james cooper evaluation

James cooper

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

In our music video we used conventions similar to that used in videos such as “The horrors- sea within a sea” such as low saturation colour effects over our clips. We also included the Britpop genre of the song with our lighting having red and blue lights (colours of the British flag). Another convention we used is having a lip sink, in our lip sink most of the singing is quite expressionless and sitting down we did this because it is one of the conventions of our genre, we emphasised this by having a big lightshow with lots of movement during the “solo” part of the song, this gives the impression of not really caring.

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

In our ancillary product we tried to keep with the same theme as our music video. An example of this is the reference to vinyl records and record players. In our music video at the start we show a record player spinning as the song starts up and later on a clip of Nathan holding a vinyl record of spoons. In the inside of the album cover on the CD and around the CD there is a picture of a record player as if the CD is a vinyl. This was done as it shows that the music is trying to imitate older (80s) music. Our CD cover it’s self shows a hooded man with lots of bright light behind him. It is very difficult to make out who the man in which gives an element of mystery and shows that the band doesn’t really care about being on the front cover. The front cover is also looks old, washed out and very grainy this was done to give a feeling of the album being old which fits with the rest of the theme.

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

We learnt that during the rough cut stage we needed to make a lot of changes. A lot of these changes were general mistakes such as in our projection we had text in the top right corner saying “DVI” which made the product look very unprofessional. Another change we needed to make during the rough-cut stage was that the order of our clips was not ideal. An example of this is that we should have had clips of guitar playing come in when the guitar starts in the song. Also we had our small bit of story line at the beginning of the video whereas it would be more satisfying for the viewer for Nathan to find the record at the end of the video as it rounds things off better. People also got confused as to what the “walking” was about, we tried to make it more clear in our final cut by have the clips space closer together so it gave a feel of more continuity.

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

Blogger – We used blogger to document the stages of our production this give us a clear plan and record of what we had done so that we could refer back to our past work clearly when it came to doing an evaluation it also helped us organize our work and show when we had done certain things.

Photoshop – We used photoshop to edit the pictures for our projection as well as putting together our Ancillary products. Photoshop was useful as it had a lot of features that allowed as to keep our CD covers in the same theme as our music video such as light filters and contrast settings.

Final Cut Express – We used Final Cut Express to edit our music video. Final cut express was good because it allowed us to put effects over our music video to change the feel of it to how we wanted. We did have a few problems with final cut express in that every time we moved something in our video, because of the file format of our video, we had to render the video each time and rendering can take up to 10 minutes for longs clips.  This vastly slowed down the editing process of our music video.