Evaluation Q1 and Q4 draft

Q1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Two particular features of Goodwin’s theory of music videos that are significant to my music video is the use of close ups and the relation between the lyrics and visuals. Typical pop music videos use a lot of close-ups as this allows the audience to be focused on the appearance of the artist which is key to gaining an audience due to the target audience being young and more likely to be interested in the appearance of the artist. My music video consists of many close-ups where the appearance of the artist makes it clear to the audience that the genre is pop. The expressions of the artist is mainly joyful and positive which again highlights that it is a pop music video. Furthermore, the constant use of direct address to the camera creates a connection between the artist and the audience and engages the audience into watching the music video.
My music video uses literal signs as well as metaphoric signs to display the relationship between the lyrics and visuals. For example, a literal sign of the globe is used to represent “I’ll sail the world to find you” and a metaphoric sign of a calendar is used to portray “Every day I will remind you”.
In terms of mise-en-scene, pop music videos are generally quite bright and colourful so that it is appealing to the audience and can have a positive impact on them which is to entertain and bring pleasure to them as noted in the uses and gratifications theory. The main way in which this was portrayed through was the different coloured backgrounds I used throughout my music video.For example, bright colours such as yellow and pink were used when the lyrics were depicting a positive message, whereas colours such as blue which is commonly associated with sadness was used to connote negative feelings in the song. The use of different props in the music video may have also contributed to the entertainment brought to the audience as there is a possible appeal to the unexpectedness of the props revealed in the music video.
Features of the music video where I challenged the conventions include the use of a female actor to lip-sync a song originally sung by a male singer. This is untypical of most music videos and the effect of the use of a female lip-syncing to a male voice is that it makes it more entertaining to watch as the audience may not have expected it.

As for my digipak, I also used many conventions of real media products. My digipak consisted of four pages with a front and back cover and two inside pages with the CD on the right hand side. This is perhaps the most basic type of digipak layout that is generally used as it is simple yet it can work effectively by having a good design.
On the front cover, I placed a sticker in the top right corner which states that it is an exclusive deluxe edition. Many products which are special and different to the original in some way usually display it on the front cover to inform people what is different in an attempt to attract people to buy it due those differences which are often regarded as being valuable. The main image create a direct address to the audience as the artist is directly staring at the camera. This has the effect of the artist presenting the product to the audience with their eye contact created by looking into the camera when the photo was taken.
On the inside of the digipak, I decided to add a ‘Thanks to’ page which mentions the people who the artist wants to thank in relation to the album produced. This is typically seen in digipaks as fans who would want to be acknowledged by the artist are most likely going to be mentioned in this section which can act as a connection between the artist and fans.I placed the ‘Thanks to’ text on the paper held by the artist in the photo as the use of this image where it seems as if the artist is looking down at the text makes it more presentable and can differentiate it from the background lyrics. A lot of digipaks would mention the production details of thesongs in the album but my digipak challenges this convention as the target audience of this genre are mainly young people and so they are less likely to be interested in the production of the album.
On the back cover I had included the tracklist, barcode and other production details of the album. This is conventional as it is displayed to inform people when and where it was produced and who produced it. The tracklist is also very informative as it tells people the name and number of songs in the album. By knowing more about the album it can encourage them to buy it.
I also included the spine of the digipak which adds to the professionalism of the product as most real life digipaks have a spine as it can indicate the artist and album name when stored, where the front cover may not be visible.

The conventions I used in the magazine advert includes the image, layout and reviews. Like most magazine adverts I displayed quotes with the source and stars below it to indicate the rating of the album to theaudience. Theses quotes are similar to those seen on real magazine adverts as they are generally from music channels or shows such as Billboard and 4Music which are two of the sources I stated on my magazine advert.
For the main image, I used a mid-shot image of the artist with her staring directly at the camera to display a direct mode of address. This type of image may be commonly used on magazine adverts as it can create a balance between the image and text so that the text can be placed over the image which acts as a sort of background. Furthermore, the layout is also conventional with the image in the centre filling most of the page as this is the initial part of the magazine advert that is likely to be noticed by people. Details of the album is noted on top of the image, below the face which appears as if the artist is holding a board with the information.

The fonts I used throughout the music video, digipak and magazine advert were similar in terms of style. All the fonts were sans serif fonts, some which were more cartoon-like and others which were more round and bubbly. These all indicated at the genre being pop as it created a light-hearted feeling to the music video. The sizes of the text were adjusted according its significance. For example, the artist and album names were the biggest pieces of text on both the digipak and magazine advert as they are the key bits of information that the audience would want to know when looking at it. On the other hand, other pieces of text were relatively smaller that the artist and album name so that it can create a contrast between the two and emphasise the more important information. On the magazine advert, the release date was smaller in size but it was placed right below the album name which makes it quite noticeable to the audience and therefore doesn’t need to be particularly big. The reviews were relatively small in size despite being a key feature of the magazine advert as I used a box to highlights it importance. As for the digipak, I used a box to organise the information about the content of the exclusive deluxe edition of the digipak on the front cover. This therefore made it stand out despite the text being in a small size.

