Evaluation Presentation Ideas

When searching for ways that we could present our evaluation questions, I found a website called xtranormal. (http://www.xtranormal.com/) We feel that this would be a great way to show our feedback in evaluation question 3 as it would be much more interesting than just reading text off a page.

This week...

This week we are working on writing up our evaluations. We need to use different formats to present each question so we both plan to use the bamboo tablet for the technology question as this is a new piece of technology which we feel is really effective for presenting our ideas. For the other questions, we need to ensure we chose a format which will be interesting for others to view.

Charlotte's - Evaluation Question 4 (Picture)

Here is an image I created using Photoshop and drawing with a Bamboo tablet. It illustrates all the technology myself and Shannon used to create our video and ancillary products. I will later do a voice over across the image on order to elaborate on the icons portrayed and form my third evaluation question.

New Feedback

After recieving feedback on our second draft video, we have decided to refilm more of our shots. Below is a shot list of everything we plan to refilm. Our previous male role now has other commitments therefore we will be using Christian as his replacement.

Shannon - Evaluation Question 4 (Draft)

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

Final Cut Pro
- We used this to cut our clips to the right length and fit them with the lyrics in the song
(print screen of final cut pro software)
-The green bar along the bottom is the backing track which is our song and the clips above it are our footage. Final Cut Pro allowed us to freely move our clips to the part of the song we needed and from there, we were able to cut them down, re-time them or change the brightness.
- Some of our shots originally were too dark (print screen example of the window shot) however this software allowed us to match the colour to the lighter shots (print screen of the improved shot)
- It also allowed us to add a slow-motion effect to some of the instrumental shots and the end shot (tube chop example) which added more dramatic effect to the video.
- With the shots where the girl and boy are stood by the brick wall, we were able to add a stylised effect which faded the edges of the shot to make it seem more like a flash back. (show shot where this was used)
- On our final shot with the candles being blown out, Final Cut Pro allowed us to add a zoom which we hadn't originally included when filming. we wanted to zoom into the lit candle which represents hope in our video as without the zoom the end shot seemed bland and appeared to serve no purpose in sending a message.

Cameras
- FinePix S6500. We had to use this camera as a back-up due to the Canon HD camera we borrowed from school having a flat battery with a charger that did not fit the camera. Luckily I had a Finepix S6500 camera that we could use to film with however, despite the fact it is a very good camera, it is more for photography rather than filming therefore the quality is not up to the standard of the other footage we have from the Canon HD camera. For our draft video, we used a Sony camera which did not provide the high quality footage that we were able to get with the HD camera, however, the shots we filmed with this camera were the outdoor shots, all of which have been removed in the final version of our video.
(Show photos of cameras used)
We also used the FinePix S6500 camera to take the photos which we used in our digipaks and posters. We were able to use a black and white setting when taking some of the images; these ones turned out most promising therefore we edited them further later on.

Editing
- Photoshop. (show print screen of production of digipak/poster) I used photoshop to create my digipak and poster. This piece of software was useful for this task as it allowed me to work on layers; this was helpful as I could work on one layer at a time and move between layers if something needed altering.
-Picmonkey.com. We used this website for editing the photos for our digipaks, we had already used a black and white setting on the FinePix S6500 camera however the editing website allowed us to edit the images further and come out with more effective pictures that we were able to use.

Presenting / Evaluating
-Animoto. We used animoto to present our 25 word pitch at the start of this process. This allowed us to clearly present our ideas to the class in a simplistic format that looks effective.
- Slideshare, Scribd. We used these to upload our work from powerpoint and word onto our blogs
 as it is a quick and easy way to display our work online.
- Movie Maker. We used movie maker to create our animatic for our music video. It allowed us to use our drawings and put them all together to see what the final piece will look like. The program also allowed us to visualise how the shots will link together and we had too few/too many shots.
- Phones. We used our mobile phones to communicate and arrange when we could meet up and film. It is the easiest way for us to stay in contact with our main star.

- I will present this question by drawing up icons with the bamboo tablet and doing a voice over which explains when and why I used each peice of technology.

Charlotte's - Evaluation Question 3 (Draft)

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Evaluation Question 3

Shannon - Evaluation Question 3 (Draft)

What have you learned from your audience feedback?
Our audience feedback has been extremely helpful when developing our products. From our 25 word pitch, all the way to our final video.

