Evaluation By Luke

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

The music video I and my group created focused mainly on intertextual reference's from recognizable artists from the 70's till present day - we decided to base our video on performances from David Bowie, The Beetles, West life, Vanilla Ice and Rick Astley - these were our favorite old school artists, and we thought they would all work well for our genre of music video. We followed conventions in terms of performance, all of our artists had singing and/or dancing in their work, so we had singing and dancing performances from most artists which interluded with eachother using appropriate cutting and fading techniques on Final Cut Pro. We aslo used conventions by using green screen to give a perfect, contrasting backdrop like you see in David bowies "life on mars" music video, similar to what we used in the first quarter of our video; also we used the film-grain visual effect for the Rick Astley performance to show viewers the age of the sequence, as most of Astley's videos seem to look like they are missing colour, so we used hue filtration to give that look, (i'll talk more about that in question 4). We challenged a few conventions by using varied camera angles, using more mid-shots than close-ups unlike most Bowie music videos; we developed a few conventions by using a pan of a graffitied wall from a youtube video behind a dancing 'Vanilla Ice' to give the urban effect that ice ice baby uses in its tacky-yet-catchy video - as seen on youtube. Due the the nature of our product and how it sticks so closely to conventions as its mainly intertextual references being used throughout we tried to stick to, and develop as many shots as possible, and as often as we could we challenged conventions to give a spoof like flow to the video.

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

The link between the 3 products (Digipak, magazine cover, music video) lies in the music itself, my main involvement was with the Digipak and magazine cover, and i wanted the link to be more subconscious than visibly obvious, to make consumers think a little bit; i really wanted the music genre to represented visually through these ancillary texts - i started by thinking what should be on the cover apart from the obvious logos - DVD, Barcode, BBFC Rating etc. -

and i decided that David bowie represented what i, and my group, thought suited the genre best, so an image was used of Patrick as David Bowie on the front and back of the digipak using the same image but mirrored and a different image on the magazine cover; i wanted a colour scheme that went with the music genre of the song at hand "sister siam" by The Whip, the word electro and techno came to mind, and along with it the colours of electric blue, florescent green and purple, so we used those in both texts. The background was one of the trickier things, but i'll explain that in question 4. So we used the iconic David Bowie to represent and link the 2 texts with the strong performance from the music video, the colour schemes were similar in both texts and fonts were also reasonably matching as well. I applied various light effects and random images using custom photoshop brushes and playing with opacity and flow of brush, which looked great on the blue-to-purple textured background. I used new media technologies vastly, without them our products would be non-existent.

3 What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

After our rough-cut deadline our work was far from complete, even though we had few lessons after the deadline to complete it - i think this helped us focus, and knuckle down a lot, and the feedback was constructive rather than negative which was a nice surprise; we had about 60% of the footage in the right place, but the scenes that needed green screening still had green behind them and that made things look messy. We were told that the opening sequence was very strong and after editing and added effects it should look great; we were told that the gaps needed to be filled and when we told the audience what was going to be in there after filming they seemed to like our ideas, even the ones we were iffy about. In the original footage at the end we had the beatles, but the audience couldn't decipher who it was meant to be, so they helped us scrap that and think of something new and a bit more general rather than aiming at a band that are hard to get costumes for. The feedback included a comment about a montage of all the characters towards the end of the music video, we liked the idea and made it work (i hope) in our product.

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

First and foremost, the Apple Mac was the core of our work, we used several programs like Final Cut Pro - to edit and add affects to our footage, Safari - to browse the web for info, images and tutorials, also to blog our planning and ideas, Photoshop - to compile images, layer and texturize to create amazing images for our ancillary texts. Final Cut allowed us to upload our recorded footage and then start cutting the bits we wanted, and binning the unwanted scenes, then lip syncing them to the music itself whilst fading shots together, eliminating the green screen so the background can be whatever you want, and adding effects using key frame animation, and the list goes on; it is a pretty amazing piece of software overall. Safari is the web browsing client used on apple appliances, we used it before we even thought about our music video in detail to start blogging about what our targets and goals were, then when we were given our song, we started heavy brainstorming on our blog to monitor our own ideas and progress. Photoshop was the key to our ancillary texts, we were given templates of the magazine cover and Digipak and the freedom to do what we will in that space... so i started off by putting our most relevant to the genre character on both texts - David Bowie; for the Digipak i had an image of Patrick as Bowie and put it in the lower left side of the front of the Digipak, and faded his blue shirt into the purple-blue background, and shrouded his head in blue and green horizontal light swirls; I applied green and blue light patterns behind the larger font, so the font wasn't just floating in mid-air. The background took a while to get right, i used the colour overlay to select the blue, then added a gradient overlay to have a diagonal fade from blue to purple, this looked okay but was very bland and boring, so i played with the texture and found a zigzag effect that looked great; i used some custom brushes downloaded from a website to create light forming from behind bowie on the back of the Digipak spiraling above him. I used light brushes with a hard or soft light effect to make them opaque yet florescent. These light effects were used because they help link the genre of music to the genre of music video and visuals.