evaluation question 4

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

1.       With the world moving towards Web 2.0 I had to get used to using different technologies in order to create my media productions. Although the school did have the technologies I needed to create my productions, I did encounter problems, these included not being able to upload certain images onto the my blog or view videos for my research due to the restrictions on the school software, which meant I had to carry out some work from home. However I was unable to do all my work from home down to the fact I didn’t have some of the software I needed to complete the tasks, for example photoshop and iMovie, which meant that our editing was restricted to just my time in school, although this didn’t cause to much of an issue as we planned relatively well and allowed time for our work to be edited. One problem I did encounter at home and at school was the inability to place a powerpoint presentation on Blogger. This became an issue as I intended to carry out my evaluation as a powerpoint with pieces of video and audio to help present what I was trying to show. This caused me many difficulties and as a result I have typed up my evaluation. Blogger was fairly easy to get used to as I had used it last year and it is a case of just inputting the information you are looking to share. However a more problematic programme was Photoshop. I found this hard to get used to and spent a lot longer that what I had planned on trying to create my digipack, this also became increasingly frustrating as I wanted to make it look better than how it came out but this was down to the fact I really struggled to work out how to use the software and to get it to do what I wanted. Another piece of technology I had to get used to with the group was Prezi. This is an online presentation website in which you can create a free account and create a presentation, we used this to create our presentation on similar artists to our target artist. This was fairly simple to use once we had got used to it, as we had to follow paths. One piece of technology that Alex and Brad had to get used to more so than me was the lights in the recording studio. This was because I was in the video was focusing on what to do in the shots. However we did have to consider the lighting on each shot, something that sounds fairly simple but once you are filming and trying to make the lighting just right it can be a bit tricky to sort out. Another piece of technology I had to get used to was Wix.com this is a website that enable people to create their own website. This was difficult to understand at first because I hadn’t really created anything similar to this before so it took be a bit of time to get used to all the different ways in which you would edit the page. Once I had got an understanding on what to do it made it much easier to navigate the site and create my website. Overall I feel the use of technologies has been vital in the construction of my products and without these technologies I feel I would of found it a lot harder to create these productions. 

here is my final website i have used the images we took whilst we where out filming and put them on the website i have also used links from other websites and inputted audio files and videos so that people viewing the website would be able to go through and find out everything they wish to know about the artist. You can see i have used colours that are similar to the artist as Ed Sheeran uses orange and black on his album i thought this would be a good idea to use and his audience would be able to associate with this.

i feel the website is laid out fairly simply and would be easy for most people to work around and find what they are looking for with ease and without to much complication. i would however of liked to have had some more images available so that could of made the website more interesting and would of given the audience something more to look at. however i have tried to use all the images i had available to me and laid them out in a way similar to artists websites currently out in the market.

this is the link to my website:

http://daz495.wix.com/ed-sheeran

evaluation question 3

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

1.       To get an idea on what our audience wanted from our media product we decided to carry out a questionnaire in which we asked questions that we thought would give us a better idea on what to put in our production to appeal to our audience. After creating the questionnaire we went out to get a response from our target market. Unfortunately the first group of people we asked were not very responsible and gave us unhelpful answers. This caused us to have a rethink, we went back looked at the questionnaire and change a couple of bits and then reprinted them and went out to try again. This time we were much more selective about who we asked for our target market as to make sure we didn’t get stupid answers again and waste more time. Another way in which I got audience feedback was by asking them to view our video and comment on the video. One thing that kept coming up was the fact the quality of our video was poor on YouTube. This was a shame because we had put time and effort into making sure the video was how we wanted it and then it was all ruined to a degree due to the fact our video was poor quality on YouTube. This was down to no fault of our own because when uploading the video we made sure we selected the highest quality so we assume this was down to the fact the something must have happened during the uploading process. I would like to have figured out what caused this and made sure I changed this as it spoilt the video to some extent. I also asked people to give me feedback on my work during the construction process.  I constantly asked people for feedback on aspects of my work that I wasn’t happy with, again the response was mixed. Some people were very helpful whereas other people just gave me ideas that were totally different to what I was trying to create. Although it did show me that people didn’t always want exactly what the stereotypes would suggest, which showed me that I should carry out more research next time in order to meet more of my target markets interests. Not all the feedback I received was bad thou, people did comment on how good some of the photography was and how the editing on the video made it run really well. I would like to take credit for this however Brad did put in more time than any of us into the editing of the video so I made sure he took the credit for it. 

