Evaluation

1) In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Our product challenges conventions in the contrast between the video and ancillary products. Usually the style will match, but ours contrast in a way that intentionally confuses the viewer, throwing them off guard and potentially increasing the emotional impact of the video. We used several conventions used previously in similar products, namely the Point-of-View style of shooting (seen in Gomez's 2006 music video for "See The World") and the gritty, dark atmosphere and themes, seen is many indie productions. I feel we developed this style to a point where it becomes darker and more gloomy than most videos of similar style.


2) How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
Our music video and ancillary texts/products (Album Cover, Tour Poster) work well together. A theme of mystery and enigmas is prominent throughout both:


- In the video, we never see the person's face as it is shot point-of-view. This garners an atmosphere of mystery as it keeps you guessing as to who the person might be and what their story is. He/she is an enigma.
- Similarly, the Album cover/tour poster's main image of a person behind a colourful umbrella promotes the theme of mystery. On these and in the video it is left up to the viewer to interpret this theme as they see fit, whether it be creating a full back-story for this person, or as simple as trying to guess their gender.


A weakness in the comparison between our main product and ancillaries is that the shooting style won't necessarily match for some people. The video is dark and gritty, intentionally low-quality in parts whereas the Album cover and Tour poster are clean and professional-looking. An explanation for this, is that the music video represents only one song, which in itself has an indie, low-budget, gritty feel. The album cover and tour poster represents the whole album, which has an unknown style.

 

3) What have you learned from your audience feedback?
The main thing we learned from our audience feedback was that we needed to make the themes and plot of the video more clear. There is something to be said for letting an audience interpret something for themselves and take from it what they can but the response to our video showed we needed to give more clues as to what is going on, without making it obvious, which was our aim all along.


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


Research/Planning
Our group used various video sharing websites to research examples of music videos and their themes and ideas to use in our own video. Sites such as YouTube and Google Video were useful for this purpose.

We also used the Art/Design social networking website deviantart.com to find work we could potentially use for the artwork (our best option given the ease of contacting the artists and getting permission to use the images), and Google images to find examples of existing album art to take inspiration from.

Construction
We used a handheld camera without a tripod to get the best possible results in relation to our video's themes and feel. The shaky effect added to the low-budget and gritty feel. We edited in Adobe Premiere Elements, and the artwork was constructed almost entirely in Adobe Photoshop CS5, making use of vectormagic.com and a very small amount of Adobe Illustrator CS5 to import the vectorised images (more information on this in previous posts).

Evaluation

We used wordle.com to put together the image seen here, made up of the most popular responses to our video.

Album Cover Inspiration/Research

Audience Feedback

We asked a group of our classmates to watch and comment on our video during one Media lesson. There were comments that the video was thought provoking, and that the ending was quite powerful. However, the ending was also said to be unclear. The main cirticisms were of the section with our main character walking towards the train platform as being too long, although the effect we put on to enhance the connotation of him being drunk was complimented as being effective. The other major criticism was of a filming error, when during the first section of the video, Paul is clearly seen putting his thumb over the mouth of a bottle before taking it back to drink from it. This was the worst filming error we made, but we unfortunately noticed too late into the editing process to go back and re-film this segment.

Final Video

The final video can be found here: http://youtu.be/Yn8mD79DObs

Audience Evaluation - Questionnaire Questions

1) How do you think we could improve the video?
2) What particularly did you like about it?
3) What particularly did you dislike about it?
4) How well did the music fit the content of the video?
5) What age group do you think this video suits best?
6) If you saw the video with no sound, which genre of music would you think it belonged to?
7) What gender group do you think this video suits best?
8) How powerful an effect did the end of the video have?

Final Album/Tour Poster Artwork

Front:

Inside:

Back:

Tour Poster:

Album Name and Track List

Final Album Name: "Spectrum"

Track List
1. Stranger
2. Rock Is Cursed
3. Nothing Personal
4. Good Times
5. We're In Pieces
6. Fireworks
7. All My Life
8. No Other One
9. Where We Belong
10. Not Now
11. Conspiracy

Final Cover Stock + Edits

We decided to use the stock image "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" by meppol for our final album cover.

Original stock:

I used the website vectormagic.com to convert the original bitmap image to vector, which both gave the image it's "cartoony" look and allowed it to be enlarged as much as I liked without losing quality.


Vectorised stock:

Stock Image Permission Notes #2

All images courtesy of artists on deviantart.com. I have gained permission for two of the stock images from the album cover drafts post.

#2: "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" by meppol

Notes:

Me:
Hey Mary,

I have a favor to ask.

As part of my college course, I'm required to produce a concept for an album cover. It would be fantastic if I would be able to get permission to use one of your pieces as the main artwork, namely "Somewhere Over The Rainbow".

Of course I fully understand if you want to refuse. I know someone asking this out of the blue probably seems a little strange.

But yeah, if you can get back to me with an answer as soon as possible, I'd really appreciate it.

Thanks for your time.

Mary:
it is ok, you can use it

Stock Image Permission Notes #1

All images courtesy of artists on deviantart.com. I have gained permission for two of the stock images from the album cover drafts post.

#1: "Ten Thousand Memories" by Jon Damaschke (jonniedee)

Notes:

Me:
Hey Jon,

I have a favor to ask.

As part of my college course, I'm required to produce a concept for an album cover. It would be fantastic if I would be able to get permission to use one of your pieces as the main artwork. We're not 100% positive which one it is we'd like to use yet, but we're particularly interested in "Ten Thousand Memories" and "Hidden World".

Of course I fully understand if you want to refuse. I know someone asking this out of the blue probably seems a little strange.

But yeah, if you can get back to me with an answer as soon as possible, I'd really appreciate it.

Thanks again.

John:
Hey Jobe,

Thanks for getting a hold of me about this. I have a few questions for you before I can give an answer.

Will you be taking credit for my artwork, meaning will your college course think that you created the work? Or is it ok to use somebody else's work as a collaboration and will you be stating that when you present your album cover?

If you make sure to give me credit as the photographer/artist, then I don't see any trouble with it. If you create a final product, it would be really nice to see what you have done with it.

Thanks,

Jon

Me:

Thanks for getting back to me so quickly.

Yes, as part of the course we're also required to maintain a blog detailing the processes we go through including gaining permission for the artwork we use. So you will be fully credited on there as well as in small print on the final product itself.

Thank you so much for this. If it's not too much trouble (and if you have them), would you be able to send me the largest versions you have of the two pieces? I can definitely work with the uploaded versions but the bigger we can get the better really.

Thanks again.

John:
Alright, you can go ahead with it.