A2 Media Blog: March 2010

I choose to present my evaluation in the form of a video. I felt it was appropriate considering the task was to create a music video so to utilize the medium of film would be fitting. It also gave me the opportunity to give a more direct, personal responses and I believe it helped me engage more with the questions I was required to address. Those questions were...
-In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms & conventions of real media products?
-How effective is the combination of your main product & ancillory tasks?
-What have you learned from your audience feedback?
-How did you use media technologies in the research, planning, construction and evaluation stages?

We started using media technology in the research stages when we looked at many music videos, to look for inspiration and new ideas for our own project. We had an idea in mind about what we wanted to depict but we wanted to keep our options open and go into this project with an open mind therefore looking at all types of music videos from all types of genres was essential in assessing the effectiveness of the content band ratio between performance and narrative elements. I used media technologies in research, by looking at other music videos, also looking at album covers. We looked at iconic and contemporary album covers and compared the two to see what tips we could consider when constructing our own. I also looked at music blogs and other peoples blogs to get an idea of how to present our blogs, with what to include etc. For the planning we also looked at other music video to get inspiration and to see how they were constructed. To test the actors out on camera, we did costume and make up test shots. The inspirations behind the costumes came from existing films and print mediums such as fashion magazines. For example the “binary opposites” look of Daniel in dark colours and Mimi is light colours was inspired by the immensely popular movie franchise Twilight and it’s two main actors. For make up, the mood boards on various websites gave us further inspiration for how to construct our music video. Then as it was a music video we tried got Daniel lip-syncing. For construction we took pictures of the actors on set as we filmed for the purpose of using them for our ancillary tasks. These pictures, as previously mentioned, were put into a slideshow and posted on youtube and social networking sites like facebook in order to get some feedback from our intended target audience. I presented my video in a form of a blog. I also presented my first question of the evaluation in form of a video, but then due to unfortunate circumstances of loosing footage, I decided I can explain things better within the writing as I was unable communicate everything I wanted to say because of my own shyness. Also blogger was used to document all the above stages.