Evaluation question 2

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

There are many similarities between my main product and ancillary tasks, all of these intentional. To start off with the people in the video are wearing rugged masks, a common theme that runs throughout the video, digipak and webpage. These masks are essential to the song and video, as it encapsulates the concept of being a 'Fraud' and hiding from society and what they are, and this is such a strong image we decided to use it for the ancillary tasks.

 

The text we used for the webpage and digipak is going to be unique every time, as I have shown in the two ancillary tasks, and this is another similarity. The font for each letter will always be different, as it is the messy effect we desired, but unfortunately this meant we couldn't have a distinct logo or title for the band.

 

 The only major difference across the three media I created is the use of animals in the digipak, and the paper birds in the picture on my webpage. We used animals to show a sense of danger that the 'Frauds' are in, and we thought they looked good against the crumbled paper background that runs throughout our digipak and webpage.

As you can see the use of simlarities such as masks, text and animals, that link my three media, make them each look professional and create a brand identity for Scarlet Harlots. This brand identity/or logo is summarised by the image of the characters in shabby masks, and messy titles that use lots of different fonts.

Evaluation question 3

3. What have you learned from your audience feedback?

During the process of making my music video I used lots of audience feedback. Peoples opinions and feedback greatly influenced the way my final piece looked, proving that this process was worth doing.

The first audience feedback I got was when I voiced my ideas to the group for initial ideas for our music video. Our ideas were discussed in detail in terms of what would and wouldn't work well, and the feedback from each other eventually helped us decide on our final idea of using masks and the 'Frauds' concept. 

Next we needed feedback for what people wanted in and from our music video, so decided to make a questionnaire. This questionnaire influenced nearly all of the choices we made when picking a song, storyline and genre; and was proved effective as our video was a success, and should appeal to our target audience as it contains everything they wanted. The elements of the video this questionnaire influences include the visual reinforcement of lyrics, the speed of the edits, and that the band don't have to be in the video to make it successful.

Once we had completed our rough cut we needed a lot of feedback in order to turn this into our final product, so we used facebook, and asked our teacher as well as family and other media students. On facebook the feedback was mostly positive, with people commenting that our "editing in the chorus was good, etc" but this feedback was not constructive. Our friends were more critical, with them picking up on audio issues such as sound in the background, and minor editing mistakes that were easily corrected. Feedback from our teacher was valuable as he commented on the effectiveness of the use of masks across all three media, and also on audio problems we had already established. Family feedback helped establish the general shots which people found most interesting, so we extended these in our final video. This also helped us recognise that we needed more special effects such as mirroring and brush strokes, to keep our audiences attention.

As you can see feedback was an essential part of making our video, particularly as the audience influenced what went into it, so hopefully they will enjoy it and think it is appropriate for the song.

Evaluation question 4

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

At a basic level we used the camera, tripod, blogging and editing software in our research, planning and evaluation stages. We used the camera and tripod to film lots of shots, which was straight forward to use and uploaded these onto our documents; but had to encode these files using a program we have called 'rename my files'. This program changed the files from a MPEG into one Abode Premiere Pro could read, and uploaded them quickly.

When editing we used Abode Premiere Pro CS4, which was easy to use as we used it for our final project last year too. This year however we needed more effects as we wanted to fit into our indie music video genre, so after searching through lists of effects we found appropriate ones that fit in with our video such as 'brush strokes' and 'mirroring'.

Blogging was also easy as we had already used blogger.com last year, so as soon as the year started I knew what to do and started blogging posts to make sure all my progress was recorded. The only problem we had with the blogger this year was posting up videos. The files were so large they wouldn't originally fit onto a post, so the IT technicians at shcool cut the size of the files without losing any of the quality in order to fit into my blog.

New programs we used this year included Photoshop, youtube and weebly.com. Photoshop was used for creating the album covers, which was fairly easy to use after testing out drafts first. The only problems we had with this program were the background, and resizing pictures of animals from google. For the background of the CD covers I wanted a crumpled paper effect to keep in theme with the other media we were creating, and tried making one from scratch before eventually deciding the most efffective looking technique was to use a picture from google images. Also, the animal images at first would not be shrunk down to fit the covers, so I had to open them up in paint in order to resize them, but these were just minor problems in an easy to use program.

Finally, online programs included youtube and weebly.com. Youtube was utilised to put our rough cut and final production online, and more specifically so we could put it on facebook to get audience feedback. At first these files were too large to put on, so we contacted our IT department and they managed to shrink the size of the files without losing any quality. Weebly.com was used to create our website for Scarlet Harlots to promote their new single, that we have made a video for. I had never tried to make a website before, but this site was extremely simple to use and just about showed us through the whole process. Pictures and blogs were easy to create and upload, and the layout was simply picked, however I feel that all the elements worked well, and although easy and quick to make looks effective. 

Final production and analysis

 

Above is our finished music video for the song Frauds by Scarlet Harlots.

Looking through the marking criteria for my media text I can see i need to show a lot of technical skills that I included in my media, and below is a few more interesting examples of these.

• Framing a shot,including and excluding elements as appropriate:

• Using a variety of shot distances as appropriate:

• Selecting mise-en-scene including colour, figure, lighting, objects and setting:

• Using sound with images and editing appropriately for the task ("name dropping"):

Re-shooting, re-editing

Once we had shown the rough cut and got our feedback, the next step was to update our video using criticisms and postitive feedback we were given.

No one commented on individual clips they disliked, instead giving positive feedback on select clips such as close ups on the masks whilst infront of the garages, and the chorus. This influenced us to not go and film anymore clips, especially as we have a lot of scenery and other smashing shots on our computers ready to fill any gaps in the video. Instead we decided to focus more on the editing.

Again the editing recieved a lot of positive reviews, as people were fond of the quick pace and special effects. We decided to use more effects such as 'solarise' to keep the video varied (seen above), as well as adding in more of the popular effects including 'mirroring'. We also sorted out the audio issues quickly, simply clicking on the speaker off button for the whole of audio layer 1 and keeping the second, as you can see below:

     

As you can see the editing and alterations I have made to my video are not very big problems, which leads me to believe that all previous work on things such as storyboards and shooting were effective, and have made the process of re-editing much easier than I first thought.

Rough cut feedback

Once we managed to put our video onto the blogger and youtube we also put it on facebook, as you can see from the screenshot below. We used facebook to get feedback from people online we knew that did media studies, from here and different schools.

As you can see from the above screenshot we did get a bit of feedback on Facebook, most of it positive online mentioning that the editing for the chorus was good, and the music matched the video well. Feedback from my family and girlfriend was also positive. They liked the way the story was structured, the way the masks left the characters annoymous, the use of effects and certain camera angles shown to the left. Negative feedback was a lot more constructive however, as we showed the video to a lot of media students at school who were very critical. Most of their issues with the video was about the audio heard in the background that is non-diagetic to the video. This will be easily corrected, however we still want the sound of the television smashing at the end of the second verse, so will have to work around that. There are a couple of editing errors that also need to be corrected, and most feedback was about including more effects, as music videos feature a lot of special effects to make the video more interesting to the audience. Apart from these few corrections though I am proud of how our video looks so far. 

Rough cut

Below is the rough cut of our final product. We found several things wrong with it when watching back such as other sounds apart from the audio tune in the background, and missing ut on some effects in the chorus. The next step will be to get feedback and corret our mistakes for the final product: