Goodbye from me

Wow, I am actually really upset. I have now completed my total media studies experience at Robert Clack School. I hope you enjoyed watching my thriller and my music video. I can thoroughly say I enjoyed it and will do my best to persue a career in the media industry. Thanks again, from me, goodbye :(

Evaluation

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

Our music video uses many ideas. Most of which are original ideas that we thought up and carried out. We compared our ideas to other music videos from artists such as The Monkees and Oasis. I chose these groups because they are of a similar genre of music as our song. I would say our ideas challenge those of other groups and individuals. This is because we are totally different and almost opposite. From what I can gather, other groups have fun with their videos but we almost seem to be over the top with ours. Some people believe that this may be a wrong idea, however we think its great. The song is bouncy and fun so why can't the video. In terms of developing ideas, I believe we did get some initial ideas off of The Monkees. These ideas are not direct, but ideas such as wearing plenty of bright and colourful clothes.
I believe that by using our own ideas, it makes it simpler in the sense of we don't have to try and imitate any other work. However there were some aspects that after watching some of the best guitar solos in the world, that some of our ideas had been used by other film crews around the world. One example of this is the famous Guns and Roses guitarist Slash. From the screenshots i captured, here is one shot that was used by both me and Slash.

As you can see, the shot between me and Slash is very similar. This is the only aspect that I could find that was similar to any other music video that I had watched. Here are some examples of how mine is different to other videos.

As you can see, the costumes we used were slightly different from those of the famous band The Klaxons.

Also, other parts we have to consider are :

Instruments - obviously to the band playing -

Camera Angles - these help the audience understand who may be in power or the object of erotic desire etc -

As we can see from this screenshot, the Point of View shot of the singer is at a high angle which shows that he has power over the object of erotic desire.

Make Up - to make the singer and characters "good looking" -

Dancing - some videos do not have dancing, others are nothing but dancing. I feel dancing helps a group to put across the type of song. E.G. fun and bubbly or sad and miserable -

As we compare Cheryl Cole - Fight For This Love to Professor Green - I Need You Tonight. Fight For This Love is mainly dancing whereas I Need You Tonight has hardly any dancing.

Lip Synching - If the lip synching is incorrect then people will not believe that it is them singing. For example, on some live performances, people such as Britney Spears, who was meant to be a role model to many young people, was often caught out"Lip Synching" rather the actually singing on live performances.

Mise-en-scene - this is key as people may not wish to purchase the song or video if the mise en scene is not very good. The Mise On Scene is what is on the screen. Therefore anything that may not be relevant may deter the audience from purchasing the video which in the long run, is the min stram of getting money, either from download or CD sales.

Even though i was unable to use extremely unrealistic features that most top music videos use, i believe our video is really good. We do not use the tropic scenes or the overly made up women.

Realisic music videos are being made more these days. This is due to the type of songs and people that are making it. This types of videos are being made for the younger generations.

One video that shows this is Chiddy Bang's "The opposite of adults"

Also, I tried to install a link that shows the comparison between my video and another video. I decided to use the song Replay by Iyaz. This music video enables me to analyse the texts and therefore am able to see the contrast between them. Here are my findings. I noticed that my video had nothing that had similarities to the music video I studied. For example, Replay by Iyaz had used extremely exotic areas whereas i did not. Also, the Iyaz also filmed using exotic women and rather exotic shots etc. During planning, i made sure that all of my ideas were original and that we did not feel that using ideas from a previous text was very professional which also allows me to express my creativity. Here is a comparison of my video to the Replay video.

As we can see, the scenery used by me and Katie and Iyaz is TOTALLY different. I used the local council flats whereas Iyaz used a tropical islands and beaches.

