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.