• Write feedback we received from our 25 word pitch
• Screen grab comments from our animatic
• Screen grab comments from our draft video
• Screen grab comments from draft ancillary products
• Show comments given on our final products
• Show comments given on final ancillary products

- Talk about how the feedback helped and what we learned from it

This feedback was useful as it allowed us to identify the weaker elements and change them in order to achieve a better result. I feel that our video has improved a lot from our first draft, this is thanks to the feedback we were given by the target audience.

Shannon - Evaluation Question 2 (Draft)

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

• We have maintained continuity through all three products. The star from the video appears on both the digipak and the poster; this shows a clear link between the three. (uses images which show the star on all three products). Our focus on star image was important as we wanted her to take up the majority of the shots in the video; this allowed her to be recognised on our other products. This links to the country/pop genre and we are therefore following the conventions.
• We have kept the theme of love running through all three products. (screen grab 2/3 shots in the video which show the theme of love and put them against my digipak and poster). We have done this because we want to show a clear link between the products to the audience. The idea of love links to the storyline we were conveying in our narrative.
• The colour scheme used across our main product and ancillary task is very natural and simplistic. The setting used in the video uses soft colours and lighting (screen grab example of setting uses) as well as the main stars outfit. (Screen grab examples of her outfit). This colour scheme is then carried over into my ancillary task (show screen grabs of my ancillary products) where I used simplistic colours which linked effectively to the video. We wanted to convey a theme of innocence and vulnerability across all three products therefore we had to focus closely on how colours and lighting could be used to present our artist in that way.

Charlotte's - Evaluation Question 2 (Draft)

How Effective is the Combination of Your Main Product and Ancillary Texts?

The key link between my music video, Digipak and poster, is the focus on the star image of our artist Verity. On my Digipak the cover image was of a close up of artist and I used a subsequent three facial shots of her, highlighting her beauty and youth. In our video we also had lots of close-ups shots of our artist and she was present in 90% of the video meaning there is a clear focus on her being a young solo artist. 

Our artist is of a pop/country genre and we aimed to target a audience of primarily females aged 13-21. Taking this into consideration we aimed to make our video appealing to this market with the use of a simply narrative that wasn't too in depth or explicit. This was achieved by ensuring that throughout the video our make and female actor never did anymore than simply holding hands, to maintain a sense of innocents.The costumes of our artist are tame, with nude colours and floral patterns that would be worn by this target audience and don't appear too grown-up or formal. It was important for our products to present Verity in a manner that she could be related to by this young age group, but still admired, for her beauty and talent. I tried to continue presenting Verity in this manner within my ancillary products, with the use of simple editing making images black and white, to reduce the impact of a busy colour scheme deterring from Verity's look. The aim of this colour scheme was also to reflect the innocents and demure side of our artist, by stripping our images back to be very natural and pure. Black and white photos also have the connotations of being old fashioned and from the past. I liked introducing this concept to my album as the nature of our artist being country/pop, is based on music that is far more traditional and not a common aspect of today's loud and bold pop names. Although we attempted to remain in keeping with the conventions of modern pop videos,this theme of a demure and youthful artist, presented with a simple look to all our products, is what we tried to maintain.

Within the video and my Digipak there was also the continuity of a theme of love, and heartbreak. This was present in the lyrics of the song, the narrative we depicted and the red colour scheme of my ancillary texts. I also used the teddy bear and rose from the video and incorporated this into my Digipak to act as a memorable symbol of love that would be recognisable to viewers across the products. 

Chralotte's - Evaluation Question 4 (Draft)

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

For all elements of the development of our products, we used Blogger, to account what we were doing, monitor progress, detail any plans we had, and form a complete record of our work. A benefit of using Blogger was that both myself and partner Shannon were able to upload and share our work in one area. Whilst each of our posts is accredited to us personally, the overall Blog forms our work as a team, and was a perfect way to share ideas and represent us together. I've found that the use of our Blog has really aided our evaluation, as we have been able to refer to our previous work with ease, as everything is date ordered and arranged into our labelled categories. Keeping our work on a digital platform has also allowed us to connect all of our products from multiple mediums together. Including the presentation of our final video, website links, and embedded documents. Without our Blog we would have really struggled to organise our work in such a precise manner, the representation of our work would be far less varied and we wouldn't have been able to as easily monitor each other. Meaning tasks may have been repeated or missed out completely.

