My Evluation- part 1

In this evaluation I will be writing about the journey of the making of my music video, with theory. I will explain the usage of props and ideas, and how they fit into what the target audience may want to see when watching a music video. How effective our music video is in terms of how my digipack and poster work/reflect upon our music video, and how successful the whole project was in terms of promoting a single and music video to the audience. I will also give in detail how effect the audience feedback was. Finally I will explain the poor and great use of the media technologies I have used through out the process, for example Internet recourse's, mobile phone technologies, and video editing software.


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


The band that we have produced over this period of a time is called 'Boyz with Bowz' they are a unique indie boy band, the song that they have released is called 'Baggy Trousers.' The reason why we chose to call the band Boyz with Bowz is because it stands out, and also has a completely different meaning to other band names in the media industry.

In our music video I feel we express a use of media texts to our target audience, and communicate this through forms and conventions, we do this by representing ideas through props, costumes, lighting, characters, and location in the music video. I will now give examples for each of these media forms.


An example for props that i will use to analyse is the balloons that we used for the studio scene, the reason i am using this as an example is because it was an idea we had from the beginning. We decided to use balloons because they represent everything that the band stand for, they are bright light hearted and cheerful, they are used at parties, and represent the idea of having fun that is what indie bands are all about.


Costumes are the key characteristic in the music video because they create a character for each of the band members, and can form a theme for fans to follow when going to see the band at gigs, the feathers on the shirt and the bright coloured bows clash so much that it works, i feel that the idea of this theme relates to many other boy bands; the reason for this is because all bands have a theme that when fans go to gigs they will follow. And the idea of bows is recognisable and fun!


The characters are an obvious relation to indie boy bands, they are all cheerful and not so much corny like other band you will come across for example JLS. Each of the characters have a different characteristic that stands out, this is shown through out the music video.


The last ingredient i would like to add to this question is location, location is really important and we have used three different locations. One of which is the park, the use of the park creates an unstagged effect, as well as a childish and immature theme for example in the park they go on the swing glide through a slide and dance around and mess around, this is not something that you could see a pop boy band do, this park scene insures that their music video does not look staged which reflects on most boy bands that ensure that their music videos do not look corny or over acted, and if they are then they need to be humorous. This brings me to the first scene of the music video, which is in a house this scenes narrative is a nightmare that one of the boy band member has.
We expanded and challenged our music video by places some effect in appropriate places of the music video, the only effect we used was speed. Overall i think we have used good forms of media texts towards our target audience, that reflect on indie bands in their limit.

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

Consider your use of the following:

For the final part of the evaluation I am going to explain how i used new media technoligies in the construction, research, planning, and evaluation. And how effective they were in terms of giving my information. Our work is presented on blogger so i had used blogger a huge percentage of the time when writing up my evidence of all the stages of the portfolio.

Youtube was used on many occasions because i had to look up similar artists to the band i was constructing for my portfolio. i also had to analyze music video of different genders, this is the best part of planning as i gain a new understanding of different media materials in the media world, for example i used music videos such as 'candy shop by 5 cent' amongst other love songs and indie tunes. When coming up with the ideas for the music video and constructing a story board this site was used to listen to the music before pasting onto our mp3 and cd.

Google was another source used as i was using this site when it came to planning and research because it gave me the clear identity of what was needed in music videos that i was planning to make such as indie codes and conventions.

The video editing software was new to me as i was only used to using the i-movie as it was simple, but after being told how to use the basics of the final cut pro i started to get the hang of it and using more than just cut and play buttons i became to discover the effects and new ideas that could be included in my music video. I was always on the final cut pro through out all my free time to make everything perfect.

The photo editing software i used was photoshop, it is a simple technology to use. But also makes photos and fonts look professional. photoshop is my favorite computer application as well as final cut pro, because i know how to use it properly and the posters and digipak always end up looking amazing. In photoshop you can change the colors of everything erase different shapes and background by just one click.

In the making of the music video the boys in the band didn't know the words to the song sung by madness, probably because it was an old song written by an old band not known to this day of age by young students. So i had to play the lyrics i wanted sung by the band over and over again, in the end it did work but we sang the words with the character so he had more confidence and got the lines write, we found that this was a good technique because the boys gained more confident and had more of a laugh in the production of it.

