Nicola's evaluation

Music Video Evaluation
1)Our products such as the DVD cover & magazine follow then conventions of having the main character on the front of them, so if people see the music video, then the digipack in shops then can relate back to the video and know what they are buying. Our DVD cover has all the basic detailing on it that follows the conventions of DVD covers such as the DVD rating, the companies that created the DVD logo, barcodes and a track listing on the back. The magazine advert follows the conventions, of having a release date to let know people when they can buy the product, the band name and singers. The production company logo and information about what is available on the DVD. Even though the song style of ‘indie’ wouldn’t often be put with an animation, because often for this style most videos are live action, we thought we have done a good job of linking the lyrics to our video for example the songs talks about rain falling on the mans head, so at the beginning of our video we created these lyrics. We also linked the music to the video by in the middle of the song a piano is played, so we had our characters jump around on a piano in time with the music. We tried to incorporate intertextuality into our video by having the space invaders sequence.
2) I think the combination of all 3 of our products has been very effective. We used the main male & female from our music video on the magazine advert & also we used the main male on our DVD cover; we done this so if people saw the video they can see the ancillary tasks they know what they are buying. We also used the visual motif of the colour orange through out our products which relates to the title of our song. During our music video, we have a starry sky which is something we brought through to our DVD cover & used it as our background. Originally we had created many idea’s for our DVD cover & magazine advert these included such as a guy standing having tangerines falling onto him; this was a good idea as it includes a reference to the song but compared to other idea’s it was not as strong. Another idea was having heads with speech bubbles coming out saying ‘The Hush Sounds’ but we felt this wasn’t a very exciting idea & does not have much reference to the video. As we didn’t have long to complete our ancillary tasks we spilt into 2 groups, one group doing the DVD cover & the other doing the magazine advert, we felt this would been an effective use of our time & skills.
3) We learnt a lot from our audience feedback; the first feedback we had was after we done our pitch. Our teacher told us we had an excellent pitch and we had clear ideas so this gave us the motivation to carry on with what we were doing. Once we completed our rough-cut we showed it to our fellow class mates & teacher, we thought showing it to our class mates was a good way of getting feedback from people that are the target audience our song has. Most of our peers said that, many of our shots were too long in time & we didn’t have many different shots, as we didn’t use many close ups. After receiving this feedback, we watched back our video and noticed what our peers said about the length of the shots, so at the beginning shot we decided to add close ups of his thought bubbles; we done this as it breaks up the length of the shot & gives us the opportunity to use close ups. Our teacher’s feedback was to include our tangerine character more, so we carried on using him as a main feature of the video such as he demolished the stack of furniture and knocked the heart over.
4) We used a lot of new media technologies in creating our music video & the ancillary tasks. To get some of the idea’s for our video we used YouTube to look up idea’s and found a previous group of long road student’s work, who created the ‘milkmaid’ video. There concept is very similar to how we wanted to create our video. When making our video we used Istop animation, a programme that as a group we were not very familiar with, so we were constantly learning through our project the difficulties that come with creating an animation using Istop such as lighting & just how long it takes to create an animation. We also had to use Photoshop to create our ancillary tasks, for our DVD cover, we had to take pictures of us against a plain background; upload it to Photoshop then use the magnetic lasso to draw around us, so we could then add it to the background. We also used our online blog to keep up to date with all the planning of our work and to get peer feedback about our work; using the blog was a great way for us to visually see our work, as sometimes we had so much going on we forgot we had to do, so referring back to our blog was useful. We used websites such as play.com & amazon.com to look up ideas for our DVD cover & magazine advert, as we were not sure of the conventions that were used. To find out about the band we used MySpace to find out about them & to contact them for permission and idea’s for their song.