Evaluation Question: In what ways does your media product use develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

In What Ways Does Your Media Product Use

Evaluation Quesiton: How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

Evaluation Question: How have you used media technologies during the construction of your media videos

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

When creating my music video I had to use media technologies for both the research planning, construction and evaluation stages of my video. The piece of technology that got the most use by far was the iMac. It gave us access to the internet which was the tool we used for all of our research as even our surveys were done online.

For our audience research we used Survey Monkey however one of the key problems with survey monkey is that it encourages people to give unhelpful or rude replies just to seem funny, due to the anonymous nature of the internet. We would not have had this problem if we had conducted surveys in person and this proved to be a problem for me as it limited the usefulness of the surveys particularly when it came to evaluating the video in which I was left with very few usable responses to go from.  We also used websites such as facebook to share the surveys via social networking.

For research of actual music videos the only website we used was YouTube as it has the largest amount of content on it. We also used Blogger to keep a record of all of our research and progress. However the issue with using a computer for anything long term is that there is always the chance of malfunction or breakdown, while we were lucky enough not to suffer with this all of our work could have been made inaccessible if the computers had an issue. This would have been worse if the issue couldn’t be resolved as it would mean we would have to use computers other than the macs in our classroom to do a large amount of our work. Again thankfully this was not the case however it is a weakness to using them.

When it came to actually creating the music video our main equipment was our phones and the HD camera while filming. Phones were important for keeping in contact with each other and of course we used the HD Camera to film. Unfortunately due to the way our videos were uploaded we were not able to keep our video in full HD, this was a disappointing set back as the camera quality itself was beautiful.

We also used the macs a lot for editing, using Final Cut Pro to edit together out footage, this however was the only way we could edit our footage realistically and there was no alternative other than using a computer of some sort.

In addition to our music video I also had to make use of technology to make the digipak and webpage. I used publisher for the Digipak and I used a mixture of powerpoint and iWeb for my webpage. Using iWeb to make the layout of the page itself and powerpoint for my text boxes. The positives of this were that the softwares compliment each other well, however iWeb was not user friendly at all and often did not look professional. It took me three different full webpages before I finally created a design utilising powerpoint that I thought looked professional. I had to use a different software in order to actually make iWeb look professional.

I made use of the internet again for creating my digipak, I used a website called PicMonkey to edit my still images so that they were ready to be used. Again this meant that my work was largely reliant on the internet working which could be a negative if the macs had developed any problems. In addition to this I also made use of simple technology such as pencils and pens to create my front and back covers to my digipak.

Finally for my evaluation again I am making use of computers, both my mac in sixth form, and my computer at home with which I am using Sony Vegas to make this video.

Evaluation Question: What have you learned from your audience feedback

What have I learned from Peer Feedback

Alisha and I created a questionnaire each (due to us sharing a music video) which we sent out to gain feedback our video, my digipak and my homepage.

These were the questions asked:

Video:

In terms of my video my audience generally praised the narrative of the video. In particular the performance of James as the lead singer/guitarist and statue received universally positive feedback. We were also praised for our reference to doctor who, meaning that the audience appreciated the intertextual reference.

Of the question in Alisha’s separate questionnaire, 6 of the comments had praised our narrative. This is a relief as the narrative was the most important aspect too our video with the performance element not being as important to us. One person commented saying that they liked the twists in the video to make the narrative light hearted and that it was an interesting take on our stalking idea. Our editing was also described as smooth and non confusing.

From both questionnaires we have been told that it was well shot, although a recurring suggestion is that we use more tracking shots within out video. While tracking shots were something we attempted to do, we ultimately decided to leave them out due to the footage not looking effective on camera. This was the only main suggestion for improving our music video.

From this I’ve learned that our video was very popular however a lot of people would have preferred to have some more creative shots within the video.

Digipak:

As I worked on my digipak alone there was only one questionnaire that I used to source information from. I asked the question what was good about my digipak and what could be improved. One improvement suggested was to have one background for all of the photos as the photos did not share a common background. The other improvement was to add colour however this is not useful feedback as it goes against the idea I wanted for a folk rock themed digipak.

Webpage: 

All of the people who took part in my questionnaire said that my webpage was easy to navigate. It was praised for its colour scheme and consistent style however some criticisms were that it might be a good idea to have a preview of the song in MP3 format for those who are not able to use YouTube and that it could also be a good idea to include a latest news section which would save people having to go to there from the home page.

Final Home Page

Final Digipak

Final Music Video

This is our final video.