Evaluation draft

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

Our genre of our product was hip hop, typically conventions of hip hop videos are focusing on the need to sell the artist. A video we analised was "Love the way you lie". In this music video this convention is used throughout, Eminem's video used parallel editing in the form that there was a present and a past from of Eminem the narrator (present) sings the chorus's along with Rhianna and the character from the story line (past Eminem) this enables him to gather as much screen as he can selling himself as the artist. Another convention is a the lyrics match the visuals. This is typically used to tell a story etc, in our music video we did this by pretending to smoke drugs as this references to drugs is in the song also we matched "looking on the internet looking for class's" visually along side the lyrics. We also found that parallel editing is used in many hip hop/rap music videos this gives them a chance to tell a story along side the lyrics but yet still give the artist the maximum amount of screen time as possible meeting the Goodwin's points. Voyeurism was kept to the bare minimum as we found inappropriate in our style of song, however typically this genre is well known to use voyeurism as a key point in the music video with lyrics based around them. So in this we found ourselves challenging the typical convention. Visual music was also a key part in many hip hop/rap music videos this also came into our video on many of our transitions and and editing to the beat. altogether I found we met typical conventions of hip hop videos although in some aspects such as voyeurism we did not find it as appropriate.

2) How effective is the combination of your Main Product and Ancillary texts?

Our aim was to create three products a music video, a digipack and a magazine advert we tried to bring them all together as one product with obvious selling techniques such as standing out from the shelves. Our promotional package links in with each other with the background from one of our scenes is our front cover for the digipack and magazine article. This matches colouring and the artist (hakan) Kanye West this would bring in the fans and draw attention to the products. The scene from the music video was a great peice of graphiti we found in camgridge using good eye cathing colours doing the job for us. But most importantly it was a very typical location for a hip hop genre again bringing hip hop fans attention to our product. We found that we achieved this well. we rated our product to a 15 as off the type of language and drug references in the song this was a slight hinderance as we had to try and keep our ancillary products clean so they were consumer friendly. The use of bright colours such as luminous greens and the graphiti background helped the product leap off the shelves.

3) What have you learned from audience feedback?

Our feedback played a key part in our media product. However our mid way rough cut feedback was not so helpful as the unfinished product was put to our peers we knew what we need to add and do as well as anyone else. Therefore we found the feedback was mostly obvious to us and wasn't really very constructive in our eyes. Although after this once we were coming to the end of the editing process we could see the style of song was restricting our editing variations and showing off skills we put this to our teacher which brought in the head of media Tanya we discussed our pro duct after viewing and there we were able to highlight some key issues which enabled us to let the sequence flow and not so dull with lots of jumping shots and editing to the beat we were able to get the storyline across in a sensible fashion without becoming dull or unstructured. Whereas class feedback at that early stage we found was more of a hindrance than helpful. We also created questionnaires and out them to our target audience (our age group with similar tastes) this was more convenient giving us some certain points to clean up and other things they found unnecessary. Altogether we found a more expert opinion was necessary at key stages of our editing process although our peers was also interesting to hear as they were the target audience.

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

Organisation in the planning and development stages was key using the 'blogger.com' helped us arganise and keep safe all of our work along side research on the internet this was the perfect interface to keep our planning as oposed to hand writing. For the editing process Final Cut Express was the software we developed our skills on. This program had been used before, for other projects although our skills were still limited. We found youtube tutorials were useful when we wanted to learn a new editing technique to seperate our work from others. We learnt to use new transitions and editing on the beat was essential in our music video. There was also times where we resorted to asking the teacher how to pull off certain effects such as when saul was lying on the bed with clara as she fades away. This was performed using two shots one with clara and saul on the bed and then another with saul in the exact same position but without clara we then faded the two shots together. This gave us a very effective clip that gave the impression of special effects! Photoshop for the ancillary tasks was at the same sort of stage as final cut as we had used it before but finished more confident on the programs that before the project. We also used youtube to find out how to put the text behind the head of our artist.(http://www.flickr.com/photos/saul_blake/5220648770/in/photostream/) this also helped give a more professional effect. Overall I found that we gained much more skill and confidence on the software.