Daniel Stephen evaluation writing

Q3 media evaluation

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

I think that in our music video we used a number of different conventions of media for example we like the bright colour's the band wear in contrast to the black and white background that they are performing in, the video of “misery business” (2007) by Paramore . Also a big contrast is the dark room of the performance to the very light high school setting which makes the cuts seem very distinctive and then the merge of the band and the characters at the end acts at the end of the narrative and ends the video its self very well. So we took these ideas in our video the graffiti and the mix of dark and light. We wanted to keep to the genre of rock and punk though the whole video so another video we took inspiration from was “Sk8er boi” (2002) by Avril Lavigne with how she moves in her video. And trying to keep with the rock theme when if came to costume we had Alphie in very vibrant colours and black to bring across the rocky theme. We thought that using mainly hand held camera shots would also show the punk rock theme because it brings u a lot more freedom to move, again like in Avril Lavigne’s “sk8er boi” the way she moves in the video the “head banding” kind of movement. And also one of the conventions we used was a visual lyrical link which is one of the six points that Andrew Goodwin tells us in his book “dancing in the distraction factory” (1992) which is for example in the lyric when the word “touch” comes up Alphie touches her face. And when the lyrics “somewhere to hide” come up her body language suggests that she wants to hide.

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

I think that the way our three pieces when together the music video, the digi pack and the magazine advert went well together. I think that what makes them work so well is the strong theme of the graffiti kept the three of them together if gives the three pieces something to connect with each other. And our stencil of the band name “garbage” we have on all three pieces so that you can make the link between them with the name.




3) What have you learned from your audience feedback?

The feedback from our rough cut version of our video was very helpful in the finishing of the final piece, the feedback was mostly about our good locations and good variety of shots along with the strength of our lip syncing but the main thing people said was wrong with it was that video was a bit repetitive at times and that the video needed finishing. So then we set about finished our music video and the feedback we got back was again mostly positive with some constructive criticism. Some of the things said on facebook were that we had picked a good location, that our choice of shots was strong, that we had good mise-en-scene and that the lip syncing of our video was very good. The constructive criticism we got from facebook was that Alphie needed to put more energy into performance and that there weren’t enough effects.


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

In the making of our music video we used a variety of different technologies. The first one being youtube which we used to find and watch other music videos that we could take ideas form and be inspired by. And we used blogger to log the videos we liked about why. Then its was time to get a camera out and get some footage of our own, once we had some we uploaded it onto Apples final cut to edit the footage together to create the rough cut and eventually the final piece. As for our digi pack and magazine advent we took some still images from the footage we had on final cut and transferred them over to photoshop were we used the tools and effects on there to create them. To get our feedback we used vimeo and facebook so that people could watch the video outside of our class room and write down that they think about our video. Then finally using the camera and final cut we made our evaluation video to explain we were try do to with our video.