Written Evaluation by Rebecca

(By Rebecca)

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

Before we began production on our media product, we wanted to do extensive research on existing music videos, particularly those within a similar genre to our song choice. This would both give us sources of inspiration and allow us to decide which conventions we would follow, and which we would challenge.

Our first step was to look at pre-existing official music videos for our chosen artist - William Control. His videos used some of the conventions mentioned by Andrew Goodwin in his Music Video Theory; there is focus on the artist as he lip syncs to the song and genre characteristics.
We also identified common imagery within his videos. William Control is known for his unique style of dress, often wearing Victorian inspired suits, which combined with his heavily tattooed appearance, creates a striking look.

We felt that his Beautiful Loser video was most effective, and noticed that on YouTube, it has the most views and positive feedback from fans. This influenced our decision not to use a linear narrative and instead create an atmosphere through the mis en scene, imagery and styling.

To get a wider range of inspiration, we selected other artists of a similar genre to look at - Nine Inch Nails, Joy Division, Placebo and Type O Negative. We were particularly inspired by the use of black and white and high contrast images within some of their videos.

Question 2 ; How have you ensured that the combination of your main product and ancillary texts are effective? 

Whilst creating our ancillary texts, we looked at both our music video and real examples of advertisements and CD packaging from William Control's previous releases. It was important to us that, when put together, our music video and ancillary texts had a cohesive look.

We first took note of common imagery within William Control's artwork, for example; Edwardian / Victorian patterns, clothing and furniture, dark make-up, focus on a singular person, dark colouring and texture over the photographs.

Then we thought of the imagery within our music video; focus on our main character, fast moving images, movement of the body, black and white and text.

We tried to combine the style of William Control's previous artwork with imagery and themes from our music video to ensure that all of our media products combined effectively and were still relevant to our chosen artist and target audience.

To further appeal to our target audience, we once again looked at the work of other artists within this genre. This would enable us to pick up on and use conventions that our audience would be familiar with.

An example of album artwork that inspired us was from Placebo's 'Meds' album. The minimal background, focus on a singular figure and contrasting coloured text made for an incredibly effective CD packaging design. We took inspiration from their designer Alex Cowper's blurred portraiture as we felt it conveyed a similar mood as our music video and fit the genre better than a more conventional portrait photograph.

William Control's artwork for Hate Culture was also an influence as we particularly liked it's scratchy texture, placement of text and use of a high contrast image.

We had thought about making our poster and CD packaging black and white, as it would have followed on from our music video. However it wasn't as striking as the colour versions, so instead we desaturated particular areas, and used a black background with contrasting white text. This replicated the mood of black and white, whilst allowing us to use colours.

For Nine Inch Nail's 'We're In This Together Now' shadows are used to a great effect - they enhance the sense of tension, paranoia and mass panic and the black and white creates a closeness that nay otherwise be lost due to the scale of the images.
Joy Division's 'Atmosphere' was comprised of clips of seemingly unrelated scenes, with the use of black and white making them cohesive and encouraging the audience to think about connotated meanings.
Type O Negative's 'Black No.1'
All of these effects are some of the ones that we were striving to achieve in our video, therefore solidifying our decision to use black and white.

Finally, we knew that the main character in our video would be female, leading us to look at the representations of women in music videos. We looked at a few of today's most popular music videos and noticed some overriding themes. In the videos of male artists
This brings to mind feminist theory and the idea of 'male gaze'.

We wanted to challenge the objectification of women in music videos - not by covering them up, but by making clear to the audience that the video was from the women's point of view, and that the body shots were neither sexualised or toned down, but depicted as 'real'.

Question 3; What kinds of audience feedback did you seek for your product and what things did you learn from this?

Audience feedback was extremely important to us through the process of creating our music video, CD packaging and poster advertisement. It helped us to make creative decisions, to steer us in the right direction and to improve on our work as we went along. It also ensured that the products we created appealed to the right audience, and did so effectively.

One example of how we gathered audience feedback was for the first draft of our music video. We uploaded the draft onto YouTube, then shared it on Facebook and asked for feedback. The comments we received both gave us confidence in some of the choices we made, for example, the inclusion of particular shots and the fast paced opening, and made us rethink some other things, for example the syncing, length of each shot and the ending.

We also used social networking sites to gather feedback on our three drafts of our poster advertisements to help us to decide on which one was most effective. This audience input was invaluable to us, as it can become difficult to make an impartial decision on something you have worked on yourself!

Social networks are incredibly useful in gathering audience feedback as you can target particular groups of people whose opinion would be most invaluable, for example; fans of William Control, fans of the genre and people within our target age range. It allows you to easily contact many people at once, internationally and without any expense.

Another great thing about them is how easy it makes it for the audience to leave their feedback, for example through a comments section or through Facebook messaging. This makes people more likely to want to have their say and respond, and we can also reply with more questions if necessary.

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

Most of our research was done using internet sites to gather information.Youtube is by far the biggest library of music videos, both from the current charts, and from various past decades. Tumblr is a great place to engage with fans of a particular artist. Twitter allows you to keep up to date with trends within music, and with William Control's latest releases. It also helps us to pick up on the fan response. Google is the starting point for research, it's ability to find information on a particular topic is second to none.

The technology we chose to record our video footage was important to ensure that our final product would be of the highest standard, and of the best video quality. It was also important that it included features that would allow us to achieve all of the shots and effects we had planned. We tested out several cameras; HTC Desire S Smartphone Camera, Samsung Digital Camera, Kodak Flip Camera and a Panasonic HD Camcorder. You can see the variety of cameras in our test shoot video. Eventually, we chose to use the Panasonic HD Camcorder, because it allowed us to record HD video onto a memory card, and it had very fast acting focusing and a very decent optical zoom. All of these features were easy to use and enhanced the level of professionalism in our footage.

 We used a portable hard drive to transport our work between different computers and from PC to Mac. This allowed us to use the full range of software that was available to us. It also meant that we could complete work from any location, and bring it back to the Mac computer that we were using for our main video and sound edit.

We used a wide variety of computer software during the post-production stage of our music video and during the creation of our ancillary products. We used both iMovie and Sony Vegas Studio to do our video editing, this meant that we had a full range of effects and features. We were familiar with both of these programs from our AS work, therefore were confident at using them from the start, saving us a lot of time!

Photoshop was essential at each stage of our project. We used it to create a storyboard that was easily rearranged, which allowed us to think more creatively in our planning stage. It was also the main software we used in the transformation our photos from our shoot into our final ancillary products.

As we are both quite camera shy, we decided to create a narrated evaluation video.We used built in sound recorders on our PC and smartphone to record our narration, then transferred these recordings into Sony Vegas video editing software. I chose to use Sony Vegas rather than iMovie as I feel that it has better precision editing features and it's multiple track layout is very useful when importing various kinds of media at the same time.

Making an evaluation video rather than keeping our evaluation is essay for takes more time, however it produces a much more engaging and entertaining evaluation.