Evaluation

Jasmine Day

How do my products use, develop and challenge forms and

conventions of real media products.

My album cover [left] is both conventional and unconventional. It is unconventional in the way that it has no pictures on it. However, this is because I thought if it were to be more simplistic it would reflect the music video quite well. It could be seen as conventional because of the bands name is the biggest text on the cover, highlighting the band to their audience.

It could challenge forms of other media products because it is plain yet still eye-catching.

My poster [right] could yet again follow conventional and unconventional forms of media. My poster is quite similar to my album cover which I feel is important in order to have a constant link through all of my media products. Like my album cover, it has no images, just text. Furthermore, some posters I looked at whilst doing research were also quite limited with what was on the poster.

I am going to challenge how conventional my music video is through analysing it in terms of Andrew Goodwin’s music video theory. He believed that all music videos should follow six key steps;

There is a relationship between the lyrics and the visuals, with the visuals illustrating, amplifying or contradicting the lyrics.

There is a relationship between the music and the visuals, with them illustrating, amplifying or contradicting each other.

That genres are complex and diverse in terms of music video style and iconography.

That record companies will demand a lot of close-ups of the main artist/vocalist. That there are likely to be intertextual to other forms of media within the music

video.

Within my music video, I have told the story of a relationship in five years time. I have made clear the relationship between the lyrics and the visuals by having a character having act out what the lyrics are actually saying. For example…

Throughout the song the lyrics change from “And there’ll be sun, sun, sunAll over our body's. And sun, sun, sunI’ll die in next There’ll be sun, sun, sunAll over our faces And sun, sun, sunSo, what the hell” To “ But it was fun, fun, fun When we were drinking. It was fun, fun, fun When we were drunk And it was fun, fun, fun When we were laughing It was fun, fun, fun Oh, it was fun.” To “And will be love, love, loveLove throught our bodys. Love, love, love All throught our minds And will be love, love, love All over her face And love, love, love All over our minds.”I have interpreted this and portrayed it in my music video and the visuals link with the lyrics very well.

There is a relationship between the lyrics and the visuals, with them illustrating, amplifying and contradicting each other.

There is a relationship between the music and the visuals, with the visuals illustrating, amplifying or contradicting the lyrics.

Within my music video I have tried to adjust the pace and timing of the video to match the visuals. I think that this is important, especially in an animation video because the characters or images need to match the lyrics. This creates emotion of the characters for the audience.

Genres are complex and diverse in terms of music video style and iconography.

The genre of my chosen music video is indie/folk. The normal style of the video is quite old fashioned, in the sense of what the people in the video are wearing yet it is modern at the same time. As I created an animation music video, it gives a totally different style then doing an actual recorded video. However, I have carried a few things from the actual music video to mine is the characters. For example, at the start of the song the guy is playing a violin, I have interpreted this to my music video and created a stick man playing the guitar. Furthermore, when the lyrics ‘sunsunsun’ play on the music video, the lyrics are actually visible and this is also the case in my animation video. Furthermore, the lyrics to the song explain the relationship between a man and women and life in 5 years time. In the original music video there are shots of male and female relating to the song, and I have took notice of this and created a stick man and stick women so the audience can still easily relate the images to lyrics of the song.

That record companies will demand a lot of close ups of the artist/vocalists.

Because my music video is obviously animation, I couldn’t show the artist of my band, however it does still portray the artists from the band. And because my video follows a particular storyline, there wasn’t much chance of being able to put in close ups as its telling a story. However, I think that the shot that appears the most in my music video is long shot, so the images to the lyrics are made clear to the audience.

That there are likely to be intertextual references to other forms of media

within the music video.

There are not many intertextual references to other forms of media within my music video, however, there is intertextuality within my video to my other products that I produced as they are all based upon the same genre and theme. This therefore, make my products seem more professional and realistic.

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

My music video and my products are a good combination. They don’t have a continuous link between them, however, the fact that my music video is animation, I wanted to make my texts quite plain and simple and I have done this by using limited colour and no pictures, just text. This makes is accessible and easily visible for people who wanted to buy the products.

I think I could have maybe made my video a little brighter however, but I think this would take the animation theme from the video, which then wouldn’t have had a great affect to the actual lyrics of the song.

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

My feedback informed me to change a lot of things that originally I thought was fine. I asked my target audience for feedback such as positive criticisms and negative criticism.

The main change that I did was the actual front cover of the CD. I originally stared to do my CD cover with a major animation theme going on, however, as it progressed it became to look quite childlike and wouldn’t fit my target audience very well. So this made me realise that in order to catch my target audiences attention, I just needed to produce something very simplistic yet effective.

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

Construction: I produced my products on fireworks, which is an image editing software, and the

actual music video I obviously hand drew in a stop-start motion way and took pictures of each drawing to match the lyrics. Using fireworks, I found a lot easier for A2 coursework as I had gained previous knowledge from doing AS coursework. The hardest thing I found to do was matching the products with the genre of my music video and making sure that it had a continuous link between them somewhere.

I created my music video using iMovie on Apple Mac. I found it tricky to use at first as I had no previous experience of using the programme. I found that the hardest thing to do when using this was to get the timing right, especially with the amount of shots I had to put in the video. It took along time to get the video right, but I am happy with the result.

I also used Slideshare to upload PowerPoint’s and Vimeo to upload videos to get an embedding code for my blog and to show images and text in a simple yet efective way. You can upload videos using blogger, however I found that using Vimeo was easier and quicker and more efficient.

Another programme that I obviously used was Blogger. Blogger is a useful website that allows a blog to be kept, and acts almost like a diary.

Research: For my research I mostly used different music video websites such as yahoo music

ton view the music videos and then finally evaluated them on my blog. One problem I found through doing this though however, was the fact that youtube doesn’t work on the school network and this therefore made it harder for me to find music videos that I wanted to analyse.

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

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

Planning: For my planning I used a number of different methods. I created a storyboard and

then put that into a PowerPoint as it made it easier to view on my blog. I also planned which fonts I was going to use by using the website ‘DaFont’.