Evaluation - Jake Cowie

Our music video develops, challenges and uses forms and conventions of a real media product. we have analysed and gain inspiration from a few certain products. our main source of inspiration for our video was Take That's 'Patience'. We wanted to create a product similar to this as we enjoyed it and found it interesting and intriguing. We use the pop genre well in our music video, while editing we made sure the cuts were fast and the clips we used were reasonably short (5-10 seconds). We used jump cuts to keep the audience interested. as well as jump cuts, we used cross fades which added emotion and fluidity to our video. To keep to the conventions of a pop video we included a lot of close up shots, The reason for this is so that because he is a new artist people will begin to learn his face and he will become globally recognized.

In our video we made sure that there was a relationship between the music and the visuals. This was achieved by using certain locations to match the mood of the music. I think that our main product and ancillary texts combine and come together very well. The location used in all three is very similar, we did this because we wanted all three products to relate to one another. We wanted the location to be the recurring theme. The concept that we were trying to communicate was about a lonely man, who lost the love of his life. I believe the we succeeded in doing this through our ancillary texts as well as our video. We wanted to create a 'pure' and 'calm' image of the artist, as this is what the lyrics say. We chose a forest location for our video to help the image of the artist, as a forest portrays peace and serenity. We also wanted him to become a recognized face and person, so we decided to put him in a fashionable costume so that he was relate to his target audience. I think that we attracted the attention of our target audience very well, as we used many different inter-textual references e.g the iPhone scene and the clothing.

Our feedback has never been perfect, but we have used it all to construct our video and ancillary products into a very well designed package. The feedback on our initial pitch was that our ideas would not have worked and to make a funny and serious video is very difficult. We decided against using our original idea, and chose another song.

We learnt a lot from our feedback from Andrea and Amar. Amar gave us some good editing advice, which we used and our video now looks a lot more professional. Andrea also gave us some great advice on our ancillary products. She said that we should over edit the front cover image and it was not as strong as the back image. We took this advice on board and created a very good front cover. Our peers said that "the integrated story was good and added a new dynamic to the video". They also said "the lip syncing is good and the costume matches the target audience well". They did not give any criticisms about our work, so we could not make any changes based on peer feedback.

We used a range of different technologies when creating our main product and ancillary texts. The first was Final Cut, we used this to edit all of our music video. we did not find using this software to challenging as we all had previous experience using it. The second technology we used was Photoshop, we used this to create our album cover and promotional poster. We found that using Photoshop was difficult as none of us had any real experience of using it, but once was got some advice and help we managed to make a professional looking digipack. We also used the HD film recorders and stills cameras, we used these to film our video and the stills cameras to create a location recce. We also used blogger to save and post our work online. Blogger made it easy for other groups to view and comment on our blog. This meant that we could see all feedback about our work. We used all four of these products to help us create our music video, album cover and promotional poster, without them it would have been extremely challenging.

If we did the project again i would change the amount of time available to film. I think that we needed more time to film as this would have allowed us to travel to different locations to add more dynamic shots to our video. I would also like to learn new techniques on Photoshop as this would open up alot of new editing methods for me to use.