OUR FINISHED MYSPACE

Link above...

OUR FINISHED ALBUM COVER

Evaluating My Evaluation

When i first found out that we had to do a spoken discussion for our evaluation i was a bit apprenhensive as we had never done anything like this before, and i was not sure how well it would go. Writing an essay would be easier as it we could re draft and adds bits in, however a filmed evaluation could only be done in one take so there wasn't a lot of room for error. Nevertheless once we started filming after the first couple of minutes it was absolutely fine, and i wasn't nervous because i felt confident with what i was saying, and i think my group felt the same.

 I think that it is a great way to evaluate because we were all bouncing off each other, and disscussing what we thought rather than just writing a rather boring essay. It was also just a far more creative way of doing it, much more appealing to us media students!

Evaluation Q4

4. How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Above and below are some pictures of us with the technology that we used. As you can see we didn;t use all that much equipment for filming as we shot outside - menaing we didn't need anything such as pag lights. I think this is quite a good thing as it show how we cleverly used less equipment but still ended up with a proffessional looking music video.

For this question we had to talk about the technologies that we used when constructing our product. They played such a huge role in the making of our project we really couldn't have made it without them. We used  key pieces of technology such as a Sony Digital SLR,  aTripod,  a Song HDD camcorder and Adobe Photoshop CS3  The internet also played a big role in our research stage. As well as this we used a blog to record our finding and our progress so we used technology right from the beginning. 

HERE IS OUR VIDEO DISCUSSION FOR Q4...

Evaluation Q3

3. What have you learned from your audience feedback?

This was the question that i was leading, therefore i felt very confident in speaking and analysing the feedback as i had looked at it very closely. We held an audeince feedback session and decided the best way to colllect the data was in a questionnaire. (There is a post below on my reflections of the audience feedback).

I think that this discussion went really well as although i was leading everyone else was also confident talking on this subject as we had carried out the feedback session together. Additionally the feedback session itself went really well, as we got some really positive responses, along with some constructive criticism, which we agreed with.

HERE IS OUR DISCUSSION FOR Q3...

Evaluation Q2

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

After we had split up the first question into 3 sections. We then split up the other 3 questions. Although i was not in charge of question 2 as it was led by Danni, i still feel that i contributed enough to the discussion, as i was confident in talking about the colour scheme, key images and personality of Skyethat we promoted.

We all felt that the combination of our products worked really well as we created a strong brand, the brand being Skye, between the video, album cover and myspace.

We could have improved this question as we didn't have our album cover up on screen. It would have been good to have this to make it easier when discussing this, and we wasted a bit of time trying to find it. Additionally i think that we probably repeated ourselves a bit - so we could have made our answer more concise.

HERE IS OUR VIDEO DISCUSSION FOR Q2...

Evaluation Q1

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

We split up the work for Question 1 into the 3 sections Music Video, Album Cover and Website (Myspace page) - so each of the 3 of us took the lead in one of these sections. This was a good idea as it gave all of us a manigable amount of work to do, and it also helped us to have an equal say because we took it in turns to take the lead.


I was given the  task of Music video which meant going over, and revising the theories of Goodwin and Vernallis and seeing how they applied to our video. We had to think about whether we used, developed or challenged the conventions so we filled in a table which broke the theories down into headings which was very helpful. All in all i think Qustion 1 worked really well, as we all took the lead for one section yet we had discussed it previously as a group so therfore we all had a lot, and an equal amount to say. We found this dominated most of our time and we spoke for quite a while as it was a very important question, so we have chosen a 10 minute clip.

Also we beginning by saying "hi we're group 4" this is a mistake we are group 3!


HERE IS PART OF OUR  VIDEO DISCUSSION ABOUT Q1:  (the full version is on the group blog)




We referenced many music video's during our discussion such as Charlotte Church- Moodswings, VV Brown - Crying Blood and Jay Z - Empire state of mind (shown below)



We also made references to specific points in our video such ones shown below

Audience Feedback

Core Audience

13-28 year olds Females

People who are like popular music and pay attention to the charts. But who also have a taste for slightly more alternative indie things.

Secondary Audience
Younger and Older women
16-25 year old Males

 
* We did an audience feedback session with 19 people, 14 girls, but 5 boys as well aged between 15-18.



