Wednesday 27 April 2011

Evaluation - The use of media technology in my pre production stage.

In my pre production stage media technology became a very useful resource to use because it allowed me to use resoures such as Web 2.0, youtube.com and google to find out information. During my pre production stage me and my group needed to do a lot of research into existing bands such as 'The Saturdays' and 'Girls Aloud' using large websites such as 'Youtube.com'. By using large sites such as youtube it allowed me and my group to see the typical conventions that are followed when producing a music video that followed the same genre as us and this helped us to produce ideas and what conventions we could challenge in order to make our music video as successful as we possibly could.
When it came to the planning stage of our practical we used a site called 'Blogspot.com' to record our ideas and thoughts. This site allowed us to communicate with the other members of our group and interact with our audience to gain some audience feedback. Using blogspot to keep record of our ideas and thoughts, communicate and share research was an effective way to keep track of our progress because it allows us to post as many posts as we want to and upload all of our work onto the site so its all in one place and things don't go missing.

Target Audience/Audience Feedback Questionnaire.

Audience feedback has played a major role in the production of creating our music video so in order to find out reliable information from our audience we created a facebook group to allow our target audience to keep them up to date on our progress.
We then used a document called 'Google Docs' to create a questionnaire to gain audience feedback. The Questionnaire uses a variety of closed and open questions to allow our audience to add comments and give us their thoughts and feedback.

Audience feedback questionnaire.

Me and my group decided to create a questionnaire asking a few questions of what our audience thought about our final product, here is the questionnaire and the results we recieved!;

Questionnaire:
1.) Do you think the overall product was a success? please circle your answer.
yes no 95% circled yes.

2.) Do you think the length of the video was long enough? circle your answer.
yes no 100% circled yes.

3.) When you see an image of The Sundays what is the first few words that in your head?
.................................................................................................
we recieved a variety of answers; sexy, young, fun, feminine.

4.) Do you think their was enough narrative in the video? circle your answer.
yes no 80% circled yes.

5.) Would you say that The Sundays have built a good brand identity? circle your answer.
yes no if you selected no what could they have done differently when branding their image .................................................................

100% circled yes.

6.) Lastly, If The Sundays were to produce another video would you want to watch it?
yes no 85% circled yes.

As you can see we only produced a short questionnaire for our audience to fill out after they watched our music video that was posted on several places including youtube and facebook to gain some audience feedback. Although one improvement we could set ourselves to do next time would be to add in more open questions to allow our audience to write down in more detail their thoughts and opinions so we would have had more solid audience feedback.

Evaluation Planning.

The evaluation of my A2 practical production will require a lot of planning and will be very time consuming so here is a plan i created to make sure i follow and complete my evaluation to the highest standard i possibly can.

Audience feedback - create a questionnaire that will be posted on our facebook group page and blog.
Video - create a video of people analysing our work, progress and changes, then afterwards have them fill out the questionnaire and upload the results.

Answer the following questions with the help of audience feedback;



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

  • How effective is the combination of your main product and the ancilary tasks?

  • What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

  • How did you use your new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages of your project? - i.e. facebook, google docs, web 2.0, storyboarding in scribd and research on youtube. Then relate this back to the question and evaluate how this helped you.

The next stage will be to include a summary of how our idea changed throughout producing my A2 practical. Including evaluating the changes we made to our blogs, facebook page, plans and research.


Critically analyse ancilary tasks and the final video, use of video/sound!


- What went well?


- EBI?


- What we were to do if we carried on in the film industry..


- How it compared to the original idea


- Influence


Evaluate editing. What went well and what we could have done differently.


Evaluate time keeping and team work, each others roles etc.


Final Overall summary.

Monday 25 April 2011

This is a photoshop document with all of our finished images for the cd cover and booklet inside. One of the girls from my group edited the images using photoshop but all of us as a group contributed to editing some of the photos although one of the members of the group edited a lot of the images due to her having the most experience with photoshop. A lot of bright colors and bold fonts were used to make the images stand out and have the focus been drawn to the girls rather than the background.
I think by having each girl having their own individual color it makes the booklet and cover look more appealing and recognisiable as the audience will relate that certain girl.

narrative section.

after reviewing our rough cut me and my group came to the decision that we needed to add in more narrative shots to make the music video have a meaning and become more interesting and appealing for our audience to watch. Without narrative the music video is very dull and boring so we tried to add in as many narrative shots as possible, cutting back and forth from our dance rountine and single shots so narrative is included from start to finish in the video.
The message we are trying to reflect in the video is 'Girl Power'. By using close up and mid shots of a boy being surrounded by girls and being fed items of food that have had salt or spices added to it to reflect the message in a fun and creative way.
we wanted to show the message in a fun entertaining way and not have the audience thinking ' i know whats coming next' kinda feeling that you assume when watching most music videos. So as a group we decided to be really creative about the way we reflected the message in our music video. We decided to go and find a guy from our school to use in our video. The whole aim is to convey the message 'Girl power' in a strong yet entertaing way. Were going to tie him up on a chair and have him blindfolded so he doesn't know whats happening and have the girls surrounding him force feeding him different items of food each with a twist to them, such as switching the labels that may say jam or chocolate and adding chili powder or disgusting things to the food and make him eat it to see his reaction! this makes us look like we have a lot of power and no guys can mess with girls!

audience feedback.

After producing the rough cut of our music video and uploading the video onto our facebook group to gain audience feedback from a variety of age groups and showing our class mates, we gained a lot of positive audience feedback. We recieved comments about certain shots and sections of the music video could do with a little bit of improvement to help us create a high quality music video. Some of the comments on improvment we recieved included; making the lip singing more in time and adjusting the brightness of certain shots, also using more editing such as cutting back and forth between shots more to make the music video more interesting and keep our audience drawn into watching.
Many of our locations that we chose to use when taking pictures or filming scenes mainly included a white background which seemed quite boring so we needed to mix up the locations more often and to add in more narrative shots to keep our music video interesting.
We received many positive comments on our rough cut, the comments included the audience giving us positive feedback on our dance routine saying that it was interesting to watch and the transactions between the shots were fluid and we used a variety to keep the music video interesting throughout the whole video.
From reviewing the comments we recieved this then allowed me and my group to take the next stage in our practical production and focus on producing the final cut of our music video.