i have completed my final digipack but for some unknown reason i am unable to put it on blogger as photoshop is not reconising it as an image however i do have each individual image that i can upload it will not let me put them together,

as you can see i have used images that we took whilst we were out filming. i am not particularily happy with my inside cover and my front because the images are too similar. looking back i wish i had taken some more images that would of been able to be used on my cover.

here is our final video complete!! after all of us putting effort in to the filming, editing and planning.
when the video was uploaded onto YouTube the video's quality got turned down so it looks like the video is poor quality but this is due to no fault of our own and we are unable to change this, below is the link to our video, ENJOY:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNXmE5LMSbA&list=UUzCuzU6TJVKZ_Khku1FndtQ&index=7

evaluation question 1

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

1.       In our video media production Grade 8 we have used, developed and challenged forms and conventions of real media productions. One of the ways we have done this is by using the artist himself, this is something you see on a regular basis in current music videos today. If you were going to compare this to a media theory you could relate this to Sven Carlson and his idea of a performance clip, where we show our artist in a number of locations for example the waterfall and the recording studio. We wanted to look at what Ed Sheeran had done in his previous videos, this helped us as we noticed that in most of his videos he had a story line to go with the lyrics. In our case we used a Romeo and Juliet story which is based on the theory by Kate Domaille in where you have to characters that seems to be in love with each other. This was good as you do not always see this in music videos made by Ed Sheeran this is why I would regard this as a form of developing current forms and conventions. We also needed other people in our video to help portray the effect that we wanted, this is where Lauren came in (the girl in our video) she helped us to create a storyline in the video. During the process of us developing our video Ed Sheeran realised his new video ‘Give Me Love’ in which there is a storyline as well as another character which is similar to our video. This shows we have used forms and conventions of real media products. Another way in which we used forms and conventions was by looking at Ed Sheeran’s videos and seeing that he is known for his use of a guitar, so we decided to include one in our video to so that we had considered current media products to inspire us. It also allowed us to keep continuity as many videos within the music industry use instruments that are played by the artist to the music. We also used the drum at the beginning of the music video that was played in time with the music to give an effect. One way in which we challenged media conventions was that in our video we had our artist walking down a street singing to the music, which is normally associated with rap music and not our genre of music. Another way in which challenged currents productions was that in our chorus our artist was just in the same place playing the guitar shown from different angles, this is unusual as normally the chorus is the piece of the music video where the most production occurs, whereas we had our artist in a simple environment without  doing to much, this challenges current media productions. 

evaluation question 2

How effective is the combination of your main products and ancillary tasks?

1.       As my media products are not real media products I have created them based on research and tried to make them as real as possible. I have done this by trying to keep continuity by basing it all around the video. I have used the images that I took when out on filming for the video and used these for my digipack and website. Throughout my website I have decided to use the orange theme that Ed Sheeran is famous for because it shows I have taken into consideration what the artist is already famous for. Originally on my front cover of my digipack I did want to use an image of the guitar and using photoshop turn this into the number 8 as I have called my album Grade 8. Unfortunately I was unable to do this as when I took the images I didn’t really take into consideration the angle at which I would need to take the photo and it made it difficult for me to work this image so I decided to get rid of this idea as it was causing me to much hassle. On my digipack I decided that I didn’t want to move to far away from what the artist is already known for. Therefore I tried to use ordinary colours without being too bright. However looking back I feel that this was a mistake because unless people are specifically looking for the album it would not stand out on a stand so I would probably use more vibrant colours had I the chance to do this again. I made sure I included that video and an image of the digipack to again show continuity. I believe that the combination of my 3 tasks went well together although looking back at it I would change a few to make sure that my products stood out more and where more appealing to my target market. 

i have managed to finsih my front cover without having to much trouble, i decided to keep it fairly simple because it means that it wont be to much for people to look at and they are able to just concentrate on the music that is on the album.

