Tuesday, 1 April 2014

Final task: evaluation


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

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

Question 3: What have you learned from your audience feedback?

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



Question 1: This part of the evaluation asks you to explain what examples of 'real' products that you have looked at have influenced your final designs. This needs to be done to explain what you wanted to create for your own video, print advert and digipack. For each, you will need to include 9 examples, either as screen shots or in the case of the videos, an embedded YouTube version of the video. For each example you need to explain the specific parts of the poster, digipack or video that you were influenced by and why. For each section, once you have explained what you were influenced by you will then explain how these ideas fit in with your own ideas and own song.

For your video, using the 9 shot grid as key frames from your music video is an excellent idea that allows you to communicate about a range of ideas and production techniques. This is an example of what this could look like:


 Some good examples of question 1 can be seen here:
http://chloestevenson.wordpress.com/2010/04/23/a2-g324-evaluation-of-music-video/ and http://musicvideoalexanderwhitcombe.blogspot.co.uk/2009/11/nine-key-frames.html http://musicvideoalexanderwhitcombe.blogspot.co.uk/2009/11/evaluation-task-one-part-two.html


 This will be a long blog post with much detail in it. Use the examples above as a guide if unsure.



Question 2: How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
This question asks you to think about what the point of your work is and how well you managed to achieve what you set out to achieve.
Is your music video like any of the videos that influenced yours? Does your video feature any of the techniques that you wanted to use, such as ones that are used in the videos you looked at? Does your video get across a key idea or emotion in a way that you wanted to?
Don't forget about the technical side of things-did your editing or cinematography create an effective video for example?

You also need to think about how your other products combine and work with your video to promote the song as something that you want people to buy. How well have you managed to make your poster look like your digipack for example? Have you used a feature or technique in one product that you've used in another that helps to make all of your products look 'similar', like they have an identity. What could you do better? How could you create a clear identity for your products by changing them? What sorts of things might you do differently when creating the 'whole package'?

Make sure that there are plenty of clear and obvious links and evaluations between products. Something like this example below is good...

Though it doesn't go into a huge amount of detail.
A better version that uses more interesting technology would be a Prezi such as this:



Question 3: What have you learned from your audience feedback?
You will firstly need to get some people to watch your final video and to look at your final products and then ask them to complete a questionnaire about it and their feelings of it.
Then you will need to evaluate what you have learnt based on this feedback.

Was the feedback positive? Was it negative apart from one specific area? What was the audience's favourite aspect of your video? What did they like about your poster or digipack?

What is crucial here is not to simply explain what your audience told you about your products, but more about what you learnt from this feedback and how this would change or affect your choices if you were to make these products again.

Use graphs and charts to explain your findings. Perhaps ask for feedback via twitter, instagram or on your blog. Use screenshots of their replies and include these in a blog post to show your feedback.

 


This example shows a wonderful range of techologies and varieties of responses: http://rominamusicvideo.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/evaluation-question-three.html

A good website to use for gaining responses electronically is https://www.surveymonkey.com
but as you can seen in the link below, paper questionnaires are perfectly fine, though not effective in showing off your range of media skills.



A more interesting suggestion would be to create a director's commentary which includes clips from the music video and vox-pop reactions from the audience.


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

Monday, 31 March 2014

Magazine Advert Task 2

When your magazine advert is created, there are still some tasks that need completing.

Firstly, do you have on your blog:


  • The initial designs? These should be sketches on paper, possibly a range of ideas. 
  • The first version you did of your magazine advert.
  • Different versions that show how you made changes and edits all the way through the process.



Lastly, you need to get feedback for your advert and then make any changes based on the feedback. It's crucial that throughout this you upload all images and provided a running commentary for each image and why you made certain changes.

A great example can be found here:
http://rominamusicvideo.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/magazine-advert.html

Monday, 24 March 2014

Magazine Advert

The final production task is creating a magazine advert for the album, featuring your single.

This should feature imagery and photos taken in the making of your digipack to create a style and coherent 'look' to your advertising campaign.

Before you create your electronic version of the poster, first plan as a drawing what it could look like and what photo/s it could contain. This will help in your planning section of your work.

Examples of which are seen below. Look at the small features and range of things included to get an idea of what you might want to use on your own.





















Sunday, 9 March 2014

Artwork and photos for album.

In order to develop and create an album cover, artwork and subsequent posters/website/promotional material, you need a range of photos, taken by yourself. You should take a lot of photos to give yourself a variety of possibilities to choose from, meaning that some photos will end up not being used. The photos do not need to just be the artist/s, but can also be reflective of your video and location, themes in the song you've chosen and/or a general art style you want to aim for. When you've taken all of the photos you will need to be able to access these via your blog. These images must be created by yourselves and not images taken from others, especially ones which are subject to copyright.

Once you have taken all necessary photos these should be uploaded in full size to your blog and labelled correctly so that you can access these wherever necessary and also show that these images have been created by yourselves. Finally, when all of the images have been uploaded, each needs a simple evaluation explaining what you wanted/aimed to do, whether you think you achieved this and whether you will be using that photo in your final work or not. Have a read of these two articles before you begin to get an idea of how this process could and should work in terms of achiveing a consistent style in your artwork and promotion:

http://pitchfork.com/features/take-cover/9168-jay-zs-magna-carta-holy-grail/

http://pitchfork.com/features/take-cover/8791-sleigh-bells-reign-of-terror/

A useful example of how this might look can be found here:

http://lukegeorgiades.wordpress.com/2013/11/21/digipak-photoshoot-doobie/