EVALUATION

Above is our final video.

In what way does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media texts?
Songs of this genre either have a massive storyline or they just predominantly performance shot, and we challenged that by using a mixture of both. From looking at the music videos early on in our project, we narrowed it down to two of them to take inspiration from and then combine that inspiration with our own ideas.

How effective is the combination between your main product and ancillary tasks?
Our ancillary texts are different to our video in the respect that the images portrayed are more produced. Our video is quite natural, I’m not wearing makeup, or flash clothes because I don’t think it fits the nature of the song. The reason we changed this for the digipack is that we need to make the single/album more appealing and what better way to do that than make me look more appealing. The music industry is very much based on sex appeal, and if you look at posters/album covers of most artists of today, you will notice how made up they are to get their viewers attention. We made sure that the lyrics of the song were included in our digipack as that is what a lot of artists do, and we thought it would be fitting. We also included a 2 photo pages with a lyric at the bottom of each, a page full of feedback from fans of Gabrielle, and of course, the front cover. Our music video is based on two videos that we both love, one was full of narrative, and one full of performance shot. We decided to have more performance than narrative because it was easier to film performance and get it looking great, than to film narrative.
Though there isn’t much to link the ancillary and video bar the song, and performer, I think it is good as it means that specific digipack can not only relate to that music video, but to others that the singer might want to release.

What have you learned from audience feedback?

I've used lots of different social networking sites to collect feedback for our video. I posted the link over Tumblr, which is the top photo, and people liked it and some commented. I also posted it on Facebook and got a fair amount of feedback. I agree with the majority of what is said, as I feel like it isn't varied enough location wise, and that the camera was very still throughout most of the video. I then posted it on Twitter and got a little more feedback, the main one here was about it being out of sync a little bit. I am pretty sure that this is just down to Youtube, as when it is on the mac it is in sync perfectly.
I now there is loads we could improve on; for instance, the cuts between shots could be smoother, we could have used more transitions and made it look as though it flowed more. Also with locations, we could have used more and created a better story that wasn't as vague throughout the video, using different shot types and movements as we went along.
I have also learned that it is actually an acceptable music video, especially for this genre of song. I was worried we did not have enough footage to make it look decent, but the minimal effect worked out well for us.



How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research/planning and evaluation stages?
Due to so many distractions over the last year, we haven’t been able to complete the music video that we had once wished to complete. Fortunately, we got it together and made a video we could be proud of.
Technically, our knowledge of the media, and the techniques used to create a video have advanced since last year making our film opening, but because of circumstances we haven’t been able to prove that in our video. Saying that, we have looked into other music videos in detail and taken ideas from those and incorporated them into our video. We also spent a lot of time making sure we didn’t overuse shots and had a wide range of them to make sure that our video can look as professional as we could make it. We spent a day filming different shots in the same outfit so we could have a range of shots to use in one sequence or throughout the entire video. In the space of a year we have progressed massively, last year we didn’t really know much about how to make a good video, but having got a great mark last year, it proved to us that we could do it, and we could do it well. Whilst researching for our ancillary tasks, we looked into photographers who almost always shoot music videos, or CD covers. We thought this would be the best place to start, as they know most about what we are working on. We looked at photographers such as TOM BARNES and TOM LEISHMAN for inspiration on our CD covers and digipack. We found images that we really loved and some we incorporated into our music video itself, others we left as they were too technical to complete for us. I researched what Gabrielle’s fans wanted to see via Tumblr – a new blogging site, Twitter and Facebook. I used these because she has a big, loyal fanbase over the internet and I could easily reach out those who listen to her by these 3 things. The internet has become such a great asset to the music industry, and it is used frequently throughout different aspects of it.
We started planning the music video very early on, and infact, hardly any of the original ideas are in the video. This is due to me not being in for a very long time, but in the last few weeks we have got into gear and planned and created a video that we have now finished to a relatively high standard.
We used the new HD digital camera to experiment with shots in the first few weeks of filming. We filmed me holding a book, and then we took the camera in and out of focus. We then tried this with the trees outside and got a really nice effect that we could have used in our video but chose not to.