For the research and planning of our product we really relied on the use of the Internet, primarily Google, to establish current artists and analyse their work. We used YouTube to watch current music videos and establish conventions, and were able to capture clips of inspiration from current videos with TubeChop. We used programmes such as PowerPoint to form slide shows of our findings and uploaded these through websites like Scribd and Slideshare. 

Through the development and planning of our work we made an animoto to present the pitch of our initial idea. Once we had story boarded the planned shots for our video we scanned them in from home and arranged them with our music to form an Animatic using Movie Maker. We took photos, using still cameras, of possible costumes and settings for our video. 

Using our Android mobiles Shannon and I were always able to text each other to arrange meetings for filming and quickly share new ideas or queries. We also messaged each other on Facebook to quickly share photos and other links.

For the production of my Digipak and poster I used Photoshop, as it provided the detail of editing needed to help my products look more professional. Within Photoshop I was able to adjust the lighting, exposure and brightness of my images as well as airbrush minor imperfections. I also was able to cut and manipulate images to fit on my product. I downloaded the free trial of Photoshop at home  and accessed the PicMonkey website for increased editing time out of class. Unfortunately the free version of Photoshop I downloaded was an older version to that of school's so transferring between the two altered the appearance of my work slightly and limited my choice of fonts when at home. However I used Dafont.com to access a wider range of fonts, so I could be selective about the particular font that would represent our artist best. We used Shannon's FinePix S6500 still camera to take the photos for our ancillary products.

When it came to filming our music video we initially used a simple Sony camcorder from school, and tripod. Although this camera was simple to use the quality of images was poor. Fortunately we then had access to a Canon HD camcorder, that had almost identical workings to the previous camcorder, but provided us we the definition we required. For some of our still shots taken to document our filming sessions we used Shannon's professional FinePix camera. Unfortunately we also had to use this camera for the filming of our final video footage, due to a flat battery of our borrowed HD camera. Although this camera produces excellent stills, it is not intended for professional video, and so did not provide the HD we were after, producing blurry zooming. 

 To edit our video we used Final Cut Pro on an Apple Mac computer.Seeing as neither of us had much experience using this software it proved rather challenging, and was difficult to re-create our ideas, however with a little guidance we gained in ability. With this software we able to remove the audio from our clips an overlay the original Taylor Swift version of the song. We also re-timed some of our clips to put them into slow motion, adding emphasis to the shot. Such our final candle scene and during our instrumental where our actress throws the teddy bear. Some of our shots did appear a little darker than we had hoped and so we were able to match lighting across other scenes to improve appearance. For our flash back shots of our actors together, we used stylise effects to soften the camera edges and even add old age sepia tones to our work.

Shannon - Evaluation question 1 (Draft)

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

Video

• Follows a narrative, girl/boy love story (uses conventions) -Tube chop scene of the flashback. Show 10 second clip of a Taylor Swift song where a boy appears in the narrative.
• Focus on the star (uses conventions) -tubechop about 10 seconds where it shows constant camera focus on the star. Then show tubechop of how Taylor swift is focused on in her video
• Uses a variety of shots (uses conventions) - printscreen examples of different shot distances used
• Used lots of close-ups of the star (uses conventions) - Printscreen 3/4 shots where we have done this.
• Colour schemes and costume represent character (uses) - printscreen of the different costumes used throughout
• Used motifs that appeared in digipak, e.g. teddy, rose (uses conventions) - printscreen of the teddy and rose
• Lip syncing (uses) - show 10 seconds of lip syncing, show a Taylor Swift video where she also uses lip syncing.
• Cut shots to the beat of the music (uses conventions) - Tube shop a 10-15 second section where we have done this. Then tube chop another video in our genre where the same technique is used.
• Used lyrics on screen (develops conventions) - tube chop the section where we did this. Our genre tends not to use this effect as it moves away from the illustrative form of the video however we wanted to add something that would make our video more original and develop the genreic conventions. There are two Taylor swift songs which use stop motions to display the lyrics however what we have done is much more basic.

