Evaluaion Q4

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

Created by Aiden Scott on a group members account.

Evaluation Q3

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

In the beginning we collected audience feedback, but it wasn't very much help due to the fact that we had a lot of blank spaces. This meant that many of the feedback forms had things like, not enough footage and a lot of blank spaces. Because of this they were not very constructive towards the idea and construction of the music video. However, when we did start to make more of the music video, we found that the more feedback we got the better the video would become, this was because it made the possibilities more extensive and made a clearer image of what we had to do.

The most recent feedback gave us a external insight into our project, letting us know that what we had done was, in fact, good enough. Many small things which may not have shown up to us, other people saw and pointed out, giving us the option to change it, which we did. We have realised that it is important to receive other people’s perspective, making sure that everything is alright. As we progressed we received less negative feedback and realised we were doing something right, and with this, we were able to delegate our time and management time effectively enough, so we could complete the filming sand the editing in time.

At some point within the making of our music video we wanted to give up. This is due to many people dropping out on us when we needed them, and from the time that we had completed around 30 seconds, the rest of the class had nearly finished. We shortly received a moral boost when people began to say that it was improving on the feedback sheets.

To conclude i believe that the audience feedback sheets are very useful and we have learned a great deal from them. Having the access to people or an audience to judge our work, gave us the opportunity to make it better based on judgement. However, the only down side to the feedback sheets were that a few select people did not understand the plot to a full extent, but the majority did. This left us with two options, fix it to please everyone, but rush it, or keep it the way it is and make sure it is the best we could make it. We chose to leave it the way it was, since it was only about four people who did not understand it out of the entire class.

Evaluation Q2

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

Evaluation Q1

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

For the entire course of making the music video, I worked within the group of myself and Rosie to form Tear Down. We Have made the video according to the genre specifics of post-grunge. This happens to be because we very much enjoy that genre of music and therefore decided to make one of the songs we listen to the main focus of our music video. To find out what the codes and conventions of the specific genre of Post-Grunge were, we decided to investigate into bands such as Seether Stained and Hooberstank. With the elements of all of these bands and some deeper music such as Disturbed we came up with the idea of Tear down and the music video. We decided to go along the lines of a suicide awareness video, which can be perceived as "sketchy" or a bit too "dark" but it was with good intentions.

The typical connotations of Post-Grunge is depression and darkness. For inspiration we looked at the past stories for not only bands but for individuals, making the process of making the music video and ideas a lot easier. In many cases the bands members had suffered some sort of tragedy making the lyrics and music in general based not hat individual. This adds the representation and connotation of sadness and darkness win the video and song, this is because it is representing the love of a lost one. By doing this and making the song based on that individual, it makes it easier for the lyrics to develop meaning an to make the song have a more emotional impact on not only the listener but for the singer, where in many cases has broken down on stage. The lead singer of Seether, Sean Morgan has had the tragedy of his Brother committing suicide and devoted not only his new album but to songs directly aimed at him. This gives the strong connotation of death, tragedy and depression in Post- Grunge.
  However, when it came to making Tear Down, we tried to make the band as positive to the thoughts and feelings of depression. so when w thought of the concept of Tear Down we decided to make sure that their main goal was to make sure that they not only turned heads away from depression and suicide but to also help people who are suffering from it, By doing this the pain was to make sure that people know that suicide isn't always he answer and make sure that they know that the do have people to support them. This was represented in our video by showing the lead singers girlfriend committing suicide and then his friend coming to comfort him, so he doesn't take that way out as well.

The clothing  often represented within the genre is perceived as dark and has the convention of "Grungy". The style of grunge and the music was brought around before the introduction of Post-Grunge and Post-Grunge is a derivative of Grunge. Kurt Cobain who was the lead singer of Nirvana, brought in the new styling of Grunge. Grunge is often represented by the mannerisms of the person, i.e. being depressed and down, and are often perceived  as wearing checkered shirts, black jeans, piercings and often boots of some kind. This is what we decided to follow for our band but decided to mix it up due to the conventions of our band and the examples they set. We wanted to be conventional but unconventional at the same time, to do this we decided to follow some of the conventional outlooks, using some checkered shirts and boots but during the band performance we had the majority of black clothing. This means that we followed the guidelines of the genre but added a different twist, so we could become an individual stylistic.

I do believe that we have challenged all of the conventions of not only a general music videos and typically of the genre. I believed that the use of clothing  compared to the typical clothing is a clear difference in our bands difference, and the ending to our music video is also different to what will usually be expected.

Problems we have encountered

Problems and resolution

Throughout the course of the year me and my group member Rosie found it vey hard to get started and started off very slowley with the production aspect of our video. We spent a lot of time on our digi-paks making sure that they werte to the best standard they could be. By doing so we fell a little behind with the filming and editing.

When we did start to film we encountered a problem where our lead singer decided he did not want to help us in our project, this meant that we had to find someone else. After considering who would be the best to we voted on making Terry (a felolow A2 student) to be our lead singer.We also decided for the original guitarist to remain the smae , but voted on our teacher becoming the new drummer instead of myself. This is because we viewed him as having a better rymthm and looking better when playing the drums to the song. Overall this made for a better finished product for the band. By making these changes we managed to get the work done in time and to a reasonable standard. When reading throught eh feedback sheet everybody seemed to agree that it was a vast improvement from before, and many of them said it looked very good as a finished peice.

Poster Analysis:Stone Sour

Stone Sours Posters:

Both of these poster advertise the release of their new album which I have annotated the digi-pak for. The album is simple yet gets the genre across very easily, you may not be able to pin point the exact genre but you can clearly tell it is not pop, but something much darker. This is due to the dark contrast and the images of a man on fire running and another of a man drowning. These are very dark and meaningful images and have been placed there to show suffering and darkness. Which is also shown with the flames appearing out the back of the Digi-Pak image
showing that it is dark and possibly having that evil connotation since flames are often a connotation of hell or evil.

The different band names allow everyone who look at the poster know bands similar to the ones bing advertised.The names of the other bands give a clear representation of the type of music which is being advertised, names such as Pop Evil and Stolen Babies does not show the typical connotation of pop, bu instead shoes something of a darker genre.

Final Draft

This is the final draft of my music video. For ther final cut we have made a few changes and moved and decoloured more images to fit in with the style of our genre. We also had to make sure that all of the peices were in time and all synced together, without any mistakes. By doing this it allowed us to get a much better draft than the original.