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

1) Our music video definitely challenges the forms and conventions of real media products. I say this because the concept of our music video is very unique and different compared to a regular standard music video. The song that we chose and decided to go with was ‘Day and Night’ by an American artist named Kid Cudi. This song has a techno/house feel to it so from the start we knew that our video would be a very fast paced edited video. The concept challenges forms and conventions of real media products because real music product usually tell a story related to the lyrics of a song and usually has an artist singing along with the song whereas our video departs from that because our video doesn’t have the artist singing along to the song and as for telling a story with the lyrics we kept that to a minimum and partly diverted from the story of the lyrics and made our own story about a male being controlled by his self conscience and being mentally kidnapped by his alter ego which is the name of the artist. Our video is extremely random but is not confusing at all as it shows shots of the man and his alter ego doing different random things in the day and night, this also challenges form and conventions of real media products because if another product was to be random we wouldn’t really understand what is going on and why but when look at our video you do clearly understand what is being shown.

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

2) The combination of our main product and ancillary texts are very effective as the group all had in mind what we wanted to do. From the begininng we said that we would use images from the music video and do a photo shoot of the artist to present on posters and the album cover. This combines well the artist is visible in all products which are the album cover, poster and digi pack. We felt that it is significant that the audience should be entertained so we tried to make the product have a diversity between them so the products would be boring for them. This was done by the editing where we would use effects to put some style into the images we also tried to use less writing in the digi pack because we know that it probably wouldn’t even get read it the product was to be bought. Overall I do feel that out product does effectively combine with the ancillary texts because they both have comparison between them as they relate to the same thing.

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

3) We collected many useful feedbacks from our audience. This was done by showing them the video during the process of editing it. Most of the feedback was very positive as we had people informing us how the editing looked professional and that even though we didn’t t show a story completely related to the lyrics they still can tell what was going on in the story we was trying to show. Although we got some positive feedback we also got some negative feedback, which helped us improve our video. Our initial idea was to make the video in colour when the artist eye was open and black and white when he was dreaming. Because most of the video was a dream this meant that most of the video was in black and white. According to our audience they didn’t think that it worked well in black and white as they preferred it in colour. When a number of people said this I changed it and added a filter which gave the parts which were in black and white (the dream) a dreamy effect called green pearl which was in colour and is very successful. Another negative feedback was that there was too many transitions which ruined the video so we took a few out and made the video flow much more easier.

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

4) Throughout the whole coursework from the start to the end we used new media technology in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages. The Internet was very useful as we used it for the blog which was used to put our coursework and our ideas on to so we would never forget/loose anything we came up with. We also used the Internet for research to get ideas for the concept through youtube where we looked at existing music videos and collected ideas from those. Another useful technology which was used in our coursework was the canon still cameras we used it to take images for the album cover and digi pack. We also used it for the blog as we took images for the making of the video from the filming to the editing of the video. Another useful technology which was used was the video camera. This was the most important piece of equipment used because without it there would be no music video to present. Tripods were used with this camera in order to stabilize the camera to give a perfect close up/panning shot as using just a handheld camera would have been successful at all. The video camera was also used for my interview and the evaluation. Final cut pro is another useful technology used. This software was used for the editing process of the video. This is were the effect and visual things came from. Final cut is quite easy to use it just takes patience and time to complete the editing to a reasonably good standard. Final cut was also used to edit my interview and evaluation as well as the music video. Photoshop is another technology used. This software was used for the digi pack and the album cover. It was very useful as there are a variety of brushes which can be used, which gives an image and effective look. It also gets rid of unwanted items in images which is not needed.

Interview Questions -

1. What did you understand from te video?
2. Did you understand the concept of dream & reality?
3. Did the lyrical content link to the visual images ?
4. What camera shots did you like the most?
5. What could have improved the video?
6. Did the locations link with the hip - hop theme?
7. What did you think of the effects?
8. Did you understand why the video ended with abraham waking up ?
9. Were you engaged through out the whole video?

Misha's Conclusion to Target Audience Feedback:

As we interviewed our targt audience we were trying to establish whether we had achieved on correcting our mistakes from previous criticisms such as;

-The black and white effect through out the dream parts in the video, are now changed ...also the pace of some of the visual images had been slower that the ythem of the song.

By interviewing our targetaudience i believe that w have been able to achieve our goals as they found the video entertaining and unique. They understood that the singer was in a nightmare and also agreeded that even with out the use of voyeurism in the video that many male viewers would be attracted to the ideo due to the axe and kidnapping scenes. To me out video was a success as it captured what our target audience had been looking for without using mnay of the codes and conventions genrally ound in hip-hop and house music videos.