DIrector's Commentary Version

Evaluation Q4. How did you use media technologies in the construction, research, planning and evaluation stages?

Blogger- This website has enabled me to document the research of digipack and digipack adverts and record a diary through out this media studies period of making a music video. When looking back on my blog, it has helped me learn and take on board the mistakes i endured during this period. Blogger has enabled me to share posts and information to the examining board in a productive, neat, efficient and effective way.

Final Cut Pro-We used Final Cut Pro in the editing process of our music video.This particular software enabled us to cut clips to the correct length, place effects and fades on clips to make them look more exciting and interesting to look at and also to make sure the viewer can recognise different characters by various colour effects.

The timeline that is shown when opening this software enables me to place the clips in the correct order that they should be in. We placed the song underneath the clips so we can clearly identify where they meet,also giving us the opportunity to mark spaces to know where certain important spots are.

Another postive advantage when using this software is that you can easily transfer footage onto it with no fuss or bother,then can easily be transferred to the editing stage where eyou can cut and play around with different filters for example.

Photoshop- This technology allowed us to create our digipak and digipak advert using various tools to make what we thought was the best we could make. The biggest advantage to me personally was the amount of different tools and effects you can use on a page that you are editing to make look professional and realistic. The amount of fonts you can use and different effects are astonishing and really did help us to make a effect page.

Social Networking Sites:

YouTube, FaceBook and Twitter - We have used youtube to look at other music video to gain ideas to work towards our own video. This social networking site aloud us to see what other people our age have created in previous years and to see what grade and standard they are looking at, helping us compare and work towards certain targets. We have used Facebook to post our finished video on, looking at our peers viewing in and giving us feedback that is very valuable. Also it has allowed us to see what people think off it and too also see how many people like our video, to acknowledge if it was successful enough for example.

Web 2.0-This software has given me the ability to upload and share my media files to the internet and has given me future skills in producing and distrbuting my media products.

Evaluation Q1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Before producing our music video we carried out a significant amount of preproduction work; one of the key features of this was finding out what the conventions of the medium and the genre which we had chosen to work in were. From this we could begin planning our product to ensure it looked professional and more importantly that it met the needs of our target audience. Now we have completed our project and produced what we feel is a professional and engaging music video, we can assess how well we incorporated these conventions into our text.

1. Conventions of the medium

The conventions of the medium consisted of making the music video look professional. To do so we used short shot lengths in our editing to keep the target audience involved and wanting to carry on watching it, we also used montage editing to engage the audience and follow the conventions of the medium. The close up shots of Roger is a convention of a professional medium making the viewer aware who the artist is, this refers back to Goodwins theory as the record label would want to promote the star in the music video. Our video used performance, narrative and conceptual ideas. There is not a clear narritive , more of a conceptual idea revolving around the Alice in wonderland theme, to keep them entertained and also relate to our conventions. We felt this was appropriate for our target audience as it would interest them (a fact which we found out from our primary research- see earlier posts)

2. Conventions of the genre

The genre in which we were working was quite unique in the sense that it was a hybird of pop, dance and rap music. Therefore we had to incorporate elements from each of these, however we did end up focusing a lot on the rap aspect of this through our representation of the lead singer.

I learnt that one of the conventions of a real music video consisted of signifiers to represent the type of genre the music video is by costume choice which we included in our music video. We focused on this convention because we looked at the forms and conventions of a real media product and recognised that this was a major part in letting our target audience decode this. Another thing that i learnt from looking at real media products was the locations that were chosen. We have used this media convention to signify not only what target audience we are aiming at but to portray an idea of drugs and imagination can be anywhere you want ti to be, as long as you frame every shot correctly.

I have learnt that real music genre conventions are the building blocks of creating a target audience, and the music genre conventions we have added in our music video are using a attractive black male which can relate to the the genre of hip-hop and rap. The image (right) is of British rapper Dizzie Rascal, reasoning behind this being shown is too portray how the clothing we have chosen Roger to wear makes the viewer make a subconscious decision that this artist relates to hip hop, which is a convention of music genre.

We also have incorporated the pop genre to the music video due to the controversial topic of drugs and living a party lifestyle. This has helped us grab a wider audienece and also i feel has interested the viewer into a more exciting montage music video.

Finally, we have used a fairytale theme to relate to a younger range of audiences. Not only will it capture these types of age groups but young adults can relate to this convention because they can reminis, look back, as fairytales was a big part of a majority of people younger lifes.

I felt any additional conventions towards genre would not make it specific enough and would loose a target audience. If we started to add lots of dark filter and blacks then it could relate to rock/ metal which i think is too much.

Evaluation Q3. How have i learnt from the audience feedback?

It is essential to get audience feedback when you finish a media text to not evaluate the success of the text, but to learn how it could be improved upon. In the music industry producers would use this feedback to improve the video before realising it. However we wanted this feedback to find out how successful we had been, and what we could do differently if we made a video again.

The positive feedback we recieved from the focus group included a lot of comments about looking professional and realistic. We as a group realise that the reason for this was the locations we had chosen and the framings of the shot that looked professional. The audience liked the mix of performance and narrative footage, and commented on the fact that it looked really professional

The feedback from the focus about improving our video was about more of a story line to the video and to have maybe a different scene or location added to the video. This would had given us a more variety of clips to edit and make the video look more visually interesting and appealing to the viewer. The storyline was confusing to some and they felt that we could have had more shots of the singer and lead actress to show some kind of relationship between the two.

These comments will help me improve in the future by involving more locations and a more scenes that expand the story to a wider extent.

See audience feedback focus group below for the video of this.

Evaluation Q2. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

Having a brand identity when creating multiple media products is very important because it allows the audience to recognise that this is who they are and what they are about, alomost like first impressions if you do not know them,you find out all you need to know, but also I strongly feel the way you identify a band clearly communicates the genre and appeals to the correct target audience.

We have created a "brand identity" by using the same colour scheme throughout the digipack and digipack advert, also including the repetition of the artist name which is written in a large and and bold font so it can be easily acknowledged and recognised. Roger was the solo artisit who we were promoting in this video and therefore both the video and the digipak feature close up shots of his face so the audience would come to recognise him (from our research we found artisits such as Example and Kayne West did this successfully).

Within the music video we have used the same background, clothing and colour filter over Roger's scene so that people know that this is the artist, to make him the only person that is singing the lyrics to ensure that the audience know he is the artist and this is the person's album you are going to purchase. I feel that also in the digipack advert using a playing card (a motif from the music video) can relate back to the song and make the audience feel that they are in almost a type of community, and know that this song has a relation to all the other songs, which may lead them to buy the whole album as they may feel interested in the songs on the rest of the album. This "brand identity" brings together the whole media product, so people do not become confused and will lead them to recognise the artist for future events.

The style of the video and digipak was that of an urban contemporary artist, which would successfully fit in with similar artists in this genre.