EVALUATION

Evaluation

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

How have you stuck to conventions of genre, forms and conventions of music video and musical genres?

An important convention of a typical indie music video is to show the working class background that the group, usually, originates from. In our music video we have incorporated this aspect as we have used a house that seems fitting to the bands original backgrounds and there are other things that connote the working class such as the bands clothes, which are similar to the people in the house scene. Even on the CD cover we have used a house that seems working class. All of our media products have a working class subtlety to them; again the dress sense on the website expresses this idea. We have also stuck to the narrative/performance structure that runs through most indie music videos as we have a performance from the band integrated with a narrative of a party scene.

Have you used postmodern ideas to challenge existing music video conventions?

Indie music videos are forever challenging typical conventions of music videos. We have challenged a typical party scene by adding in hallucinations of clowns and other mysterious things. This adds an edge to our music video and sets it apart from typical pop videos. By suggesting that a little girl has come up with this scenario challenges society’s beliefs and may shock the audience or make them think upon the way today’s society influences children. 

What overall effect does the challenging of these conventions have on your product?

The fact that we’ve suggested drug abuse creates this overall idea of a struggling society and challenges the audience to think about their lives as well as enjoying a music video.   

-Katie

Feedback from Class

We have gained feedback from two groups in our class, male and female. The evaluated our music video, and told us about shot quality, relevance according to genre and overall suitability.

- Sophie.

Evaluation

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

-What technologies did you employ to create your production? Did the drive your creativity?

We used applications such as IWEB for the website project, Photoshop to make the Digipack, and IMOVIE, to create the music video.  We also used Photoshop to produce the images for IWEB. We found that the programs allowed us to create our ideas, and put them into a real piece, although at some points they restricted us.

- How did you use technology to research and plan your production? How have you used technology to gather audience feedback?

We used YouTube and other websites, to research into the sort of video we would like to produce ourselves. To plan our production, we used Blogger.com, we posted all of our ideas and feedback onto this website which also allowed us to keep a portfolio of our work, and evaluate our progress throughout the course. To gain feedback from our audience, we posted the video onto facebook, which allowed our friends to comment on it, this also allowed us to gain feedback, from a fresh audience, and not just our class, which already have an expectation, as they know our planned idea.

- How has online media technology enabled you to distribute your project to a wide audience?

As previously stated, we posted the video onto facebook, so this allowed us to push the video onto a wider audience. Also we have added the video up to YouTube, so this allows us to reach the whole world, rather than just our friends/classmates on facebook. 

- All Group.

Evaluation - Audience Feedback

Audience feedback was often what drove us to continuously try to improve our work, including the video and both the Digipak and Website. For the digipack, we put a few samples of the images such as the front and back covers onto Facebook and asked for people’s preferences and opinions. We got several comments back, which we took on board and chose the design we felt was strongest and had the most positive feedback. 

In terms of the video, we got audience feedback from people in our lessons that filled out a sheet for us towards the last stages of editing. It helped having a peer assessment near the end because they could spot problems or areas for improvements we had over looked such as a caption we have over one of the clowns that continued over the next clip and that we had a clip that was too over exposed. As well as giving us areas to improve, they also told us bits they liked which helped us to see that the video was working and we put this feedback on the Blog. 

For example we were unaware of a background space of the website but have now filed in using images that we also used as part of the digipak as some of our feedback was to give a running theme to the website and digipak.

Overall, we found having audience feedback was very useful to help us spot problems or areas for improvement visually and technically however there could be problems with this as people have different ideas of genre and image for bands so may give us advice that doesn’t fit the logistics but luckily we did not face this problem.

-Rebecca

Final Video

This is our final edit of the music video This House Is A Circus by Arctic Monkeys.

CD Final Piece

Here's a final screen grab of the CD digipack, completed.

-Sophie