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.