Evaluation (media)

Evaluation
The Hives – Hate to Say I told you so

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

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

In our research we watched many different videos by The Hives and other bands of
the same genre to try and understand the forms and conventions used. We took
that into account when creating our music video, one thing we developed was the
uniform that The Hives normally wear in their performances. They typically wear
Black & White suits, yet however in the video ‘WAIT A MINUTE’ they switched to
more casual leather jackets and white shirts, so we followed this theme and
dressed our actors in similar attire. We also used this leather jacket and shirt look
for the album cover, CD’s and poster for continuity among all media products,
similar to The Hives who are known for their continuous look

•

For our Digipak, Poster and video we altered
the colour by adding different filters and
colour correction, we flattened the colour on
everything other than the video where we
actually upped the contrast as some of our
lighting made the image too flat. Overall we
were going for a dark theme with some stand
out colours as from our research we
discovered that this was more typical of the
rock/garage genre, this also fits into the
choice of clothes and the colours of them.
We also took this into account when
choosing the set for our video, we chose a
garage which is naturally quite dark and lit it
up with some stand-alone lights to create
interesting shadows and colours, also the fact
it is in a garage is a convention in itself as
that is where garage music initially started.
For our second locations we used the woods,
this is more of a challenge of the typically
garage music as it was a bit brighter, but we
thought it contrasted well.

Before

After

Original

Ours

•

For the shooting of our video we used a
mix of fast camera movement, slow
camera movement and still movement.
From researching The Hives and other
bands we noticed that during fast parts
of the song, the camera moves faster
and slow parts it moves slower. We
challenged this convention a bit by
having a mix at different paces but
gradually getting some faster moving
shots towards the middle and end as
the song really picks up. We used a lot
of close ups of the instruments and
singer in our video to follow the
convention of the genre as we saw this
a lot in the original Hate to say I told
you so music video. We challenged this
convention with some moving pans to
close ups and the occasionally
long/medium shot to add some variety.


• When editing the video we decided to use conventions
from most of The Hives’ previous video with fast
cutting rates overall and some extra fast cutting rates
at other points. We also tried to sync up the video to
the music as best as possible, by cutting the video on
the beat so it would feel correct when it cuts between
shots. During the editing process, we went against the
standard convention of garage rock music videos by
adding text over the screen on the chorus, this is
almost merging with conventions of pop music videos
where they do this quite often, but we thought it
suited the video so added it in.

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

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

•

We decided to keep the same style with all our media
products so they would relate to each other and the
genre. We wanted to make them recognisable and
unique to our project but also keeping the typical
genre stereotypes. We decided to make all our media
products, simple but bold with a dark themed picture
and style with bright bold text which stands out. From
our research we discovered that one of the main
things people look for when browsing a magazine or
CD section are bold stand out colours and fonts.
We decided to keep our colour scheme the same
throughout all our media products by using only white
text through out(apart from a little red part on the
magazine advert). We used a font called BEBAS for all
of our products as well including the music video
which is a all caps bold font, we believe this stuck out
and was clear and bold. For the rest of the colour
scheme we stuck to a dark, gloomy theme with highly
saturated colours. We used the highly saturated theme
as from our research we discovered that The Hives
mainly used black and white for there videos and
album artwork, it was a strong theme we picked up on
so we decided to create a similarity to it.

• For our magazine advert, we kept it bold and simple. We used ‘Prepare
for The Hives’ to catch people’s eyes and interest and didn’t use much
text in the magazine at all, this was to make people wonder who The
Hives were and draw in attention.

•

Both the music video and magazine article are linked to the album, we used the
same photo for the magazine as we did for the CD cover, this was so that the
audience would recognise the CD Cover from the magazine article and create a
connection. We also linked the music video by using a shot in the wood’s for the
DVD disc. One way we made the Album effective and interesting was by creating a
fun CD/DVD idea. The actual disc would have a picture of the band on, yet behind
the disc, the picture would be identical, except the band were gone as shown
below.

What have you learned from your
audience feedback?

What have you learned from your audience feedback?
• We showed our music video to
many people using social network
sites such as Twitter, Facebook &
Youtube to gather feedback and
comments from a wide range of
ages and people. We also showed
our music video to a feedback
group and got them to write what
they thought was good & bad
about our videos on sheets of
paper, we then collected the
pieces of paper, took a picture and
uploaded them to our blog.
Overall the feedback was really
good for our music video with not
very many negative comments.