I have used the two characters that were in the video to show soem sort of consistancy, it also give some sort of idea to what the ablum is going to be about, it shows it will be able a relationship and love.
i do feel that the writing on the front cover isnt as noticable as it should be, so i would probably change it so that you can see it clearly.

i did orginally want to use the guitar image cut out and try and turn this into the number 8 but this was becoming to much work as it wasnt sitting right and i couldnt seem to make it look like the number so it would of made the front cover look out of place.

this was the image i was trying to work but the way it was shot didnt make it easy for me to edit it how i wanted.

 

 

this is my inside cover, this would be on the back of the booklet that would come out of the album so people would be able to read about the artist and what the album is about. i wanted to use these images because it allowed me to capture the fact that it was all about the couple and how they where together. i realised after that i didnt have as many images as i thought so i wasnt able to give the full effect. i did try to use the image of the studio as the background but again it was proving to hard to work all the images around so i decided against this as i was running out of time and didnt want to spend to much time trying to figure how it would work out

Here is an image of my back cover, you can see that i have used a couple of the images from our filming. I decided to keep it fairly basic as i looked at Ed Sheerans previous album and found that he had kept it fairly simple and hadnt put a lot of information on the back. As this album has been sucessful I decided to keep my cover similar to this as I was hoping for mine to be sucessful.

Below is an image of Ed Sheerans album cover.

today we went out to try and film a shot where i was meant to fall down using an point of view shot and also smash a bottle. however we had number of problems one of which was the weather. it had heavily rained the night before meaning the ground was soaking wet, and as i was meant to be landing on the floor i decided i didnt want to be falling on the soaking wet floor. as a result of this we looked around for another location we could film the shot and found an underpass where the floor was dry and i was able to land without getting wet.

when we was out looking for the scene we found an good location for us to film the shot where i would have to catch the bottle and toss it away again without taking my eyes of the camera. this took a number of takes because we had to co-ordinate a number of things, when the bottle was thrown, when i caught it and when i threw it away again. i also had to make sure i didnt take my eyes off the camera and kept the lip singing going all at the same time.

it took several attempts some of which were ruined by me not catching the bottle and others because alex had to walk alongside me and throw the bottle but where we were meant that on occasions he appearded in the shot which is not what we wanted. finally after several attempts we managed to get it right without getting to wet which was also a bonus!

Today we started our digipack, this is one of our ancillary tasks. We had to create a front, back inside and CD holder. Our teacher said that it would be easier to use a template as it has been used in previous years and has been sucessful.

Here is the template we used to make the digipack it made it easier to put our images on as it gave us something to work towards. It also gave us measurements to use on photoshop which was much help as i was able to work within the parameters

After managing to create one page of my website i found it wasnt so hard so cracked on and made the second one, this was just a simple get in contact page where users would be able to email into the artist and ask him questions, they would also be able to ask any information about the artist and get their answer on the website. this would also create a forum where people would be able to talk about the latest news on the artist, below is my contact page:

as you can see i have included fields so people are able to get in contact with the artist and sign up for a newsletter where they would recieve free information on a weekly basis

i have managed to figure how to start using Wix and have designed one page on my website already, this was my events page, i listed 3 events where the artist would be performing and included images oh the events, i took inspiration from other artists websites because most of their websites have a page similar to this and i felt it is a good page to have as fans should be able to see when their favourite artist is going to be performing live for them to see.

i started to design my website today, i am going to be using Wix as it is a good website that allows users to create their own website using a template or by using a blank document. it also has a number of videos that enable you to follow step by step guides in order to create a website exactly how you wish it to look.

here is the front page to wix. you can see that you are able to use templates that have been produced already or you can get a blank template and create your website from scratch. along the top you can see where you are able to access videos that will help you to create your website in the way you want it.

