Media Evaluation

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

The Thrills are a indie/rock band originating from Ireland. They are inspired by the 1960s and include this in their previous videos. We then went on to look at other indie/rock bands and their videos and after analysing some videos and noticing that most music videos are performance based lead us on to think how we could challenge this convention of videos.
We wanted something different and quirky which led us to look at Michel Gondry's work. He made a video for The White Strips but it was a Lego men animation, we really liked the idea of making a different style of video and went on to do more research. We looked at Melop Mene - I Adore You, a completely hand drawn animation and it challenge normal conventions but also used them still use different shots and camera angles.
We decided to go with hard drawn to make it stand out and different to other indie/rock band videos.
Originally we were going to use Photoshop because that would of made it stand out from other animations as well as other music videos.
With our group making a animation it made it easier to get the visuals and lyrics to match up and this is a normal convention in other music videos but we added a twist to the way we made it by putting the childish edge to our drawings.
We had to keep the props and background simple and plain so that they would be easy to re-make if anything happened to them and also because we needed to make it look 1960s style and we did this by adding filters, basically by keeping this 1960s style theme that The Thrills following its a form of them and their image. We included some famous icons from the 60s such as Bob Dylan and the love he had for his music which tide nice in with the lyrics & also President Kennedy.
Even though we challenged and didn't use the normal conventions of a music video in some ways we did use the conventions and challenge them at the same time. However the childish and quirky way we made our video defiantly challenge other media products.

2.
How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary products ?

The combination of our music video and the ancillary products are effective in different ways.
Our main product - music video, we created a different quirky animation with a 1960s influence running throughout. The video is very plain almost dull colours but we need to create the sense of the 1960s so we put a sepia tone over the footage. Throughout the whole video there are no references to the band or images at all because we didn't want to get into the performance based music video. However our Ancillary products are different but still has our childish quirkiness to them, the Digipak was a simple night sky reflecting the name of the album "Saturday Night". There is a city scape skyline with bright bold stars and a moon, this is a complete change to the colour choices in the video. The font chose to be the title and information was bold and seen straight away and we used the same font on the Digipak and magazine advert which linked them nicely but then also there are other things that link the two products together. We used the skyline, font, moon, stars etc. on both of the products.
I think that by making these products so similar will help people to recognise the band and there style but also show they are different to other indie/rock bands. This to me is an effective way of making people remember and recognise our products because the more you see something or a similar object along the same lines it make the consumer think about our product.

3.
What have you learnt form your audience feedback ?

Throughout the making of our music video we were given feedback from and peers and teacher and it became very useful because it would so us where and how we were going wrong.
Our first real feedback blog was when we had to so our rough cut video to our peers, however , even though we only had 5 seconds of footage we got a good response, which made us believe in ourselves even more. Although our rough cut couldn't be properly judged because we hadn't started editing or anything yet our peers were very nice and complimentary.
We also got feed back from our teacher which also was a very useful and worth while thing because we got told things that we most likely wouldn't of thought about ourselves such as our camera work and how we needed to treat it as a actual cinematic piece of work.
The peer feedback using Goodwin's Theory was very helpful to know exactly what our peers thought of our video. With the Goodwin's theory feedback it all turned out to be good about our editing, camera work & Music and visuals.
Music and visuals was hard for us to get right while filming and then to get good feedback about how people liked the movement of the characters and other props. The last feedback we got was about the whole video but the main point that stood out to us was that we had no reference to the band at all and we never even thought about how we hadn't referred to the band until some one mentioned it.

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

We have used many different new media technologies throughout the making of our music video. In the planning stages of this project we used the internet, Google to find the lyrics and find out more about The Thrills themselves. We had to contact the band to check we could make this video and use there song, for this we used MySpace.com the on-line social networking site.
We used Wikipedia to get the basic information on The Thrills and this is when we found out about the 1960s influence and then to get more of a feel for what The Thrills do with their previous videos and how to get this classic 1960s feel.
In order to get started we had to get the music track from the CD on to the MAC, to do this we used iTunes to get the track and then converted it into a suitable file so that we could us it in Final Cut Express. Next we had to get our first ideas together to show our class and we used PowerPoint for this and then used slideshare a website which allows you to share you PowerPoints.
For some of our characters in our animation we used Photoshop and printed them and then filmed.
Anything that was filmed on the camera was then captured it to Final Cut Express and edited, it came to making our rough cut and we had to convert the Final Cut Express file in to a Quicktime file which was then uploaded to YouTube and also to blogger which is where we recorded all of our progress.
After the rough cut we had to carry on filming and capturing until everything was filmed and captured into Final Cut Express it was time to edit. When this was all finished we had to convert it again and upload it to Blogger & YouTube.
Our Digipak & Magazine advert were made all in Photoshop, however we used Google and Wikipedia to research and get the pictures we needed to use and help us create and desired finished products.