Evaluation Question 1

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

USE
The song we chose is an experimental genre. Ambient rock, the story is not bound by a linear story line set out by what the band want you too feel. Ambient rock, such as classical it set out to people who want to listen to music to feel something and forget their troubles, rather than have people tell them what to feel. As with vocals you need to find something that directly links to the way you feel. With a love affair its not hard as most songs tend to about that. Yet if you have a more free thought issue its better to turn to vocal less songs to help you through. While the piece of music we used has no lyrics, we tried our best to use a story line that appears that it is set in stone with the events, yet in retrospect is subtly open to interpretation. We have both shown images of romance and depression. When the story looks happy its when the music is a bit more up tempo. Whilst the scenes of depression and suicide are when the music is more lower tempo. I believe that it fits very well with the tempo as they are the parts of music that relate to it. Again bringing in the theory of binary opposition, as romance is in my mind and I'm assuming others as closely linked to depression as insanity is to genius. Romance is an example of true happiness (as long as it is with the right person) and depression is an example of true sadness. Which I displayed in a pretty obvious way.

This is a picture of when Harry met sally. I really love this movie, and I am particaurly fond of the characters in this movie. Especially Harry and Sally. I wanted to have the same romance between my characters and this movies. Now obviously i couldn't bring the same amount of character development within the first minute as within a 2 hour movie yet it was influential for me.







Develop
 The most experimental thing I believe in my opinion is the sudden U-bend that is made in the guys life. At the start with the woman it is shown that it looks like nothing can go wrong. Then suddenly in ends and it leads the the broken man you see at the end. If you refer back to my example music videos. You can see that in all three it follows one kind of theme, it starts with a depressing theme and ends with it, It is shown as more of a coping mechanism behind the characters in which you may be able to use in real life circumstances. Where as in my video I didn't follow that convention at all. As depressing as it seems i wanted to sway from that 'there's a light at the end of the tunnel theme' and focus on the fact that some people don't make it. Its a kind of awareness video rather than anything else. 

The notebook is deemed to be the most romantic movie ever. Well according to critics that is. I took the idea around when 'Harry met Sally' and 'The Notebook' to start off the first scene off the the music video. We then gave it a U-turn into a much darker 'Girl, Interrupted' feel with the theme of teen suicide. Its not the happiest of themes, yet we managed to develop a sudden change of genre and theme around the video. This is a mass develop of current media products as not many media texts drastically change genre. This is not to say that none do, as many major movies change pace halfway through, With such movies being 'Hot Fuzz' and Danny Boyle's 'Sunshine' both have a drastic change of pace in their screen time. However both 'The Notebook' and the themes from 'Girl, Interrupted' were influential. You could also argue that this could be a form of use.

Like most people my age, I have jumped on the non-stop 'Breaking Bad' bandwagon. And why not, Its dramatic, well shot and great AMC TV. Though there is one eye catching feature on this hit TV series. The ever so famous time-lapse. This occurs in most episodes. with view of the New Mexico outback. This inspired me to create on of my own and develop it to my own techniques. Unlike 'Breaking Bad' my time-lapse has a significance to the audience. As this is where it all goes wrong. I know that the time lapse has been around longer than this show, dating back to the 1880's. Yet this is the show that inspired me to use this and develop it to my own use in my video.

Challenge 
An element that shows the speeding of time is the very famous 'Time-lapse' this says a lot more than is originally puts out. This is the period in which the whole cutest happy relationship turns a lot more sour then leads to the inevitable end. There was scene that was an original idea that we left out. That the girl moved on very quickly and walking past the boy, with her new boyfriend would lead him to his contemplation of the end. But instead using the genres idea of interpretation I wanted to leave that out so the viewer can question why he took it so hard.
I also took into consideration the Effect theory. which is what people do with this piece of media. I hope that people use it to realise that they aren't alone. Yet it can be misconstrued as an idea for the contemplating. The idea is risky and for the people contemplating it, it can go either of ways. Media is a risky thing, its about how you use it as, according to the effect theory it can manipulate people. We challenge the gender representation in the media. In a standard relationship, the woman is always perceived to care most about it, while the man is happy to be in the relationship or not, the man is always the more dominant and effects the woman emotionally a lot more than the other way around. In our media text we perceive this to be the other way around, as the woman's action clearly emotionally scar the male. This is mentioned in Winship's "Gender Complicity Theory", this states that females see themselves in the image which the masculine culture has defined.  

