Evaluation

Media Studies A2 coursework evaluation

For my media studies A2 course project I created a music video for the song savior by rise against, the target audience for my music video is teenagers, young adults and others who enjoy alternative rock music. I took this into consideration when developing each aspect of the music video, digipak and music magazine advert as it was important if I wanted my video to be successful and appeal to my target audience.

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

My media product both challenges and engages key conventions and audience pleasures that are used in other alternative rock music videos, I have analysed rock music videos in detail and established methods and themes that are commonly used to capture the audiences attention and keep them interested in my media products. One example of a convention that I have followed in my music video is the lighting throughout the entire film. I found when analysing other music videos that they almost always had very low lit shots in each scene, I paid close attention to this and decided that most of my video would have to be low lit. I also recognised in the actual music video of the song that we chose for our project that the band shots were lit with a spotlight visible in the shot, we also took this into consideration before filming and decided that it would be a very effective aspect and work well in the music video. I believe this turned out very well and helped make the final product look professional. I also however broke this convention in the music video, by making some of the close up shots of the singer very well lit, which challenges conventions in other music videos. I believe this worked well and made the shot grab the audience’s attention as they are more drawn to the facial expressions of the singer rather than distracted by lights in the scene or not being able to see the singer very well due to a low level of light, which I avoided.

Another example of conventions that I followed is the choice of shots that I utilised in the video, I noticed in my research that the choice of shots seem to be similar in each of the videos, I made a note of this and tried my very best to replicate shots that I had discovered in my research and what I think worked well. I believe that I used a vast range of shots in the project and used them in the right areas of the song. I noticed that most of the shots in my research were mid-shots and close-ups. Alternative Rock music videos included a lot of these types of shots and so I did the same, using a very limited amount of long shots. This worked well and has a strong effect on the audience as it makes the subject appear more dominant which was also a common theme in music videos that I had researched. I also used a lot of low angle shots which also made the subjects appear more dominant. However I also challenged these conventions by using some high angle shots looking down on the subject, which had a nice effect in the video even though it was rarely used in other alternative rock music videos. I also received some praise from my target audience for doing this.

My digipak makes use of many common conventions that I discovered in my research, for example one of the conventions that I followed in my digipak is the very limited amount of text that is on the entire product. I noticed in my digipak research that alternative rock album covers and digipaks included very limited text in order to avoid boring the target audience or making them less attracted to it. My digipak does not bore my young target audience with a large amount of text, but uses a very simple put effect picture with a small amount bold text over it, this draws the attention of the audience and keeps them interested which makes it very effective. The text of my product also works well as the colour of it contrasts strongly with the background, which makes it pop out and grab the audiences attention, whilst preventing it from being unreadable or distorted.

My magazine advert also makes use of a lot of conventions that I discovered in my research, for example it also makes use of very limited text which does not bore the target audience or make it unappealing to them. This is something that I avoided very carefully as I had seen magazine adverts that had made this mistake in my research. My magazine advert also follows conventions as the text is a very different colour to the background, I was careful to not make the text look out of place of the magazine, however I wanted it to pop out in order to catch the eye of my target audience.

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

My video and my ancillary products work very well together as they have the same dark and gloomy theme, which is common for alternative rock music products like digipaks and magazine adverts. They have the same colour scheme and look very similar which strongly helps to promote them as a whole. My main music video relates to my ancillary products strongly as they both include a lot of black and white effects. All of my magazine advert and digipak are black and white and a large amount of my music video is black and white as well which makes them all work very well together. I discovered from my research that making the colours of the album covers and the magazine advert seem to have a strong effect on the audience which is why we decided to do it. I believe it works very well and would not change my choice of colours in all of the products.

My music magazine and my digipak include the same photography and a similar design which makes them work extremely well together and also makes them distinguishable and recognisable for my target audience. The text style is the same as well which has the same effect, because my digipak and my music magazine have a similar design but a different layout, it has a strong positive effect on the audience as it may be confusing if they included very different photography or a completely different design. I avoided making this mistake as I had seen other adverts differ very much from their album cover and whilst sometimes it worked well and did not matter, other times the design and photography seemed to differ too drastically and I wanted to make sure to avoid this.

