In what ways does your media products use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
When creating our music video, we wanted to follow conventions of a current music video of the same genre as closely as possible. During the research period we watched several music videos to try and determine what the codes and conventions were. We also looked at current Videos from our artist Vanessa Carlton, we did this to see how she portrayed the themes and genre through her music videos. We found that most of these videos had a narrative structure, meaning they told a story, which some songs often do, we then decided this would be most appropriate for our video. We also noticed that the band members, in particular the main singer, was either the main character through the story, or where often featured throughout the video, we felt this was an important factor, as it creates a more natural effects, as if the signer is showing memories, instead of telling a story- this is the kind of affect we wanted.
In terms of the ancillary products, I think that my advert follows conventions, when beginning my project, I looked closely at how similar advert have been constructed in magazines and newspapers and based my advert on these, focusing on the main codes and conventions, such as text and images and most importantly the layout.. The research was hugely helpful as initially I didn’t know how to construct my advert, and after research of current adverts I made a few sketches of what mine should look like.
However, the tour program was a little harder to research, as i couldn't find much information on the internet, I had to ask friends and family if they had any sources i could use, i finally found a few programs, however they were for theatre shows. However i still feel they were a good reference for me to use.
How effective is the combination of your main ancillary texts?
I tried to reflect aspects of the video into the ancillary products, a good way of doing this was to continue on the colour scheme of red and black, i also had to consider that the text needed to fit the genre. As a group we had previously agreed on a dark, contrasting colours, red and black, we also thought this would tie in with the theme of love, with the red and despair with the black. We also decided on 3 different fonts that will be used throughout the tasks. This worked really well because our products were consistent which would allow the audience to be able to recognise our band, through the different media platforms for example they would see my advert and could instantly associate them with Vanessa Carlton.
What have you learned from your audience feedback?
From the audience feedback I have learnt that the music video looked professional and that the transitions and effects between each shot were good as it allowed the video to flow well. The locations were frequently mentioned during feedback, as some thought that it added verisimilitude and people could relate to the location. Another positive comment was that the audience could relate to the characters, and the story line. I feel that the story line of love a despair is something that everyone can relate to- no matter what their age.
Feedback associated to my ancillary tasks was mostly positive. However some comments were made that the Adverts didn't contain enough information, i feel this is something i could have resolved if i had taken some audience feedback into consideration earlier in the production process.
However the audiences still felt that my advert and program were very professional, and that the layout meant they were easy to read, and flowed better.
How did you use new media technologies in the construction, research, planning, and evaluation stages?
New media technologies were used during the research stage because I used several search engines to try and find out the conventions of all of my tasks. However, in some cases i had to use friends and family to find out information and get other sources. During planning, illustrator was used to create some simple layout designs, this included the colour scheme and the house font.
During construction, the music video was created on Adobe Premier Pro which was the best software to use because it allowed us to edit the video by importing videos and cutting them in the correct places and inserting fades between each shot. When creating my adverts and program, i used Adobe Illustrator because the software is easy to use and i had previous experience using this software, this allowed me to piece together my final products. Alongside this, I used Adobe Photoshop to edit my photos, in different ways, including, editing out backgrounds or creating new effects.
