Evaluation Conclusion

Evaluation Conclusion

Evaluation Question 4: How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Question 4

Final Cut on Prezi

The importance of Social Media:

In contemporary society, everybody, regardless of who they are and what their profession is, are affected by social media. The most notable sources of this are Facebook, twitter and also YouTube which could be considered as part of this. During our production we found that both Facebook and YouTube were a great help to us, just as twitter would be if we were selling our product to the market. This social media provides an excellent platform on which we can brand and sell our product to our target audience successfully. Without social media, advertising would be limited, which, in turn means that products cannot sell.

Evaluation Question 3: What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Focus Group Write Up pt 2 I think that the comments that we received about our work would definitely change the way that we would all work, if working in a group again. I feel that we would need to make sure that everyone is pulling their weight and doing equal shares of work, because this has not been the case across the whole project. Lots of the work has fallen to individuals, which carries the rest of the group through, which I do not feel is fair in any way shape or form. That said, I do think that the group worked well as a whole, and we all had our own individual contributions that had a big impact on the video and the work that we completed.

From the comments that we have received we have learnt a huge amount about producing and editing a music video. From the comments that we received we have learnt that it is imperative to get things right from the beginning - right at the planning of the video. We have also taken on board that it is not just the editing process that makes the video look good and professional, but it is that of the shots that you get whilst out filming. One comment that was said about our video in particular was the fact that we had used lots of medium shots and close ups that looked too similar, and our video seemed to lack depth of emotion, because we had very few 'distance shots' (long shots).
I feel that if I had to make another music video, I would be very well prepared to do so, by taking these comments on board. Of course, this feedback would not relate to everything in another music video, because the song would be different and so would the style of the video. But this feedback has all proved very helpful and I have taken it all on board as constructive criticism.

Evaluation Question 2: How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

Evaluation Question 2 - Will pt 2 To view in a larger format, please click on Evaluation Question 2 underneath the main blog title.

Evaluation Question 1: In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Evaluation Question 1 Media pt 3 Please click on "Evaluation Question 1" underneath the blog title to view the content on a larger scale.

Completed Music Video

For viewing, please refer to the DVD. Due to rending by YouTube when uploading some of the video has gone out of sync. Although still watchable, you will gain a better viewing experience from the DVD.

Digipak and Advert Analysis

As a group, we sat down together and analysed our product, highlighting both positive and negative points, and why we have included certain elements and how they impact upon the audience and make them want to buy the product.

Final Digipak

Completed Advert

Right...

After having our video assessed by our teacher, and getting some positive (and negative) feedback, we decided on including band footage into our video to cover all aspects of what a music video should look like, in order to reach the higher bands. Although we have left it late in the day to film (literally!) we are pleased with what we have got and cannot wait to get it into the final edit! Pictures on another post to follow! :D

Digipak and Advert

Today we completed our final digipak and our advert to support this. The digipak is much the same as the first two slides, showing our actor in colour with the background in black and white,this is also the same within our advert, making it easy to relate tot he both.Now that the advert and digipak are finished we can finish up tweeking the small elemnts of our video that need to be amended.

Digipak Design

We have decided that for our digipak we are going to go with the idea of balck and white with certain elements of the image in colour, so far we have out first and second panels completed. We decided to use the desgin that we drew up a few weeks ago as our front cover as it goes well with the theme and the song. We have also completed our second panel within the digipak which shows Jack, our actor in a low angle shot,whith writing around him talking about his success' and what he has achieved.

How much footage?

I thought i would show you how much footage that we have filmed, and how much has been used within our video, to start to get us to our final product. We have finished filming now and want to focus on getting all of the digipak and advert work finished and reviewed, as well as finishing the final edit completely.

Ending Overhaul (cont.)

Today we added in the lip syncing to break up our ending montage. This worked well, and we used our close ups from the emergency filming in order to complete this. I feel that the ending now works well and fits in with the rest of the video.

Our finished ending.

Ending Overhaul

After looking at our first ending montage, we felt that it was to slow and too long. I spent a few hours selecting various clips and shortening them to a reasonable size, and adding cross disolves in order to make them flow much better, now that this has been completed I feel that we need to get some more shots to break up flow of the ending as this does still go on for quite a while.

This shows a small section of the ending, as you can see the shots are small with cross dissolves. Although they look big here, they are definately not when you see the whole editing process.

Emergency Filming!!!

We had to get some final shots today to fill some small gaps, these shots were simple close ups and extreme close ups, now, we have finished our filming completely and are focusing on the final edit to make it as good as possible!

Filming Today

Today, Tuesday 8th November, we got our final shots for the video. This involved taking our male actor, Jack and our female actor Jess, and filming our argument scene, which, ultimately adds to the them of Jack ending up on his own. This was a very successful session because not only did we manage to get our final shots, but we got a good variety in order to make the argument scene look good. Hopefully, we wont need to do any more filming and we can focus on our editing!

"Mind the Gap"

Whilst continuing with our editing to day, we realised that we had not got enough shots to cover all of the lyrics that we needed to cover. So, once we had worked out the lines that we needed to film, we found a conveniently place brick wall, and decide to film some close ups of Jack lip syncing the missing lines...

Filming Today

Today, 1st November 2011, we travelled to Cheam Park to get some more shots with our actor, Jack. The filming mainly consisted of close up and filler shots as we are now coming towards the end of production. The shots included the skyline of London, Close ups and Medium shots. The surrounding area, being a park is very different to the urban surrounding of London that we have used, showing a journey and that situations can change.