Something we definitely challenged is the Romantic movie/ romance movie. As when a couple are together and they break up. The woman/man goes back to fight for them. Instead thats not real, Thats an exaggerated interpretation of a relationship. We turned that on it head with this and made it an over exaggerated version the other way around. As they do not fight for each other, one just gives up. I would only consider this as the video takes a very dramatic turn. As the start does not suggest the end at all. 

Evaluation Question 2

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

Cohesion is the action of formatting a united whole. This what we need to acheive in order to format a succesful and effective advertising front for our video. Cohesion is the key to this. (brand image)

The image that links both the main product and the ancillary text is the one of the bench. This is being the most important scene in our main product as it is where the couple come to meet, and we also revisit it later in a black and white panning shot later in the video. They are cohesive as in they all contain the same image, but with a slight difference. The poster is just the empty bench where as the album cover is of both a bench with the two characters on it. We faded one of the characters out (The boy) as to show that he is just a ghost, yet we never explained that he may just be a ghost of her imagination, as does she regret the break up, Or did he actually do it, and does she feel responsible. We did it to create an image for the main product, and the band itself. It is used in modern day marketing. The marketers would create an image, in our case the park bench. It is a cohesion that will get linked to our band, If people see the park bench they will instantaneously link it back to 'Pangean' and their new song sometimes echos. You can see and example of this back in the interview I had with the band, where Matt is wearing an IT crowd jumper. The jumper itself doesn't say IT crowd on it. Yet we can distinguish that fact from the three 8 bit faces of the characters on it. This is the shows 'Brand image' so to speak kind of like the Coca-Cola or Pepsi image it is instantly recognizable. That is the point of the park bench to our band. it is the band image, that ties in to the selling of our video, and it will eventually get to a point that if popular enough, people can tell that it is 'Pangean' just from looking at the black and white park bench. The combination is very important as no one is going to recognize random images and relate them all back to one particular thing.

        

Above are the two photos we used, Its just a simple park bench, photographed on a sunny day with a bit of clouds. It is not really significant in anyway, neither is it spectacular nor irregular, it is a mere bench. But that is the beauty of brand imaging, you can take one simple thing and turn it into something massive. I used Stratus's theory of binary oppositions (which i explained earlier on) About Happy being the binary opposite of sad. Happiness was conveyed right at the start and sadness at the end. My poster front cover is black and white, which is to reflect sadness, i also used this at the end of my movie. right after the car park scene. The poster is the representation of the sad side of this film. Whereas my album cover (Sleeve) is the happier side, in which i made it in the colour form. it is a very subtle use of his theory. 

I personally believe that we made a very effective cohesion between our pieces of ancillary text and main product. Using Stratus's theory of binary opposite subtly and using cohesive images, yet to too out there, just simple. If this was released on billboards and TV we would be able to create a strong band image in no time.

Another way that it is effective is the relation to genre. The ancillary texts give off a more ambient rock/Folksy feel, especially in our CD cover. Genre in itself can be used as a marketing ploy, but for that to work, the CD cover has to look the part in order to make the consumer interested. If you refer back to the CD covers that I analysed, I looked over a few different genres. With one being a space narwhal and another of a man hanging himself, they strongly related to metal/metal-core, whereas ''Blurry Lights'' album has a much softer feel, and is much less controversial. We followed this trait as it will get people interested in the genre to both realise that its an Ambient Rock / Post Rock album.

This our back cover. You can automatically see the link between the screen grab and our cover. This is the part where he is considering to jump. We used this as the back as people who watched the music video will see that this is the cover for our song.

This is the Inner panel 2 and another screen grab from our video, here we see the two chracters on the bench. This is another cohesive link between the video and the cover.

