad it slightly difficult to make out some of the facial expressions within them. This was a very easy fix as we just had to return to FinalCut and lower the intensity of the effects that we applied to the flashback scenes. The second and final piece of feedback we received was that there weren’t actually any lip synced sections included in the video. This issue was down to an error involving mis-communication regarding when we could borrow the camera from the media department. Our planned date was supposedly unavailable, leaving us to film the whole of our rough cut in one lesson, without the lyrics prepared. This issue was already noted by the group, and justified in our second filming period where we re-filmed all of the clips that we had rushed in the previous session with lip syncing.  The final piece of feedback that we received was that that the storyline was a little difficult to follow, and that it should be made clearer. We took this feedback on and went straight back to the project to justify the issue. This was also a simple fix and just involved rearranging a few of the clips into a more obvious order to make the story clearer.

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

In terms of the programs that we used to learn everything we know now and create the products that we used, there were numerous vital to the task’s completion. The first of these technological aspects was the website Blogger.com where all of our work is showcased. This website acts as a portfolio for the whole project, and shows when the products were completed etc. The next most important media technologies involved in the project, were most definitely the Final Cut and Photoshop programs, without these, we wouldn't have been able to create the products that we had spent all of our time planning.

I knew how to use these programs relatively well before beginning the topic, so I didn't feel that I learnt many new skills in the process of making our music video. The one thing I did learn was how to use Chroma Keyer and a green screen to impose visuals on top of a pre-existing film.


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All in all I thoroughly enjoyed the project, I enjoyed using my pre-existing skills and developing them further.