George Tibbett - Evaluation Questions

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

Our media product is performance based and therefore does use conventional aspects of real media products such as other music videos by 'The Pink Spiders'. Within some of there music videos they also have a performance based mise-en-scene. Our media product which is a music video for the song 'Seventeen candles' by 'The Pink Spiders' uses a filter to make the hole video in black and white to fit with the genre of 'Indie Rock' and help display the meaning of the lyrics in which there is a story about a girl on her birthday but she isn't happy because she wants a different type of party. Even though we did this to fit with the genre of the song, the filter does challenge the typical media conventions of this genre of music which normally is very colourful and upbeat. Within our music video we used props to develop the forms and conventions of real media products, these props include the instruments such as a drum kit, guitar and a microphone. These develop the the conventions of real music videos because in our music video we used the microphone prop in a non-instrumental way, this is because one of the band members threw the microphone to help the meaning of the lyrics. In a normal music video there may be band members useing instruments but they may not use the props in the same way as we did. In our video all the characters dressed up to fit with the genre and make it seem as if we were an actual band. This helps with the conventions of real music videos because the band members of real bands are likely to dress in the same way.

How effective is the combination of your media product and ancillary texts?

Our music video and the ancillary text are effective. in our poster advertising a tour we used the band members to help connect the poster to the music video. The poster works well because the design and colours go with the typical style for the type of music. The magazine advert and the digipack work together because they use the same colour and font styles to help make a connection and give an effective combination. The music video is very focused around a boy band, this is then shown in the poster because the image used includes the band members posing in a very similar way to which a real band would, the image is also edited and given effects that help portray the characteristics that were shown of the character within the music video, these characteristics include being relaxed and messing around but at the same time getting a serious piece of music which they want to sell. The music video does have a black and white filer that isn't used in the poster, this is because we want the poster to have colour to help attract people to the band. Because of this they aren't directly linked through the visuals but there still a good combination.

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

From our audience feedback we have learnt that some people enjoy having more of a narrative so that they can gain a clearer understanding for the story of the lyrics which would be beneficial and could help people hear the lyrics. The audience enjoyed the filter used on the video because they felt that it went well with the genre, we used a black and white filter. The audience liked they way we filmed the music video, we filmed it in a relaxed way and at the same time had fun. We have learnt that many people want different things from video, we also learnt that one of the main things people want from a music video is the band members and the characters. The majority of the audience wanted a narrative and a performance based video, they wanted to see the characteristics of the band members within a narrative as well as in the performance.

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

In the filming stages of the production we used touch screen digital camera's, these gave a better image quality than that which we would have achieved using older and more outdated camera's. Although we used HD camera's, one of the camera's which was a personal camera of one of the group members, had a technical issue and the aspect ratio/image quality was not a god as the rest of the footage we had managed to capture. We used the social network site 'facebook' to contact 'The Pink Spiders' to ask them if it was ok for us to create the music video for there song 'Seventeen Candles'. We also used youtube to watch music videos that the band had previousely made to help us get an idea of the kind of videos they normally make. Using the editing software's 'iphoto' and 'Final Cut Express' we put together the clips that we had captured to create the music video, we synced the mouth movements with the song being sung. We then used the software to create a voice over where we put the music video in a smaller frame infront of our faces as we were talking about the different parts of the music video.