Here we have anotehr screen grab from our video and another panel. Another example of Cohesion.

Here is the front cover of our music video presentation. You can see clealy here that we have taken a screen grab from the video and then worked magic to make it our front cover. This will be instantly recognisable from our audience to see that this is our work. We have created a simple yet effective cohesion between our work and cover based on advertising purposes We made the bench the sole image as this is where the couple come to meet on a date. This will become the image of the song.

Evaluation Question 3

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

In order to get audience feedback from our video presentation, we created a questionnaire for people to answer when they finished watching our second draft of the music video. A very interesting thing I learned from the questionnaire is how people interpreted the ending. I made this the final question purely under interest rather than a need to know basis. The best answer to that is that people found it open to interpretation, that is how my partner an I wanted to show off the ending, with non linear story-line laid out for people rather a mix of emotions and feeling between people believing he jumped and people believing that he stayed. Through  this i learnt that we played the ending very well as people had different ideas as to how it ended.

These are the examples of the two most helpful questionnaires from the pile. The one on the left giving us a solid 9, listing factors that they enjoyed and felt that we did well, and on the final question answered that its open to interpretation, which is what we were going for, but under justification, explained an answer.  The second with a lower score of 4, which we believe is because they wanted to give feed back on what we could have done better. The audience member stated that it would need a final bench scene, as we have this place that they would come together. We showed this as now only one is alive (or not, you don't know that) while the love they shared is dead. That was the purpose of the black and white, to display that. But not only is it significant to me. Every company in the music/film and other media industries use audience feedback to alter their projects. As they need to hear feedback, without it they would go in blindly not have a second opinion on anything. A second opinion is crucial to the media industry, to send out a video that hasn't been viewed by the common people would not be wise. The audience can pin point where they need to change certain aspects of the video. Using a focus group to show what was good about the video and what needs to be altered. They would probably do this a few times with different drafts to get the most liked one out.
     Of my data, I was very surprised that the first bench scene was shown as a good aspect, I personally believed that it was too long, and a bit too one shot. Yet people seemed to see that as a good aspect, under not to many transitions, you were able to focus all your attention on the two main characters over anything else.
     The main element that people believed that we needed to change was the final panning shot of the city. They thought that the black & white element was a good touch as it reflected the mood of the final scene. Where as people believed that it should be the bench rather than the city, as it would be a great final cut, to go back where it all began, but with a different ambiance. not a happy one but a sad one. I managed to get a lot out of my audience feedback. I especially enjoyed the answers to the last question as it showed that it was an effective ending which made people think 'Did he, didn't he?'. The idea of Audience theory is also applicable. Why do the watch what they are watching? How do the consume it? Does it effect them? The show of effect was shown by the first person we interviewed, 'Max Pickup' who stated that the video he watched was depressing, You can tell mainly from the facial expression that he kind of looked saddened by this which goes under the 'Effect Theory'. The other three Displayed the opposite with the 'Uses and gratification' concept where they they were open to rejecting or using the piece of media. They all made an ending in their head and gave reasonable suggestions as to why this occurred. This is an example of Reception theory, where the users play the text around to their interpretation from the original idea.

This is an example of one of the talking heads I used for my evaluation. He stated good parts and negative parts from my video. He said what he feels is his version of the ambiguous scenes and that he likes the Time lapse. This video was really helpful, as i gave me ideas under what ti improve on and what i would do again if I did it again.
My talking heads session also supported Barthes "Death of an Author" theory. He hypothesized that the audience create their own meanings to texts so that they are "Unstable and open to question or user interpretation" He declared that "text is a tissue of quotations" which is not drawn from persons experience. The meaning of work is drawn from the impressions of the consumer, rather that the ''Passion'' or ''Tastes'' of the writer. My talking heads really supported this theory as they all gave their own interpretation of the text which varied from my partner and I.
There are three types of spectator-ships. Passive spectator; who takes up the intended meaning/doesn't question the text, Negotiating spectator/Active spectator; who both gives and takes/retains own view but also interpolates themselves within the film and Libertarian spectators; who reject the intended purpose/believes that there are many different readings. From my talking heads session, I discovered that my audience are a mix between negotiating spectators and libertarian spectators, while no one I interviewed were passive towards the text. The talking heads were either believed that there were many different readings towards the media text or that they had their own views but accepted some from the video. From this i have learned that i have been successful in creating an open to interpretation video.  