Problem Solved

After a few tense editing sessions and a lot off pressure from the teachers, we, as a group managed to rectify our editing problems and get back to the standard (and more) of what we had before we lost a lot of work. Now that we are back on track, we can get on from where we left off!

This pic shows the opening that we lost, and had to reconstruct, a lot harder than it looks, changing clip speeds and using colour correction.

Editing Problem

Today we have had a few small problems whilst we were editing. Final Cut quit unexpectedly and, by no fault of anybody but myself the work of half of todays lesson was lost. Next time I will remember to save! Looks like im in for the long slot after school and for the next few days...

More Digipak work...

Much the same as my last post, we are still working on our digipak design and how we want it to work out. We have decided to run with the black and white theme, but keep some of our original image in colour. Today this slide was put together as an idea that we can base the rest of our digipak around, although we still need to decide weather this will be our final design. I have mixed feelings about this specific tile. I feel that it could work, because it shows the loneliness. But on the other hand, i dont feel that it compliments the song.

Digipak Design

Today we sat down and decided what kind of Digipak theme/design that we wanted to go for. We are still trying to finalise our ideas, but common themes arising are that we will have the artist alone, not part as a group, and that our Digipak will be in black and white. We also decided that we are going to stick with a 4 panel product instead of 6, simply because we do not want to put too much into the product, which may take away from it. One thing that we have decided on for sure, is the fact that we will be branding our actor as an individual artist, giving the whole product individuality and originality.

Digipak Sketches

Below are out basic sketches for the digipak that we are hoping to create for our product.

We started by getting some basic ideas of what we wanted our digipak to look like down on paper. The design work was important to us so that we knew what we had to do when the product was nearing completion. Without the prior planning, I feel that we would not have created a strong digipak because our ideas would have been mixed up with no clear path to follow.

Editing

Today we continued with the same work as our previous session on Tuesday 11th. We have noticed that there we still have big gaps to fill, and some of our footage already needs to be re-filmed. Although, at the moment this is no major drama, if we leave it, the problem will escalate! But today has been successful by continuing to build our skeleton of the video

Editing

Today, we continued on with our editing, tidying up our opening and roughly positioning shots to where we wanted them to be. All in all a successful session as we have a main skeleton ready to start finalising!

Filming 7th October 2011

For our filming session today, we headed out to the local village to get some more lip syncing shots and fillers. Although in past posts I have mentioned that we do not wish to film in the local area, Carshalton Highstreet is an area of outstanding beauty, with it's historic church and beautiful park. We managed to get some vital shots to in order to reveal our twist at the end of the video and also managed to fill some small gaps we had in our lyrics. Hopefully we have finished the bulk of our filming now and we will not have to do much more...

Filming 4th October 2011

Today we made another trip to London to get some filming done for our music video. The day was very successful getting a lot of footage filmed, and this time, we had our main actor with us! We had a plan for the day (please see below) which I felt we stuck to very well enabling us to get lots of work done, cant wait for the next filming session....


4th October Plan:

10:00 - Arrive in London and head to Green Park, where we aim to film a manner of shots, but mainly showing the actor alone in such a big space to show his lonliness. I aim to take some pictures, not only for the but for the group to add. 

10:45 - Filming in Embankment and Westminster. This seems to be the best location for us in order to film opening shots of the music video as it gives us the opportunity to film some of our flashbacks.

11:30 - We now aim to be at Oxford Circus where the busy streets will be perfect in order to emphasise the solidarity of our main character, this will  also be another opportunity to take some photos for the Digipak.

12:15 - We plan to head straight to Primrose Hill, where again we would be looking capture the emotion of the actor as well as the surroundings that he is in. We then plan to head to Charing Cross in order to finish up our filming for the day.

13:45 - For our last section, we wish to film the introduction locally, which is shown by the first few storyboards; this consists of the two actors arguing and then the accident taking place, it is vital that this is filmed correctly in order to gain maximum effect. If all goes to plan, we could start editing from here but we can film any shots that we have missed or did not account for as and when needed.

Transportation

To make our music video as good as possible we do not want to be filming in and around our local area so as you can see from our plans we have opted to use Central London. We want to make good use of the cheap travel that we are lucky enough to have to get around the capital. Our oyster cards give us free bus travel which is very helpful for getting us to the station, and we also get half rate travel on the tubes so the day works out relitvely cheaply. In  total individual travel costs have only reached around £10 which is very helpful because of the ridiculous prices that we would otherwise have to pay.
We aim to get ourselves to Leicester Square and walk around for the rest of the day filming and get a tube home, a very cheap day for lots of filming...

Filming 27th September 2011

On the 27th September our group travelled to London to start our filming for our music video. This gave us the idea opportunity to assess our locations and to start to get some filler shots for our video. We also used the time to take photos to include in our Digipak, which we are currently designing. Unfortunately our actors were not available for filming today, so we could not get any of our lip syncing done, but we found the day very useful as it gave us the opportunity to work out how we wanted to film and to finalise our locations.

I have included some pictures below of the day and what we got up to. I will be creating a post like this everytime we film to keep track of what we have done. Whilst we have been filming, Nathan has been experimenting at home on Adobe After Effects to try out different ways of making lyrics appear on screen. I believe that these are very good, and full credit must go to Nathan for his excellent work on these. I have included the pictures below to show you what he has done which will hopefully be implamented into our final video.

Lyrics Analysis

Story Boards