1. in What Ways Does Your Media Product Use, Develop

8/14/2019 1. in What Ways Does Your Media Product Use, Develop

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Evaluation



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

media products?

• The conventions of my media product depend greatly on it'sgenre. Within the pop genre the actors used are usually very goodlooking to appeal to the audience. The videos also typically includea lot of miming or lip syncing to focus on the artist. There is alsousually a simple narrative or story which also cuts between thisnarrative and the artist performing. The artist is usually included inthe narrative, either telling the story or being involved in it. Theartist is also seen engaging the audience, either by simple mimingto the camera or just by using different close up shots e.g. lips oreyes. Pop videos are also used to illustrate the meaning of thelyrics and visualize the music in a very straight forward way. In

other words there is usually a direct link to the narrative chosenand the meaning of the song, the video is also usually edited tothe beat or rhythm of the music.



For mainstream, major record company artists, the musicvideos are they most important tool in selling the artist. Soimportant that the artists image in fact becomes more

important than the song, this is why the star's own personalor quirky style is usually present throughout to make themunique and special, their fashion is also usuallyrepresentative of their target audience too. With regards tothe technical side of pop conventions, the camera shots areusually different and fast paced. This means a variety of long, medium, close up and extreme close up shots. It isusually the close up shots of the face, or lips when lip syncingthat sells the artist to the audience most. The movement of the camera is also usually very varied, with the use of stilltripod shots and overhead crane shots to establish settings

as well as pans and dolly tracking to follow the story. Notonly are all these shots edited to the beat of the music, butusually very fast to keep audience interested and wanting to

watch it again to catch bits they may have missed first time.



We have included all these conventions mentioned in our video. When choosing ouractors we decided upon a very pretty, photogenic girl who we knew would appeal toour female audience as a role model as well as to our male audience as a form of love interest. The same goes for the good looking actor we used, the girls will look upto the female more if she is seen with an attractive boyfriend as

well as fancying him and the male audience will also look up to.We used lip syncing for the entire first chorus and various other points when LadyGaga sings 'Boys, Boys, Boys' or 'We love them'. We also included her miming theline 'Boy's like you love me forever' in the third verse. We used lip syncing as it is agood way to expose the artist and will make the audience think of them singing itwhen they hear the song. We didn't however want to use it too much as it wouldboring to just watch her singing the entire song, this is where the narrative

convention came in and we used the rest of the song to tell the story.



Chosen

Actors

Lip Syncing



The presence of a storyline is evident at the very beginning when we seethe girl waking up in bed with a boy, getting dressed and leaving. The plotis all about a girl who loves boys (links with lyric meanings), she is first

seen waking up with a boy and hastily leaving trying not to wake him up.She is then seen walking down the road on her way home when a boypicks her up in his car. Once inside the house she is seen using herlaptop, possibly talking to boys then getting ready for a possible night out.

The last full verse is used to showcase the artist, which is where thecutting in of the performance and the narrative is present. The lastchorus' of the song tell us of how she really loves the boy she initially

woke up with and even though other boys are shown it is him that sheends up with.

Girl wakes next toBoy

Girl gets dressed



Girl leaves Boy Begins walk home Boy picks her up

Girl puts on make-upGirl on laptop Girl chooses outfit.



PerformanceSection

Girl with boy in car Girl with boy in pub

Girl with boy again Other boys Girl ends up withboy



• Our artist is also very involved as the whole video followsher, this is reinforced even more when it is apparent she isthe only female that appears in the entire video. Different

shots of her are used throughout, extreme close ups of hereyes and lips at the beginning to show her anxiousthoughts about the boy's bed she is in. Close ups of herface are used for miming as well as more extreme closeups of her lips for 'Boys like you love me forever' and 'We

love them'. There is also a medium shot of just her legs inone of the chorus'.





