1. In what ways does your media product use; develop of challenge forms
and conventions of real media products?
Research is essential when producing a product; it provides the
foundations upon which we work on. During our research, we exploited
the many media forums, to eradicate any misconceptions and to thus
confirm the line of work we were out to construct. Schiller is a German
music artist, whose videos exhibit the obstacles present in an average
couple’s relationship. We incorporated Schiller’s theme in our
video, however we further developed it. Our video develops this form of
convention as it is established upon breaking the stereotypical image of
men. Strength, power and fortitude are all terms that are generally utilized
in terms of men. In our video, we employed the other side of man;
both, bringing out and exploiting the decrepit surface embedded deep
within men. Genre is a way of categorizing a particular media text
accordingly to its content and style. It does not simply rely on the text but
on how it is made and presented. The genre of our music video is
‘Psychological thriller’. Generally, music videos with the theme of
‘Psychological thriller’ contain the cliché theme of a woman’s heartbreak;
however in ours we challenged this convention: the narrative is portrayed
upon a young man’s loss of love, illustrating the psychological challenges
that have been conjured; presenting the perplexity and malaise of the
young man.
2. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
The dull dimming of the video was incorporated to give reference to the moon.
Symbolically, the moon is considered to rule the emotions and senses of man. It
illuminates the darkness, the effect which we wanted to utilize in this video; the
recognition of the young man’s disturbed mind. The prime colours of the video are
based upon the spectrum of blue. Blue historically symbolises
truth, spirituality, sincerity and most importantly communication of feelings. As in
relation to our video, it is based upon spiritual happenings, the young man
illustrates his deep sincerity to his dead lover through communication with the
audience; whereas at the same time the truth about his psychotic state is
unveiled.
Similarly, we incorporated this colour scheme into the digi-pack and the magazine
advertisement. We placed the image of the couple together on the digi-
pack, however we also embedded a horrifying image of the deceased woman into
the background. This effect demonstrates the plot in a nutshell for the audience; it
also creates deterrence and curiosity within the audience. Within the magazine
advertisement, the same image of the deceased woman was used. The overall
fearsome aura of the advertisement was used to seize the audience’s most prime
attention, as it has generally proven in the past to. The combination between the
digi-pack, advertisement and the main product was in place to create similarity
between the main product and the ancillary texts. The use of same font, colour
scheme and general theme in all 3 aspects of the project provoke resemblance
with the ancillary texts. This also makes the overall product more user-friendly as
the audience will automatically know they are in compliance.
3. What have you learnt from your audience feedback?
Before generating ideas for our music video we researched by watching
different music videos but what attracted us the most was shiller, a
German music artist so we planned to make a music video based on love
tragedy, before we shot the video we received positive audience feedback.
We also learnt that we should always target a specific audience which will
accept the video concept and can give appropriate feedback .The teachers
were also very happy with the idea and motivated us even though the
story board that we made was even harder to implement. After make a
video to gain feedback we used a focus group in whom we asked different
questions related to our video we also wanted to find out if our music
video will be widely accepted as a part of physiological thriller
genre, without carrying this out we would not be able to kknow the
feedback and would not be able to correct the mistakes in the video and
modify it. We also distributed questionnaire to our target audience other
than the focus group, which ensured us that the audience is aware of the
genre that we discussed in the focus group. The more the people attached
to this questionnaire the more feedback we gain this also influence them
that we are trying them to connect to our video and could be a hit if
launched.
4. How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and
evaluation stages?
Planning and research included in our blog, where we upload all the work
as it progressed our coursework. This enabled us to keep up to date with
our work. YouTube, Google were the two main resources of planning and
research as we watched a lot of music videos from which we took
inspiration and ideas which we used in our own video. Google was a very
helpful resource for our digi pack; we viewed different digi pack to get an
idea. Our ancillary task was designing a digi pack and magazine
advertisement. We used DSLR’s to shoot are video and with the help of
tripods we shot from different angles as we also used lights to create a
dark background. For our digi pack we used still images which were taken
during the premier on apple Mac as this software provided a lot of
features and was recommended for editing of the video by our teachers as
our video starts out with fade in aperture blur is used to focus the persons
hands slight colour correction is used throughout the video cyan is
boosted then, jump cuts were used to create confusion. For our evaluation
we used power point as i made our evaluation more presentable instead
of it look just plain writing which can cause lack of interest for the viewer
and boredom.
