Final Evaluation

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

Our product conforms to the conventions of media in as much as our video is linked to the style of our music. The dark themes in our video, along with it having a more narrative format, are associated with the rock genre. Strong examples of this include the videos to songs like Bullet For My Valentine’s “Bittersweet Memories”, Green Day’s “21 Guns”, and one of the videos I reviewed, Theory Of A Deadman’s “Hate My Life”. I also feel that the fact that our main video not showing the umbrella image from our ancillary products (especially the album cover) is conforming to these standards, as in many rock music examples, the front covers of albums are often abstract images which seemingly don’t relate to the rest of the albums’ products in any way. Examples here which inspired our album cover include Biffy Clyro’s “Only Revolutions” and 30 Seconds To Mars’ “This Is War”.

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

While the main image of the umbrella which was central on our album cover was not represented in the video, we still used linking themes to make sure the products matched up.

The main theme was simply an air of mystery. The front cover of the album which we developed pictured someone holding an umbrella towards a camera, meaning only the person’s feet were visible, while our video was shot in a point of view style, therefore leaving the main character almost completely unseen (the only shots in which any of the character was visible simply showed his hand). This air of mystery was something which we were keen to maintain as we felt it not only provided a link between the products, but conformed to a genre standard, as often rock music’s lyrics and videos has an unexplained, vague edge to it, or sometimes is even meant to deliberately confuse the audience.

One way in which we subverted these conventions while still having a link was by creating a strong contrast between the two themes. There is almost no colour whatsoever used in the video, with most of it taking place in an urban train station, thus creating a generally grey, concrete backdrop to the events. We even filmed these shots on a dark, cloudy day to keep this colourless feel. In contrast, the album cover is flooded with colours. This is such a strong contrast that it is actually memorable as a link. We even further drove this point home by titling the album “Spectrum”.

3) What have you learned from your audience feedback?

The main thing we learned from our feedback was that we needed to plan more carefully with reference to the length of the song. By not having too many incidents pre-planned for the storyline of the video, but rather a basic plotline, we fell foul of timing and had to have an extremely long middle section which drew criticism for being dull and killing the momentum from the first section of the video. Another point which arose was the need for clearer explanation – we expected with our video that people would pick up on the theme of the character’s depression, and thus grasp the reasoning behind the ending, but not making this clear enough meant that some people branded the ending of the video “confusing” and “unnecessary”, whereas we felt it fit with the plotline very well.

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

Research & Planning: During the research and planning section of our project, the main sites we used were YouTube, Google Images and deviantart.com. YouTube was the resource we used to look at videos which were in a similar genre or style to what we wanted our final product would be, while likewise with Google Images, we looked for album covers and tour posters for artists similar to the style of music we had chosen. Finally, deviantart.com was where we found the original images which inspired our own final album cover, after narrowing it down from several possibilities.

Construction: We used a basic handheld video camera for our filming process, with no tripods. The reason for this was that it would add more realism to the idea of our point-of-view style of shot. The shaky handheld effect made it seem more like the viewpoint of our character rather than a cameraman’s filming, plus it gave us the grittier style which fitted with the darkness in our video’s theme. We edited the video using Adobe Premier Elements. The ancillary products were created by editing a single original image in Adobe Photoshop CS5 in several different ways. The website vectormagic.com was also used to change the styling of the image before editing.

Evaluation: Once again, the usage of YouTube came up here, as we showed the video to a group of classmates for Part 1 of our audience review using this video sharing website. In the first Audience Evaluation post, there is also a “word cloud” of some of the most common phrases used to describe our video, which was created using the website wordle.com. Part 2 of our Audience Evaluation used Premier Elements again as we used it’s function to export a product to DVD, burning a hard copy of our video and showing it to several different people to gain more detailed comments.

Audience Evaluation - Part 2

The other part of our audience evaluation, aside from the focus group of students in our class, was to take a version of the video that we rendered out onto a DVD and show it to various friends who could comment on the video, giving us a further level of evaluation on our video, going past just one viewing in class. We had the following rough set of questions as guidelines for the viewers:

1) How do you think we could improve the video?
2) What particularly did you like about it?
3) What particularly did you dislike about it?
4) How well did the music fit the content of the video?
5) What age group do you think this video suits best?
6) If you saw the video with no sound, which genre of music would you think it belonged to?
7) What gender group do you think this video suits best?
8) How powerful an effect did the end of the video have?

