The document discusses how the author used various media technologies throughout the construction, research, planning and evaluation of a media studies project. During the construction stage, the author used Prezi to create a timeline and SlideShare to share research on music video codes and conventions. SurveyMonkey was used to design questionnaires and analyze audience feedback. For research, the author created videos using iMovie and Final Cut Pro to demonstrate evidence, uploading finished videos to YouTube and Vimeo. Online services were also used to convert camera file formats for editing. Overall, the author leveraged different online tools at each stage of the process to facilitate planning, audience testing, and sharing of the final media product.

1. Media Studies: Evaluation
By Martin War

2. In what ways does your media product use, develop or
challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
 While constructing the product you need to acknowledge in what ways your product would use,
develop or challenge codes and conventions of other media products similar to ours. Codes and
conventions are key to make it a music video in the band or artist’s genre of music, for example we
couldn’t create a flowery music video with a death metal song and say that we used a lot of codes
and conventions we would need to note that we challenge the forms of common codes and
conventions.
 The music video that i have created uses a lot of common codes and conventions similar to the
style of the video, Narrative, and to the genre of the band chosen by myself. The music video was
not only a narrative, to give it a music video feel and less like a movie or short film, I decided to add
in small clips of lip-syncing, to give it a performance element alongside the narrative, which is a
common code and convention in most rock genre videos. We would also analysis Biffy Clyro’s
original music video for their song Machines to see how it was similar to the ideas we already had
for our own interpretation of their song, or maybe how it differed and would it affect the video’s
overall performance with the audience feedback if we couldn’t back up challenging their needs. The
genre of this song usually would tell a story through the lyrics or a graphical story via the video, this
is what we aimed for. Matching the tempo of the song would aid the video a lot whilst viewing it, a
common code and convention of this music video’s genre, but matching the tempo of the song to
the tempo of the editing would be difficult but we believe at the end of the video when the artist
starts to rip the newspaper down the editing and shots speed up. With similar videos in this genre,
whilst in the editing phase you often see some sort of colour grading and a blue tint placed over
the video, we decided to go against this view and leave the video untouched, apart from some
minor lighting changes, if we changed our video to fit the common convention the video wouldn’t
look half as good and give the desired feel for the shots with the artist in the suit.

3.  As far as editing goes, a lot of the clips carried on the same motion from the last, to keep the video
rolling exactly how we believed the song makes the audience feel, blending the connecting shots
together would give a slow but steady feel to the video, which as a group and listening to the
audience we thought the video connoted. The shots of the video are what you would expect to see
from a video in this genre and type of song, we believed that we had to honour the common code
and/or convention in this case, because having faster whip pans and high angles would connote a
complete different feel and not connect with the video in such a way that a ECU and steady pan’s
and tilts. During the secondary scenes when you see the artist with the female actress we wanted it
to feel completely different to anything you’ve seen in the video yet, having a white out before the
secondary scene connoted a complete change in everything, including mood of the artist and the
way he even looked, with a massive style re-vamp. We wanted to shots and editing to be completely
different aswell, the shots would most likely be stationary in this case and the editing would be as
minimal as possible, with the brightness of the camera turned up.

4. How effective is your main product and your
ancillary tasks?
 The plot of the story is about a man, who falls off the rails and starts to lose the dearest things
close to him, he starts to depend on alcohol instead of sorting out the problems he already has,
with poor living conditions and a failing relationship. We’ve shown our video, while in numerous
stages of creation, to our teacher and other peers in our class and they’ve expressed the
emotions that we’ve strived for. The two ancillary takes that we’ve created are a CD Cover,
which including front and back cover, front and back inlay and a disk print. Because the images
for the front and back cover, and the inlay sleeves, come straight from the video itself, it would
be just as effective as the main product with the same messages put across to the audience. The
front and back CD covers both leave very strong messages to the audience, the light focusing on
the alcohol is a decision made with a lot of the lamp was a good decision because it adds to the
sense of falling off the rails with a broken and fallen lamp lighting the bottle which has become
his life. The front inlay and the back inlay are of the artist and the huge talking point of god in the
video, the image of the artist will construct star image and help the audience become more
accustomed to the artist himself acting in the video. The cross is a huge scene in the video and a
key talking point, when the audience believe that all hope is lost, in an alcohol in juiced rage, he
comes across a cross and understand the error of his ways and problems that he has faced and
the solution. The CD print itself follows the idea of the set with the newspaper taken from the
set and the name of the band and song printed on the CD.

