Stuart dutton evaluation sorry late explain why at college

Stuart Dutton

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
What have you learnt from your audience feedback?
How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Evaluation – Long road music video group 41

Our media product was originally designed to be conventional but not to a specific genre. We used many techniques used in the industry and some used were improvisations made up on the spot that we surprisingly found to be quite effective so in a way our video turned out is non conventional. An example of non-genre specific conventions used is the synchronised dance in our video which is usually seen in Boy band pop videos rather than indie electro videos. We took a risk including it in our video but we feel it paid off as we managed to establish the shots and capture it in an effective way. However we did conform to certain forms and conventions of our genre; our song chosen was of an indie/electro theme. We used whiteboard background, coloured lights, and silhouettes to achieve vibrant, colourful yet abstract shots similar to shots you would find in a professional electro music video. On the contrary a way we challenged the convention of our genre was including a close up guitar solo shot as this type of shot would usually be found in a rock video. To conclude our media product partially used and developed real media conventions but we stayed away from heavily conforming to styles of the indie electro genre.

We represented the artist of the song in our ancillary text in a vibrant indie fashion. The Band members are on the front pasted on to a rainbow striped background doing so we have promoted the artist through use of art creating a certain atmosphere for the product. Our cover has a similar colour palette to pink Floyd’s dark side of the moon a black background with abstract light spectrum art. However our cover is done in a much more light hearted way. I feel our ancillary texts closely link with our main product quite well. We kept the lyrics and the general feel of the song lights and music in mind while constructing the ancillary products. Therefore we used the conventions to give the texts a similar feel to our music video. We use bright vibrant rainbow colours on a black background to achieve this. Other ways our ancillary products linked with the main product is the information and images on the packs. Our DVD cover and poster are both entitled light and music (the name of our song). The DVD cover has multiple images of us as a band which was extracted from the footage of our main product which I feel is another effective link. Another strong link between the two products is the torchlight effect image in the top right corner of the front of our DVD cover. This is because it relates to a memorable and key shot in our video near the beginning when the camera is zooms in on the sun and then zooms out on a torch in the night time.

I learned a great deal about our own media product through peer feedback. It is interesting and insightful to hear the perspective and opinion of people who haven’t been involved working on the product. Peer feedback on our rough cut had a huge influence on what content we included in our final cut. Important criticisms highlighted shots and ideas that didn’t fit and work effectively which we took on board in order to make decisions for our final piece. For example one student commented on the irrelevance of our daytime shots in relation to night time shots which led us to scrap most of our daytime footage. The feedback from our final cut was mostly positive and I have learned what techniques/shots work better than others. We were praised for our use of close up shots so I learned how to capture an effective close up. There wasn’t a great deal I could learn for my final product feedback as the comments were similar and positive but I learnt how effective certain shots were as they were the ones mentioned by peers meaning they were memorable. I learned from feedback for the digipack what worked and what didn’t. I learnt the image on the inside cover wasn’t as effective as I thought as the image was of low quality and we tried to hide this by putting smudge effects on it. The image was criticised as it looked too smudged and out of focus but the colour stripes around the world were praised. We received feedback on our actual blog also. Again the majority of this was positive and criticisms were mainly on our messy tagging of pieces of work. Instead of sticking to 4 specific tags we all had a multitude of nicknames in the tagging as we had a light- hearted approach to our blog. I learnt this is not necessarily the best idea as it can become silly.

New media technologies have completely revolutionised the industry. Especially for amateur filmmakers like us, YouTube New media technologies were essential to every part of our project. In the research side of our project websites used predominantly were; YouTube and Google images. YouTube was used to look for conventions of real media products similar to ours for inspiration and ideas. Google/Google images were used also for ideas and inspiration from real media products. However Google images were also used closely with Photoshop in terms of construction as we cut from many existing images to make our own. The construction of our project involved mainly final cut. We uploaded our footage to final cut and used it to edit footage and add the audio for both our rough cut and final project; this was an essential piece of media technology. Planning for our project was not done on paper. Instead we used www.blogspot.com. We regularly uploaded a comments, images, and videos. This allowed us to continuously add to our planning and background content of our product and the way the site is structured allowed us to look back at our own ideas with ease. For evaluation of our product Microsoft word and final cut were used. I used Microsoft word to create our evaluation and final cut will be used to record my commentary.