Brad powers on.... after looking back over our shots we found gaps in our video that we didn't have any footage for, this was more than likely down to poor planning, but we needed to sort this, after our experience in the preliminarily task we found that brad was the most adequate and reliable at using iMovie so we decided to leave him in charge of the editing as it would make it easier on the group although we all had input.
after realising we had the gaps brad gave us a list of possible shots we could use to fill the gaps and sent alex and I out to find these shots, we found an area by the local shops that we thought we would be able to film some of the shot he was looking for, after about 40 minuets of filming we recieved a phone call brad asking us to hurry back because he wanted the shots now! so we finished up what we were doing and headed to face Brad.

On our return we found he had gathered together all our shots and sped them up at the end of the video to give the effect that you would be able to relive the whole experience in one quick go. We had discussed this but didnt really think we could do it, but Brad being the trooper he was had found away of doing this and made it look good.

Today we decided to go through the video and see what we had shot and what was left to shoot. This was a good idea as we decieded to change some bits. We also decided to take some shots out and cut them down so that they werent as long. Once we took out some of the shots we realised that we would need to film some of the shots again and get some new shots filmed so that we had enough shots to put the video together.
Up to this point the video is totally in sync with the song and all the editing is complete, we will need to change some bits as we are adding some images to the video to break it up so that will put the video out of sync so we will need to move it about again once the images are in to make it work again.

after uploading the shots from the studio we realised that the some of them were out of sync with the music so we decided to take the video apart and reconstruct it to make sure it all fell into place. how did we do this without wasting to much time you may ask? well brad being the brightspark he is came up with the idea of writing down the timings of the shots on a piece of papaer and then we would know where to put them again.

above is the list which helped us keep sane and keep the video in sync with the music and although this took a bit of time to write out it saved us a lot of time in the long run and made it so much easier to fit the video together.

Today we was meant to be going to the studio to film our shots but because there had been a mistake in the booking we had to change our plans and decided to shoot some shots outside. We had decided to film a shot where we smashed a bottle to make it look like the character in the video was drunk and had fallen over because of this, so again we had to use some props, including a bottle.
We found that each location we had planned to film the shot was either too wet (as it had been raining quite heavy the previous day) or once we had arrived and thought about it some more didnt seem right, we found an underpass that looked like it would represent where someone who was struggling with a drinking problem may spend time, so we decided to film our shots here. We also filmed the shot of the character falling on his face as he has had to much to drink as it would be dry and there would be less chance of us getting wet.

Today we visited the studio and filmed a large part of our video. We filmed a part of the chorus and some other shots that are going to go in the video. We had Lauren with us as she was going to be a part of our video story line some of the shots we filmed included me sitting down and playing the guitar whilst lauren was sitting behind me not paying attention as if she was interested. We also filmed our some of the shots for the verse. We made sure that each shot was filmed 3 times incase we made any mistakes, we would be able to edit each shot to get exactly what we wanted from it.

Above is a picture of the studio we had booked. As you can see we had the lighting available to us so that we where able to make the shots exactly how we wanted them. We also used some other props in the studio including some stools and a guitar that we bought with us. Bellow is a picture of the props used.