2)How effective is the combination of your main product and and ancily texts (DVD digipak, Magazine Advert)

Digipak Front Cover

Advertising Poster

Opening Scene of Our Video

Overall, the three parts of our coursework (Digipak, Music Video and Advert) worked really well together. I believe that all three reflected the song in the sense that they are fun and the song is fun. The video is fun and bubbly, the magazine is almost cartoony and the digipak has images of colour and screenshots of use jumping from trees etc. I feel that in the market world, the products wold have worked together and made people want to buy the product. Therefore i believe that our products were all a success. When designng the three peices of work, we wrote down all the genres and styles in which we have seen before and decided to try and be creative. One thing that we noticed was that there were not many music videos that were linked that well with their posters and covers for the tracks. Therefor we tried to focus our attention on making the ancillary tasks just as fun as the video itself. The way in which we did this was by using photoshop to mix the cartoon background with the real images of me. By doing this, I felt that the fun was still kept in the task. The image we used for the fromt cover of the digipak was jus totally experimental to start with but then we realised that by just having fun with the camera on the iMacs, that we were actually making great material for our digipak. This is the reason in which we used the image we used. It was a totally random photo that we wanted to take (purely through boredom to be honest) and VIO LA .... The perfect photo.

3) What have you learnt from media feedback?

I have learnt quite a lot from our audience feedback. I used the website www.wordle.net in order to produce a picture of all the most common words that were said during all the feedback session.The wordle website puts a cloud of common words together in order to see what the most common words used.

Here it is:

The use of audience feedback is key. if the audience do not enjoy tour product then the wholeTEXT - AUDIENCE - INSTITUTION chain is broken and then the company cannot continue to produce any more products. We used many different forms of technology in order to gain audience feedback. For example, we use facebook and myspace as well as recording people after watching our video. The most interesting fact about our audience feedback, was that people did not expect it to be as good as it was. It was a pleasant surprise and when we asked why, most people said that they were not expecting the levels of creativity in which we had. I also learned that somehow, less is more. This is because from the people we asked face to face, they loved the fact it was simple yet creative. We did not use any props that you could not buy in your average shopping centre and did not bother with make up as it makes it too staged and false. The best piece of audience feedback in which we received was from the band themselves, The 99s. The reason for this is because the E-Mail we received from them after watching our video expressed the fact that they really enjoyed it and we almost felt like they approved of the video. This put a huge smile on our faces as we felt we had accomplished our goal of making a great music video. After looking at my results from my online survey, I was actually rather happy to see that one person who had taken the survey obviously did not enjoy it as they said it did not look professional and that they would not purchase the video. The reason I was happy was that it obviously had to have some bits added and overall left room for improvement. If this little gap for the extra effort was not there then we would not have any new ideas and therefore would become postmodern. Each individual has their own ideas and this is what I felt was great. The person who did not like our video had their own ideas which in the long run, could produce a new genre or style.


4) How did you use new media products to construct and research your media product?

We used social networking sites such as facebook and myspace in order to find our music to use. We also used sites such as wordle, google, and youtube to try and research previous music videos, digpaks and magazine adverts. Without this technology, I think our video would be extremely hard to have completed. We used many new media products to be able to constrct and research our media product. Such new technology includes surveymonkey.com, YouTube, Facebook aswell as objects such as digital cameras etc. I shall now list in sections all the new technology I have used.

RESEARCH - I have used the following technology to research for the production of our video.

• YouTube
• Facebook
• Myspace
• Google

PLANNING - I used the following technology in order to plan my video.

• iPod - Listening to the music to learn lyrics
• iMacs - Producing anamatics
• Google - Looking at software to help produce the video
• Facebook - Get ideas that people might like.

CONSTRUCTION - I used the following technology in order to construct my video.

• Video camer - For filming
• iMac - For research, editing and blogging
• iMovie - For editing

EVALUATION - I used the following technology in order to complete my evaluation.

