Q3 What have you learned from your audience feedback?

We carried out an audience viewing session for several members of our target audience to view our final piece and fill out a feedback form. From compiling the results it’s clear that some questions presented a mixture in answers, which could be put down to individual taste, yet some were consistent throughout. I think that audience feedback is crucial for a product to be successful because fundamentally it will be our target audience that we would want to purchase the Track and Digipack.

http://www.slideshare.net/Fudman 

Q1 In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Q4 Evaluation How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Research and Planning.

To begin with, my partner and I had to brainstorm about what genre music video we would like to direct, and also whether it would be a narrative, performance or concept based and also who would sing for our video. So we constructed our initial ideas and then conducted some similar product research for all the different types of music videos based around our chosen genre of indie rock. By researching different music videos, it widened our knowledge of what we would later want to include in ours. We constantly considered similarities and differences throughout all of the styles of music video and listed the positives and negatives of including them in our video.

We posted all of our findings on the blog so we could constantly look back and refer to what we had found out.

For our target audience research we created two different types of surveys, one online and one handout. We collected results from male and females, ranged from varying ages.


Our online survey was constructed through poll daddy and posted it online on social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook.

After gathering lots of information we started storyboarding our ideas. We drew them out then photographed them to put on the blog. This helped us show our overall video, and helped show if we had a good narrative story and always helped us when filming to get the correct shots and help bring to life the visions that we had in our head. After finalising our storyboard we went on to create our filming schedule which helped us plan where we would go on what days, and which scenes we would shoot. It also helped us to finalise our actors, and give us time to gather the props and equipment we would need for that day of filming. We also uploaded this to our blog so we could have a permanent online reference as well as a hard copy. The film schedule and storyboard were also very useful during the editing of our music video and helped us with placing of our shots, so we could get the story in the correct order and related to the lyrics.

For our ancillary tasks we captured the still photographs on the day of filming. The reason for this is so that all of the outfits were the same, and even the tiny details such as hair placement and accessories. We did not want any noticeable differences between our still shots and shots within the video. We took the images with a Fujifilm digital camera, this gave us very clear, good quality images which we could use for our digipak. After our music video was completed, we went through all of our pictures and picked out the ones with the best composition and lighting and then continued on to edit them, linking to our house style.

Construction.

Throughout our media production, we had to use a range of media technologies. Our experience and knowledge of the equipment varied. We were used to using the cameras, but had to learn how to correctly use the video cameras. It was good to experience a new technology and widen our knowledge of media equipment.

Cameras - We used digital cameras and video recorders to film and capture our media production. One the days of filming we had with us, our camera, video camera and a tripod. We used the tripod to film steady shots, pans of the setting, and slow paced zooms to show peoples emotions. In our opinion, use of the cameras was quite simple and so was uploading the footage and pictures onto the computers.

Adobe Photoshop.

For the digipak and magazine advert we used Adobe Photoshop. Photoshop is an software we are very familiar with and found it very easy to use. For the ancillary task we used the photos which were taken on the day to keep continuity with costume, setting, weather and time of day. Our best images were uploaded to Photoshop where we proceeded to edit them. At first we played around with some effects to make our images more interesting as we knew they were going to be black and white. We settled with a cartoon effect which we were very happy with as it brought out more tones within the black and grey image. We cropped them to size and slightly changed the levels of the images to make sure the lighting was perfect and the images were sharp. We then converted the images to black and white to fit the house style and then we chose which pictures would go with which part of the digipak. We then added the relevant text and information to each picture and linked the theme throughout them all, and also ensuring that we kept the same font, colours and sizes.

Final Cut Express.

For editing our video we used Final Cut Express. This was an unfamiliar software for us, so at first we had to learn quite a lot about it as it a difficult program to use. We uploaded our footage from the cameras and onto Final Cut. We had to capture the better shots from the longer sections of footage that we had filmed and upload them to the timeline. We then had to render our video and finally we could start adding stereotypical music video elements such as the title slide. We could also start playing around with and adding transitions e.g. a fade/dissolve, within our clips to create a smooth continuous video. We also made some of shots slow motion to really show the audience how our character was feeling and to emphasise the important scenes of the video. We changed the whole video to black and white and also added a few still shots into the video. Adding the song was quite difficult as we had to find out how to remove the sound from the video clips so only the sound of the song could be heard. We finally did this by selecting the video clips and lowering the noise levels on them and then selecting the sound clips and increasing the volume.
Throughout the editing of our video, we regularly posted our most recent videos onto the blog to show our progress each time we went on Final Cut to edit it. We did this by exporting the video and then converting it to a reasonable size to put on the blog.

Ancillary Task - Advert