Oliver Flint - Media Evaluation

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

Our music video used, developed and challenged the forms and conventions of real media products. This was an intentional idea, as we wanted to create a memorable music video, that doesn’t really resemble anything of the similar genre. The song that we chose, ‘Sister Siam’ by The Whip, had a very distinctive 80’s style electro pop feel, at first we wanted to embrace this by having a video that uses that synth-pop feel in it’s video. After spending a while looking into this we found that this is just too stereotypical, and as I said earlier, this is not what we wanted. We changed our idea dramatically, from being a stereotypical 80’s style music video, to something completely different. We came up with the idea to make a collage of different artists that resemble the feel that we got from ‘Sister Siam’. This is the first thing that challenged the forms and conventions of products from the same genre. We initially got our idea for the music video from a Red Hot Chilli Peppers music video ‘Dani California’. We loved the idea of putting many different artists in a video, although we weren’t fond of the fact that the artists that were represented in ‘Dani California’ had little or no relevance to the genre. We wanted to have artists in our video that represented the genre of our music. This brings us to the way we used the forms and conventions of other 80’s style music videos.
Because our song had that particular 80’s feel that isn’t really that recognisable in this present day, we had a dilemma to overcome. We had to decide whether to include artists in our video from the 90’s and 00’s. We decided not to in the end, coming to a conclusion that this would in a way overpower the music, which is what we really didn’t want to do. We decided to go with artists from mainly the 80’s and early 90’s, the synth-pop era. These artists were, David Bowie, Rick Astley and Madonna. All of these artists stuck to the conventions, as in they all came from the era that electro music was popular. After thinking of artists that we could use, I introduced the idea of using some artists who weren’t from that specific era. I suggested this as I thought people of a younger generation would have a hard time recognising all the artists that we are portraying. The artists we decided to add that challenged conventions were, The Beatles, Vanilla Ice, Westlife and Elton John. Overall this worked as it broke up conventions and the number of artists primarily from the 80’s and brought some individuality to our video because of it being unique to any other video from the same genre.




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

The combination of our main product and ancillary texts worked really well as we knew from the start of the planning stage what we wanted to represent. We wanted to represent an 80’s style feel as well as a more modern feel. We achieved this in many ways. Firstly we got the main idea from our music video, David Bowie. Bowie is the first artist to be shown in the music video; we thought that this should mean he should be the artist to represent all our ancillary texts as well. Another reason for using Bowie as the focus was that out of all the artists shown in the music video, he was the most recognisable to the viewers, or at least we wanted him to be.
For our magazine advert we decided to go for a theme that would stick with the other products, we wanted to show our products with an 80’s feel to them. Our magazine advert had a picture of Bowies face on the front with a light blue patterned background. Written across the advert was a pink banner saying ‘Sister Siam -The Whip’. We used some filters over the image to make Bowies face look a lot brighter than it was in the original shot. We used a lot of bright colours as we wanted to represent the 80’s feel that the music portrayed.
For our Digi-Pak, we decided to go with a very similar image to the one we used for the ad. We used the whole of Bowies face but and made him look brighter again, but this time we put him on a black background and round his head were lightning bolts, we did this as we wanted the Digi-Pak to be very similar to the advert, but no too similar as to be exactly the same, we didn’t want the buyer to have seen the advert and bought the Digi-Pak only to find they looked exactly the same, we thought that would be quite tedious, and may have looked lazy. Instead we wanted to have them quote different but similar in such a way as to know that they relate to each other.
In all, the combination of our main product and ancillary texts worked really well. We managed to portray the fact that they were all supposed to be connected, but we also managed to show that they were, very individual to each other, making the buyer feel that they have a new product each time.





3. What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

The first lot of Audience feedback we got was from the rough cut of our piece. On the whole the feedback for that was generally constructive criticism; people thought that our video needed more artists to be entertaining, because at that point we only had four artists in the video, as we were yet to introduce the others. Another criticism that occurred was that they couldn’t easily tell who the artists, that were being represented, actually were. We overcome this later on with the introduction of more noticeable artists like, Elton John, Vanilla Ice and Westlife. Some of the feedback we got mentioned the fact that our video was not finished; it had many shots which were blank as we didn’t have any footage to put there. We asked for suggestions as to what to put there and many people came up with ideas that we decided to add to our video. Some of these ideas were more shots of artists that were less represented in the video, like The Beatles.
After we had completely finished our music video, we had another chance to get audience feedback. On the whole the feedback for our completed production was very good. We found that people understood the comedy that we wanted to add to it. They also realised that we wanted to generally represent the 80’s style of music through the artists. Another comment was that at no way through they didn’t get bored. This was good as it is what we had tried to avoid from the start, we didn’t want them the audience to get bored as this wouldn’t make them want to buy the other ancillary products.
We also got some comments on our lip syncing; it was generally good apart from one point where it was slightly off.
In all our feedback for our final product was really good, the criticisms that we got were very small generally about cuts in the footage that didn’t seem to fit.





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

We used many new and existing media technologies in the construction, research and evaluation stages of our final product. The technology that became most useful was the cameras and media editing software. Firstly the Cameras provided us with technology good enough for us to film exactly what we wanted with as little stress as possible. In conjunction with the cameras, we used tripods to hold the camera in static positions, this was especially helpful when it came to close up shots, for example the shots of bowie where the camera panned down from above Bowies head, this would have been almost impossible to achieve without the use of a tripod as the shot would have been extremely shaky and end up looking awful.
The editing software that we used was ‘Final Cut Express’. Over the years I have got more used to the dynamics of Final Cut and have managed to use it in ways that I never thought possible. We had to use the effects capabilities a huge amount in our music video because without added effects such as, Green Screen, Saturation and Colour Hue, the artists would not have been represented in such a way so that the audience would recognise them without too much hinting. For example, we wanted the audience to establish that Elton John appears in our video playing the piano, to achieve the desired effect of an ‘Elton John Style Video’ we had to watch a couple to get an idea. The video that stuck out the most (as in representing Elton John) was his music video for ‘Crocodile Rock’. This video was rather grainy in appearance and seemed to have a slight pink hue to it. We managed to replicate these effects almost exactly. We used the built in effect called ‘hue and saturation’ to create the grainy/pink hue that we saw in Elton’s video.
Another effect we had to master was the green screen effect as we were going to use this quite a lot in our production. At first we had no idea how to do a green screen effect, so I decided to look on YouTube for a green screen tutorial for Final Cut, and from that we learnt how to accurately achieve our desirable green screen effect.
Photoshop played a big part in our overall completion of all our media products. We used it most for our magazine advert and Digi-Pak. We did come upon a problem that we managed to overcome, what we initially wanted to do with the style of our magazine advert and Digi-Pak was to have lots of fancy brush tools to stick with the 80’s theme that our music video was like, but after looking, we found there really weren’t any that appealed to us. We overcame this dilemma by downloading free brush tools of a website that we found from Google, this was great as it gave us a whole load more ideas as to what we could do with these brushes.
Another technology that we did use was a Canon stills camera. We used this camera as a way to document what we were doing so that we could look back later on in our blog to identify forgotten ideas and the like. Likewise we used blogs to also capture our ideas that we may have forgotten, for example we put images of possible locations to record and we put possible costume ideas. Without the blog, it would have been almost impossible to document all these possible ideas to look back on and replenish.