LAURA EVALUATION

Our media product uses conventions of an 'indie' video, in a number of ways. It was our intitial idea to make it a conventional video, as we wanted to follow the success of a typical 'indie' video. There us a use of lyrics relationship to visual throughout the video. We tried to portray the lyrics by showing them visualy, for example, the lyrics "our paths never seem to converge", we used a split screen, one screen the male artist is walking away from the camera at day time and then in the opposite screen the female he is singing about walking towards the camera at night time.
There was a strong music and visual relationship, there is a guitar being played in the music, and in the video the artist is playing the guitar. The music is very relaxed and slow paced, the video also has a very slow pace to it, the artist moves very slowly and gently, this compliments the music well.
In terms of the demands of the record label - representation of the artist, the artist is shown in a very simplistic way, the use of camer work helped to portray this, particularly by using close up shots of the artist, again going along the idea of typical conventions. This may all be appealing to the female audience in terms of appearance.

The combination of our main product and ancillary texts is quite effective. The ancillary texts were produced by choosing simplistic shots from the video, as the whole image of the artist is very simple and down to earth, these had to promote this image. To improve the ancillary texts we could take a photo shoot to use unique images for them instead of from the video, still creating the same mis - en - scene, to promote the artist.
We used visual motifs, including the guitar. When creating the ancillary texts we created the images carefully thinking about colour and spacing and manipulating the images to create something to fit with our ideas but at the same time make it look different, rather than just using a plain screen grab from the video. There is a strong artist representation in all three products in our promo package.

I feel that the audience feedback was a great help towards producing the products.
Feedback througout the process helped us to see what other people thought and any improvements suggested could then be made.
We also had feedback from our teacher - Andrea, which really helped when we came across problems.
When producing our roughcut, the feedback we recieved for it was reallt constructive and was a massive impact on perfecting our final video.
The feedback also encouraged us to re-shoot some of our video to improve it in ways suggested in feedback.

We used media technologies throughout the project. We carried out a lot of research to begin with using mainly the internet. The use of the internet was particullary usefull when researching for the ancillary tasks, we used sites such as 'play.com' and looked at top 25 music DVD's to get ideas of how images had been manipulated. The two programmes we used in the construction stages were 'final cut' and 'photoshop', without these programmes we would not of been able to produce the products to the high quality at which was achievable with the use of these programmes.
I found these programmes quite straight forward to use, although sometimes did find them challgenging to understand, but once explained they were very straight forward.

Overall, i feel the production of the video and ancillary tasks were a success, although challenges were faced in the process, and we had to re-think ideas along the way, we still managed to complete the tasks and were satisfied with them. All the technology we were able to use was a great advantage in making high quality products, and were generaly easy to use. I thought we would have trouble making the lip-synching work, but suprisingly we achieved this first time everytime.