3. What have you learned from your audience feedback?

When given audience feedback it is a extremely good idea to respond to the feedback by changing the ideas that are expressed to need to be changed. In our case it was good to get feed back from that age group because they were our target audience in the first place. The age range started from the age of 14 up to the ages of 30 or 40,     depending on the character listening to the music. The feedback that was shared with us was given by a group of students studying media, they are around the age of 17 to 18, because of the maturity we notified the feedback given.

The feedback had improved our music video suddenly, as i was not too sure about the ending of the music video because it had too many shots and didnt end too smoothly. So the feedback helped me identify the ways in which i could improve the ending of the music video, which was to erase the last too shots of the band, meaning that the first character in the music video was the last.

One of the feedback comments was that the lighting in one of the scenes was too strong leaving shadows, in which she did not agree with but the other students in the class disagreed with this comment made and said that the lighting worked as the shadows were clearly noticed and had a good effect.

The audience when asked if they thought the concept and acting in the music video worked, had said that the music video worked on so many levels, when answering this question one person had said that the idea of including an humorous acting scene at the beginning followed by an unstaged performance for the rest of the music video worked wonders. This was the best positive feedback we gained because it was an aim to make it look unstaged yet humorous.

Finally the comments on the editing of the music video was really positive the audience had said that the use of speeding up the music video at certain times of the music video was rely effective and went well with the music, one feedback quote also said that the music video shots were good as they looked unstaged and we had many different angles and lengths. 

If i was to comment on my own music video, digipack and poster. I would have said similar feedback about the products. I would say that the music video looked unstaged and had some very humorous shots in it, i would also say that the editing and effects worked well. But i found that the images used on the poster and digipak may have needed to been taken by a professional camera, so that they would look better, and not cut from shots of the music video. I would also say that the products introduced the band to their audience really well and gave some very good codes and conventions. 

2. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

I am now going to discuss how effective the digipak, poster and music video work together, i will compare all the products to each over and identify the similarities that are shared upon each product. 

The digipak and poster link together as they are both sticking to a pattern. Both the poster and digipak are colorful, relating to the bows in the music video. They both stick to the pop art style, keeping to the bows.

Each bow the characters wear are different colors, creating a fashion of their own so that their fans can follow it through and wear the colored bows to their gigs. The colors of the bows are pasted on the digipak and poster , creating a theme and relationship between the advertisements and music video.

Our products of advertisements achieve their aim to promote the music video and band by introducing the new band to the media world by involving images of the band together in an unstagged format, relating to the music video, in the music video it was tasked to make it look as natural as possible, so ideally we had to keep the digipak and poster similar to this style.

The fonts that are repeated on the cd digipak and the poster is a comic themed font that kinda relates to the idea represented in the music video as the beginning of the music video is about a dream creating a humorous idea, we wanted the poster and digipak to have a clip of this, which was pasted on the back cover of the CD album which was the character of the mum played by Jamie.

I feel the images are recognizable ecpesciallydidgipak due to the pop-art theme that stands out to the audience.

Latest problem

After spending alot of time to try and make my digipack perfect, i realised that other members of a2 media were doing different to me, i forgot to put disk desgin on the pack, and just placed the background, and when i went to create this it wouldnt let me.

Another problem is i didnt use my common sense and realise that rough trade and Song bgm are two completely different record labels, so i need to go back and change that.

Also i missed out the terms and conditions (what i call it) so i need to change that.

ideas for promotion

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Internet-

 Everyone uses the internet in this decade, because it has every answer to any question and can help us gain all the oppertunities. This means only one thing, that it could possibly be the best way to promote our band, and new release, as they can buy it through itunes and other sites.

The ways inwhich we could promote through the interent, is to put banners up on sites that audiences visit, we could also input interviews on youtube, to make the band look as exclusive as possible.



Facebook/social networks- this is always a good way to promote singles and realeses as people tend to be living on social networks expesially our target audience.

posters- posters to be pasted up almost everywhere, catching everyones eye.

tv- adverts, interviews and previews. TV is seen by all eyes.

location

Because we had to change our plan, we needed to change our location...

location 1- is the same as our original plan, which was to film in a white room, and put balloons in it. This is what we will label the 'studio'.

location 2- in the park, this is a scene where the lads will be having fun, hopefully giving an unstagged effect.

location 3- in a house- this is where the scene will be where nik has a night mare