Evaluation - James Hamill

Our task at the start of this year was to produce either; a music promotion, a film teaser trailer promotion or a television trailer and promotion. Initially we wanted to produce a film teaser trailer promotion, but when we struggled to gather ideas, we then decided on making a music video. In order to avoid copyright laws when producing the video, we downloaded a song from www.jamendo.com - the song is called Discount Store by Dan Byrk.

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

Our media product follows the basic conventions of real media products aswell as challenging them. Many music videos are performance based and although some have a slight narrative, ours actually tells a story between the performance shots. After looking at several music videos, I have found one which is mainly narrative like ours, Michael Jackson's Thriller.

Below I have included our video, and a clip from Thriller so that you can see the differences and similarities between our music video and a professional product.

Fellow - Discount Store



Michael Jackson - Thriller


*I could only include a clip from this video due to YouTube restrictions*

I think that the main way in which our music video has challenged the conventions is the strong use of narrative. The video tells a story of a day at work for the protagonist, who is working in a Discount Store. While undertaking his duties of stacking, cleaning etc. he has some problems with customers and then deals with them himself until getting fired by a manager. There are not many music videos that use such a narrative as most which do are mainly performance based, with little bits of narrative included.

Another thing that we have challenged is the camera shots and angles. We captured a shot from height and changed the gradients and colours to make it look like a CCTV image, then we embedded this shot with another so that it is seen on a screen and it is easy to see that it is CCTV.



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

The brand image that we aimed to get was fun, yet mellow and we tried to incorporate this into all our of products. The background of the storyline for the video was to get this image accross, which is why the main character gets into several arguments with customers and his manager. The theme was carried accross into the ancillary tasks as the album covers and website had cartoon-like effects added to them.

Question2

3) What have you learned from your audience feedback?
Below is our audience feedback video. This video shows the audience watching the video, answering the questionnaires and also giving us their answers.




Below is an example of the questionnaires that our audience were asked to compelete after watching our music video and then also seeing our ancillary products. Questionnaire 1 is for the Music Video, 2 is for the Ancillary Tasks.


From our audience feedback we learned alot about our products. The good things that we found out are that it does appeal to our target audience of teenagers and young adults that are interested in the pop, rock and indie genres. We found out that people's favourite shots were when the protagnoist was filling the shelf with Rubicon and also the CCTV shot. The other things that the audience liked from our video was the use of camera angles and effects added to brighten the shots up a bit. Another thing that was commented on by some of our audience was the use of props available to us. We were able to use a broom, cupboard, stock etc. from the shop and also managed to actually board a bus so that it looked more realistic.

However, there were some aspects of our video that got pointed out for possible improvement, the main one was the poor acting of the protagonist as even in the first shot, he was smiling as he awoken, as well as several other times during the footage. Another problem was the lip syncing was sometimes just slightly out of time with the music, this was down to various issues. Although most of the audience liked the narrative within the video, they did say that there could have been a few more performance shots. Some of the clips seem to be dragged out a bit and could do with being seperated a little by showing more performances.

 Below is a pie chart showing some results from our audience feedback. The question asked was; What would you rate the music video on a scale of 1-10 (1 being the lowest - 10 being the heighest).



We also asked our audience to fill in a questionnaire for our ancillary tasks. Blake and Danny produced album covers and a magazine advertisement and me and Ash produced album covers and a webpage. When the results came back the album covers produced appeared to be the most successful. The audience liked the effects that each group had added to theirs and how they still managed to each follow the brand image. As well as this, all our other ancillary tasks received positive feedback, especially the webpage which received very positive comments. There were only a couple of negative comments to take from this questionnaire, mainly being the size of the writing on the products.

4) How were media technologies used in the tasks

Media technologies have been used throughout the whole process of creating these products. The slideshow below gives information on all the technologies used and how we used them.

Presentation 1