Final Post

So, the blogs are due to close tomorrow and it's time for me to say my goodbye's. I have really enjoyed being a media student for the past two years and I have learnt a lot of skills which I will like to take further in my life. I hope to study Film and Television Production at University for the next 3 years and so all my filming, editing and analytical skills I have learnt will really help me with this.

Evaluation question 2

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

When I first had to create my ancillary tasks, I wanted to ensure that I had a consistent theme running throughout them so that my target audience of teenage girls would have appeal to them and that they related to my music video well. For the inspiration of my Digi-pack and magazine advert I looked at Pixie Lott who was the artist of my chosen song for my music video, "like a broken arrow". We wanted to portray Pixie Lott as a young teenage girl who is trying to connect with her audience. So, I decided to use locations that teenagers would be familiar with such as parks, benches and their front living room.

For my Digi-pack I used the black and white theme that I have running throughout music video which gave it the professional look that I wanted to and I think it fitted with the lyrics/theme to the song (relationship break ups). For the front cover I took a print screen from my actual music video where Elle is resting against a white wall. I used this image as the audience will be familiar with it from the music video and it will clearly show that she is the main female protagonist being re

presented in the video. I adjusted the contrast a little more so that she stood out against the all and adding in a "swirly" font which i downloaded from a fonts website as I think this fitted with my pop genre and showed the young and girly character, inspired by Pixie Lott herself.

For the inside covers I chose a "kiss" shape to represent the love within the music video and on the other I used a black silouette of the cupid with an arrow as I also had this in my music video as an overlapping shot of when Elle and Alex in the video are arguing, the arrow breaks over them.

Here is my second ancillary task which is my magazine advert. Again, I have kept the consistency running throughout by continuing the black and white theme and again using a "swirly/girly" font to keep the initial idea of portraying Pixie Lott as much as possible. Again I have used screen shots from my music video so the audience can relate to the advertisement as they recognise them fro the video itself. The purpose of this was to promote the album itself. I used quotes from famous music magazines to make it look more professional and believable.

Overall, I think the overall effectiveness of the combination of my ancillary tasks is good because I have used the same locations, fonts and images throughout that my target audience of teenage girls will be able to relate to and along with the storyline and narrative of the music video.

Audience Feedback

Through out the whole process of my music video being created and edited, it was vital that I had some audience feedback so I knew what people liked/disliked about my video and whether any changes could be made.

I spoke to my friend Savanna via bbm messenger on my blackberry and asked her what she liked about my music video and what she thought could be improved:














So, from looking at this conversation I can see that Savannah really likes the fact that my music video is all in black and white as it makes it look more professional. Also the performance shots as it broke up the narrative of the edited shots with Elle and Alex together. She said to improve that the editing needed to be more "choppier" so with this feedback in mind I went through all my shots in my music video and for the clips where Elle and Alex are lying on the bed in IKEA, i edited it all to the beat so it looked more choppier and not just a long run of smooth clips.





On the day of the after school viewing of our music video's, some yellow slips of paper were given out for people to say what they liked out our music video's and what were their favourite parts and why. Here are some of the comments my group received:

Black and white fitted well with the tempo of the song.

Good narrative that fit with the song.

It was a realistic portrayal of the story that the target audience of young teenagers can relate to.

They used good locations.

I liked the idea of the reversing clips. It really made it clear to the audience what was happening.
The photo's looked realistic.

The studio scenes looked professional.

The play fighting scene showed how much they loved each other, and I liked how this was contrasted with the fighting scene behind the broke arrow to show that they had broken up.

I liked the split screens at the end, with the contrasting light and narratives.

It was perfectly composed, a really good music video.

Good story telling.

I loved the editing, especially the L.O.V.E and the bed scenes in IKEA. I thought this was edited to the beat well.

I liked the L.O.V.E

The camera angles and effects were effective.

The black and white made it look more natural and fit with the emotion of the narrative.

Good transition between footage.

It fits well with the pop genre.

