Ashley Andrews - Individual Media Evaluation

1) In what ways does your Media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
From the beginning of this project, we have gone against conventions to make something that was unique and different. When we saw ‘try life in another language’, where they use animated heads with real footage, we immediately knew that this is what we wanted to do for our music video.

2) How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
I feel that the continuity of style between the music video, digi-pack and magazine advert is strong with clear links between all three products and ancillary texts. We have a black and white theme that runs throughout our entire project. The reason for this is because it goes well with the animation. And that is another thing that runs throughout our project, the animation. We animated the heads of the band members for a surreal and quirky look.

3) What have you learnt from your audience feed back?
Our audience feedback has been invaluable to us because it is them who has to like our products and not us. Using our audience feedback, we improved our main product and ancillary texts to their full potential.
The feedback that we received was from media teachers and fellow media students who where doing the same project. So the feedback was honest, supportive and professional. The feedback we most appreciated was constructive criticism because we then used this to improve our main product and ancillary texts.
For our main product we got feedback at various stages of the project. This is important because we could act upon our audiences comments and improve our music video. We first got feedback in the research and planning stages of the project. Here are some comments we received;
‘Good introduction’
‘This is a really good blog with lots of research into similar products.’
‘It is clear that you have a solid idea of style.’
‘influences shown well’
‘good use of more ideas’
‘could be hard to deliver’
‘nice mood board’
‘Theme and ideas easy to understand’
‘micro + macro elements good idea and very clear’
‘Emailing band (Did they reply?)’
Most comments were positive which gave us a real good moral boost. The one comment we picked up on was, ‘could be hard to deliver’. That is because the animation would be hard to put on footage and it would be very time consuming but because of this comment we decided that we were going to commit to this project.
The next feedback we received was after we made our rough cut. The main comments was that it didn’t look even half as finished. We understood this and worked harder to get it finished on time. There were some good comments which were that the black and white theme worked well with the animation.
The last feedback we received for the music video was when we had finished the video. Here are some comments;
‘the edge sketchy look is good and matched the music.’
‘drawings were a good quality and added a professional look to it.’
‘Editing and fantasy elements was good and over all idea was interesting and quite unique.’
I am glad that most people liked and enjoyed it but there were some constructive criticism which was that the animation was not on the heads all of the time. If we had more time and longer to do this project, a lot more time would have been spent on the editing and animation part of the music video. But nonetheless I am still proud and satisfied with the outcome of the music video we have produced.
We also received feedback for our ancillary texts and here are some comments;
‘Writing is hard to read because of the background’
‘Liked the rating’
‘The black and white relates well to the video’
‘Images on the back work well as they relate to video’
‘Lacking some information such as production logo’
‘Just screen grabs from that video even though it contains other videos’
‘The speech bubble is a good idea’
These were some good feedback but if we had longer to complete these ancillary texts then more could have been done to make them the best we could.

4) How did you use new Media technology in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
The advantage of internet use in this project has helped us immensely. In the research and planning stages of this project we used youtube.com a lot to look at similar music videos to help give us inspiration. Without youtube.com we would not of discovered this brilliant video, ‘try life in another language’;

This is the video that started it all. After viewing it we knew that we wanted to do something similar. Other videos that helped our research were;
Gorillaz - Dirt Harry
Example - Watch the Sun come up
Gorillaz - Clint Eastwood
Eminem -
Kid Cudi - Day ‘n’ Night
Raveonettes - sound of colour
All of these music videos are on youtube.com. They all feature animation mixed with real footage and because this was our idea for our music video, it helped us get more ideas.
When planning when to shoot we used Google maps to help organize where and when we needed to meet up to film.
Final cut editing software really helped us with what we wanted to do with our music video. Most of the project has been spent on editing our video. To get the black and white theme for our music video, we desaturated the video and then played around with the brightness and contrast to get the right look that we wanted. We added a few effects aswell, for example, when the band members are ‘jumping’ backwards onto high walls, all we did was reverse the footage and slow it down. The animation was the hardest part. Once the drawings were on paper we would upload them onto our Apple Mac and edit them on Photoshop. The we converted the animation into a PNG file which was then opened on final cut. It was easy enough putting the animated head on the footage but every time the human head moved, the animation needed to be cut and moved. This was very time consuming. 10 seconds of footage took 30 minutes of editing.
Photoshop was used in the making of our ancillary texts. The magazine advert and digi-pack looked great because of this software.