1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
All three of our media products use the forms and conventions of real media products, with the music video challenging the conventions in a few areas. For the ancillary products, we met the codes and conventions of real media media products pretty well in my opinion. We included images in both the magazine advert and the digipak which both have links with the music video. Although the images are from a seperate shoot from the music video, they both include the recurrent themes of leaves and Autumn in general as well as both having Hope, the main singer in our video, as the centre of focus for our audience. For both of the ancillary products, we included all of the relevant information such as record label, and the address for the artists website. For the magazine advert, we included a list of locations for a UK tour and included a track listing on the back of the digipak. On both of these products, we used bright colours that stand out so that they catch the audiences attention and makes them want to either buy our digipak, or see Autumn on tour. As previously mentioned, the main product challenged a few of the conventions of real music videos but generally conformed with them. The area where we didn't follow the codes and conventions was that we only had one singer in the group rather than all of the group singing which is common in most girl bands. Because we only had one person singing throughout, the focus was primarily on her, representing that she is the lead of the group. We met the conventions of the music video for the other parts, by including a dance routine which is a main feature in many pop songs featuring girl groups. We also met many of the features outlined in Goodwin's theory. We had a lot of close ups the artist singing which met the requirements of the record label. We also had links between the lyrics and the visuals, as part of our feedback states that Hope's body language was negative, in relation to the negative lyrics of the song. There was also a link between the audio and the visuals as the group were dancing along with the music with Hope also singing along to the song. We managed to include the feel of voyeurism in our music video by the way that the artist was singing directly to the camera, as if she was singing to the audience.
2. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
I think that the combination of our 3 products was very good, with all 3 linked because of a few recurrent themes. Because Hope is the main image of all of the products, our audience would be able to recognise that they are all from the same artist. On a smaller scale, the use of leaves in all three shows that they are all linked together. Although they are not as prominent as the other features, you can see that they are all from the same product range, rather than products from different albums or something. The use of leaves also has a link with the name of the artist 'Autumn' as they are a feature associated with that season, as are the colours of the leaves, being red, orange and brown. By using these bright colours, we felt that we would be able to attract our audience to our product. Also, because all this was done in Autumn, an were to be released at the same time, our audience would be able to link with the images because they would be experiencing the same things as it is based around the same season.
3.What have you learnt from your audience feedback?
A lot was learnt through the various stages of feedback. We recieved lots of positivity as well as some good pointers that we should improve for the final product. The main pieces of feedback we had was regarding the rough cut. Because we had trouble organising all of the people involved in the music video, we had to rethink our whole video and instead use a member of our group as the singer rather than someone who wasn't in our lesson. This allowed us to shoot footage during the lesson time rather than having to use our free time and have trouble getting everybody that we needed at the same time. Overall, the feedback helped a lot because it allowed us to refocus our attention and make significant changes to our work so that we could come up with the final product.
4. How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
We used a wide variety of technology when making our music video. We mainly used blogger to evaluate any research that we carried out as well as other computer programmes for the editing of our final product and ancillart products. We used photoshop to edit our magazine advert and digipak and to add all the features that we needed like the record label details and extra information for our bonus content and tour dates. Final Cut Express was a main piece of equipment that we need to use for our music video and our directors commentary. We also used it for getting screen grabs for our ancillary products. I think that we used the equipment to a high standard using a lot of the feautres available.
