Connor Banks - Final Evaluation

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

When researching music videos we gained inspiration from Madonna's 'Hung Up' and the continuous use of a boom box throughout every location and clip. The same boom box would be seen in different locations and with different people and we wanted to highlight this in our product.

 We also looked at Nickleback's 'Rockstar' music video. From this we saw different social groups and types of character lip syncing the song. There was also a recurring character who was cut to every so often in the video. We decided would be the artist for our video as the audience can take refuge and confidence in the recurring character every time they appear on screen. We found this quite effective and took on board some of the aspects that were seen in 'Hung Up' in relation to 'Rockstar'. We wanted to demonstrate this in our video as we could see that including these different social groups involved the audience more and gave us a change to successfully convey our target audience through the video.
Our video itself develops the revival of the 80's pop genre and adds a new quirk to the fun and colourful electric pop genre. We wanted to exploit the need to sell the artist as much as possible through colourful backgrounds and visual/lyrics with the use of the phone hand signal. We wanted to convey these characteristics appropriately and approximately in order to establish a strong link between artist and audience.

We looked at digipaks and magazine adverts for David Bowie and Madonna, and decided that we wanted to mimic the eccentric and voyeristic style of marketing they had produced. As well as showcasing the 80's genre again by linking generations, we also manage to create a new, vibrant and colourful piece that highlights the artists persona and diva image, much like the talents of Madonna and David Bowie.

How effective is the combination of your main products and ancillary texts?

All three parts of our promo package work together effectively mostly through the originality and concept for the package. Our concept itself was to attract a variety of audiences and social groups making our target audience as vast as possible. We wanted to achieve a new and original look in our package, much like the styles in the current, popular music industry. We achieved originality through the artists eccentric clothing and quirky performance style, creating a new, vibrant and fun image to attract the young, trend-driven target audience.

What have you learnt from your audience feedback? 

Upon receiving feedback for our rough cut version of the video, we were mostly pleased with the results. The majority of feedback being positive with a few minor details to improve on. It was said that the variation, timing and pulsing of shots and cuts made the video very engaging and desirable to watch. The video was said to have a 'good feel' to it and that this element never wore off or became boring. Some negative feedback included tweaking the coloured backgrounds to a complete block colour and making sure that all the clips were in sync with the music. Feedback from staff and teachers was mostly positive for the same reasons. However they suggested exploiting more footage of the artist as the performance from the artist was so strong and captivating for the audience.

Feedback on our final piece also highlighted a few issues. The transitions between shots could've been much more eccentric and fun to fit in with the atmosphere of the video. It was also said that it would make the video more interesting.  Positive feedback included the main singer singing to the camera constantly. It was noted also that the female character syncing the dialogue in the middle of the song made the video much more amusing.

Feedback on our digipak and magazine advert suggested that we should exploit more of the artist, seeing as though we did most of that in the video. A simple visual metaphor for a product wasn't as engaging and didn't showcase the continuity of the promo package as a whole. We decided to place large scale images of the artist on both of the products to link the video with them. The artist can also be seen performing the phone 'Call Me Up' hand signal and holding the rubber duck, both of which are seen in the video.

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

We used a varied amount of technology in creating the video, some being basic and some being quite complex and alien to us which proved a challenge at some points in the construction of the product. We were able to work with Final Cut which is a program we in the group are all familiar with.  We were introduced into new techniques such as fading the video sharply to make it pulse and also animating the clip so it shifts across the screen. I these techniques proved effective with the timing and editing of the video.


We were also introduced to the green screen techniques we had to learn, such as finding the right chromer key to match the colour of the green screen wall. It was a very tedious process making sure that there were no freckles of green on the shot however the effort and time payed off when we completed the video to good quality. Before filming we practiced this using various location images as our background.

Our biggest challenge was working with Photoshop to create our digipak. The ideas we had planned for the digipak could not be completed due to our general lack of knowledge on how to use Photoshop. It proved more time consuming and we had to rethink the image we wanted the digipak to posses.

We used a video camera and still image camera to capture footage to be edited or modified for both our music video and digipak. This proved extremely useful when we felt we didn't have enough footage as we could very quickly film and upload in a fast and productive amount of time. We also found this useful when we had trouble with Photoshop as we were able to go to the studio and take back-up pictures with the still image camera.

We also used Blogger to keep track of progress and return to previous moments of inspiration if we needed to, which proved very useful when we had to rethink ideas for our digipak.