The video was also clearly edited to the beat of the song, this is first seen when hereyes flick open on the predominant word 'pop' in the first verse and how each image of her in poses section changes on the beat. Our star's image is also quirky and cool yetrepresentative of our target audience. For example the dress she is seen walking homein is a typical dress young girls would wear on a night out with a cool pair of heels andclutch bag. When she is getting ready she is seen in a leotard, which is a commonfashion item of other pop stars such as Lady Gaga herself, Beyonce and Katy Perry. Our

singers leotard however is worn over tights to make it more relatable to our audience.Her coat she is wearing in the pub and outside scenes is also very fashionable yet wouldstill be worn by our audience. The last outfit she is seen in, the body con skirt, waistcoat, pearl necklace and crop top is a slightly daring outfit however most girls in ourtarget audience themselves would own a body skirt or a waistcoat.



• We used many different camera shots in our video, two occasions this is very obviousis when she is leaning against the boys front door and is beginning her walk home aswell as when she is about to get into the passing boy's car. At 0.58 our singer is seensimply lifting herself from leaning against the door, in the space of the next 2 secondsthere are 4 different types of shot - medium, close up, back to medium then long. At1.19 is the first glimpse of driving down the street. The next 9 seconds includesanother 7 shots of our singer simply getting into the car - long shot of girl walking andcar emerging down the street, a medium/long shot of girl walking from inside the caritself, medium shot from the street of her getting in, a close up of her reaching for thehandle, medium shot of her getting in from the view of the other side of the car,medium shot back from the other side, close up of boy turning wheel from other sideof car to drive off then final long pan shot back on the pavement side of the road of

the car driving off.





The variety of movement is also evident at various points, theoverhead crane position at the beginning when the couple are seenin bed, also for a brief moment when the girl is on the laptopsinging the chorus. The use of a tripod is seen at all the 'drinks in

bars' sections where the glasses pop onto the screen, as well aswhen the girl is walking down the road. A pan shot is the first shotseen in the video, the establish a closed bedroom door and thecouple asleep in a bed, this is again used to follow the car drivingaway. A dolly tracking shot was used to followed the boy walkingover to the girl with her drink at the pub. All these different views,

shots and movements were edited together and the result kept ouraudience entertained.

Overhead CranePosition

Tripod Shots



• The only convention we challenged was that we didn'tuse any choreography or back up dancers in the video. This purely because we wanted our artist to be the mainfocus and for the video to tell a story. Even though we did

use performance aspects, we stuck to the posy options asit was more effect to cut still poses into the short snappybeats of the song rather than dance moves.

• A convention we developed was the reference to sex atthe beginning of the video, even though many pop videosand Lady Gaga's in particular show kissing scenes and

revealing outfits not many have shown a girl waking up ina boys bed with a boys shirt on an her clothes strewn onthe floor. This is challenging to our genre as it appeals toyoung children, this suggestion that the couple have hadsex can appear to be too adult for our audience howeverwe didn't show anything explicit which is how we kept in

touch with our target audience. This suggestion will alsobe appealing to our older audience and make it moreinteresting or controversial which will attract more mediaattention to the video and ultimately the artist.



2. How effective is the combination of your mainproduct and ancillary texts?

• I think the combination of our main product and ancillary texts are very effective. To go

with our music video we created an advert for the album to go in a magazine and a CDalbum cover which includes the front, back and a front insert. All 3 of these linked togetherwith the girly theme, the girlyness is the video is very obvious from the mise en scene inthe bedroom with the make-up and dresses to the girly flowy font used in the ancillarytexts. The chosen font was used on both of the texts to relate the two to each other, keepa running theme and to allow the audience to associate the artist with this particular fontand become part of their identity. Simplicity is also a running theme on both texts asminimal text is used. The front cover of the CD simply has a full face picture of the artist,

another way of selling the artist not the actual music. The text itself also simply says thename of the album: Her Majesty and her name Louisa Giardina. The same simplicity can besaid for the magazine advert, the main focus again is the photo of the artist with just theline 'Includes hit single Boys, Boys, Boys' along the bottom and a small image of the albumitself in the bottom right hand corner. The mention of the single furthermore ties the videoin this text. The photo on the advert also relates really well to the name of the album asthe photo was taken from a low angle to give the appearance of her looking down,suggesting superiority and the hood up suggests royalty = Her Majesty.



