Evaluation Part 3 - How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

Evaluation Part 2 - In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Evaluation Part 1 - The Brief

The brief that we were working to was to manage a new artist, produce a music video, six gate digipak and an A4 magazine advert, to promote the artists album,

The artist that I used was Amy Piner who I discovered on unsigned.com. I listed to her songs and decided to contact her to ask for her permission. I done this by emailing her and messaging her on Facebook.

I really liked the song as I thought that there would be a lot of potential for a music video to be made for it and I liked that the genre was hip hop/r'n'b as there was more things to do for the video.

Final Ancillary Products

Digipak

Magazine Advert

Blog Reflection - WEEK TWELVE

This week was the final week for our ancillary products. I was doing the magazine advert and Hardeep was doing the digipak.

The first thing we done was do a photo shoot with the artist as we had done one previously, but because we had changed the artist we had to do one with her. I done her make up so that it would come out clear in the photos, as we noticed that in the previous ones the artist looked plain and dull, and not very much like an artist. We looked online for inspiration from other artists and how they posed, such as Pixie Lott, Cheryl Cole and Adele, as we thought they would look a lot better as they are professional photos.

Once I had uploaded the pictures I was thinking of using I edited all of them for her too look more glamorous, added colour to her skin and making her glow. Then I started designing my magazine advert how I drew it. I made the background purple as that's what me and Hardeep decided together as we had a purple background in the music video and wanted to carry that forward in to the other products so that they linked. We experimented with different fonts to see which ones would look best, and made sure we used the same ones. However I did change some elements, by getting rid of the competition that I had featured on the flat plan and making the other information that I did have on there stand out instead. I then put in the photos that I edited in to the space that I left and chose which one I thought looked best.

Hardeep then sent me the digipak over to me and I cropped the front cover of it and placed it in to position on to the magazine advert. I then made some finishing touches and then it was complete.

Final Music Video

Blog Reflection - WEEK ELEVEN

This week was the final editing week for our music video. It was very stressful as there was so much to do for ours to be complete. We still had to film our artist and edit all of it to fit in to the rest of the music video because we changed our idea. Our artist was only given a few days to learn the song as it was a last minute decision however she learnt it quite well.

When we filmed the artist, we done it on a green screen and positioned lights around in order for there to be minimum shadow behind her. This took a while to get perfect as when we moved one camera then another had to be moved. This was a challenge for us but we done well at it. We set up three cameras one to the left one straight ahead and one to the right of the artist and filmed them all at the same time in order for us to get her at all angles and this made us do it faster than what it would of taken if we done it one by one. We done this 3 times with the artist facing a different camera each time, giving us a total of nine videos to work with when editing.

When editing the artist we used many techniques that we hadn't used before, such as marking the spots of all the artist videos we used so that they were all at the same place, making it a lot easier to cut. However, due to the fact that the artist didn't have that long to learn the song, sometime4s she didn't get the lyrics spot on, so we had to edit around that too so that it still looked ok. 

In our feedback last week, some people suggested that we have black and white parts in the music video too, and we took this on board. We decided that all of the black and white parts of the music video would be the parts that the narrative is meant to be seen as depressing and a bad time for the couple in it, as we thought that it may make it clearer for the audience and make it more visually appealing.

Another thing that we took on board was having the contrast of the boy kissing his ex girlfriend and then kissing the new girl as this showed how different both times are. This is because we feel like the audience should see that he is making the wrong decision as when he is kissing his ex girlfriend the shot is a lot happier and brighter and when his kissing the new girl it is dull and depressing, showing that it is the wrong thing to do and he should be with the right person.

Another thing we done was make sure that the video was cut to the beat of the song, and this come across quite difficult in our song as there are parts that are a lot slower than others and we had to make sure that the narrative parts that were slow were especially edited correctly as they are the parts the audience pay most attention to and would look stranger if it wasn't cut to the beat, however the artist singing can look good even if it wasn't cut to the beat. However, we done the best we possibly could to cutting the video to the beat of the song and I feel that we were successful in that area.

Overall, I am very pleased with the outcome of the music video even though this week was long and stressful building up to the final product.