Last night whilst i was relaxing at home i noticed that the sky had turned red and it was a lovely sunset... it took some time but my brain finally clicked that we needed a shot of a red sky to go in our video, so i ran upstairs and tried to take the best shot i could, when i showed the boys they were impressed that i had been so quick to react and get the picture so we decided to use it for the video

today we went out and picked up from where we left off yesterday. we looked back over out shots and werent happy with one of the close up shots of my singing so we re-filmed this so that we had a number of shots that we could choose from.

on our story board we hadnt actually stated where we were going to film the next shot so we decieded to walk around the surrounding area of the school to see where would be the best place to film. we found a quiet waterfall where we would be able to film some shots with a nice backdrop. then we found a problem.. we couldnt figure out what the best way to film the shot would be because over the waterfall there was bridge but there wasnt really anywhere brad and alex could stand with the camera to get a good shot. then brad came up with the idea of me standing in the waterfall where there was some larger rocks this would allow us to get a good shot whilst alex who had taken over the filming for today could stand infront of me and capture the whole location, below are the pictures of the location:

 

 

i found that today because we didnt really plan where we were going to film the shots, we didnt use our time wisely and wasted time walking around looking for places to film. also it was rather gloomy today so it made the shots a bit dark when they could of been alot lighter.

 

today we went out to film our first shots. this was fairly easy or so we thought, we used the story board to see what shot we was planning on doing. this was the tapping of the drum stick and the extreme close up of my mouth. it seemed like it would be an easy shot to film but it was rather difficult to get the tapping in time with the music. brad filmed this shot by holding the camera on a tripod directly infront of where i was tapping, then he moved to a high angle shot to capture it from different angles. when we was actually filming we found that we liked the idea of having a PoV shot so we decided to film this shot to see what it would look like.

the next shot we filmed was the close up shots of my mouth lip singing when we did the original shot we noticed that the cmaera was further away from my mouth then we first thought so we filmed the shot again, the next problem we realised we had was that when we zoomed in on my mouth that the camera went out of focus and so we had to move the camera away until it was focused and was easily seen.

here is the email we wrote out to send to the record label to avoid any copyright issues, it also prevented us from having our video removed from YouTube:

here are our the shot lists. We needed to fill these out so we had some idea on what we were going to film on what day.. it gave us a sense of structure, and with 3 boys this was probably a good idea.

today we decided our main character. this was something we had to have a think about as we didnt want to get someone that was going to be unavailable when we needed them and we didnt want someone that was going to find it hard to perform infront of the camera.

we started to think about people that we knew that would be willing to fill the void. i had mentioned to the group that i would like to be in the video at some point wether this be as a main character or as someone that supported the main role. another possible candidate was our friend called matt. we thought he would be good because he was confident and fitted the profile we were trying to use in the video. however we found a stumberling block, he attends college and his college times clashed with our filming times.. this would not work therefore the search went on.

i came up with the suggestion of a boy called harrison that attened the sixth form, we went looking for him to ask if he would be willing to do it and he was, result! we knew he could sing and act as he has played a main role in the school productions so he seemed like the perfect person to play the main character. however alex started to have his doubts about this because harrison looks remarkably like ed sheeran and if we used him it would be like we were copying his video. we started to talk about it and decided against using him.

finally we made a decision. i was to be the main character, although i wasnt what we were orginally looking for i would be available for all filming and i would be able to have close input into the production so we made the decision to crack on and use me as the lead role.

Before we started our video we thought it would be a good idea to brainstorm some ideas and in different colours to show who had contributed to the session started to write down some ideas. we looked at what Ed Sheeran had done in his videos and some of these ideas went down onto the paper which is understable as he has had so much sucess with his music.

when one idea went down on the paper another member of the group would expand on that idea and we found it lead to a sucessfull session because we where able to see what all of us were thinking and how we could start putting all the ideas together to make a video.

below you can see that each of us used a different colour pen to see who contributed to each part:

Here is a summary of what we found from our questions air's it, by making it a big sheet like we have it enabled us to see what sort of information our target audience would be looking for. It also meant that when it came to us making our video we would know what to include to satisfy our target audience needs and wants.

as you can see when we handed out our questionaires people filled them in incorrectly which left us with some results that were useless.

