Jenna Silk Evaluation Writing

1) In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Our lyrics, music and visuals all fit with the punk rock genre as mentioned by Andrew Goodwin in “Dancing in the Distraction factory” (Rout ledge 1992) it was one of the six important conventions of a music video for the music, lyrics and visuals to link with each other. The music and lyrics are quite dark and heavy with a negative mood and emotion. The visuals relate to the punk rock band image, for example we set some of the video in front of a wall of graffiti of which we got the inspiration from the band Paramore in their video for “misery business” where the band is performing in a black room covered in white writing. We based our video around the performance of our lead singer in the video, as does Garbage’s music video for “I think I’m paranoid”. Also the motif of graffiti showing the lead spray painting over a stencil of the band name, Garbage. The songs tempo varies a lot so the locations contrast each other from the edgy graffiti wall to outside in some woods.
The lead girl, Alphie, is presented in a typical style for the rock genre of today. She is shown dancing and delivering the lyrics to the song “Silence is golden” in the settings and locations. Her look fits with this style as her clothes are in style but also quite rock chick.
All of this mise-en-scene is to adapt the artist and video to represent the genre of the music by using props like amplifiers and graffiti giving it a rock feel.
The camera shots are a mix of static and freehand. We found that the freehand camera shots worked better for our style of video in what we wanted to achieve as it allowed us to capture a large variety of angles, tilts, movement shots and tracking, for example in the woodland scenes where we follow and move around Alphie.
The lighting was kept natural as it was quite dark which fitted with the mood. Bright lighting would have contradicted with the down tone of the music, lyrics and genre. Green day’s video for “American idiot” uses quite dark and natural looking lighting and they also are a punk rock band so we kept the lighting this way to fit with the look of other bands and their videos of this genre.
Our digi-pack and magazine advert have a similar look to the album covers of the pop rock artist Avril Lavigne and two of her albums “Let it go” and “Under my skin”. They are both quite abstract and edgy featuring the lead singer.

2) How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
Our music video is very similar looking to our digi-pack and magazine advert. They all use the graffiti stencil of the band name, Garbage, to promote the band. Screen grabs were used on the digi-pack and magazine advert that were taken from the music video itself so it is all directly linked with the edgy, punk visual style with strong, dark effects on the images. We used an overlay of the graffiti wall with an opaque image of Alphie from the music video to make the poster look abstract and interesting.
Originally our idea was more complex and our digi-pack was going to have a jagged diagonal fold almost triangular shape as leaves and then the inner fold would have graffiti on a wall of the band name so it looked as if leaves were growing over the graffiti which would contrast as our video does with the graffiti shots and outdoor shots. This idea proved to be too ambitious for the time we had to achieve it.

3) What have you learnt from your audience feedback?
We got feedback on our rough cut firstly from our teacher. He said we needed to break up the performance throughout the video as it could get boring just having performance so he gave us the idea to spray paint our own bit of graffiti on the wall and film Alphie doing it throughout the video but not revealing it until the end of the song.
We also got feedback on the rough cut from our classmates. They listed the strengths of our video; “Locations. Nice shot variety. Good editing. Good emotion shown by character and good lip synching. Good camera shots in locations and nice mix of long shots, close ups, etc.” The areas for improvement; “shot variety in final chorus (unfinished editing). Add some effects to transitions. Some strange shots. Editing cuts short. More variety of shots.” What they thought should be changed; “In the forest shot college is seen in the background. Transition work. Too much of the same movements from the performer. A bit repetitive at times.” And what our group still had to do; “Editing (ending incomplete) and sharpen it up with transitions.”
This feedback helped us to decide to include the discussed graffiti shots and to add some transitions.
We also had a lot of feedback when we posted our final music video onto facebook. Here are some of the things people commented on:
“Lots of different shots and good links between the visuals and music. Good effects at the end.” “Liked the general idea of the video. Good transitions and movements from each shot. Movements and facial expressions from the performer weren’t very convincing, could have been stronger. Could do with more effects and the opening shot could have been better.” “Sold the artist. Good locations and cool mise-en-scene. Good lip synching.” “Could do with some instrumental performance.”
Overall we were pleased with the feedback. We were happy with our leads performance and did attempt to get instrumental shots but the musicians that we tried to incorporate were unavailable at the time of our filming.
Lastly we had feedback again from our classmates about the strengths and weaknesses of our blog, video, digi-pack and magazine advert.
Some of the strengths of our blog were that it had good content showing we had researched well, good detail, various examples of digi-packs, good planning ideas, lots of writing and pictures to back up what is said, very visual, images and text all relevant and all stages of planning are documented.
The weaknesses of our blog were that it needed more music video examples during the planning stages, the Garbage graffiti logo is unclear and difficult to read, good quality posts but some are quite lengthy, maybe create smaller posts when making new ones.
The feedback on our music video stated the same strengths and weaknesses as our feedback from facebook.
Strengths of our digi-pack were that the graffiti goes well with the genre and the picture fits in perfectly, obvious links between video and digi-pack,

4) How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
We used new media technologies throughout the construction, research, planning and evaluating of our music video and ancillary projects. We used Blogger to document each stage of our project. Vimeo was used to post our music video online for others to view. We used social networking sites such as facebook for feedback on our final video and myspace in the first stages of planning to contact the band.
Final cut was used to upload our footage and create and edit our rough cut and final version of our music video. We also used photoshop to make our magazine advert and digi-pack. We had difficulty using photoshop at first but soon developed our skills in using both programmes.
We also made a documentary to evaluate our music video, we used the same technologies but discovered more techniques for example I learned how to add images into footage on final cut for the documentary when it talks about the album cover and magazine advert and examples of other artists work using google images. Also we included a small clip of the Paramore “misery business” video from youtube to the documentary when it talks about what inspired us to use the graffiti wall as our main setting.