Q4. How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

The internet was vital in the research and planning stages as it enabled us to look at existing examples as well as present our work in an organised way. In order to create a successful music video I had used the internet to research existing music videos and get some inspiration from them to create my own. I noted the conventions of music videos and considered how I would use them in my own music video.  YouTube had hugely assisted me in the researching and planning process as I was able to watch and analyse existing music videos. The features of Youtube were useful in the analysis process due to the ability of being able pause and print screen certain scenes to analyse. I also used YouTube to upload my music video as well as some demonstration videos of how I made use of certain features of the software I used. We used Blogger to present all of our work by creating posts and labelling them under the different stages of our coursework. This enabled us to keep our work organised and easily navigate through the blog.To upload certain files such as Microsoft PowerPoint onto Blogger,I had to use a range of different websites. There are many websites available to choose from which enabled me to present my work in different formats. Some of the websites include: prezi, slideshare, scribd and issuu. I chose specific websites for different types of files, for example I found that slideshare was better in presenting PowerPoints and scribd presented word documents better. Also issuu looked professional in the way it presented documents in the format of a book which was suitable for the evaluation. In addition, SurveyMonkey was useful in helping me obtain feedback on my work so that I could make improvements to it. The features were great in helping me design a professional survey that could be analysed easily with tables and graphs of the data.

To shoot my music video I used a digital SLR Canon 550D. I shot the footage at ISO-100, shutter speed of 1/50 and aperture of 1.8. I used a 50mm 1.8 prime lense. This produced high quality videos that had enabled me to construct a music video that mimicked existing ones in the real world. Using a digital camera was beneficial as I was able to constantly review the videos I had taken which meant I was able to adjust things as I go along and make it as good as possible. For example, I found some of the videos I had taken were out of focus and by being able to check the quality of the videos it allowed me to immediately re-do it.

My music video is performance-based which uses a green screen background. To ensure that the green background works effectively, two bright lights were placed on both sides of the actor so that it was bright enough to show the actor on camera clearly. However, due to uncontrollable factors regarding lighting, the two shoots that took place on separate occasions produced slightly different quality videos.

I used the software Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 to create my music video. There were many reasons why I decided to use this over other software such as Windows Movie Maker. Firstly, there are many effects in the software that had assisted me in constructing my music video. For example, one of the main effects was the ultra key which allowed me remove the green background from my video clips. This was an important part of editing as my music video is performance based with the use of the green screen to create a range of different effects to present the song in an interesting way.
Another important feature of Premiere I used was the 3-way colour corrector. Since I had shot on different occasions where uncontrollable factors such as light had affected the outcome of my footage, I had to alter the colour of the footage so that they matched more in terms of colour which the 3-way colour corrector had allowed me to do.
In addition, Premiere allows you to use different layers which hugely assisted the construction of my music video as it allowed me to create different effects such as putting the lyrics on top of the footage as well as duplicating the footage so that it showed two of the same footage in different positions. It also organised all the clips and titles I used as I had put similar parts on the same layer e.g. all the background colours were on one layer and the audio was on another layer. This made it easy for me to edit as I could hide or mute the layers when necessary. For example, when I was editing the clip so that the lip-syncing matched the audio, I had muted the audio of the original clip and matched it with the higher quality audio clip.
In terms of the transition of my video, the position tool had greatly impacted the construction of my work as I created key frames to make the video appear on or off the screen. I also used the scale tool a lot, mainly to create the effect of the video enlarging. This were effective in shifting from one scene to another as it appear to be quite smooth.

To create the digipak and magazine advert I used Adobe InDesign CS6 because it had a lot of useful features that allowed me to create a professional standard product. In order to make the text look professional I had made use of the line spacing tool which enables you keep the distance between the lines of text consistent. I also used the tracking feature to widen the distancebetween the letters so that it is more spaced out and clearer to read. Furthermore, for the background text I altered the transparency setting so that it was quite faint which made it distinct from the foreground. When creating the text of the CD of the digipak. The ‘type on a path tool’ tool was very useful as it allowed me to arrange the text in the shape of the CD so that it was equally spread around the CD. I used some effects such as the drop shadow and outer glow to enhance some parts of my product. For example, with the magazine advert I used the outer glow to create an effect of the background text fading out. This in effect made it seem more natural and blended the top part of the page together. I used the drop shadow on the box for the reviews as it made it stand out from the background which is important as the reviews inform the audience a lot about the quality of the album and can give them a good initial impression of the album.

Adobe Photoshop had helped me to edit the photos I used in the digipak and magazine advert. I was able to adjust the brightness and contrast of the images using the images settings. This had sharpened the images so that they looked clearer. To smoothen the image I had used the spot healing tool on selected areas of the skin to make it all relatively the same colour. Since the background colour of the images were not consistent I had to use the magic wand tool and quick selection tool to remove the background. The quick selection tool allowed me to carefully remove selected areas around the image whereas the magic wand tool was useful in selecting large areas of the same colour which I wanted to remove.

In addition, I edited in the quick mask mode to create a selection of the image to edit. I selected the lip area to adjust the colour of it and I did this by adding an overlay effect of pink/red on it. I also used the brush tool and set the transparency level relatively low so that I could fill in areas where necessary without making it inconsistent.