• One thing that a lot of people commented on was the actors wearing the same
clothing and how it was effective to have a uniform and the video appeared
more professional because of that.

• Also as seen from the pictures of the notes above, one thing a lot of people
commented about was the use of fast transitions and fast paced editing fitting the
style of the video and genre.


•

One comment left on the YouTube video left some constructive criticism about the quality of
the video and the lighting needing work. Although we were going for a dark look, the lighting
could have been improved, but as we only had two days to film and it was winter time, the
light was changing throughout the day so it was really hard to keep a consistent look.
•

We also got feedback from twitter. I tweeted out
asking for constructive feedback and got some
interesting responses. One person said that it was
obvious it was a college project as the mise en scene
was quite amateurish, which is fair enough. But we
were going for a messy garage look to fit the genre so
in fact this helped back up the genre stereotype.
Another person said that it wasn’t the type of music
they normally listen to but they enjoyed it, which was
nice to hear feedback from a different perspective.


• Another comment from our feedback group noted they liked the chorus words
appearing on the screen over the video. This was something we put in the last
minute and was abnormal to the genre stereotype so we’re glad it was effective.

• We also got a few comments about how the live performance and
instruments suits the genre. This is something we researched and was a
major genre convention, so decided to make our music video completely live
performance and from the feedback it was effective.

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

How did you use media technologies in the construction &
research, planning & evaluation stages?
• From the start we started using
media technologies when
creating our ideas and planning
for what we should do for our
music video, we used the
program Adobe Illustrator to
brainstorm some ideas we had
for the song we should do, we
found this program easier than
writing it down on paper as we
could change our ideas
instantly and have an un messy
brainstorm which we could
always look back on.

•

During the research process, we started to use a range of media technologies, the
main one being the internet and YouTube to research music videos of the genre
and our chosen band The Hives. YouTube made it easy for us to pause the video
and note information down and watch the video whenever we wanted. We also
took screen shots of these videos to annotate for our research, I did this by
cropping it in paint then saving the image and placing it in my presentation, this
was very effective and useful as I was able to take single frames and conduct an
analysis on them. We also conducted a few interviews with people around college
using a Cannon 600D DSR camera, we wanted to get a range of research techniques
and captured video of people whilst we asked them questions. The camera was
affective as we could get a visual and audio interview to create a variety amongst
our research, this was also useful to see who we were actually interviewing and
what our target audience may look like. Another way we gathered research was via
the website Surveymonkey.com, we used this website to conduct a questionnaire
and then sent it out to different social networking sites to get feedback. This was
very effective as I posted it out to Twitter and Facebook and got a range of ages,
from both genders and with different music tastes to see what they thought.

•

During the construction of our video, we used a Cannon 600D DSR camera with a
tripod, we wanted to create a variety of shots, so the tripod was effective as we
could alter it to the exact place we wanted the camera to be, sometimes getting
into places which wouldn’t be possible by hand, it also meant the shots wouldn’t
be shaky. However, we also wanted some shot’s without the tripod as they were
quick moving and we wanted a shaky look to them, so we took advantage of both
situations. During the construction of the video, we edited using Adobe Premier,
we were all new to the program, so it was confusing at first, but we soon learned
how to use it for our needs. The program was useful as we wanted to sync our
video to the frame to make sure the vocals and instruments looked in time, this
was a very long process, but was made a lot easier by the fact that the audio
levels were shown in the timeline, so we were able to sync it up to the frame. We
also used the program to change the colours of our music video, we used the
‘levels’ colour add on and adjusted each shot to how we wanted it to look, this was
effective in the final look of the video as we managed to make shots darker and
added contrast to create a better look. Also whilst constructing our video we used
Adobe Photoshop to create some .png files of text to place over the video, this was
effective as it was easy to create a text file and delete the background so we would
have just the text to place over our video, we were originally going to do this in
premier, but we could adjust the font more in Photoshop and after some trial and
error we got what we wanted.

•

We also used Photoshop to create our digipak and magazine article, the digipak
took a while as we had a lot of pictures to input, but Photoshop made it easier as
we were able to edit the photos in another tab and then drop it into the main
digipak file. We edited the CD & DVD disc colours and textures a lot, we wanted to
create a more effective image so used a circle blur around the edges for a unique
feel, it also focused in on the band more. We took advantage of the layers feature
in photoshop when creating the digipak especially as there are many layers as
there are so many images, this made us able to create everything separately and
input into the main digipak file later on.

Evaluation (media)

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