1. EVALUATION ALEX WRIGHT

2. In what way does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? With the understanding that we had no budget to create our video, there were limits of what we could do to create an effective product. We avoided following a mainstream high concept approach therefore, and made a small production piece with a more casual effect. However, we kept to the rules of a generic music video to conform with the people, as we have come to understand that the majority of the public don’t like change or difference in something they are used to. Personally, I feel our video challenges more then develops the forms of real music videos, firstly due to the lack of close up of our protagonist in our video. Our deliberate use of long / mid shots were used because we did a narrative sequence opposed to a montage of images. It shows the journey of our character, and the audience can relate and take this journey with him. We were inspired to do this from our artist research of likes of Jamie T and Just Jack,

3. From this research, we also decided to only use the one character of Pete, opposed to a whole band. We were following a more independent approach to this, rather then the generic conventions of music videos, and we think it works effectively. As our only character, we ensured he had very down to earth characteristics, rather then being flashy and glamorised in order for our audience to relate to him. We created a sense of verisimilitude by using recognisable locations such as central London, again helping our audience to relate to our protagonist, giving it a sense of reality. The main way we have challenged conventions is by not having Pete singing or miming throughout, but only rapping. We felt it would be more effective this way from our artist research, and we feel it has been done successfully. Again, we challenged conventional videos by not using voyeurism to sell our product, although our story line is based on love. We used post-production graphics by adding lyrics, graphic images and transitions, as well as editing the colour contrasts. We included diegetic sound also, which is unusual for generic music videos, and paused the track when Pete walks out the door to match the visuals to the music. We used the effect of stop motion to enhance the originality of our product, inspired by artists like B.o.B.

4. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts? We created many ancillary products alongside our final video to help us build a character of Pete and engage with his audience. We made two social networking sites; Twitter – where his fans can follow and communicate with the artist and find him from similar artists of that genre, and Facebook where digital natives can gain information and see pictures of Pete. We also made a Youtube account where his fans can see behind the scenes videos of our artist, keeping them up to date with his actions. We inter linked all these sites together along with our blog, giving the necessary platform for the audience to be able to interact with Pete by commenting on his page, seeing information and pictures of him and where to buy his products. We made a digipak, which we could upload to his social networking sites in order to promote him, a very important aspect for our artists success. It shows his character as a new artist, in everyday locations and poses etc. all our products combined portray the same image of his character, giving the audience a realistic perception of him. We learnt a lot from the previous preliminary tasks we did, for example from the ‘She and Him’ video we knew to match the visuals to the beat or the lyrics, and our ‘fast and slow’ sequence taught us that being simplicity was a lot more effective at times.

5. What have you learnt from your audience feedback? We originally researched by doing questionnaires in the planning stages of our product. We let our target audience listen to our song and asked what they would want or expect to see from this genre. We took on board the information we received and began to plan our video and form our character of Pete accordingly. Once in the editing stages of our production we were peer assessed, where we saw an insight into our audiences thoughts to our video, and asked if there was anything extra they would like to see before we had finished editing. It helped us a lot by doing this, as the main comment we received was how the majority didn’t like the fact that Pete wasn’t miming at all, so we were able to film and include him rapping. Also, they didn’t quite understand the order of our narrative sequence, so we edited it accordingly to make more sense. Once our editing was completed, we asked out audience to peer assess it one more time. There were major improvements and extremely positive feedback that we gained, and they liked our post-production graphics. We learnt that naturally we will never be able to please everyone, but we gained an outer perspective and more of an insight on how to improve our video making the final outcome a very successful product.

6. How did you use media technologies in construction and research, planning and evaluation stages? Throughout the production and distribution of our video, we used numerous amounts of technologies. Being digital natives, we are very lucky to have such a vast developed range of technology available to us. it is very significant that the advancement from analogue filming was important, as we can now upload and edit digitally. We had good access to the equipment, including cameras, lighting and Apple Macs, all working at a cost efficient professional standard. We filmed on HD Sony hand-held cameras, which we uploaded onto MacBooks and edited the main part of our footage on iMovie HD. We later tried to do our post-production graphics on Final Cut, but experiencing difficulties due to lack of experience, we decided to use LiveType which proved to be just as successful. We converted this product into QuickTime and uploaded it onto our Youtube page.

7. We also used social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook as means to promote and sell Pete to the public, and our blog site to record all our actions. We did our research on the search engine Google, and used iTunes as a platform to upload our soundtrack into iMovie, as well as onto my iPod so that Peter could listen to it whilst we were recording. This process of convergence was key for Peter to mime in sync to the music. To keep a log of everything we did, we often photographed on my Nikon DSLR camera, enabling us to upload these images on to the blog. Also, we used it for the stop motion effects and the digipak. The images were often edited or enhanced in Photoshop. For recording our research, we used Microsoft Word and PowerPoint, which we could upload onto the websites Slideshare and Issu to embed into our blog, such as how I have done this presentation here.