Tom Turpie's Evaluation

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

We took the words “la nuit” (the night in French) which is said frequently through the entire song as well as the word “party”. From these two sets of lyrics we chose to use minimal lighting and bright colours to produce a party atmosphere within the video. We also attempted to write “la” and “nuit” on each side of one of your group members hands so that when the words were said in the song he/she could turn his hands to reveal the words. Because the song we chose is in itself quite unique and exciting we tried to portray this through the video to try and create a gripping and electrifying feel to it, unlike anything people would expect a video would look like from a group of A2 media students. The music genre (Dance/New wave) is very prominent within the video, due to the heavy of UV paint and special effects. There is also a large amount of dancing which has been enhanced with the special effects used and also by sleeping up/slowing down. We got the inspiration to use the UV paint from the Black Eyed Peas video for the song “I Gotta Feeling” which features a heavy use of the substance much like our own video. We also took the inspiration to use time effects from the music video “Floating” by Jape which is primarily shot in slow motion. The last video we took influences from was Friendly Fire’s video for the song “Skeleton Boy”, from this we took the idea that the performers were not visible but the UV paint stood out giving it a other worldly and surreal feel to the video. We kept the camera in a fixed position so that the performers had a wider space to experiment with different dances etc. We used a UV light as our main source of light as we wanted the UV paint to to stand out while the performers were hardly seen. We have always tried to keep the visual quite stimulating and striking with the use of the UV paint as well as glow sticks, photographic enlargers (which we manipulated to make them different colours) , SFX, and outlandish dancing.

2. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancilliary texts?

Our project seems to meld together seamlessly as we have tried to keep the same invigorating style throughout the development of each of the parts. By having out digipak simplistic yet colourful style much like our video but instead of it being black it has a much lighter feel so that instead of it being black it has a white sleeve. This allows it to go with our video but also create some sort of contrast between each of them much like many other bands/artists do. i did this as i did not want the digipak, video and magazine add to be exactly the same as i thought it would make the project seem bland and as if we had simply given up on creating something interesting and different to the other pieces in our assignment but still able to relate to it, which i believe i have achieved. The magazine advert also fits nicely with the image we were trying to give to the band as it still follows the video’s artistic style quite closely, i believe that in this case the design of the poster should be very similar to the video as, if people had seen the video and liked it, they would then see the poster recognise the style and buy the album.

3. What have you learned from your audience feedback?

When our video’s rough cut was shown to the class and put up onto different forms of internet media, such as Facebook and vimeo we had a wide variety of different positive points and criticisms. Many people loved the style we were putting into our video but also we were told that we needed different shots, shooting in day light both of which we chose not to take into account as we had a strong view on how the music video’s art direction and we believe that introducing either of these would not suit it. Another point we were given was that we should have put lip syncing into it which we had planned to do but at the time that we had to produce the rough cut, the UV paint I had ordered had not turned up and thus we could not film the lip syncing parts of out video. Since we have produced the our final cut, all of the feedback has been incredibly positive to the point that random people within the school that had seen our video on Facebook would come up to me and tell me how good they thought our video was. Due to this excellent response to our video I think that the finished product is both what our group wanted to create and also appealing to the public which is what we were wanting to achieve. The teacher feedback we were given was mostly positive, there were a few points that out teacher did pick up on. These were that at certain points within the video the there were visual dips where the audiences interest could be lost due to some of the shots being held for too long, this was also partly because our song was slightly. I removed this by editing random clips of the performers into the shots, speeding them up, adding effects. after doing this i believe and as does my teacher that these visual dips had been removed and the video ran for the full 4 minutes with the viewer staying fully captivated by it.

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

Throughout the time when we created our video we used the program final cut express, i believe that this is a very powerful piece of software and seeing that i was the primary editor in my first year of media studies i had become quire proficient at using it. For both the Digipak and magazine advert we used the program photoshop, again due to the fact that i took art (digital and mixed media) in my first year and also own this software this made it easier for me to create the digipak. We also used the internet to generate interest and feedback in our video, using facebook, vimeo and youtube. By using these websites we created a better video as it gave us a chance to see how people would react to it, and thus better it but editing to remove parts that people disliked and add what they thought would improve it.