Evaluation (media)

Evaluation The Hives Hate to Say I told you so

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

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? In our research we watched many different videos by The Hives and other bands of the same genre to try and understand the forms and conventions used. We took that into account when creating our music video, one thing we developed was the uniform that The Hives normally wear in their performances. They typically wear Black & White suits, yet however in the video WAIT A MINUTE they switched to more casual leather jackets and white shirts, so we followed this theme and dressed our actors in similar attire. We also used this leather jacket and shirt look for the album cover, CDs and poster for continuity among all media products, similar to The Hives who are known for their continuous look

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? For our Digipak, Poster and video we altered the colour by adding different filters and colour correction, we flattened the colour on everything other than the video where we actually upped the contrast as some of our lighting made the image too flat. Overall we were going for a dark theme with some stand out colours as from our research we discovered that this was more typical of the rock/garage genre, this also fits into the choice of clothes and the colours of them. We also took this into account when choosing the set for our video, we chose a garage which is naturally quite dark and lit it up with some stand-alone lights to create interesting shadows and colours, also the fact it is in a garage is a convention in itself as that is where garage music initially started. For our second locations we used the woods, this is more of a challenge of the typically garage music as it was a bit brighter, but we thought it contrasted well. Before After

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? Original Ours For the shooting of our video we used a mix of fast camera movement, slow camera movement and still movement. From researching The Hives and other bands we noticed that during fast parts of the song, the camera moves faster and slow parts it moves slower. We challenged this convention a bit by having a mix at different paces but gradually getting some faster moving shots towards the middle and end as the song really picks up. We used a lot of close ups of the instruments and singer in our video to follow the convention of the genre as we saw this a lot in the original Hate to say I told you so music video. We challenged this convention with some moving pans to close ups and the occasionally long/medium shot to add some variety.

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? When editing the video we decided to use conventions from most of The Hives previous video with fast cutting rates overall and some extra fast cutting rates at other points. We also tried to sync up the video to the music as best as possible, by cutting the video on the beat so it would feel correct when it cuts between shots. During the editing process, we went against the standard convention of garage rock music videos by adding text over the screen on the chorus, this is almost merging with conventions of pop music videos where they do this quite often, but we thought it suited the video so added it in.

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

How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts? We decided to keep the same style with all our media products so they would relate to each other and the genre. We wanted to make them recognisable and unique to our project but also keeping the typical genre stereotypes. We decided to make all our media products, simple but bold with a dark themed picture and style with bright bold text which stands out. From our research we discovered that one of the main things people look for when browsing a magazine or CD section are bold stand out colours and fonts. We decided to keep our colour scheme the same throughout all our media products by using only white text through out(apart from a little red part on the magazine advert). We used a font called BEBAS for all of our products as well including the music video which is a all caps bold font, we believe this stuck out and was clear and bold. For the rest of the colour scheme we stuck to a dark, gloomy theme with highly saturated colours. We used the highly saturated theme as from our research we discovered that The Hives mainly used black and white for there videos and album artwork, it was a strong theme we picked up on so we decided to create a similarity to it.

How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts? For our magazine advert, we kept it bold and simple. We used Prepare for The Hives to catch peoples eyes and interest and didnt use much text in the magazine at all, this was to make people wonder who The Hives were and draw in attention.

How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts? Both the music video and magazine article are linked to the album, we used the same photo for the magazine as we did for the CD cover, this was so that the audience would recognise the CD Cover from the magazine article and create a connection. We also linked the music video by using a shot in the woods for the DVD disc. One way we made the Album effective and interesting was by creating a fun CD/DVD idea. The actual disc would have a picture of the band on, yet behind the disc, the picture would be identical, except the band were gone as shown below.

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

What have you learned from your audience feedback? We showed our music video to many people using social network sites such as Twitter, Facebook & Youtube to gather feedback and comments from a wide range of ages and people. We also showed our music video to a feedback group and got them to write what they thought was good & bad about our videos on sheets of paper, we then collected the pieces of paper, took a picture and uploaded them to our blog. Overall the feedback was really good for our music video with not very many negative comments.

What have you learned from your audience feedback? One thing that a lot of people commented on was the actors wearing the same clothing and how it was effective to have a uniform and the video appeared more professional because of that. Also as seen from the pictures of the notes above, one thing a lot of people commented about was the use of fast transitions and fast paced editing fitting the style of the video and genre.

