Our Evaluation

In the evaluation of our project we have to make a video answering four questions to do with the whole project we have completed. These questions are -

Q1: In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Q2: How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

Q3: What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Q4: How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Becca has started to draft some answers to these questions which we will use as the starting point for the production and scripting of our evaluation. Here are some our notes -

Q1: In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

	Use	Develop	Challenge
Music Video	·          Close up shots of the singer and of the instruments at key parts in the lyrics and certain beats of the song ·          Close ups of the actors in the narrative when emotion is shown ·          The pace of the editing always matches the song and changes on a beat ·          Mike Posner club scene – red lighting, slow motion editing ·          Eminem strangle scene – brutal and scary with her disappearing at the end with him being alone ·          Contrast between light band shots and dark and light narrative shots linking in with the binary opposites theory by Claude Levi-Strauss ·          Ferdinand de Saussure – the signifier and signified through the lipstick, Laura’s clothing and the smashed mirror ·          Key moments on a beat – fast paced bit of the song and the glass bottle smashes exactly on a beat from 2 angles	·          Mike Posner – slow motion club scenes – we added the sound of tinnitus on top of this to increase the effect ·          A lot of the music videos we have looked at don’t usually start with an establishing shot, but some do (Paramore, Now) so we have decided to develop this and create an establishing shot without any characters or band members in it, just a location ·          A lot of our narrative footage is very dark in order to represent the dark and sinister feel behind our narrative but videos that we have watched don’t normally have it quite as dark as we do but we think ours is much more effective ·          Laura Mulvey – Visual Pleasure and the Male Gaze – Laura is presented as powerful not passive. However, she is presented as an object of male sexual desire and Orrin does have ‘the bearer of the look’ throughout the video hence why he keeps going back to the drugs	·          Stereotypical all male band ·          Andrew Goodwin feminism – presents women as voyeuristic – Laura is powerful ·          Black screens for a beat right at the beginning of the video ·          The music videos we have looked don’t usually have shots that are as far away from the band as some of ours are, but we have used this as an establishing set of shots for the band shot location ·          Another thing we noticed when analysing videos is that the band members are normally in the narrative in some way and this is something that we haven’t done, we have separate actors to our band members (Paramore, 30 Seconds to Mars etc.) ·          Using an outdoor location for the band shots in such bad weather isn’t something we have really seen done either, they are all normally on a stage or in some fancy room that has some link to the narrative – dark and dingy
Digipak	·          Not having the band on the front cover of the digipak and having something that relates to the key theme of the album instead ·          Including the advertising for the deluxe features that come as a result of it being a digipak ·          Using an image on the back cover that has some space that is clearly suitable for the track list to be placed there	·          A lot of examples we have looked at don’t include the band at all in the digipak but some do, to develop this we have decided to include an edgy image of our band on the inside left cover of the digipak to clearly state the identity of the band somewhere on the digipak	·          Female band member is presented as being quite powerful and equal to the male band members – challenges Laura Mulvey as she is not meant to be sexualised and also challenges Andrew Goodwin as she is not presented as voyeuristic or passive ·          A lot of the examples we have looked at have not numbered the track list – we have decided to number ours to make it clear to the consumer exactly how many tracks and features are on the album
Advert	·          Including key pieces of information about the item that the advert is selling ·          Including an image of the band as the main image on the advert to clearly show who and what is being advertised. ·          Including social media logos and website URLs to inform the consumer about how they can follow the band and keep up to date ·          Including the disclaimer notice at the bottom	·          Having the band on the advert is something that is sometimes done and other times isn’t and when they do have the band on the front, there is usually an interesting effect on the photo making it not so clear. We have developed this by using quite a normal image for our advert with no effects ·	·          Female band member is presented as being quite powerful and equal to the male band members – challenges Laura Mulvey as she is not meant to be sexualised and also challenges Andrew Goodwin as she is not presented as voyeuristic or passive ·          Not using the image as the whole background – using a black frame instead to create the contrast between dark and light.

Q2: How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

Digipak

·         Image of the smoke on the back of the digipack – links to the drug abuse used as a key feature of the narrative in the video. Orrin is pictured with a lighter which holds connotations of smoking etc.

·         Image of the legs standing on the hand in heels – links to the instability and the role of a powerful female that is featured in Laura in the video. Links to the fact that she has full control over him and he is much weaker than her when he is high on the drugs.

·         Image of the band in an edgy looking location on the inside left cover – this links to the band location in the video as well as linking to the edgy and dingy looking locations that we filmed in for both the narrative and the performance.

·         Image of the lips on the CD part – lips are red which links to the seduction and temptation involved in the narrative. Laura is also wearing red lipstick throughout the video which helps link the two products together.

·         Title ‘Temptress’ – links to the element of temptation that we have made very prominent in the video to help tell the story of how addicted and tempted Orrin is by Laura’s presence.

Advert

·         Image of the band in a dark location – links to all of the dark scenes that we have used in the narrative section of the music video. Complete blackness links really well to the really dark scenes that we have in the narrative.

·         Image of the digipak in the corner – links the product (digipak) to the advert for it showing the consumer exactly what is being advertised on the poster.

Q3: What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Video

·         We got some audience feedback about the song choice that we used right at the beginning of the process. We were stuck between our chosen song and Warriors by Imagine Dragons so we asked our target audience which one they preferred since the songs were of the same genre.

·         Rough Cut – once we handed in our rough cut we spoke to our target group and got them to answer some questions about our video at that stage to give us some specific feedback on what we could do to make our final cut even better.

·         When we re-filmed our performance footage after the rough cut, we were a bit unsure on the footage so we asked our target audience what they thought and this helped us make the decision that we should re-film it another time just to improve it even more. The feedback was very positive and everyone we asked said that it had improved, however we wanted to make it even better again.

Band Identity

·         We got some audience feedback about our band logo. We had 3 choices that we were undecided on so we went to our target audience and asked them which one they preferred out of the 3.

Q4: How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Research	·         Blogger was used to present all of the research we collected both secondary (from the internet) and primary (target market research).
Construction	·         Adobe Media Encoder was used to encode all of the footage to the correct file format – Microsoft AVI, PAL DV Widescreen. ·         Adobe Premier Pro was used to edit all of the footage together for the music video. ·         Adobe Photoshop was used to edit all of the photos used on the digipak and advert. ·         Adobe InDesign was used to create the layout of both the advert and the digipak.
Planning	·         Blogger was used for all of the planning that went on behind all 3 media products as we documented everything on there.
Evaluation	·         Adobe Media Encoder was used to encode all of the footage to the correct file format – Microsoft AVI, PAL DV Widescreen. ·         Adobe Premier Pro was used to edit all of the footage together to form the 20 minute evaluation in the form of DVD extras.