Digipak

• Main star on the cover (uses conventions). - Show my album cover and compare it against Taylor Swift's/ Ellie Goulding's covers
• Close up / head shot used as cover image (uses conventions) - Compare against other albums that use head shots.
• Black and white image (develops conventions) - Show how our genre only really uses colour images on the cover.
• Legal information / barcode / record label (uses conventions) - Image showing other albums in our genre with legal information on the back

Poster

• Main image is same as digipak (uses conventions) - Give other examples (use an image) where the image is the same on the digipak and poster
• Album release date (uses conventions) - Show an image of another artist in the genre that displays the album release date on their poster
• Rating and Reviews (uses conventions) - Show an image of another artist on the genre that displays ratings and reviews on their poster.

Theorists

• We have used Laura Mulvey's male gaze theory by portraying our star as attractive to men and admirable to women. To do this, we brought youth to our star through her make-up which was basic and subtle, her costume which was girly and innocent, and through colour which was mainly natural and plain.
•  Todorov threory. Equilibrium (the boy and girl being together). Disruption (break up) New equilibrium as a result of the disruption (the girl having hope of being happy without him)

Charlotte's - Evaluation Question 1 (Draft)

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

Our product is of a country/pop genre and our star is a young female solo artist. We therefore attempted to emulate the conventions of similar videos to that of our genre, with other artists such as Taylor Swift, Ellie Goulding, Birdie and Kate Nash. 

The conventions of a music music we have used for our product are;

• Focus on star image, with 90% of shots being of our artist and the frequent use of close-ups highlighting her youth and beauty. This can be scene in all the videos we ananlysing, especially in ones from artists such a Taylor Swift.
• 
• Lip syncing throughout, important to link audio with video and express emotion through artists expression.
• Cutting with the pace of the song. We tried edit our video to cut shots between lyrics, and on the beat with out fast paced instrumental sections.
• We used a variety of shot distances and positions of our star. 
• Our artists wore a few different outfits to show the change of time and increase variety and interest. In the the videos we evaluated this was also a common idea.
• We attempted to keep most of our shots moving at some level all the time, whether it was with the use of zoom or panning. We read about the importance of camera movement during our research and planning. 'In a typical music video, more than 95% of all shots are moving. Tracking shot, crab, pan, tilt, zoom in or out, character movement. Static singers are never shown, opening her mouth only, in a still shot. At least pan or zoom is used.' It is regarded as a vital convention of music videos, to maintain interest and keep it sleek.

• We used some narrative within our video, which is a convention most common in pop videos and was very popular in the videos of the artists we evaluated such as Taylor Swift. This narrative attempted to follow the lyrics of the song in a Illustrative manner.
• We cut between different scenes and settings to add variety and interest.


• For our instrumental we took inspiartion form Kelly Clarkson's video from her song 'Since you've been gone.' We tried to re-capture the sense of distress and upset through the use of dramatic movements and the symbolism of destroying items from their relationship.

For my poster and Digipak I based the layout around the designs of similar products I analysed in my research and planning. From analysing these currents products of the same genre as mine, I was able to establish key similarities and conventions that I could use in my work. Some of the conventions I followed include;

• I used the same image on my poster as that of my Digipak, to maintain contiuity and advertise the appearence of the album being promoted.
• I used only a few fonts on the poster and Digipak so it wasn't too busy and there was consistency. On the other produsts I assessed the font of the artist's name was almost used as a logo to represent the genre of the artist and be repeated throughout future products to create a brand. I attempted to achieve this myself with the chosen font of my artists name, as it is distinct and recognisable from other artists. 
•  The cover image I chose for my album was a close up shot of our artists face. I chose this shot as it allows the target audience to establish what our artist looks like and it exempiflies her beauty and  youth. As our artist is a newly introduced artists it is especially important to present her appearence to the public, so she can become recognised and well known. When researching I also found that other digipaks of the same genre frequently used close ups on their covers, so I thought it was vital to follow this convention and in turn reflect our genre of pop too.

• For the back cover of my digipak I made sure I included the vital conventions I had identified on other products. This included the presents of a barcode, track list and copyright small print.
• Details on my poster that I had noticed across similar products were the details of the release date of the album, a wesite address or twitter page of the artist in the small print and reviews from magazines of the album's quality.
• In other genre's such as indie, album's can often be rather minimal and simple with panels of a single block colour. However I noticed that with the pop genre albums appear to have an image or pattern on every panel of the Digipak. I therefore followed this convention with the use of pictures covering all of my Digipak, or at least writing and objests on every page.