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Throughout the project we took the time to show our film to members of our target audience, this was to give us some very effective guidance as we acknowledged their thoughts and took their ideas into consideration which help make the overall finished project a better product in the end. We also took ideas for shots from the actors in our film, this helped the video flow better, as the actors were more comfortable with how it was being filmed, rather than being told what to do and subsequently affecting their performance, I feel like the actors felt very comfortable being filmed which had a positive affect on the outcome.

I asked as many people as I could to complete a survey online which helped me to establish my target audience, from this questionnaire, I was able to establish what age and genders listened to alternative rock which strongly increase my knowledge of the audience which I was trying to cater my project to impress. This helped a lot in my project and if I hadn’t have done that or paid as much attention to my audience feedback then I would have much less knowledge of the genre and struggle during the production stage. We have also learned of things that we could have improved on in the video, for example a member of our target audience said that they did not like the black and white nature of the band shots in the video, however the majority of people that we asked said that they liked the black and white shots better than the coloured shots, which is why we decided to keep it black and white, despite myself preferring the coloured shots.

Our audience said that they liked the plot of the entire video, personally I thought that there is a lack of a story line that is easy to follow, however I learnt from my audience that it is not really essential to make a video that keeps their attention. I also learnt that I had put too many band shots in the video, and it began to look very repetitive, I learnt this early on in the project and so I was able to remove some of the band shots and add other shots to make the video much more diverse and create a better product. I believe that without audience feedback, I would have missed a lot of mistakes and would have been unable to produce the best possible product that I could produce.

After asking my audience to review my final product, I feel like I had fulfilled most of their desires in terms of what they would expect from an alternative rock music video although I learnt that there were some areas that I could of improved on, for example, in the section of my music video where my main actor is walking through the graveyard towards the low angle camera, they suggested that the editing was too slow and that it did not match the speed of the song very well, however I did manage to make my audience feel sorry for the actor and show how sad he was supposed to be in that part of the video, which is what I was aiming for during the production stage.

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

I used a Nikon D3100 to film all of the music video and shoot photography for the magazine advert and digipak. This is a camera that I am very comfortable using as I have a lot of experience with it; I believe it was a very good piece of equipment to use to complete the task and gave me great results in the final edit. I used a variation of two of my favourite lenses for the production of media project, most of the band shots and dark scenes were shot with a Nikor 18-55mm f3.5-5 lens, and other close up shots were shot with a 35mm f1.8 lens which helped me get very shallow depth of fields with a wide aperture which worked well in the video.

To edit the music video I used iMovie on an iMac which had absolutely everything that I needed to create a good product, I was familiar with the program however I did not have much experience with it, although I had made one other video project on it before. Despite my lack of experience with this program, I got the hang of it very quickly and felt comfortable editing from the very beginning which definitely helped. For editing the photography of the digipak and the magazine advert I used a small variety of editing software, the photography was edited in Photoshop CS6 which is a program that I am very familiar with using and felt confident getting a good result from. I have a lot of experience with CS6 as I have edited a lot of images on it before hand and so editing the photography for my digipak and magazine advert was easy with this software. We also used Photoshop CS5, fireworks and Microsoft publisher to edit the magazine advert. I was unfamiliar with Photoshop CS5 and so I did not feel confident with editing with it at first however after this project I feel much more familiar with the program and would be happy to use it again for another project.

Publisher and fireworks were also programs which me and my partner were very familiar with and had used countless times which meant that our communication with each other and use of the programs were very smooth, we were able to work well together when editing on these programs and come out with a result that was what we were trying to achieve and that I believe reflects our ability. I do not think that there is much that we could have improved on, however our audience feedback suggested that we may have left too much empty space on the digipak which we could have added to in order to improve the product.