Evaluation: Question 4

How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
During our construction and research stage one of the most important media platforms for us to use was SurveyMonkey, as this was the major way in which we were able to understand the audience for which we were creating our media product. We used it to also determine how we should create our final music video, though asking questions that related to style and genre, that would help to inspire our video. In these earlier stages it was important to utilise social networks, such as Facebook, so that we could get as much feedback from our surveys as possible.

Also important in these beginning stages was obviously Google and YouTube. allowing us to research even further the genre that we were focusing on, the specific bands that we were focusing on or, in the case of Flyleaf, creating our product for. We were also able to research album artwork, genre conventions, audience conventions, audience characteristics, and various other things that really benefited us in the creation of our media product.

http://blogs.grammar.sch.gg/00laner01/

This is a link to a previous students blog whom we looked at to help us create a flowing and impressive blog. It also helped us to understand how to format our blog and has especially helped during the evaluation process.

During our filming process we obviously used a camera and tripod. We utilised these tools by experimenting with camera angles and shots, including the shakeycam technique that features at the end of a video, to represent the madness that our Alice character was experiencing. We used the tripod to mainly get good height on some of the shots, and also to keep the camera steady when doing our spinning shots that appeared in our video.

After we had filmed all the shots for our video we needed to edit them all together. For this we used PremierPro, which allowed us to not only place the shots together in a flowing video form, but also edit the colouration in the shots, the speed of some of them, and we were even able to reverse some of the shots in order to create a warped and unusual feeling within the video.

We also used photoshop to create our digipack and poster.

All these elements of media technology have converged together to create our media product and  convey to our target audience either everything that they stated they enjoyed during our survey, or the conventions and characteristics that we found when researching the genre and the surrounding sub-genres.

Evaluation: Question 3

I chose to do this question through a Pinterest page. However due to the fact that to view a Pinterest page you require a login, i have taken screenshots of my page and placed them here. Below is the link to the Pinterest page as well.

https://uk.pinterest.com/egeddesmcclure/media-evaluation/

Evaluation: Question 2

Evaluation question 2 from EirinnGM

Evaluation: Question 1

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

1.The fact that our music video is entirely based around a narrative could be unconventional for the genre. Throughout the post grunge genre and the music videos that we analysed at the beginning of our course, all had some element of performance. However we decided to develop the convention of many post grunge music videos using both narrative and performance elements, and instead decided to do an entirely narrative based video.
2.Andrew Goodwin identifies intertetxual references as one of the key elements of music videos. Our product definitely uses this convention as our music video was inspired by Alice in Wonderland.

3. I think that the fact our video, and even our advert and digipack only includes female characters/actors challenges the conventions of modern music videos. it is typical nowadays for narrative music videos to contain at least one male character, and by having all actors included in our be female means that we have gone against the convention of the industry. As well as this, we have tries to avoid the idea of the 'male gaze'. Over-sexualising of women in all forms of media is something that people have now come to accept, however instead of catering to the male gaze we instead focused on creating a product that would appeal to fans of the band and the genre. Our music video embodies David Gauntletts second theory of 'Girl Power', due to the fact that we specifically chose bands with female leads and then chose to only include female characters in our video.

4.In many music videos colour effects and correcting techniques are used to create a more impressive, artful and professional looking video. We definitely used this convention when editing, due to the fact that we wanted to create a very saturated and in some areas particularly moody tone.
5. As mentioned above we used colour editing techniques on our video, which we were initially inspired to do by video we studied earlier on in the project. Specifically. Paramores 'Brick by Boring Brick' which is heavily edited to give the illusion of hallucination. However instead of making things brighter and more saturated as they did in that video, we went the other way and instead created a darker and creepier colour effect as the video progressed.
6. The clothing that we used in our video challenged the conventions of our chosen genre, by being costumes. They were all different and bright, over exaggerated to fit the theme of our video. Typically in the post grunge genre the clothing is dark and plain, so as to not draw to much attention to it, However the colours used in the costumes from our video were very important as specific colours in specific shots actually influenced our choice of colour effect. For example, in shots where in Faith appeared in her blue dress we applied a blue effect so as to bring out the brightness in the dress with the contrast of the darker forest background.

7.We filmed some close up shots, usually focusing on a particular part of the face of whichever character was in shot, and this is an example of us developing the convention of close up shots as typically they are used in post grunge videos to focus on the instruments or actual members of the band.

8.The location we chose is unconventional for our genre, as many videos from the post grunge genre, due to them being heavily performance based are filmed in a studio. We however chose to film our in a forest/lake location, challenging the existing conventions.

9.Our use of spinning camera shots is one we developed from the genre and utilised to further enhance the idea and theme of hallucination.

Video

The final cut of our music video.

Digipack

   Our Final digipack design.

     

Poster

  

Final poster design for our media product.