* Every person that we asked said that the video looked professional. Some of the main reasons why they liked the video were: the changing clothes shots, the effects, there was lots going on, it is eye catching, quirky and fun, with nice bright colours.


* Others music videos they compared it to are Duffy – Warwick Avenue, Kesha – tik tok and Dolly Rockers, which is interesting because the first two of these were some of our references.


* The majority seemed to get that our video is performance and concept based. And that the changing clothes was the concept. People identified the themes as being: lost love – break up, London, femininity and youth, independence and fun.


* They all got that the genres was pop, some even specified retro pop/alternative pop – this is good as it meant that the genre came across strongly in our video.



* When asked about the identity of the artist our feedback described her as; quirky, likeable, young, pretty, individual, appealing, fun to watch, original, fashionable, flirty/sexy


* They listed a lot of mainstream music channels that it would be shown on such as 4music, MTV, The Box, TMF, The Hits, MTV hits, NME, Q


* They listed a lot of mainstream magazines that it would be reviewed in such as Time Out, Smash hits, mainstream music, NME, Glamour


* When asked if they wanted to watch it several times over 74% said yes, 10% said no, 16% said maybe – which I think are pretty good results.



* About half of our audience said they would spend money to download the single


* Some of our audiences favourite moments included the clothes changing, the split screens, the end shots, a lot of people liked the reaction shots, and loads of people loved it when Skye danced with the random guy.


* When asked for criticisms people noticed that some of it was out of sync, they thought the change from b&w to colour was too sudden, they wanted more retro clothes, more random people in the video and one person didn’t like Sian’s green lips on the album cover.


* Everyone said they liked the album cover and MySpace and that it fitted well with the video. They said it fits perfectly. It glamorous, it looks very professional and the SKYE cover is great.

Our Album Cover

Album Cover References

Impending Deadline...

Ok our deadlines Friday 27th November,

We have made a start on our Myspace page and have filled in any gaps on our video sequence.

Myspace:

It has the basics of a good myspace page, however we need to add in our photos of the shoot and write up somemore interesting information about Sian.

Majorly we need to think of a name for her, as this will need to be changed asap.

We've uploaded photos of Sian from everyday activities.

Video:

thankfully now all the spaces are filled which is great cos it means we can focus on putting in effects and trying to make it look good.

We need to get feedback from miss before we are complete, hopefully get this by wenesday so we have enough time to alter anything and also have our screening on the Thurs.

Shoot:

Today was meant to be the shoot but unfortunately due to washing the dress, it was dripping wet today which meant we were unable to do it.

Which is why we have now made sure our myspace is getting done, therefore we are technically ahead of schedule as the album cover shouldn't take as long

Artist Name

Soo, we have been thinking a lot about our artists name and we have narraowed it down to three.
1) Sparky
2) Skye
3) Sapphire (Saffy for short)


No one that we have asked so far likes Sparky because everyone thinks it sounds like a childrens tv presenter or a dog's name.  So then we did a poll of Skye or Sapphire with our target audeince and the results were that 60% said they liked Skye better and 40% said Sapphire. We agreed with our audience and so we went with Skye. I am very pleased with this as i think it is a really original and memorable name and it is girly but also shows off her quirky personality. So its perfect!

Teacher Feedback

Yesterday miss gave us our first proper feedback on our footage. She said...

*Our "camera movement was the best out of all the groups"! (OO YEAH)

* Some shots she felt were too long, and we agree. We need to cut them up and put other shots inbetween to keep it interesting.

* She thought we got a great performance out of Sian, but that her lipsyncing wasn't always perfect so we need to play around with the editing to get it as good as we can. Or we can just make it so amazing that no one notices.

Changing Clothes Editing

Over the last couple of weeks we have been trying out some of the changing clothes wdits that we wanted to do.  I think they are going pretty well and are looking really good. We have a revoling door one, and lampost one, and a walking towards the camera clothes change. We have also been trying out some split screens and i am happy with how they are looking as well. Look out for them in our video... :)

Editing

After looking at the green screen footage, we relaised that the quality of it does not match up to our london footage therefore we won't be using it. This is annoying as i think our video would look great with a really simple glamorous performance breaking up the london shots - however we have plenty of footage from the london shots to fill the video and we will keep it interesting with our editing so hopefully it should all be ok.

