Media evaluation

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

The genre of our band The Thrills are a 1960’s indie- rock band from Ireland. Instead of a performance based media product like most indie-rock bands we decided to challenge the conventions by making it into a animation; Instead of a stereotypical indie-rock band music video we wanted something interesting and fun. In most of the Thrills music videos they tended to have a sepia filter on them, so we decided to use this effect on our music video to give that 1960’s feel. To add to the 1960’s feel we used mise - en scene to help us for example a guitar, Bob Dylan a ‘Vote J.F Kennedy poster’. Also in most indie-rock music videos the camera is mainly focused on the lead vocalists but we challenged this by focusing on the main animated character. We decided to film our product on a camcorder instead of using istopmotion which was our original idea. By doing this we could intentionally add shadows and have shaky camerawork to create the childish theme which we had intended on doing. However the song talks about ’love’ ’sex’ and ’hate’ which is an opposite theme to our video. We were hugely influenced by Melpo Mene’s ‘I Adore You’ which uses a hand made drawings of characters like we do.


How effective is the combination of your main product & ancillary texts?


Our ancillary texts and main product complement each other very well. There are three parts to the ancillary products: The main part is our media product which is a animated music video for The Thrills ＇Saturday Night’ . We did a DVD cover for the album and a magazine advert as well. We did the DVD cover and the magazine advert a bit differently to our music video but we did still do a cartoon theme just slightly different; The DVD cover is a blue night skyline with shining stars and a moon in the corner. We used the same look for our magazine advert so when the consumers see it they can link the two texts together ( branding our products). The DVD cover and the magazine advert have the same colour background, font etc. except for the information on them are slightly different; The DVD cover has the song lists on the back but the advert has recommendations from music magazines - NME ‘Album Of The Year’ also the release date. The main product and ancillary texts are both simple showing consistency within our products.

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

The first feedback was about our blog; Telling us how our blog contained the right elements and that we had done a lot of research and that they could see the links between the bands that we had decided to research as well. Also they told us to be careful when making our characters not to make them to unrealistic so that they can understand the story behind the song. Since we were doing an animation for our rough cut we did not have a lot of footage but everyone still gave a positive feedback and encouraged us; They also told us to add more transitions in and also needed to add in the song. Our teacher‘s feedback was very useful she told us to concentrate on different camera angles and various shot types. Our teacher also told us that our video was ‘a quirky and effective approach to the genre of music＇which was good because this is what we wanted the video to be like. People also commented saying how our visual relationship with the lyrics was very good because the visuals were telling what the lyrics were saying in different ways, but everyone could understand what it meant. They also told us that our storyboard was very clear and that they could see what we were trying to achieve and that it will turn out very good if we manage to do everything.


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

We used many various different new media technologies for the construction, research and planning our media product. To construct our video we used the search engine Google and Wikipedia to help us research about The Thrills to see what genre they were and when they were formed and just general background information to give us a sense of what kind of a band they are. Google images also helped us find the images of The Thrills and also helped us search for examples of digipaks. We used Myspace to contact the band for their permission to use their song ‘Saturday night’ but they did not reply. Also we used YouTube to look up videos which we could use to give us inspiration for our video also to look at some of the Thrills videos so we could analyse their style; Also we uploaded our music video on YouTube so everyone could see it so that we could get feedback from the comments. iTunes was used to import our music, once we had filmed on a camera with a tripod to hold the camera in place, finalcut was used to edit the footage. We tried to cut the footage to the beat of the drums. Powerpoint was used to help plan our product, we made a pitch and presented it to our classmates and they were able to tell us what they liked about our ideas and what we could change. Also the our blog from Blogger helped us plan because what ever we came up with we put it on the blog as well as ideas and what we did for each lesson; We were able to see the process and the progress of our music video. Since we had to make all our props Photoshop was used to create some of the characters used in our music video; We did this buy using the pen tool. Dafont was used whilst we were making the texts for the DVD covers and magazine adverts.