Dale's Evaluation Draft

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

Currently only got a plan for the things I'll talk about with this, and these notes will eventually be put into the form of a video (maybe).

Digipak and magazine advert: talk about the inspirations (in particular Biffy Clyro's 'Live at Wembley') and talk about the use of the rule of three to help the brand as well as conform to conventios of the good-looking magazine adverts in the research stage (in particular The Verve's 'Love is Noise').

Music Video: talk about the videos of Death Cab for Cutie and Elbow, and the way that you conformed to the elements of their performance videos and how they inspired you. In particular, the live recorded version of Death Cab For Cutie's 'Bixby Canyon Bridge' and Elbow's 'Lippy Kids'.

Notes: criticise the choice of inspiration for digipak and the name's style in comparison to what you've constructed - wild vs mature, which was an accident.

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

3.) What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Video

The feedback we got from the class was generally positive, and we were pretty glad to get comments on the bad stuff in the video too. For some reason a lot of people avoided saying what they thought was bad but still gave us a low score, which is what annoyed us most of all. What we did find out from the in-class feedback though was that whilst we thought the lipsyncing and instrument synchronisation was good for the most part, others noticed it being off quite a bit, in particular the keyboard playing. The variety of shots we used was also seen as positive, and that the mise-en-scene though simplistic worked pretty well – this was surprising, as I thought the video was pretty plain and dull compared to a lot of other people’s.  The outfits in particular were complimented as fitting the style of music, but something me and Tom noticed was that the lead singer (Pat) shouldn’t have worked very well as his appearance didn’t really match the voice of the singer in the song – Harry (the guitarist) would have been better. The location was also noted by others to be too school-like, probably because of the objects in the background, but it was a better location than we originally chose in the draft (which we changed after some feedback from the teachers that it was, again, too school-like).

What we learnt from this feedback is that when filming, we really should’ve focused more on improving the instrument’s syncing to the music, as we seemed to have focused so much on the lipsyncing that we didn’t take notice of Tom’s off-beat keyboard playing. We should have also planned ahead of time to avoid using an area filled with school equipment, as we were planning to use the main hall but unfortunately that was booked solid for the last few weeks of filming thanks to the pantomime and PE exams.

Digipak and Magazine Advert

I also received some feedback from the class on the ancillary texts, and was happy to get compliments on the magazine advert in particular. I was pretty unhappy to not get any criticism over certain parts of it, for example the logos along the bottom – they could have potentially done with some identification as to what they were, for example the icons for where you can buy it weren’t really too clear on what they were there for, and having them in such a non-symmetrical way on the page just feels bad to look at (3 on the left with 1 icon on the right). People did give compliments on the professional and mature nature of the content on the page however, which is what I was aiming for and was therefore happy to hear.

The digipak got some positive feedback too, for example the two-panels of images on the front was complimented as well as the contents on the back cover. What was noted though was that the montage of photos didn’t really seem to fit, and that the page with the ‘credits’ on seemed too out of place, which I totally agree with. In the future, what I won’t do is base the design on a band’s album that is completely unlike the style I’m aiming for – in this case Biffy Clyro’s ‘Live at Wembley’ album. After comparing the album design to the magazine advert, I noticed that the red changed the tone of the work entirely and definitely didn’t work very well in conjunction with the magazine advert’s minimalistic colour scheme. What people also noted was that there’s very little information on the back next to the barcode where would otherwise be information such as copyright info, etc., which is something I would definitely aim to sort out in the future. The spacing on the photographs on the back was also off, and the disk tray didn’t really fit well with the rest – some people mentioned that the design didn’t feel very even, as some pages were cluttered with information and yet others (like the disk tray) were almost entirely empty, comments that I completely agree with.

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