Blog 21 - Final Evaluation

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

We went for keeping the same theme as Kesha herself, we aimed to make our video as much like something that she would create as we could, we felt that there was a mix of artists coming through in our video though. Just olike in Lady Gaga's video Just Dance, we went for the idea of creating a 'wild' house party, so using conventions of real media, this is the image we tried to repeat, but in a way that we have developed this and possible challenge these ideas is that we have used the same person throughout the video instead of having other actors/actresses in it to. The reason we chose to do this was because we wanted to give the idea of the affects of taking drugs. We challenged it bu not physically showing the drug taking happening, but we showed the affects for example hallucinations, we showed this by the idea of having 2 of the same actress, we used layering to give this effect and felt that it worked really well, that the actress believed she was at a party with lots of people, but in affect she was actually partying and dancing on her own.

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

Whilst trying to promote our product we had to design a number of things for our product to work with, for example we had to design a front and back cover as well as an advert for our product to be promoted with in magazines and as a poster. The idea for my advert came from another advert that I had seen by the artist Nelly and most of the ideas for his I felt would work really well for mine, and the feedback that I got for it made it clear that I opted to take the right choice. I used brighter colours for my advert than I did for my digipack, this was because the promotion of the Digipack was a lot more important than the Digipack itself, I felt if it was attractive enough people would remember what it looked like then it would stick in their minds so by the time the Digipack came out they wouldn't be as interested. I kept the theme the same though, I kept the background of everything the same as I felt there should be a memorable theme running through the whole product.

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

From gathering feedback from a wider audience and also from my target audience, I have learnt that it is vital to get their opinion, the reason for this is that they are the people you will be selling your product to so they will be the ones spending their money and people like to spend money on things that they like. The main thing was that it had to be attractive to look at and from the feedback I recieved I found that it could have been more so, for example some feedback I got was for the colouring to be brighter so the contrast between the background and writing was made a lot clearer.

How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages of all your products?

The majority of the work that we done using IT resources were in our lessons on a Thursday, these were the lessons where we would be designing, creating and finishing our Digipack and our Adverts. The programme that we used to take out each of these tasks was Adobe Photoshop. I really enjoyed using this programme as it was really simple when you got into it, to begin with in the first few lessons, I spent time either asking questions or working out personally how to use the programme it wasn't until at least 2 weeks in where I really started to enjoy the work that I was doing. Being able to use photoshop I felt made my work a lot better, for example if we'd been given the simplicity of just being able to use paint, the work I would have achieved wouldn't have been at a standard in which I consider these pieces of work to be. Photoshop was a really good programme to use to be able to get a range of effects and paint work that made my work look like a real genuine Digipack or Advert. For example, being able to get the effect that I did with the advert, front cover and inside of my digipack wouldn't have been achieveable if I'd not been giving the oppurtunity to use this, it was a certain shape that I used to a certain size that enabled me to get this effect, in which I felt was really effective and worked well with my theme and artist.

Here are a few screen shots along the way..

This was the first screen shot I had done of my work, the first edit that I made to the image was to make the eye shadow of the actress more noticable, so using the Clone Stamp tool on photoshop we were able to get the same colour coverage across the whole section, so that both were equal.

The second edit I made was to make the 'Z' darker on the side of the actresses face, just so that it was more noticable, as you could see from the above original, the darkness of it was very faint, and not greatly noticable.

One of the final edits that I made to my chosen image, was the backdrop, I made the background black as I felt that was i

n genre of the type of style that Kesha would choose, I then added an effect that made the background a bit more edgy, so using a paintbrush tool I was able to give a sketchy painting.

Blog 20 - Evaluation and Feedback of the video

The response we received from our video turned out to be really positive and we were grateful that people had taken time out to watch the video. It was whilst reading through peoples comments that we saw how well our ideas had worked and how successful they had turned out to be and that all the ideas and effects we had and wanted for the video had paid off.

Here are some of the comments and feedback that we received from people who had watched our video.

As you can see all of the feedback that we received was positive and that the majority of people enjoyed our video.

If we were to do our video again, we would have chosen to film in the night time where the lighting etc would have been more effective to fit to the genre and theme that we wanted to take. Another choice we would have made would have been to start our filming earlier and added a few more dates to the filming to get the best result, but other than these minor parts, we were really happy with the result that we got and also the feedback that we received from people.

Blog 19 - Finished Video

Here is a copy of our final video, we completed this on 5th April 2011, we were really happy with the final result. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U90ClLCqDCU We uploaded our final video on the social networking site Facebook for people to view and to comment what they thought worked well and what they thought didn't necessarily.

Blog 18 - Creative Camera Use

This particular shot was used by our actress to get a good point of view shot from her, the reason we chose this was because we wanted to emphasise the point we was making, that through drugs and alcohol your balance and visibility can all be affected.

We particularly liked this shot and also did our teacher, the lighting in the background coming through the blind made it look like we had used a special effect but in fact, this was just natural daylight coming through, it made the actress look a bit off colour and blurry which again added to an affect we wanted.

Here is an example of layering, this was used a number of times throughout our video and turned out to look really effective. The reason we chose to take this idea was to show the effect of 'seeing double' an affect you may get from taking drugs, the idea of hallucinating.

This was the very first shot that we took in our video, it was not intentional but it has worked so well to go with the theme that we have chosen. This shot shows her face blurring in and out, something that we noticed after filming, so this again goes with our theme of not having 100% clear vision or balance.

Blog 17 - Rejected Footage

The reason we didn't use this shot in our video was because we felt the actress was too close to the camera so you couldn't really get the full effect of what we wanted, you couldn't see her body language or anything which is what we wanted.

The reason that we decided not to use this shot was because the lighting in the room was way too bright, there was no way you could get the effect of a house party or get into the song from this shot as it was too bright and showed too much of the room, where we wanted to see just the actress.

We didn't use this shot as it was unnecessary and if we did use it the lighting was too bright, however we did use the footage that came after this of her walking down the stairs, this was just the beginning 'sequence'.

The reason for not using this shot is clear, we obviously wanted to get the impression of the blurry-ness from drug taking etc, but this shot happened to be too blurry and too bright.

As you can see from our final video, we showed the use of layering, we originally wanted 3 of the same person in each shot, but after lots of work trying to achieve this we were really disappointed with the result, this was because the particular position that she was in meant that the the person in the middle would have been cut out and the effect was ruined as she moved lots so her arm was lost in particular shots.

We did not use this shot for the same reason as above, we felt it was a lot more effective with just the 2 characters as oppose to the 3 as it didn't really work how we wished.

We did not use this shot as, not only was the room too bright for the effect that we wanted but also because the actress turned to look at the camera.

This shot was not used again, because the lighting of the location was too bright to represent a house party.

This shot was not used for obvious reasons, the dog ran into the frame that we were trying to shoot, meaning we had to re shoot this particular shot.

We didn't use this shot because we didn't think it was very useful, you could only see the side of her, but in fact we would have wanted to see the front of her so we can see what she sees. Also the lighting again in the room is too bright.

This was the shot after she had walked down the stairs, the reason that we did not use this shot was not only was it too bright, but there were particular objects in the way, that would have been a distraction from the video itself.