There was an almost universal opinion for the first question, that we could improve the video by either putting in an extra section in the middle, or having some sort of incident happen to the character while he is walking towards the train platform. This tied in with the responses to the third question, which labelled this central section as the part most people disliked, with comments of it being “too drawn out” and “boring after a while”. However, one aspect which was commented on as being liked was the effect we put on here, by overlaying two versions of the same clip with a slight time difference, and reducing the opacity of one, we created a blurred, “drunken” visual effect which helped towards establishing the physical state of the character as he enters this final decision.
The music was pretty well complimented as fitting the video, particularly by the people who I explained some of the lyrics to, who said the incidents happening in the video matched well with the lyrics of the song, and also that the generally dark feel of the video went well with the title of the song, “Rock Is Cursed”, and it’s general storyline of someone being out of luck and at the end of their rope. Most people accurately said that if they just saw the video with no audio over it, it would probably still reflect the rock genre, with other answers being the metal genre, as it is often darker, and one suggestion of punk rock. Due to the themes of alcoholism and depression in the video, along with the dark ending of the character’s probable suicide, most viewers said the video was best aimed at a slightly more mature audience. The almost universal thought was that the video and music suited males more than females, with a girl who the video was shown to commenting that it was “too depressing”.
People’s opinions on the end of the video were varied. Some who saw it thought it was indeed very powerful, and had tremendous shock value, while others thought it was unnecessary and made our video depressing. Overall, we feel that the ending was a good decision, as it makes out video much more memorable, and really pushes to the forefront the effects of depression on our central character.

Choice of Image & Permission For Usage

After viewing the literally titled first drafts, the group had to decide on which image to go with as the final choice. I at first pushed for using either the image titled "Some Kind Of Bird" or "Man On Bridge And Gloomy Weather" for the darker connotations which I felt fitted the genre, but after some thought, the group decided to use the "Rainbow Umbrella" image, in it's original colour rather than the black and white version, as it fitted with the sense of mystery we had introduced in the video by never showing the main character. Jobe got in contact with the artist of the image and gained her permission with the following messages:

Jobe:
Hey Mary,

I have a favor to ask.

As part of my college course, I'm required to produce a concept for an album cover. It would be fantastic if I would be able to get permission to use one of your pieces as the main artwork, namely "Somewhere Over The Rainbow".

Of course I fully understand if you want to refuse. I know someone asking this out of the blue probably seems a little strange.

But yeah, if you can get back to me with an answer as soon as possible, I'd really appreciate it.

Thanks for your time.

Mary:
it is ok, you can use it

Original Stock Image: "Somewhere Over The Rainbow"

Album Cover First Drafts

At this point in the project, the group split the responsibilities between us. while myself and Paul concentrated on filming and editing the video, Jobe moved onto the graphics work, and created several draft ideas from images found on deviantart.com. While we were waiting for permission to use some of the images, and deciding on our final album title, he simply made the drafts using literal titles.

We asked a group of our classmates to watch and comment on our video during one Media lesson. There were comments that the video was thought provoking, and that the ending was quite powerful. However, the ending was also said to be unclear. The main cirticisms were of the section with our main character walking towards the train platform as being too long, although the effect we put on to enhance the connotation of him being drunk was complimented as being effective. The other major criticism was of a filming error, when during the first section of the video, Paul is clearly seen putting his thumb over the mouth of a bottle before taking it back to drink from it. This was the worst filming error we made, but we unfortunately noticed too late into the editing process to go back and re-film this segment.

Album Cover Ideas

While thinking about our album covers, it became clear that due to Spy Catcher's commitments to recording their upcoming album, they would not be touring soon, and thus we would not have the option of having an artist photo on our album's front cover. However, this did not present a problem, as we had already been thinking that our album may be more suited to a cover without an artist picture, as this seemed to be a common option in our chosen genre of music. We saved a collection of album covers which displayed this fact to use as inspiration for ideas. A selection of these covers which closely inspired our final choices included:

Every Avenue - Picture Perfect
























Green Day - American Idiot
























Biffy Clyro - Only Revolutions
























You Me At Six - Hold Me Down

Final Video