The Coursework Evaluation Questions

To fully evaluate my coursework I have to answer four questions. These are as follows:

Question 1 _____ In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

- Think about all the other media texts you have studied; the videos, adverts and the CD/DVD covers

- how did content analysis help you to plan and construct your own product?

- what is similar about your text to other real products... and what is different?

- explain your creative decision process

- what are the key influences behind your work?

- what examples of intertextuality are there in your work?

- is your work stereotypical and can you explain how?

Question 2 ______How effective us the combination of your main product and the ancilliary text?

- what is the intended role of an advert?

- what is the intended tole of a DVD/CD cover?

- which combination examples have you studies - what have you learnt about the relationship between these products?

- what makes your combination effective and why?

- in hindsight - what could improve things further?

Question 3 ________ What have you learned from your audience feedback?

- outline the various examples of audience research you have undertaken - explain why it was required at different times throughout the production process

- how was this information key to the decision making process

- what pieces of research surprised you and why?

- what pieces of research made you change direction and why?

- what can you take away from the audience research process as a whole?

Question 4 _______ How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

- go through the four stages of production and outline the various times when you used technology

- for each experience you need to highlight the problems and challenges you anticipated

- how you planned for these

- the problems and challenges you actually faced

- the things you learnt form each process

- how you carried this learning on - ie.. built on mistakes and progressed from before

- what do you feel confident about now .. what have you mastered?

Final Magazine Advert

When we had finlised the planning my group sat down and decided out of the 4 designs we wanted to become our final magazine advert. Overall we decided to use the 4th design, which was a longer version of our CD cover, with some text at the bottom saying 'NEW SINGLE OUT NOW' and picture of The Feelings record label. Our fnal advertis pictured below...

Editing Our Music Video

It took my group two weeks to edit and finish our music video. We did this on an Apple Mac using Final Cut Pro, I think our group made full use of the up to date equipment we had. When editing our video, we used different effects, transitions, chroma keys to create an 80's grainy effect.

- We used motion tracking, this helped up layer clips and make it look like our film was inside of a scrapbook

-Changing saturation of clips to brighten the colours, then syncing them to the song. Making sure the mouthing was inline with the song.

- Changing the sepia levels, brightness and de-saturation filters to add a grainy like effect of which most films had in the 80's

- In some clips we used close ups and medium close ups of facial expressions and objects to coincide with the fast pace of the music.

-Changing the speed of clips to give a time travel effect

- We inserted images and layering them on top of the original image in some clips, this enabled us to add in pictures to a moving image. For example, when the main character, Ben, is on the train, the band are pictured in side the newspaper along with him and his long-lost girl friend, Lilly.

- In this particular clip, my group member, Adam, added in a chroma key filter, this for a couple of days, we achieved the effect that we needed. We changed the colours so the top layer of the background vanishes,enabling us to see two clips running over one another, and therefore letting the viewer see Ben walking down the station platform, and then seeing Ben and Lilly running past him in the background.

- We used a variety of different camera angles

- We applied fading transitions to make it look like Ben was looking his girlfriend, Lilly

- Applying motion paths (at the beginning and end) to layered images to zoom out into the background

- The book closed to signify the end of a chapter or stop



- We tried to re-created a clip in The Feeling's Join With Us music video which shows the band running through long grass doing cartwheels

Music Videos

- People expect a video with a song

- Its un conventional to have a song without a video

- Video killer the radio star was one of the first songs to have a music video, it was less about the music and more about the visual image (music video)

- Nowadays, it’s extremely hard to make it big without a record label; you have to be represented by a record label because they have the money, contacts and knowledge.

- A record label will promote you, book interviews for you, design music covers for you, book tours/concerts for you

- The record label decides how the band is and what they release.

- The record company tailor the bands to how they think they should be

- 90% of music companies don’t make a profit, this is when the bands get dropped

- Zutons have been dropped.

- Alphabeat have been dropped.

- Record companies will take 10% of the band’s profits

- Some bands argue that its more about the image and less about the music. For example: Prince quit his record label, Warner’s record label, because of how they wanted him to be

- Some bands are now referred to as indies. This is an independent band, where they do all the leg work themselves

- They usually get the cooler underground sounds as they don’t have a record label controlling what they do

- Independent bands are more daring to change their style of music

- They are smaller and not very well known bands

- Bands are interested in trying to get a no.1 single

- The charts primarily reflect the distribution and promotion by their record labels, this results in an unfair Music Chart

- The more independent bands, promote their albums and not singles because album sales bring in more money than single sales