Evaluation-George Campbell Evaluation

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

This year our project was to create a music video for a song of our choice. We were told that we had to reinvent the appeal of the artist through our media product. Our media product uses, develops and challenges various forms of real media products. We have used techniques that can be found (and are common to) almost all music videos around the world. We have used conventional techniques such as lip syncing and special effects, within our music video to form the basis of the product. Lip syncing was used to emulate the effect of Taylor singing the song and we used special effects in the form of a green screen scene in which Aisleen (who is playing the crack addict) is standing infront of fast moving traffic. We did this for two reasons, the first is that it is used to indicate the passing of time and the second is to highlight that see had taken cocaine in the previous scene.

The music video itself follows a strong narrative in which Ed Sheeran (Taylor) is singing about the girl in the song. This form of narrative is very common of music videos, especially when the artist is singing about something or someone close to them.

Other ways we have used forms of real media products is that as well as making the music video we also made a website and radio spot in order to promote the music video. We also used social media sites such as facebook and youtube to get research from our target audience as well as helping to promote the music video.

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

We wanted to recreate the image of Ed Sheeran, this image we wanted to create was that of an individual who has been through a struggle with his emotions, but also create an image that our target audience can relate to.
In order to do this we used a combination of our main product; the music video, and ancillary texts; the website and album cover. The first way we help to create this image was to create an overall "theme" to use across all of these products. This theme was an urban theme which was incorporated accross all of the products to help to relate to our target audience, this was done because the majority of target audience come from city suburbs which suffer with issues such as alcohol and drug abuse; which we wanted to highlight the issues with.
Our music video incorporate the urban theme as the locations for filming were based in Dagenham and Romford. The website also supports this theme as it incorporates a graffiti style when presenting objects.
We have also incorporated all of these products together by using technologies such as QR codes to link the album cover to the website and links on the website to link it to the video on youtube as well as our MTV video show.

3) What have you learned from audience feedback?

We involved our target audience in every stage of our project. We wanted to create a product which tackles issues which are facing our target audience so we used a combination of techniques such as interviews, surveys and reviews.

During the planning stage we initially posted a survey on facebook (being our main medium of communicating with our target audience) to try to discover the kinds of issues which affect our target audience, using the results collected from this we found that one of the main issues which affect our target audience is drugs. We then conducted target audience interviews asking a specific list of questions to analyze the kinds of music our target audience listen to, as well as finding our popular artists.

After creating our final product we used a number of techniques to analyze the effectiveness of our finished product. We firstly created another survey; along with our music video, on facebook to receive the audiences overall feelings about our product.

We also conducted a test audience viewing in which we got a number of individuals who are in our target audience age range (16 -18) to watch the video and record the initial reactions. We then interviewed each of them in order to gain a more in-depth reaction.

From our research we found that the target audience feel that the choice of song and theme highlighted issues which affect many teenagers today. The audience members also commented that the choice of locations were good as this makes it seem more true to life.

The target audience also commented on the actors used within the music videos. Our audience felt that the use of actors who where the target audience age made the overall product more effective as they can find it easy to relate to the actors.

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

We used various technologies during all stages of our project. The technologies we used take both the form of hardware and software. We used a standard set of hardware during all stages of the production. The pieces of hardware we used were a Macintosh computer which was used; among other things, to edit our music video as well as create surveys, convert media files, access the Internet etc. We also used a camera in order to record the scenes required for our music video, as well as interviews and podcasts. We used various pieces of software (including websites) during all stages of production. During construction and research we used software that would allow us to plan and log each stage of our production as well as performing market research. We have used a blogging platform (blogger) in order to log all of our activities and to post various aspects of our project.

We used a piece of software called Celtex which allows us to organize the filming and editing stage of our project. It includes features such as a calendar (for organizing the days we were going to be filming and editing) and Master Catalog which was used to organize the props, locations and actors which would be required for each scene of filming. During the research stage we used a web application called MusicMetric; a platform which has statistics for music artists including demographic data and music purchases, which allowed us to analyze the demographics for our chosen artists such as the main age group of audience, popularity by country etc.

We used SurveyMonkey in order to create surveys which allowed us to get information directly from our target audience. We posted the created surveys on Facebook, which acted as our main communication method with our target audience. During the editing stage we mainly used two pieces of software – Abobe premiere and After Effects. We used adobe premiere to edit our footage as well as add transitions, text etc. and we used After Effects to create the green screen scene in which Aisleen is standing in front of fast moving traffic.

We used YouTube during all stages of our production. It acts as our main method of getting our work into the public domain. We posted various videos on Youtube including our lip sync test, audience interviews and finshed product. From YouTube we could then embed the clips into various other sites including our blog and Facebook.

By George Campbell