Advanced Portfolio Critical Evaluation

Evaluation

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

. As our choice of genre was a mixture of electro, ambient and experimental we had quite a lot of room to put in our own ideas and interpretations whilst staying within the conventions of this kind of style.

i feel that we enforced Fever Ray's unique image in our video with our our performer's interesting image: pink wig, long floral dress, white facepaint, blue glitter, confetti under her eyes and also mysterious facial expressions.

. All of our performers, animals and girl,  moved quite experimentally, like animals in the woods and dancing quite curiously in the garage.

. i think all of our efforts reflected the dream-like interesting atmosphere of the music, and though not as dark as karin's videos, mirrored the experimental eletro genre.

. Normally electro videos feature footage of instruments and performance but Fever Ray choose to challenge this convention and produce more conceptual narrative videos. we conformed to Fever Ray's style and showed our editing skills through lip synchronization and editing to the beat. 

 . I have never seen a video with our story before, therefore we can say that it is quite post-modern and challenges existing music conventions. though kaiser chiefs used obvious masks in their video for 'never miss a beat' there were social meanings behind this decision to distinguish between teen groups like tribes whereas our masks are used to add to the dream-like mood and present them as animalistic.

. As the song is a remix by rex the dog, the track is in fact more upbeat that Fever Ray's other songs, this allowed us to stray from their dark, mysterious unsettling style and add more colour and movement such as the dancing in the garage, making our video our own :)

ALICE



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

For our song, we decided to use the conceptual themes of animalism and mystery as the focal points for our video, cd cover and website. We believe that we have kept to these themes in all of these three segments of our overall work. Firstly the video itself involves the use of animal masks (6 different ones in total), which relate to the animalism aspect, and also there is an air of confusion and mystery surrounding the main actress throughout the video, most notably after the change to the second location. Moreover, the website contains images of the actress which are intended to be eccentric and shocking, which challenge the audiences perceptions of normality and also help to create an abstract atmosphere.

The three aspects of the work are closely interrelated, for example the CD cover features single shots of the set for which we filmed the music video, and also has the same dark background/bright lights combination which features on the website.  The website and the CD cover both have the similar purpose of selling the product and also advertising the artist, whereas the music video tends to elaborate on the themes which are present in the song.

All three of the elements that we created target the audience, whether directly or indirectly. The website has to directly target the specific target audience that we have or else it would fit its purpose, which is to try and inform new people of the bands existence, and to give information to people who are aware of the band. The music video definitely targets the audience, as it contains the bright lights and animalistic themes, which we decided to use, as does the CD cover.

Dean

What have you learnt from your audience feedback? 

Having almost finished our music video, we thought it’d be crucial to get feedback from our target audience. We asked people for their opinions as well as additional suggestions on the overall feel of the video.  Ensuring the feedback wasn’t biased, we asked media students and our media teachers for constructive feedback. At first, the feedback was that the video felt too distant as there were too many long shots used in the wood scenes. We felt this was true, so we went over the wood scene footage, and found some appropriate mid close up and close ups that we incorporated. The badger scene was confusing for the audience as they didn’t understand what was going on. To solve this problem, we added more shots like Over-The-Shoulder and Point-Of-View from the badger’s perspective. We wanted the ‘badger’s perspective’ to be clearly noticed so we put a colour effect on it. The majority of people we asked thought that a blue perspective looked better but having asked Mel our teacher who recommended a black and white perspective, we stuck to these colours because it realistic.  As for the garage scene, the audience liked it but felt there was a lack of close ups of her and the animals. We agreed and we added closer shots and different effects like ‘zoom blur’ onto the clips.  The problem we found is that we had to delete and cut down the existing clips so the garage scene would not exceed the time estimated.

Ashleigh

How Did You Use Media Technologies In The Construction And Research, Planning And Evaluation Stages?

1)    What technologies did you use to create your production?

Having used Itunes to download the Fever Ray mp3 track, hotmail to e-mail Fever Ray’s record company for permission and Blogger to store the planning and research, these have been the primary stages that have lead onto creating the music video. The main technology we used was the software IMovie which enables us to edit our video and add effects onto the clips. The Apple Mac software has driven our creativity because we experimented with features it has to offer and used editing effects that we didn’t originally planned to use. We used PhotoShop to enhance pictures used for our digipack. The features enabled us to manipulate images, layer images and make our original idea come to life.

Ashleigh

. We used technology such as the internet to research and plan our music video as we needed to view Fever Rays website, their existing videos on you tube and explore both the band and the genre of Electro  Experimental.

. Creating our own youtube account has allowed us to upload the music video so that people can view it world wide. We are awaiting feedback as viewers can leave comments, 'Like' or 'Dislike' the video, add the video to their favourites, subscribe to our account and also share with others.

Alice

3) The emergence of new online media technologies has allowed a more widespread distribution of our product then has ever been available in the past. Sites such as YouTube, Dailymotion, and Metacafe allow videos to be uploaded and viewed by anyone who wishes to, giving a global scope to the distribution. As well as this, social networking sites (Twitter and Facebook) allow links to be posted on their pages, which in turn makes you product known to however many friends you have on that site, and makes your link easier to locate on the internet.

Dean