We now wanted to look at our audience and what sort of music they are interested in, so we decided to carry out a questionaire that would allow us to find out this information. We asked a mixture of opened ended and closed questions to see what sort reaction we got from people. 

 

 

Unfortunately we did hand out some other questionnaires but the response we got was irresponsible and we had to disguard these answers as they didnt help us in any way in deciding what to do with our video. After receving these reponses we decided to go and give the questionnairs out to different people as we thought that by doing this we would get a more responsible answer that would help us contribute to the video.  

 



We have also carried out two other tasks that involved us filming and using different camera techniques. Again these were done in groups. The first task we carried out was to produce a music video from any band that we wanted. As we were a group of boys we decieded to attempt to do One Direction - Thats what makes you beautiful - I felt this wasnt very good as the camera work was all shakey, to change this i would use a stand or a trolly that will allow the camera to be steady at the same time. I would also make sure that when we upload the video that the music stays in time with the video and not out of sync. Below is the link to the video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxda7mUI5uI&feature=BFa&list=UUzCuzU6TJVKZ_Khku1FndtQ

The second video we filmed was a script from Friends, it was a short film where each person took on one role. I again didnt think this was the piece of work, as the camera angles rarely changed and there wasnt really much emotion in the video considering it was a comedy it didnt come across as one. If we did it again I would make sure that the camera angles changed and that we choose a better place to film as in the classroom wasnt a good choice at all. I learnt that by planning it means that you are able to get a better final piece that you can be much happier with.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFnETHKDs4Y&list=UUzCuzU6TJVKZ_Khku1FndtQ&index=7&feature=plcp

This is an image of our group looking at similar artists to Ed Sheeran, we wanted to look at what sort of music he produced and similar artists so that we could see the best way to produce our work. We also wanted to look at how videos in the genre are put across so that we could follow this because as we have a target market it is important to consider what the target audience want and what they expect to see.
From the research we found that there is a mix of slow acoustic pieces and then they were followed by fast paced beats where in Ed Sheeran's case he occasionally raps.

This is good because it was good for us becuase we didnt really want to just have a slow song we wanted to have a bit of tempo to our video as it would make it more interesting for us to film. It also gave us some ideas about what our video should contain and how it should be laid out as we didnt want to move to far away from the genre so that we still connected with our auidence.

For the final production I am working in a group with Alex Sodimu and Bradley Stokes. The reasoning behind this is because, on our recent task where we had to create a music video, we worked together and worked really well. We came up with a number of ideas between us, and when we were filming the music video we started to think of ideas that we could use for our final piece even though we hadnt actually decided what song we were going to do.
We have decided on a  music video as we filmed one for our practise task and felt this would be the best way for us to get the highest marks possible. We had a brief to follow, bellow is the brief:

A promtion package for the release of an album, to include a music promo video together with:

• a cover for its release as part of a digipack (CD/DVD package)
• a webpage containing and promoting the artist

The song we have decided to film is Ed Sheeran Grade 8. We looked at a number of  various artists and their songs to see what would be the best option and we choose this song because it is a modern artist and we are able to relate to his work.

The final task we carried out before decided on what we were going to do for our final project watch a film sweed or a music video. Our group decided to do a music video for the song 'Without You' by Mariah Carey.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4tdADU8zRo&list=UUzCuzU6TJVKZ_Khku1FndtQ&index=5&feature=plcp
From the task I learnt that it is important to make sure you choose the shots you are using carefully as if you dont it can make the video look rubbish, it can also make it difficult to edit the video as you may need to use your character as a reference to what they are singing to put it in time with the music. It also allowed us to use more features of the i-movie software to edit the video. Another thing I noticed and will consider more seriously when it comes to the final task, that was that we must plan more in depth, this is because if we dont and something goes wrong or we are unable to film a particular shot, then we must be able to change it or have a back up.