Green Screen Shoot 10/11/09

We wanted to break up our london footage with some performance stuff filmed on a green screen which we will then add a white bakcground onto. We did this today and it didn't go quite as well as planned. We had pur actress Sian wearing a sequined black and gold boob tube, which looked amazing HOWEVER, Tom noticed at the end of our shoot that the sequins on the dress were reflecting the light of the camera and making some of the seqins look green! This means that when we change the background to white she will have holes in her dress! o dear.
We will capture the footage to see that it looks like, but it may be that this footage is unusable (except for the CUs and ECUs). If this is the case we will see what we can do without it, but if we really think we do need this performnace footage then we will film her again when we do the album cover shoot, as we are going to film that on a white bakcground, not a green screen.

Brick Lane Shoot 8/11/09

We did our brick lane shoot this weekend, as due to the very very heavy rain ,we were unable to do it last weekend. Although the weather wasn't grear, at least it wasn't rainy, and now looking at the footage i think it is safe to say that the shoot was a success. We got every shot that we planned to do, and got a lot of spontaneous fottage and well so we have loads to work with.

We started off filming around liverpool street staition and then moved on to spitalfields market, and then to brick lane. We didn't feel rushed for time throughout the day, and got a chance to experiement with loads of different shots such as a contra-zoom and manual focussing.

We have shown some of our footage to Mrs B and Mrs D and both think it is really good.
Now we just need to concentrate on doing some really good editing, and hopefully we will all be happy with the main product. :)

Reflections from the shoot

So over half term we had our shoots! On wednesday 28th Ot me and danni and tom went by ourselves to our location and shot some scenery shots so that we didn't have to waste Sian's time. Then on Saturday 31st Oct we did our first shoot with Sian. We shot in our Carnaby and Soho locations and i think this actually went really well.

We realised that when having moving camera-work, it looked much better if we carried the camera on a tripod to steady it, so i think that those shots look much better. However although we were planning on shooting on Sunday 1st Nov there was torrential rain. Shooting outside in October and November we knew that we may come up against weather issues, and so we planned for this by having many colourful umbrellas on stand-by, that we could work into our shoot. However, this was just too heavy and we didn't want to risk the equipment in such heavy rain. Consequently we are now shooting next sunday 8th Nov - this is when we will do our shots in Brick lane and Spitalfields.

Having looked at our footage from last sunday, we have realised that it is quite good to have a weeks gap between the shoots as we can really see what we need to do. Therefore we were able to come up with another shooting list for this weekend, meaning we won't miss anything.

Overall i think it did go well and i am happy with the footage we have. Hopefully this weekend will go well as i can't wait to get all the footage to ether so we can really get into the editing.

Album Covers Notes

A) 1- Typical Features:
* Barcode
* Album Title
* Artist Name
* Track List
* Web Adress
* Strong, main image
* Booklet with additional info and extras
* PUG

2- Categories
* Genre
* Groups/Solo Artist
* Male/Female
* Drawing/ Photo
* Image of artist/or not
* Debut Album?
* Greatist Hits?
* Compilations or one artist
* Record Label
* Era
* Double Disc or not
* Audience

3- Different Functions they serve:
* Attract buyer = constructing an audience
* Show artist
* Informative, shows which artist, what album
* Track listing, how many, sometimes shows times
* Style of Album to match style of artist
* Selling the genre

B) Michael Jackson
History: Past, Present, Future book 1
Released: June 1995

*Very striking image on the front. Michale Jackson in concrete as a statue, behind is a fireball.
* Prestning himself as a statue gives us the idea that it is all very epic, and he is creating history.
* Fireball continues on the back - implying the songs themselves are epic and amazing and histroy making
* The booklet inside conventionally shows song words. But also begins with a written extract by Elizabeth Taylor and Steven Spielburg basically saying what a legend MJ is. Also lots of pictures of him growing up, his life, him performing and people at his concert holding signs saying 'king of pop' etc - once again presenting him as a historical legend with an epic life.

OUR STORYBOARD