Evaluation QuestionsQuestions 2,3 and 4

2.How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?BRAND Overall, I tried to create an overall brand, that wasn’t completely polished and

obvious. I tried to make it as if it was ‘chaotic’ and intentionally ‘rushed’. For example, my cover is hand drawn, so it looks as if has been done with no real effort.

This is intentional as, it ties in with the feeling of the video. The video features shots of the band playing, as well as shots which feature ‘behind the scenes’ or ‘out-takes’ of the music video being played.

This again creates an overall ‘chaotic’ feeling throughout my video. This can link into my TARGET AUDIENCE.

AUDIENCEAs shown in my target audience collage, Iam targeting an a young, musically influ-enced audience. They will use the internet To find new and exciting music, and willregularly attend gigs and music festivals.

The way I tried to identify with this audi-ence was to first and foremost not to patronise them. My research and previousexperiences shows that programmes whichtry and appeal to this audience go about it in a way that is too clear cut and blatant. This can make the programme less appealing to the audience they were trying

to target in the first place. So, first and foremost, my video contains the sort of people I want to target, and it shows them having a good time. It can also link into the Brand. As I've previously said, I tried to create a ‘messy’ style brand. I feel that this style can typified in the modern teenager. The modern media portrays teenagers as polar opposites. Either ‘hoodies’ who are a menace to society, or A* students who are at Cambridge and oxford. I feel that my video targets the people in the middle. Good people who are having a good time but are no harm to society.

LINKED INSTITUTIONSDue to the indie/alternative genre the song and products, I want my product

to feature in the relevant institutions. For example, I would want my advert to feature in NME and Q Magazine. I feel that my target audience are most likely to see it in these magazines.

If my advert was in magazines such as KERRANG (heavy rock based) or SMASH HITS (pop based) my target audience would not see my product. This would be a waste of time and money.

For the video product itself, I also want it to feature on relevant institutions such as NME TV and MTV ROCKS. Again, I feel these are the sort of Music channels my target audience will primarily watch.

But, as song gain more popularity, they will go on to feature on more mainstream magazines and more popular magazines. This can be the progression of music products today.

3. What have you learnt from audience feedback?

For my audience research, I got together a focus group of twenty people and asked them a series of questions. I tried to make my focus group as wide as possible. It contained an age range from 17-47, and I asked both men and women. This meant that the questions would be as fair as possible. So, his helped to decide what my video should look like, and what style the song in it should be.

The pie chart shows that indie music was the most popular amongst my focus group. This was conclusive for me, because this was the style I was going to go with in the first place.

Firstly, I asked my focus group what genre of music they liked the best. This was the result:

A few weeks had passed, and I had created my music video. By now, I had created two adverts, and two cd covers. I reassembled the group and used them to help me decide which one’s I should use. Here are the results.

13 preferred this

7 preffered thisFrom what I gathered from the following discussion, was that the first cover fitted in with the songs on the e.p, and the nature of the music video. The general consensus was that although the people liked the second cover, it didn’t suit the nature of the songs on the e.p.

I also used this opportunity to get some feedback on my final music video. I managed to get down some quotes of what people had to say. Here are some of them.

“Really fits in well with the song. Like the way you’ve managed to mix in some performance shots with some shots of you pretty much doing nothing. Works well!”“Its alright. Like how you managed to get someone dancing in there. Not too keen on your setting though”“Well done! Its not a particularly ground breaking video in terms of story telling, but I don’t think it needs to be.”“It seems to me that you seemed to run out of footage a tad. And I suppose if I was being super critical, there’s a tiny bit of bad lip syncing. But I couldn’t do any better. I’m just clutching at straws here. Well Done!”From this feedback, I gathered that people liked my video, and it was successful in that sense. Some of the faults that were highlighted by the group I did know about myself. But on the whole, it seemed to be the plusses outweighed the minuses and they liked the video.

4. How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?ADOBE PHOTOSHOPI used Photoshop to help create my cd cover and the advert. I managed to change this:

Into this:

This is how I did it.

Firstly, I had to remove the border of the hand drawn image, to make sure the image was neat. I did with the ‘crop’ tool like this:

Next, I wanted to make the blacks in the image a lot more vivid. So, I highlighted the black area’s and coloured them with a darker shade of black in using the pencil tool. Like this:

Once I had to this, I still did feel happy with the blacks. I wanted them to stand out more, so pressed Filter>Artistic>Plastic Wrap to give it more of a gloss. I did it like this:

Once I had done the blacks, I decided to re-colour in the grey areas to make them more vivid. I did this with the pencil tool. But, I decided not to put any effects on these areas. So I left them as they were.The next part I did was probably most difficult. I wanted to add on some more windows on the buildings on the image. But I wanted them to have a ‘sketchy’ feel. I wanted to replicate the windows on the building in the middle. To do that I had to use the ‘clone stamp tool’. I had to have that building as my base and copy from there. I had to do it like this

Once I had done this, I felt happy I had reached my final product.

The software I used the most when creating my final piece was Adobe premiere elements 8. I used this to edit and create my music video. It was primarily used to cut and organise my footage onto a timeline. This is what the timeline looks like:

As I am creating a music video, I had to put the mp3 of the song onto the ‘soundtrack’ bar and work around that. As for ensuring the lip-syncing was in time, I had to change the length of the clip by making it longer or shorter. Like this:

Once my video has been created. I had to put it on YouTube. As I already had a band YouTube account, uploading it was pretty easy. But, I had to ensure people will see it. This is how I promoted it.Firstly, I put it on the bands Facebook page. It looks like this:

Facebook automatically embeds the video into the feed. This means that people only have to press the play button and they don’t have to search for it on YouTube. I also did the same for the MySpace page. This is how it looks: