Dale's Evaluation

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

Wix - Dale Luck's A2 Media Evaluation

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

3. What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Since the beginning of the project we have used feedback to change almost everything to do with the band. For example, when the project began the band went by the name of Saxon Static and used a Radiohead song. After getting feedback from fellow class members who fell into the target audience, we discovered that the name wasn't as particularly fitting as we had first though, instead making people think of band styles that were much more classic-rock oriented, like Van Halen. After spending a rather large amount of time attempting to think of a name, we just couldn't think of one that would fit the style of the song we had chosen, which lead to us then rethinking the choice in song - what we settled on after that was Lippy Kids by Elbow. What we did then was construct a new target audience based on the new style we were going for, and asked members of the school who fit into that group what they imagined the group would be like, which then lead to the current construction of the band that focuses on a much more professional, straight forward image than we originally had in mind. What I learnt from this feedback was that different styles can be reflected in very different ways that not everyone will be able to see - in this case, the original band name had very little consideration put into what style it conveyed, eventually forcing us to change the entire song, style and name (We Three Fools).

When constructing the magazine advert and digipak, I wanted to reflect this new style, but really did rush their design. What I had during the draft stage was essentially some unrelated artwork there to just look nice, an effect that was drastically reduced thanks to my inability to see that I'd accidentally colour corrected it enough to make it the photos green, a view reflected in the feedback gained from various class members. In order to try and fix everything wrong with it, I redesigned the entire magazine advert whilst retaining the original inspiration for the digipak, opting for the use of black and white photos to avoid any colour problems that may arise from being colour blind again, and getting opinions on what was and wasn't working in term of the colour scheme. The montage of performance photos in the Biffy Clyro album that inspired me was taken to the extreme for the design of the magazine advert, using very similar styled photographs of our own band to create a professional but attractive layout. However, whilst people did praise my final magazine advert, the digipak didn't turn out as well as I would have wanted, which many pointed out to be because of the style of the band that was used to inspire it - the band Biffy Clyro's style wasn't at all like what we had wanted with ours, and yet I had used their style to inspire almost every aspect of my own digipak, resulting in a digipak that just didn't fit the style I was going for. What I learnt from this stage of the coursework and the feedback gained was that it's very important to put as much focus on the consistency in style over all the products, not just focusing on one like I did and neglecting the others.

With the music video, the original plan and final plan differed greatly because of the feedback we gained and the experience we had during early stages of production. As we attempted to meet the deadline of the draft, we were using a combination of narrative shots and performance shots, but came across a lot of problems during the shooting that meant we had a lot of shots left to shoot by the time the deadline came and we weren't able to properly meet it. The feedback we got on that process was that the narrative shots we did have didn't work anyway, and that to avoid problems with the final video we should just use performance shots and avoid having any narrative at all - these comments were from teachers and students alike. What we learnt from this was that keeping things as simple as possible works best, and the more complex the idea the more problems that can arise. The feedback we gained from this draft was invaluable in increasing the quality of our final video.

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



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?

Music Video Draft Feedback Evaluation

When we got the feedback, we weren't expecting anything fantastic - shooting problems, insufficient planning and issues with scheduling stopped us from doing even a quarter of the final music video properly. Mr Ford pointed that out, and said that of we did have we needed to have more connection between the different members of the band - as is, the band members don't seem to acknowledge each other's presence, and so to fix this we plan to be including a moderate amount of shots where they notice each other, very much like the actual music video for the song. We've also been told that the performance shots were incredibly poor, which is fine, and so we plan to have the final video be nothing but performance.

The location of the shot is also being changed, as the E-Learning Centre is obviously out of place, especially with the things on the walls. We were going to use the main hall, but unfortunately the pantomime rehearsals have that booked solid until December (past the deadline), so instead we've opted to use the drama room, which is appropriate enough. A problem we'll come across there is the things on the walls to worry about, which hopefully I could try to edit out but probably won't be able to. It is possible that we could take those things down and replace them after the shoot, if the drama department let us.

Another problem that we seem to have with a band member in particular, Tom Cartwright, is that he seems to focus too much on the keys when playing to the point where he seems fairly robotic - to fix this, we've decided that he should probably be more relaxed in his shots. In addition, to that change, we'll also be including shots that show the instruments being set up (plugging them in, etcetera), and various other shots.

We're hoping that the final shoot goes a lot better this time, but due to scheduling problems - again - we're having to do it on the 22nd, just a few days before the deadline, giving us a very limited amount of time to be editing the video.