Evaluation

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

Having researched into Goodwin's theory on the conventions used in R&B/Grime music videos, myself and Rafal had decided to challenge a couple of the points he believed to be the typical conventions. Although our video wasn't of the same genre that Goodwin's theory was based on, we still wanted to experiment with the ideas Goodwin put across. We also noticed how a lot of similar artists within the same genre as Gotye (our chosen artist) were mainly performance based videos, which we definitely portrayed with our production as you can clearly see both Rafal and Ellen singing to the camera, and of course Ellen performs a dance routine.

We also had a narrative based production, as we had a story line running throughout, which was that Rafal was travelling to see Ellen, however she is not really there - which is shown as she disappears from the stage at the end of the video.

How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary tasks?
We have found that our music video and our ancillary tasks all linked together. The song we have chosen has rather unhappy lyrics, therefore our digipack has a design that reflects this emotion. The website that we created links together as both the digipack and the music video are shown on here. Having these three tasks merging together in one way or another has had a huge impact on the success of our products. Our audience has really enjoyed our music video and also have found that our digipack and website design very useful, easy to use and artistic. This therefore has had an enormous effect on our audience.
We also attracted our audience by showing a couple of behind the scenes clips on social networking sites, such as Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr, which were extra parts to our main product that we have included on our YouTube account. This allowed the audience to feel that they were more connected with what we were producing and could also laugh at our outtakes. As mentioned throughout my work, we found this important when it came to building our audience and fan base for our video, as we are connecting directly to our audience and allowing them to see a personal side of the production team and our actress/dancer, Ellen.
In combination, the main product and the ancillary tasks have had a huge effect on our overall success of our main product.


What have you learned from your audience feedback?
The feedback in which we received from social networking sites such as Facebook, Tumblr and also YouTube has been phenomenal, as our video's view count is still rising. Although the feedback was mostly positive about our work, we also learnt that there was room for improvement in certain areas and aspects of the video itself, the editing and also the filming. Having shown our finished product to an audience that is mostly within our target audience, we have learnt what they like and dislike about our music video from their honest feedback and opinions. Fortunately, a very large percentage of the audience were satisfied with our work.


How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages? 
The research I have looked into was based on mainly analysing current music videos that are within the same genre. This used the internet, using Youtube to find the videos. I also researched more into Goodwin's theory on R&B/Grime music videos in order to compare this to a more recent and very popular music video by Gwen Stefani.
Our storyboard for a our planning was created using a designing software, which allowed us to create a more effective and artistic storyboard and also one that was very easy for us to follow. We also produced call sheets which were created and edited on the computer.
From producing the music video, we learnt a lot about the use of lighting and the use of the slow motion camera. We found that we had to really experiment with the lighting in a couple of the locations in order to get it perfect. We also learnt how to use the slow motion camera and edit the shots we got using it from experimenting with different techniques. We used the slow motion camera for the dancing scene, as we felt this would add a more overall dramatic effect. The artificial lighting, using a lighting board, was also used for the dancing scene as we needed to get the correct lighting in order to get our desired shots to work.
We used photography and photo editing software, such as Photoshop and PhotoFiltre, to create our finished digipack to give a much more professional finish to the album cover. We also used the same and similar software to edit the screen capture that was used on our artist's website for the background. Our website was all created by researching into official artist's websites and taking ideas and planning out our own website by what we had seen.
Also, although we were aware of how popular social networking sites are, we didn't realise what impact these websites could have when it came down to sharing our video and spreading the word. We were hugely and pleasantly surprised by the reaction and the feedback that we had almost instantly from uploading our video to Facebook and Tumblr within the first day or two of uploading it to YouTube. Our audience feedback therefore leading me to be able to give an accurate evaluation on our the overall success of our finished products.

The Response to Our Music Video (via YouTube)

After having shared our video with our friends and finding some amazing feedback from them, I turned to look at our YouTube responses, which again we found very positive and we were extremely happy with the responses we received. The following responses that are shown are all of the feedback we have received from YouTube so far, this has all been given to us over just the space of one week.

We even received some constructive criticism (shown in the screen capture) which we found highly important and we really appreciated this as it allows us to move forwards with our future work and allow us to continue improving on our mistakes.

We believed it was of importance to respond to our audience as they asked questions and gave us feedback, as we felt that building a relationship with the audience would be helpful and important to help gain a wider audience and also allow them to understand we take their feedback into consideration.

It was to mine and Rafal's huge surprise to see that our video had reached over 1,000 views in just that one week! Although we did receive one dislike on our video, we understood that there will always be someone who doesn't like the work we create, however, the huge amount of positive responses that we have been given has been fantastic.

The Response to Our Music Video (via Facebook)

Me and Rafal also used Facebook to show everyone what we had created. We found that we got a lot of positive feedback from our Facebook friends. The screen captures below show myself and Rafal sharing our video on facebook and the comments and likes that we received.

From the above pictures of me and Rafal posting our video, that alone received 24 likes, a positive comment and two shares from our friends who wanted other people to see our work.

Below shows the feedback our video got from the friends who shared our video:

We were both extremely proud of the feedback we had received, and over a very short period of time (ranging between the 26th and 29th of March - only a couple of days after uploading the video onto YouTube!).

The Response to Our Music Video (via Tumblr)

I use a very youthful, current and popular social networking site which allows young artists to broadcast their work over the internet. I decided that considering I have a fairly large amount of followers, that I could share mine and Rafal's production over Tumblr and see what feedback I received.

As you can see from the image above, I posted the video twice, overall receiving 10 notifications from different people. Three people decided to share the video with their own followers, six people liked the video and one person commented on our good work.

The Finished Video

Both myself and Rafal are extremely proud with the outcome of our production. We have been receiving some amazing and positive feedback since this was uploaded, not to mention a large amount of views on YouTube in such a short period of time.

(The feed back and view count will be uploaded in a later post.)

Behind The Scenes

We felt that it was important for us to share a behind the scenes video with our audience. This will give the audience an insight to the filming and the personalities behind those shown in the video. This will help to also build a relationship with the audience themselves, which we believed is an important factor in the music industry as this will help maintain or perhaps even increase the fan base for the artist.

The Digipack

Our first idea for our digipack design was quite complicated, however, we put our best efforts into making it work. The video below explains our idea and shows the behind the scenes footage of the creation of our initial digipack.

However, as you can see from the video and from the image below, our idea hadn't worked out quite how we had expected. Our idea was to join all of the images together to create the cartoon styled sad face that we used on the template, however different sections of the cartoon face were painted onto Rafal's face, however unfortunately a lot of the painted lines did not match up once the images were put together.

Although our initial idea for our digipack did not work as well as we had hoped, we did create a design that we felt comfortable with and felt it was one that would even be a popular choice. This not only was an interesting and unusual album design, but we also felt it reflected some of the emotions that are portrayed in the song we had chosen for our music video. We were able to put some of the images I had taken of Rafal's painted face to good use, as we still decided that this would be a successful album cover.

Below shows the final design that we have come up with using these images:

With the editing to the colour on the images this allows focus to be drawn to certain parts of the images and even allow the album to stand out. We both feel that our album is rather unique and does therefore stand out to the audience. We feel that although our initial idea had not worked as we had expected, that we perhaps have had a better outcome with using only a couple of the images taken.