5.  The second ancillary task is the magazine advert, for this we decided that star construction and
star image was everything, so instead of taking an image from the primary scenes of the video,
we decided taking an image from the scene of when the artist was performing his “happier”
scenes, with his fresh and update look we believe it will connect with the target audience a lot
more when both wear similar outfits and clothing. How effective is the magazine advert? I know
that it is the best possible advert available for this song because it gives you all of the
information needed to purchase the single and all of the information to understand about the
single, with the construction of star image being the main priority in the development of the
advert i believe that we have achieved everything need to sell the single with the help of this,
and the ancillary task.

6. What have you learnt from audience
feedback?
 Audience feedback is by far in my opinion the most important element of the media
development, during the pre production of the product, during the product and also post
production; I would look back throughout the process to make sure i am following the
suggestions and also the feedback given by the audience to create the product. I would also
make sure to go against certain things to challenge the common codes and conventions of the
music video’s genre to add risks and showcase my skills while creating the video. To make my life
easier while creating the product, analysing the feedback given via questionnaires created on the
popular survey website adequately named SurveryMonkey.com, this would only need me to
make a quick glance onto the blog which i post all of my research and development documents
onto, instead of having to scroll through around 30 different filled in questionnaires to aid me. I
used social networking websites such as facebook and Google+ to get users to fill out my
questionnaire.
 Throughout the development of our music video having other groups analysis and watch our
rough edits and current edits allowed the group to gather more audience feedback as we edited,
having some very talented editors in the groups helped us with tips and other editing
recommendations. Having our teacher and peers around us while the entire process took place
was a good thing, we could always check in with our teacher to look over our current work to
see if it was meeting the schools high standards, having this saved a lot of time in the end
because having him mark as we go along could allow us to make the changes straight away
without wasting anytime.

7.  The information received and analysed didn’t always meet my expectations and ideas, but
obviously i would have to change some of the ideas to agree with my target audience’s feedback
or there would be no point of gathering it, the whole point was to listen to the audience and
create something that the majority would like to view, this was confirmed by me talking with
other groups about the same problems that they faced with making the decision of agreeing
with their target audience or going against them. I decided that a mixture of both would be
ideal, i would listen to the majority of the audience and the majority of ideas given to me, but
then i would also challenge a few of the audience’s ideas and also the common codes and
conventions to see how i could make the genre differ to the present representations of the
genre.

8. How did you use media technologies in the construction
and research, planning and evaluation stages?
 During the research of the blog and product we used many different technologies of media to
help aid the product via visual effects and construction. For example the use of the web
program Prezi allows the user to construct a presentation and still adds the visual effects you
could expect to see on software you would have to purchase. We used Prezi for the Long Term
planning sheet, this will help me with the creation of the timeline and allow us to zoom into the
day and explain in depth which we will be doing. SlideShare is another online web program that
we used, this requires a PDF file to be uploaded onto the website, and the PDF is created on
Power Point Presentation. We used SlideShare for codes and conventions of album covers.
 Before i could create anything, I would need to find out what my target audience would be and
would prefer to view from other suggestions. I would now create a questionnaire and a survey
for people in my class and other people in my school to survey. I used the website
SurveyMonkey to create them on, i would then ask people to fill the questionnaires out via a
URL which they could either do then or at home on their own computers. From here i would
analysis all of the data taken from SurveyMonkey and create charts which would be further
analysed and the results would be posted onto the blog.
 Other minor software would be Microsoft’s PowerPoint Presentation and Word, PowerPoint has
been used and combined with the online software of SlideShare, after we had made the
presentation on our computers programs, we would save it into a PDF and upload it onto either
SlideShare or ISSUU.

9.  When creating a video for the research side of the blog using a video distribution website such
as Youtube and Vimeo has been vital to the explanation of our evidence for the examiner. We’ve
used both video distribution websites to compare the quality of the uploaded videos and how
easy they are to embed into the blog. Software used for the editing of the videos uploaded to
YouTube or Vimeo was in two programs, when we first started editing videos, we used the
program iMovie and for the final production editing we used the software Final Cut Pro, the
reason we used, a different editing program for the final product is because we grew familiar
with iMovie and wanted to challenge myself with a more in-depth program which would allow
us to edit in greater detail compared to the other program iMovie. I had to use other online
services which helped me edit the videos, due to the cameras file format the files wouldn’t go
straight onto the Mac to be edited in either iMovie or Final Cut Pro, i searched for a program
on the internet to help me convert the files to an MP4 and found an online program which
would allow me to upload it onto the site then it would convert the file to the chosen file type
and allow me to re-download it for the editing process to begin.