Same Text

Regal Pose

Close up Image

Minimal Text

Outfit used in videoVery Simple



• On both texts the dot on the top of the J has beenreplaced with a small crown. This is a cute, girlytouch which also reinforces the album title of 'HerMajesty’. In order to relate

We also replaced the traditional 5stars with crowns to again relate tothe Her Majesty title. The back of the

CD cover also links with the simpletheme as it has a plain blackbackground with clear contrastingwriting, again in the same continuousfont. Overall I think due to the simple,

feminine theme throughout the mainproduct and ancillary texts the

the album cover to the song, the photo of her in the insertis in an outfit and very similar to a shot in the video itself.We also included 2 reviews on the insert to help give thealbum critical acclaim and encourage the audience to buythem. We decided to use reviewers that our audiencewould be associated with such as MTV, a channel most of them will watch and a Radio 1 DJ which most of ouraudience will listen too.



3. What have you learned from your audiencefeedback?

• After showing our video to our target audience we asked for their thoughts,

good, bad or both. The good qualities of our video which kept cropping upwas the very quick editing and the wide variety of shots to show simpleactions, especially the part where the girl is seen dropping the boy's shirtand just before it hits the floor we see a close up of it doing so.



Feedback also complimented on how well we sold the artist

and just how much the video was about her. All of the people

we asked liked our album cover and advert and thought our choice of photos were perfect. The use of the same font

throughout and the crown detail on the 'j' of majesty

appealed to most however some would have liked it if the

font was simpler to fit in with the simple theme. With regards

to the video, the choice of actors, storyline and the way weedited so the drinks popped up on the beats seemed to be

the favourite aspects amongst our audience. However the

only thing our audience would like to have seen would be

some dancing cut in with the pose section of the video.These comments however were only made by 2 out of 20

people so we are generally very happy with our audience

feedback and have just learnt that a bit more dancing would

be desirable for a pop video.

4 H did di h l i i h



4. How did you use media technologies in theconstruction and research planning and evaluation

stages?• Research planning:

In order to research for our music video, album cover and magazine advertwe started off by setting up a blog to store all of this research. We then used YouTube to find videos of existing music videos to analyse and the searchengine Google to find album covers and magazine adverts. It was easyenough to find the videos on YouTube however not all had the embeddingcode to allow us to post them on my blog. When this occurred I used Googleto find the videos on other sites such as MySpace. Album covers wereextremely easy to find on Google then I used Photobucket to get embedding

codes so I could upload those onto my blogs too. When looking for albumadverts to analyse it was very difficult, after using various other searchengines such as Yahoo and Ask I could still only find one. Once I had done allthe analysis I used polls on my blog to get audience feedback, thistechnology helped as it not only collected the data but it also sorted it for meand told me which option came out on top. The next stage was to createstory boards, once I had drawn these out I used a scanner and a HP scanningprogramme to get the drawings onto my laptop then Photobucket again topost on my blog.



• Construction:

The first step in constructing our video was to record all the

footage needed on a video camera. We then used a USBfirewire to transfer the footage from the camera onto theApple Mac. When we first uploaded the footage we realisedwe had 19 minutes of footage to cut down to roughly 2minutes of the video. In order to do this we used AdobePremierPro. This software allowed us to create the wholevideo including the speeded up and reversed parts. In order

to take the photos for the ancillary texts we used a digitalcamera and an SD card and card reader to transfer thephotos onto the MAC. We then used Adobe Photoshop toedit the photos and arrange all the text on them.Within the video itself media technologies were shown. There are shots of a mobile phone being used to ringsomeone as well as a laptop being used. There is also arelatively close up shot of our singer using Facebook, thisrelates to our target audience incredibly well as it is a sitemost of them will use or at least be familiar with.



• Evaluation:

• Even though our evaluation consisted of verbal feedback from our audience we had toencode the video using Premiere Pro to aMPEG4 file in order to upload it to YouTube.

This made it possible for our audience to

watch our video without having to be at theMAC we used to make it.

• Overall the most frequent and helpful mediatechnology used was the internet and inparticular blogger to create this blog,

YouTube and Photobucket. I will also be usingScribd to upload this presentation to my blog.

Documents

1. in What Ways Does Your Media Product Use, Develop