• iMacs - for blogging
• Online Survey - Audience feedback.
• YouTube - Feedback

Survey Results

After Completing my survey, I have (with the help of http://www.surveymonkey.com/) constructed graphs in order to compare my results. Here are my results. (Apologies for the quality)

Here are the questions that i put on my blog and also, I shall analyse each question in order to show the answers people gave.

1) Are you .... Male / Female

2) What age group do ou fall into ..... -16 / 17 - 25 / 26 +

3) What did you think of our musc video ..... Very Good / Good / O.K / Poor / Extremely Poor

4) What did you think made the video good ..... The Locations / The Camera Shots / The Mae up and Cosume / The Sory Line / The Lip-Synching

5) Do you think it lookedprofessional ..... Yes / No

6) For the purpose of marketing, would you be intersted in buying the product ..... Yes / No

7) Does the video add somthing to the song ..... Yes / No

8) Where did you see the video ..... In School / Facebook / YouTube

I shall now analyse each quation and the answers that I recieved. Rather then write the questions out again, I will refer to them using the numbers above.

1) 45% Were Male and 55% were Female

2) 0% were 16-, 78% were 17-25 and 22% were 25 +

3) 68% said Very Good and 32% said Good

4) 56% said the Lip Synching, 24% said the Camera Shots and 20% said the Story Line.

5) 89% said Yes and 11% said No

6) 89% said Yes and again, 11% said No

7) 89% yet again said Yes and believe it or not 11% said o

Finally .......

8) 57% said Facebook, 14% said YouTube leaving 29% to say in School

Overall, my survey resultsshow a rather positive reaction to the work me and Katie produced. There were a few negative replies but that did not put me off at all, after all, without critics, the media world, from advertising flyes to music videos, would not improve and move with the modern times of today.

Contribution

I think that my contribution to the production of our music video, digipak and advert was a fair contribution. Me and Katie did a rather significant amount of the editing together, I did most of the advert and we had an equal imput on the digipak. Overall we had a similar input on the whole task.

Postmodernism

Postmodernism is the work which by does not look to the future. By this I mean not creating new ideas, but using ideas that have already been used and slightly changing them. Many media texts use it but sometimes it takes some careful looking at to understand them. There are many aspects of postmodernism :

Pastiche - Borrows work and ideas from others
Parody - Takes an idea, copies it to make it funny - Scary Movie
Reflexivity - Refers to itslef and uses internal references
Quotation - Repeats and quotes from other sources
Intertextuality - Uses different text in order to add new meaning.

I was looking at an episode of The Simpsons "Simpsoncalifragilisticexpiala(Annoyed Grunt)cious " that was a parody of the Disney film Mary Poppins. A few ideas that The Simpsons used was obviously the nanny, who was called Shary Bobbins. They used references to Quentin Tarantino's Resivour Dogs and Pulp Fiction, aswell as English history and films with quotes about Jack The Ripper and Olver Twist.

I do not believe that any of our ideas used in our music video were "borrowed" and even though we did research on other music videos, we already had ideas set in our head.

Reply

The group that allowed us to use their music, The 99's replied to an e-mail I sent them regarding the music video. I emailed them saying :

Hi James, I would like to again thank you and the other guys for letting us use you song for our video. I have attached a copy onto the e-mail for you to watch. I hope you enjoy watchinf it as much as we enjoyed making it.

Thanks Again

Chris.

They replied :

Hi Chris,

Thanks so much for sending us that. Just showed the other guys ..... It's BRILLIANT!! It looks like you had real fun making it. Well we all wish you the best and hope you guys get GREAT grades for all your hard work and effort.

Take Care,

James (The 99s)

I thought this was great as we had impressed the original artist.

Representations

In many music videos there are stereotypes, especially towards gender. I do not think there are any stereotypes apart from the fact that at the end, stacy is the object of erotic desire and is the reason that the singer is singing the song. Apart from this, I do not believe that there are any stereotypes towards gender. The only stereotype is the clothing choice. I feel as the music is slightly indie, that the clothes should be slightly indie aswell.