Henley's Evaluation

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

Our music video uses several of the same conventions which are used in real pop rock media products. From looking at, and analysing professional music video’s including some of P!nk’s other videos, we chose specific conventions in which we wished to include within our music video. Our music video explores some of Goodwin’s theory as we linked our lyrics with the visuals in our video. Examples of this include “There’s a ring around my finger…” we had a clip of myself removing a ring from my finger, and “I pray to God you’re not a heartbreaker…” we had a clip of our main character Evalene placing both her hands together in front of her heart to portray a praying motion.
Genre characteristics also played a big part in our music video. The specific traits relating to our genre of pop-rock included Evalene’s bright, girly make-up, the use of the guitar and a mixture of bright and dimly lit surroundings. P!nk is portrayed as an independent feisty female and this can be seen in her previous music videos. We tried to create the same level of feistiness within our video by getting the main actress to show emotion whilst singing, and she did this quite well through facial expressions and hand gestures. The structure of our music video is fragmented as we show several clips of events that happened in the past, in our case, the ‘flashbacks’ which we purposely made black and white so that it was clear to the audience that these occurrences happened in the past.

These conventions include the make-up for the main character and also the styling and outfit choices. We chose to focus on the eye make-up specifically, and the main character Evalene wore hot pink eye shadow so that it would be eye-catching to the audience. From the very beginning of our ancillary task, we all had a clear idea of how we wanted the CD cover and magazine advert to look like. We all wanted to stick with a pink theme throughout our project as the artist who sang our chosen song is 'P!nk'. 

Another convention that is widely used for advertising purposes within the pop rock genre is photographs. We took several photographs of Evalene; the girl who lip sang for us in the music video, so that we could choose 3 to use for the front and back covers of the DigiPak and also the main image for the magazine advert. We managed to edit our images using PhotoShop and add our bright pink text onto the images. We also altered the font and developed the overall images by experimenting and applying different effects onto the text and also the photos.

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

I think the combination of both our music video and our ancillary texts are really effective as they compliment each other and our conventions are portrayed clearly throughout both. Our main theme of the colour pink is clearly displayed within the music video through Evalene's eye shadow and also the top she is wearing. We chose to focus on our theme of the colour pink as that is the stage name of the artist who sang the song in which we produced a music video for. From watching several of P!nk’s music videos, we all noticed that she always had an element of pink within the video, whether it be nail varnish, hair, clothes, shoes or backdrops. The soles of Evalene’s shoes were a light pink colour and we enhanced the colour on Photoshop and this can be seen on the back cover of our DigiPak. We felt this was an effective thing to do and it really stood out from the back cover. By clearly portraying the colour pink throughout our entire project I believe it gives the audience a clearer understanding that the artist we are producing for is ‘P!nk’.
The outfit we had Evalene wear portrayed a girly yet edgy side.

She wore dark jeans with a bright pink top, and a black and white coat over the top as it was quite cold the second time we filmed! When it came to producing our ancillary texts, we weren’t too sure which font to use as there were several possibilities. We wanted something bold and edgy to stand out, but it also had to be quite soft to reflect the femininity of the artist and the album. For the front of the digipak we chose a font which had a bubbly effect, and we made the lettering bright pink with a black outline, and then blurred the edges of the letters slightly to give it a softer feel. Once we had finished our ancillary texts we went back to the front cover and decided to change the font again as it looked quite childish and not very professional. In the end we chose a simple font and selected the ‘bold’ option to make it stand out from the background image. We used the colours black, pink and white for the fonts on our magazine advert and digipak.

We have used the same image throughout our ancillary texts; however we manipulated the photo in different ways to give each cover an interesting, eye catching look. For the album we chose to have the images on the front and back in black and white, with an element of pink; so in our case, pink eye shadow and the sole of the shoe to be pink. We also used bright pink wording to make the cover stand out. For the magazine advert we decided to use a photo in colour, although we still manipulated it a bit by adding an effect and using the sharpening tool to brighten and sharpen some areas of the image. I am really happy with our final album cover and magazine advert as I think they are very aesthetically pleasing and look professional.

3.   What have you learned from your audience feedback?

From all of the feedback we have received throughout our project, we have learnt a lot as a team. First of all we had some feedback from our class mates about our pitch presentation; our initial idea for our music video. All three of us had a clear idea of what we hoped our music video would look like when it was complete, so our pitch presentation was quite detailed from the beginning.

Our fellow classmates picked up on this in the feedback saying how it was clear we knew what we wanted to do and had thought about elements of the music video in depth. One of the main elements in which we had thought about in depth for our music video was the flashback scenes and flashboards with lyrics. After analysing the music video for ‘7 Things’ by Miley Cyrus we really liked the idea of having some scenes showing the lyrics to the song. We chose some of our favourite lines from the song ‘Heartbreaker’ including ‘I won’t be leaving here alive…’ and ‘What if I’m falling for a heartbreaker?’ as these lyrics stood out the most to us and we believe they send a strong message to the audience. We then wrote these lines onto A3 size pieces of cartridge card and added a love heart shape in the corner of the page. We all felt that the scenes we filmed of the flashboards looked really professional and the flashboards are personally my favourite element of the music video because it breaks the lip syncing scenes up and I feel it ties in really well with the pop-rock theme.

Next we had the feedback for our original rough cut. We were told that our camera work was quite wobbly so to improve this, when we filmed our real music video we ensured we used a tripod. Our class mates also felt that the introduction guitar clip was too long, so we broke it up a bit by placing a clip of our main character Evalene in between the guitar clip. We were given feedback for our music video, and were advised to re-film the lip syncing scenes, which we did the very next day. We were also told to include more camera shots from different angles which were something we ensured we filmed plenty of when re-filmed the lip syncing scenes. We also got a couple of our friends to watch our music video and give us some feedback as to what we could change to improve the overall video and a couple of them said that they would like to see more effects being used. After hearing this we all watched our video over, adding more effects to a few of the camera shots.

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

Throughout our entire music video project we used several media technologies. During the construction of our music video we used a Canon camera, tripod, digital camera and also a Blackberry smart phone. After completing our test shots using the camera and tripod we found it fairly easy to work the camera when it came to filming our scenes. When it came to editing our music video we used various programmes on the computer. We used Final Cut Pro to edit the scenes we had filmed and to produce our music video. We also used Final Cut to add the special effects such as black and white, and the fade in and fade out transitions.

We used QuickTime to covert our music video into a file that was compatible with YouTube. YouTube is another media technology which we used throughout our entire project for research, inspiration and to upload our music video to the internet for others to see. We also used Photoshop to manipulate our images and to create our effective album cover and magazine advert. It took a while to get used to Photoshop and to understand how to work the software as we hadn’t used it before and it got quite confusing at times, however we got there eventually and produced some good quality ancillary texts! We also used iTunes to upload our chosen song to Final Cut Pro. We have documented our entire project on Blogger. Everything we have researched, created and produced has gone onto our blog as a way of presenting our project.

During the stages of research we used the PC’s and the internet to find all of the information we needed such as typical conventions of a pop-rock music video, and also some information about the artist ‘P!nk’ to help us with the certain conventions we had in mind. Planning our music video was something in which we all found quite easy as the three of us had very similar ideas as to what we wanted to include within our music video. We drew a storyboard including detailed annotations to show what we specifically wished to include within our pop-rock video.