Media advanced portfolio critical evaluation

Media-Advanced portfolio Critical Evaluation

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

    We have stuck to certain conventions that relate to our pop genre. We have done this by using a young female to play the main role of the artist in our video and included dance shots every so often to fit in with the rhythm of the music and to show the idealistic themes of our genre. However we wanted to include an old man in our video, as this character would relate well to the story of the song. We realised through feedback from classmates that an old person in a pop video might not appeal to that genres audience. To make this more comical and attract more to the audience, we used a young male and dressed him up as an old man, the humorous side of this is that you can tell he is not actually an old man. Pop Music videos consist of short shots to make it quick and sharp (this is mainly because pop music is fast and therefore needs the video to flow to the beat of the music). I think making the shots last at least 3-5 seconds was one of our main priorities we tried to achieve and creating the mixed scenes flow from one shot to another.

We have incorporated many different aspects of postmodern ideas that generate a certain challenge of technicalities and performance that other music videos contain. These include things like bright colours, make-up, props, split screen effect and light changes (e.g. colour gels over lights whilst filmed or edit the lighting colour on the Mac). Make-up needed to be a key element in our video. Ke$ha and most current artists such as Lady Gaga take dramatic changes to the way they look with make-up whilst being filmed and to when they are just socializing. I found that the main feature that is used for the make-up is glitter. Glitter is stereotypical for sparkling and giving a ‘fun’ vibe, and so glitter was used on the face.

When we researched Ke$ha we found that on her website the text used was in a graffiti looking kind of font which stands out as being bright and urban. Therefore we took this onboard and decided to make our own font by handwriting, scanning it onto a Mac and carefully editing it on Photoshop to recreate the style of Ke$ha’s. The text was then able to stand out on our website and CD cover and relate to the genre we followed.

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

We have maintained a clear image and theme throughout our campaign by the consistency of colours used for example and the way they link to the genre type, we used bright colours such as pink within our music video and on our website to reflect the pop style and image we wished to portray of a fun, girly female. Our theme and song title reflect fun and flirtation, we demonstrate this theme throughout our video, website and CD cover seen in the images such as sequins and our character blowing kisses. Costume is also used consistently portraying a party like look, seen in all our interrelated related products. They are related by the joint purpose of wanting to sell our artist and portray her attitude in a positive way, this is seen by close ups and dancing in our video for example and the animation on the website. They target the audience by showing our artists fun personality and likability, a very important factor desired when making our products to sell our artist. Shots seen in the video of her laughing and dancing emphasise this likability factor and this relationship and link between all our products help reflect the personality of our character. The relationship between our products is very consistent using the same fonts and colours for example, aspects of these are our house style within our products and are used consistently to represent and be associated with our artist. Miming to the camera seen in our video also helps target the audience and establish a pseudo friendship with them and helps them feel involved.

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

We gathered audience feedback in many ways. One way was throughout the process of editing. We got other groups to come and watch our video and then give us written feedback., through this we was able to improve our editing for the rest of the video. We also posted the video on youtube then asked close friends and family to watch the video and then give feedback, either over the internet or face to face.
We would say that after the feedback during the production process helped us get a perspective of what the target audience liked about the video so far. For example on group said that one of the beginning shots was too long and boring and didn’t go quite well with the other fast short snappy shots that we used around it. With this in mind we decided to use the spilt screen effect and the colour flash effect. This relates back to our target audience cause even though it’s still long, it’s still vibrant and still catches your eye. It goes well with the other clips around this one.
I would say that as a group we do agree with the feedback. Most of the feedback was positive, and then with the negative feedback, we fount that it was easy to take the feedback in and then deal with the problems. One of the problems I would say with this is that it’s only a handful of our target audience, we’re not getting a proper view of our audience feedback.

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

To create our production we made use of the equipment provided, including the film camera and the Apple Mac. The Apple Mac allowed us to use certain applications such as, imovie, iweb, Photoshop and the internet. The internet was used most of the time, whether we were looking at Ke$ha’s website for inspiration or just to blog, the internet most certainly helped us along the way with research. Photoshop is a great programme, there are so many different edits that can be made on an image. Once discovering all these possibilities of changing an image, you become more creative with the use of layers and filters.    

Online media technology has enabled us to get our project to a wider audience through many different ways. The first way is the blog, this as enabled us to update what we are doing with the music video on a regular basis. Another way is through youtube and facebook. We was upload the video on to youtube then post the link on our facebook pages. From this we was able to get the video to bigger range of our target audience.

We used technology throughout the whole process of our production and it helped us greatly. Firstly, it enabled us to research in depth into our artists existing videos, websites and CD covers to develop a sense of their styles and ideologies, with our artist Ke$ha, this involved fun and parties etc. We also used youtube to gather audience feedback which helped us greatly to look for improvements to be used, positive feedback was also used as well as constructive. We posted our split screen idea for example on our blog. The software such as imovie and photoshop has also helped improve our productions and come up with new ideas. Photoshop was particularly helpful as we discovered all the different edits and effects to help us and we got audience feedback from this to help us decide which if any edit was right for us and our production.