Final Evaluation

We chose the song "The XX - Heart skipped a beat". We felt that this song had an indie feel to it, so we took this and used it throughout our project.

1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Our music video has an indie style to it. We showed this by the clothes the actors wore, the location of our music video and some of the footage we shot.

The costumes our actors wore to represent this indie feel and genre were as followed; the male actor wore a hat, nerd glasses casual shirt, bracelets, jeans, a studded belt and plimsolles. The female actor wore a head band, casual dress, leather jacket, and flat casual shoes.

The location of where we shot our music video was at an abandoned barn. Inside, it had an empty feel to it. The walls were covered in graffiti which made it unique.The barn also had large empty window frames in which we made the most of by shooting footage with the actors sitting in them .

The footage we shot represented an indie feel. E.g. At the end of our music video we had the two actors lying outside on the grass. This created a feel of freedom and open space.

2. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancilliary texts?
We designed a magazine advert and digipak for our music video. We used the same style for both projects; so as they are individual products, by us using the same style throughout they come together and look like they belong and fit together as one project.

Our magazine advert is a shot of in side the barn which is the location where we shot our music video. We added a dim effect to the picture which makes it look more professional. We added everything that was relevant and needed on the magazine advert i.e. the bands name, the song title, the release date of the song, where customers can purchase the song, a comment and star review from someone well known, and record logo.

On the outside cover of our digipak we used a graffiti styled background for. Again, we included all relevant and needed information including; the bands name, song title, age rating logo, DVD logo, record logo, barcode, a list of tracks that are on the CD album, and a brief description of what the didpak includes. The inside cover of our digipak had the same graffiti styled background as the outside cover, this is so it flowed through and fitted together.

3. What have you learnt from your audience feedback?
Our peers feedback helped us develop our project throughout different stages. We got a lot of positive feedback but also some negative feedback. We took all of our feedback into consideration and made changes to our music video.

When we recieved feedback about our rough cut, we changed and added a lot of footage. We even decided to re-film the first verse of the song. This was because the original footage we had filmed for the first verse was filmed from far away and you could not see lip syncing and it was quite boring for the audience to watch. From our rough cut feedback we also changed the end of our music video to make the ending more clear. Also, throughout the music video we added more footage and added different effects to make it a lot more interesting to watch.

4. How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
The new media technologies we used were blogger, final cut, and adobe photoshop. We used blogger throughout the whole of our project; research, planning and valuation stages. We used final cut and adobe photoshop to create our music video, magazine advert ,and digipak. Our whole project was heavily dependent on these new media technologies.

We used blogger to upload all of our progress on all of our tasks. Blogger also helped us to communicate with our teacher and other class members to gain feedback on our project so far.

We used final cut to practice and test effects during the planning of our music video. After we had shot our footage for our music video, we used final cut to put together and edit our footage, which created our music video. Using final cut we were able to cut out unneccessary and any unwanted footage, enabling us to put together the footage we needed to create our music video. Final cut also enabled us to add filters and effects to our footage which enabled us to create the style we required.

We used adobe photoshop to create our magazine advert and digipak. With adobe photoshop, we were able to style the texts, add pictures, and add effects. Again, this enabled us to create the style in which we wanted.