It was really good.

I loved the animation of cupid with the heart.

The L.O.V.E was effective.

Good different angles and speeds.

I liked the broken arrow.

Good portrayal between past and present.

I like the change of scenery, it made everything really touching and the fast forwarding made the video feel emotional.

I like the romance of the characters portrayed and how one shows the difference of how their relationship changed with their body language.

Good lip sycnhing and creative angles used throughout.

The rewinding scenes which embody the essence and meaning of the clip.

Good use of photographs.

The singing seemed very realistic.

Good use of black and white.

Good links between shots.

Evaluation

After having an enjoyable Easter holidays break, myself Elle and Emma decided to meet up in school before we went back and to do our evaluation together. We discussed the possible ways in how to portray our evaluation from a PowerPoint, scribd upload or simply to just type it onto our blogs. However, we wanted to be more creative and so we decided to sit in front of our MAC and film ourselves having a discussion answering questions 1,3 and 4 and decided to record the whole evaluation, except for question 2, which is a personal opinion on our own digi packs. Most of our answers although pre arranged/planned were from our own opinions, which made the discussion seem more real and interesting as all three of us were having in depth convosations about our media production.






Also, after completing our evaluation, we decided to sit down and watch our music video just to see it and we came up with the idea of doing a voice over narrative to some of the clips and explaining why we chose them and how they are portrayed. We muted the song down when we were talking and this gave it a really good effect as we weren't talking over the whole video so you can still here the music playing. This wasn't compulsory towards the evaluation but we thought it just gave a little more explanation as to why we used certain shots that we did and also shows that myself and my group are being creative.

Summary of Editing Changes

Opening Credits - changed ikea shot - changed lip synching - new opening [x] - l.o.v.e to the beat [x] - changed clip behind the broken arrow - unreversed the arrow - edited to the beat (bits in ikea) [x] - Added the water umbrella "ooh" shot - made alex+elle appear on the split screen when the word "love" is sung - alex+elle brighter contrast - happy times, elle on own - darker Here is a summary of the most siginificant changes to our music video which as a group we have made over the last week. the "[x]" means I have blogged about it and as youc an see, some of the changes I still need to blog.

Editing to the beat

We also noticed as a group that the start of the chorus all of the editing was a bit miss matched and was not edited to the beat at all and we though this would stop us from gaining as many marks as we can in receiving the highest grade possible.

Although our song choice is slow and hard to edit to the beat, we sat as a group and listened to the song over a couple and times and tried to highlight the key points of the song as to where a more "upbeat" was. We noticed that at the start of the chorus where Pixie sings "and your, sitting in the front row, wanna be first in line..." was where the beat was most evident throughout the whole song.

So in order to edit this to the beat correctly, we as a group looked at what footage we have placed to his part of the song. At the start of the chorus, Elle and Alex jumps on the bed in IKEA, imitating (500) Days of Summer that we had used for our product research earlier on in the year which inspired us to film in IKEA. We as a group made sure that Elle lands when the first symbol sound is played. On the next symbol sound we made sure that her face was shown and then quickly on the next one his face was shown. After that a two shot of the couple together was next shown on the fourth symbol noise and finally on the fifth symbol noise he kisses her.

So, now looking at our "media checklist" we can tick off the "successfully editing the footage in time with the beat" as we have completed this task successfully!

Changing the opening

At the start of the film we as a group decided to replaced the bit where Elle touches her top area of her body when adjusting her dress as we felt that this was very inappropriate for an innocent pop music promo. We decided replaced it with a clip of Elle in Ally Pally running up to a telescope and looking into this. We think that this starts off as an establishing shot to set the scene that she's in Ally Pally, alone and broken up with Alex. It also can act as if she is looking down the telescope into the music video as it goes straight into the stop motion of L.O.V.E. At first we thought that this looked a bit weird as the cross dissolve transition that I was putting between these two clips were not working, but other members of our media group convinced us that it looked a lot better than it did before so I kept it.