Evaluation - Ciaran Dyer

Evaluation

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

  Our media product uses common forms and conventions of real media products in a number of ways. We have tried to make it as memorable as possible by completely changing the way in which the music artist is portrayed. Altering the artists image is a common technique used within music videos, it is important to keep reinventing a music artist so that they still seem new to the audience. The audience does not want to keep seeing the same types of music videos again and again from the same artist. However we reinvented our artist’s image by showing a darker side to him which is not a common way of reinventing an artist image. Usually artist's try to reinvent themselves in a better light and try to show their fans they have improved on aspects which they have been criticised for, where as we have done the opposite, we have tried to emphasise our artists problems and exaggerate them.

  Another common motif within our music video is that we have a narrative in our video which is common within other music videos, there are also breaks from the narrative to show the music artist singing. This is a very common motif within music videos, it has almost become expected when you see a music video. If you just had the whole video of the artist singing then the audience are quite likely going to get bored, however a purely narrative based video may not please the artists fans as they would like to see more of the artists singing.
  We also have sexually objectifying shots in our video and de-fragmented body shots for an example we have a close up of my lips while I am singing. Camera shots like these are common within music videos as they make the video more abstract and interesting.

I think that the combination of our product and our ancillary texts work well. The ancillary texts such as the CD cover and the website use bright and bold colours which infers that the music video will have a happy theme to it however the video is actually the opposite to that, the theme of our video is quite dark, to sum up the video it is about obsession and stalking. I think that the video and ancillary texts work well together as they contradict each other and add a sense of surprise when watching the video.
  The images we created of our music artist also work well with our music video as the images do not show the artist looking happy, they are of him looking down at the floor or looking into the distance. These images are on the website, when seeing them on the website before watching the video, they may be interpreted differently but after watching the video you will understand them and realise how they fit into the theme of the song. 

  From our audience feedback we have learned quite a lot, we learnt where we needed to improve our video and also what worked well within our video. The main issue with our video was the amount of repetition, there was quite a lot of repeating shots in our video, this was due to the fact that we did not have enough clips and we needed to fill time by repeating the same shots. We have worked on improving this by just spending some more time filming to get some more clips so that there is not as much repetition in our video.  

  In our video we have used loads of different media technologies, we have used green screen to add a background while I am singing, this makes the scene more interesting and makes the video look more professional. We have also used a number of different software programmes such as garage band, Photoshop and premiere; we used garage band to create a radio show promoting the song which we are doing. We used Photoshop to create the CD cover for the song and other images for the website, this again was for promoting our media product. Premiere was used to edit the music video. We also used websites such as wix and survey monkey, we used wix used to create the artist’s website, the website was used as another promotional method to represent the artist. Survey monkey was used in the evaluation stages to gain audience feedback on how we could improve our music video and what worked well within our music video. Media technologies were extremely useful throughout all stages of our product. These technologies were not only helpful but they were also necessary, we would not have been able to create a video at all without some of these technologies, for example without premiere then we would not have been able to edit our video or even put the clips in order.