Evaluation

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

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

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

My audience have not only given me feedback for my music video showcasing, but they also gave me feedback for my music video pitch which I did just before I filmed and long before I had edited the music video into the final for what it is now.

Here are some of the ideas which helped me to achieve a better music video for my audience:

• Colourisation - I used this for some of the shots, just to enhance the colours because they seemed to be a bit dull. This also included some of the effects I used such as the 'Dreamy' effect in the chorus, which corresponded to the lyrics.
• Star Image Motif - I used the cardboard box idea and Jack In The Box idea as a star image motif idea which I also used on my website and my CD digipak.
• Fast animation of the band in the chorus - In a way I did do this, although I didn't do it in the chorus because I had packed a load of other footage into both chorus' so I thought I would speed up some of the band members and put them in various parts of the video.

Here is my audience feedback which I got back from my showcasing. I have also included what I agree and disagree with and commented on the comments I got:

Click to enlarge.

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

Throughout my editing, filming and ancillary task stages, I have been using a blog (which is what this post appears on) as an online diary. On here I have showed what decisions I have made, what problems I have discovered and over come. Previous to all of these posts, I posted all my planning stages and music video, website and digipak theories to help me decided how I wanted to make and develop my project.
Before I started to film my video - while I was still in the planning stages - I posted my location shots, initial ideas and my music video pitch (video clip).
Within my blog I have embedded videos from YouTube, pictures, power point slideshows and MP3's, these have enabled me to make my responses more creative and to help show my thoughts and ideas better.

During the filming stages of my music video, I used a HD video camera to achieve the highest quality with the least amount of grain. I though the camera itself would also be better for the lighting of the environment, because when I used the mini DV cameras the bright lighting made the quality more grainy and a bit pixelated.

Panasonic HDC-SD60 Full HD

Panasonic Lumix FZ35

Along with using a video camera, I have also used a stills camera. I used a compact bridge camera for my stop frame animation shots and for my photoshoot of the band, I borrowed an SLR camera because it was able to fit a flashgun (external flash) on to the top. I needed this because I was shooting at night and the flash on my camera wasn't strong enough.
I also used a tripod, for both the stop frame animation and for the photoshoot. I needed it for the stop frame animation because the camera needed to be kept in the same stable place the whole time, so that when I managed to the photos together in the editing stage, they would flow together and not jolt about.

Nikon D60

I used the tripod for the band photoshoot, because it was done at night. This meant I needed to put the camera on manual mode and change the aperture and shutter speed to get the correct exposure. This meant it needed to be stable because the shutter would have needed to be open longer to get more light in. Also, because I was in the band there was no one to hold the camera whilst we were in the frame, so a tripod was the best option all round.

During the filming stages of my music video, I mainly used the same lighting throughout. I used overhead filtered lights which were on tripods for the performance parts, which I used the flashing setting, where it flashed along to the beats on the song, which was very helpful because I couldn't have done that whilst playing. I also used the lights which were on the ceiling, but they only added a little bit of light, because I wanted the it to be slightly dark in the warehouse so it had the effect of being midnight.

Similar lighting to what I used

In the shot for the 'A jack in the box, a doll and a teddy bear', I used the light on the video camera because it was brighter and gave a better effect of what the focus was on. For the remaining parts, excluding the toys coming out of the bass drum and the jack in the box popping up at the end, I used the white light setting on the overhead filtered lights, because these shots were happening in a different part of the warehouse and I thought it would split the sections up a little bit so the colour didn't overpower the video.
The toys coming out of the bass drum had very simple to achieve lighting, I positioned my stills camera on a tripod in front of the bass drum, making sure the reflection of the camera couldn't be seen in the bass drum skin. I used four different coloured filters and put one colour on for each shot. It worked well, because it fitted in with the performance by using the same colours.
Lastly, the jack in the box popping up shot (which was right at the end) had white light, but also had a faint green light as well, this gave a more dynamic/3D effect of the boxes behind when the shadow appeared. The shadow had a thin green outline around it.

'Dream' effect

'Vignette' effect

To edit my music video, I used iMovie on a Apple Mac. This is a basic editing package which comes pre-installed but it still can create brilliant effects for what I needed. I used only a few effects on individual shots, because quite a few were similar. The effects that I did use were 'Dream', 'Flipped' and 'Vignette'. The 'Dream' effect made the shot a bit lighter but also softened the tones and outlines, which I used in the chorus section where the words are 'trick of the light.' The 'Flipped' effect just flips the shot round, I used this when I positioned the camera behind the band and it flipped on the beat. The 'Vignette' effect adds a rounded black frame around the shot which fades into the middle, it was a good effect to use when I wanted the focus on the main subject in the frame. I also used colourisation on some of the shots to make them darker or to make the colours deeper.

'Flipped' effect

My music video had lip syncing in it, so to get this all in time I used the 'precision editor' within iMovie, this was also useful to get the other instruments in time as well, especially the drums.

'GIMP' logo

Desktop publishing software was used during the website design and the digipak design. I used a free image manipulation program called 'GIMP' to create a cardboard-like design for both my ancillary tasks and this was a typical theme in my whole project. Also on this program I created the band logo, album name design, information to go on the back and spine of the digipak and the tracklist, the buttons for the website, news feed, adverts which are animated on the right side of the page and animated jack in the boxes with band members heads on them.

'Lightroom 3' Logo

Additionally, I did a band photoshoot where I took numerous amounts of pictures of the band together and just the members on their own. I picked the most successful ones and edited them using another program - this time not free - called 'Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3'. I manipulated these images so they were mainly black and white, but the graffiti on the wall behind was bright and crisp. I opened these manipulated files up in 'GIMP' and made a paper crumpled effect which when I scattered them over the inside of my digipak and the bottom of my website, it gave the effect of the photos being stuck onto the side of a box.

Once I had made all the components for my website, I used a program called 'Serif Page Plus' to make it take the form of a website and from here, I would upload it.
The components I used were:

• Cardboard background
• Opaque overlay
• News feed
• Adverts
• External social icons
• Internal buttons
• Band logo
• Band member jack in the boxes
• Photoshoot pictures

In 'Serif Page Plus', I uploaded each of these components separately and then arranged them how I wanted them. To arrange them how I did, I looked at other websites and found that the news feeds were either in the middle or on the left. This is because the audience read left to right and it makes sense to have it this way. After I had done all of the arranging, I exported the website as a HTML and then uploaded it to a free hosting site called 'Angelcities'.