What have you learned from your audience feedback? One comment left on the YouTube video left some constructive criticism about the quality of the video and the lighting needing work. Although we were going for a dark look, the lighting could have been improved, but as we only had two days to film and it was winter time, the light was changing throughout the day so it was really hard to keep a consistent look. We also got feedback from twitter. I tweeted out asking for constructive feedback and got some interesting responses. One person said that it was obvious it was a college project as the mise en scene was quite amateurish, which is fair enough. But we were going for a messy garage look to fit the genre so in fact this helped back up the genre stereotype. Another person said that it wasnt the type of music they normally listen to but they enjoyed it, which was nice to hear feedback from a different perspective.

What have you learned from your audience feedback? Another comment from our feedback group noted they liked the chorus words appearing on the screen over the video. This was something we put in the last minute and was abnormal to the genre stereotype so were glad it was effective. We also got a few comments about how the live performance and instruments suits the genre. This is something we researched and was a major genre convention, so decided to make our music video completely live performance and from the feedback it was effective.

How did you use media technologies in the construction & research, planning & evaluation stages?

How did you use media technologies in the construction & research, planning & evaluation stages? From the start we started using media technologies when creating our ideas and planning for what we should do for our music video, we used the program Adobe Illustrator to brainstorm some ideas we had for the song we should do, we found this program easier than writing it down on paper as we could change our ideas instantly and have an un messy brainstorm which we could always look back on.

How did you use media technologies in the construction & research, planning & evaluation stages? During the research process, we started to use a range of media technologies, the main one being the internet and YouTube to research music videos of the genre and our chosen band The Hives. YouTube made it easy for us to pause the video and note information down and watch the video whenever we wanted. We also took screen shots of these videos to annotate for our research, I did this by cropping it in paint then saving the image and placing it in my presentation, this was very effective and useful as I was able to take single frames and conduct an analysis on them. We also conducted a few interviews with people around college using a Cannon 600D DSR camera, we wanted to get a range of research techniques and captured video of people whilst we asked them questions. The camera was affective as we could get a visual and audio interview to create a variety amongst our research, this was also useful to see who we were actually interviewing and what our target audience may look like. Another way we gathered research was via the website Surveymonkey.com, we used this website to conduct a questionnaire and then sent it out to different social networking sites to get feedback. This was very effective as I posted it out to Twitter and Facebook and got a range of ages, from both genders and with different music tastes to see what they thought.

How did you use media technologies in the construction & research, planning & evaluation stages? During the construction of our video, we used a Cannon 600D DSR camera with a tripod, we wanted to create a variety of shots, so the tripod was effective as we could alter it to the exact place we wanted the camera to be, sometimes getting into places which wouldnt be possible by hand, it also meant the shots wouldnt be shaky. However, we also wanted some shots without the tripod as they were quick moving and we wanted a shaky look to them, so we took advantage of both situations. During the construction of the video, we edited using Adobe Premier, we were all new to the program, so it was confusing at first, but we soon learned how to use it for our needs. The program was useful as we wanted to sync our video to the frame to make sure the vocals and instruments looked in time, this was a very long process, but was made a lot easier by the fact that the audio levels were shown in the timeline, so we were able to sync it up to the frame. We also used the program to change the colours of our music video, we used the levels colour add on and adjusted each shot to how we wanted it to look, this was effective in the final look of the video as we managed to make shots darker and added contrast to create a better look. Also whilst constructing our video we used Adobe Photoshop to create some .png files of text to place over the video, this was effective as it was easy to create a text file and delete the background so we would have just the text to place over our video, we were originally going to do this in premier, but we could adjust the font more in Photoshop and after some trial and error we got what we wanted.

How did you use media technologies in the construction & research, planning & evaluation stages? We also used Photoshop to create our digipak and magazine article, the digipak took a while as we had a lot of pictures to input, but Photoshop made it easier as we were able to edit the photos in another tab and then drop it into the main digipak file. We edited the CD & DVD disc colours and textures a lot, we wanted to create a more effective image so used a circle blur around the edges for a unique feel, it also focused in on the band more. We took advantage of the layers feature in photoshop when creating the digipak especially as there are many layers as there are so many images, this made us able to create everything separately and input into the main digipak file later on.

Evaluation (media)

Technology

real media

main digipak

media products

main product

media product

media technologies

ancillary

cd cover