Evaluation Question 4

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

The theory of 'Participation Media' is important in this question. As before the internet became available to most. People subdued to media, like a form of propaganda, it was either except or don't, no real other choice behind it. Within the 21st century, companies such as Facebook and Twitter became available to all with a decent home hub. Tumbler is the most important social media site for TV shows as after an episode, the 'Fandom' will go on and talk about it, and can get others interpretations of the theme. People can now become part of the show they love without working on it directly.

Our production was broken down into three separate parts Research, Construction and Evaluation. Each were helped out by the media technologies provided to my partner and I on the internet. 

In the Research stage, Google, Wikipedia and YouTube were the biggest help for us, Especially YouTube. YouTube gave us examples of music video in which we could start our initial videos. While the videos were not of our genre, they are of our chosen story line and with YouTube they were handed straight to us through a simple interface. After we finished that and gathered a main idea around our story line, we turned to Google to iron out any bugs we had around our theories, and that lead to me to an amazing blog around the idea of Strauss theory of binary oppositions.  

( http://www.slideshare.net/laurenminns/strauss-binary-opposites)

Slideshare was also a very helpful website. A website where people have made a slide about that they believe is important. The only downside of SlideShare is that people can say anything they want and call it a fact, so its sometimes hard to find fact from fiction on websites from this. 

Another very useful website was Wikipedia the online encyclopedia. We used it to look up items we didn't understand for example Post-modernism. But again also with this website its hard to uncover what is true and what is a lie as anyone, anywhere can change it around. 

The last main website we used for Research was Bandcamp. It is a website in which a indie band can set up a home page an it will help to raise awareness on their band, its a fantastic idea for any upcoming band. 

(http://pangaean.bandcamp.com/)

We also used a camcorder to interview the band and asked what they wanted. We stuck to their guidelines and it turned out like they expected.

The next stage was Construction. This was the point that my partner an I put all of our research knowledge into practice. This was a major part which indeed included Media Technologies. 

We needed camcorders to film our music video. This was essential. We used one like this, a Sony HDD camcorder. With it being in HD we managed to get a good picture on the video, we never experienced an issue with quality control. 

Unfortunately  the cameras outer body has experienced some wear and tear and it made it hard to connect it to the Tri-Pod so we have experienced a few shaky scenes, But my partner managed to get it in a good frame. 

My Partner and I found that iMovie did in fact not agree with us. We found it both hard to use and sluggish. So we moved onto Windows movie maker 16.4.3508.0205. We found it much more convenient, easier, and generally much easier to use. The only downside is that the transitions and wipes are much more 1980's than modern in comparison to iMovie. Yet I believe we made it work. While the wipes sway away from the 21st century, The technology does not. It moves away from the VHS editor. which would take months. Its much more convenient.   

For our prilimanry texts we used Photoshop. We used it for The poster, Album cover, and magazine advert. All in all we found it to be a comfortable experience, having both had experience of it before we didn't really come across any issues in the using of the product, yet we tried our best to not make our anchillary texts seem 'Photoshoped' E.g. Fake.

We needed to use a blank DVD to place our movie on. It was a plain and simple copy paste style action with minimal to no effort, was very easy.

Finally was the Evaluation part. We used a laptop to display our video to people. This helped us to gain an prospect on what we could do better and what we did well. This was a massive benefit in our evaluation. Another part we used was word. This is Microsoft's word processor application. We used this to create and design our own questionnaire to hand out to people once they have seen our video, (you can see an example earlier on in the Blog. We used Blogger. I posted the video up on to it and waited upon comments, sadly non have arisen yet but if they would have we would have taken them into account. Overall the amount of media technologies we used in our evaluation question has been significantly less than the other two. But we believe we have done a thorough evaluation and corrected any issues that we had.