Final Video and Final Time Management Update!

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 We have finally manged to upload the final cut of our finished video onto Youtube and onto our blog at last! In Conclusion, , I have had a great time working on it and I learned a lot about the processess involved in preparing and staging, filming and editing our music video  This is Charlie Pugh, signing off...

Evaluation Question 2

Question 2- How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

1.

                                                                        COLOUR
Firstly throughout the entire video, the main character is dressed in mostly dull colours such as dark green for his jacket and blue for his jeans which is designed to match both the redundant themes of the first half of the video which is set in the streetways of Ludlow that on which the film was shot on. The only brightly colourful setting in the first half is the yellow wall seen in the opening shot as the protaginsiat sits down drinking which is meant to signify his only confort in life before he discovers the blueprints.

However in stark contrast both the advert and the digipak have a much brighter colour scheme such as yellow and white in the background when inside, the fonts have a bright eyecatching colour code scheme of red and blue on the advert and pink, red, white and yellow on the digipak, which in both cases stand out brightly from the background  and are designed to be easy to read and to catch the attention from both young people and people who are interested in the 60's abstarct advert designs, and both the artists are shown with a happy expression on their faces which makes sense as most indie artists usually use a lot of bright colours in their advertisements

                                                           
                                                                FONT TYPE & SIZE

The font that I chose for two of the products which are the digpak and the advert,  was the red chalkboard design located on the top of the other fonts that I had considered using. I chose this because it looked more different than the other fonts with the text looking as if it had been drawn, as opposed to typed which was similar to the style I was looking for, a retro abstract type. It was originally both going to be red in both the digipak and the advert, but after getting the new HD cameras, the new image used for the advert didn't fit well with the colour so it was switched to blue and red for the headlines of the advert, blue and purple for the HMV and ITunes advertisement placeholders and yellow for the digipak. I have used the same type of font in both the Digipak and the Advert to maintain coherency and a sense of brand identity so that the audience would be familer with my product and to maintain a link between the two seprate products.

                 
           

                                                                Props and Costume

Throughout the entire video, We have only used an old farmers costume consisting of green boots, a farmers cap, and a green jacket which is meant to tell the audience that he is poor, lonely and reclusive to match the low-budget redundant style of the video while in the cutaway band sequences we have dressed in regular clothes to cut the narrative beat. I chose clothes in darker colours such as dark green and blue to contrast against the upbeat tune which sounds bright and colourful. At an earlier stage of the production when the second half of the video consisted of more entropic imagery such as flying into space and landing on the moon, we were going to have extras dressed as space aliens interacting with our main character wearing a space suit, which was dropped due to lack of available resources. As for Lighting, as our video and advertisement shots were shot mostly outside and inside the Drama Studio, we didn't resort to using studio lights due to lack availability again.  

                                                                    

                                                                Visual Themes

As I have mentioned before in my Genre Research, the main narrative themes presented are reality meets fantasy and trying to achieve your dreams which are represented by the main characters desires to do something else with his life by flying into space. These themes were influenced by the Pixar film Up where an old man flys his house with hundreds of balloons to get away from the realities of life and the Button Moon TV show where Mr Spoon flys a rocket to Button Moon whenever he gets bored. In an earlier draft a stop-motion animated sequence consisting of a paper rocket landing on a cut-out moon, resembling the low budget effects of Button Moon was going to be the conclusion, but was cut for time.

2.

After showing the finished designs of both the digipak and the advert, I used the apple Mac computers to record an audience reaction and resoponse to gain feedback, they thought that although the quality of the images was fantasic and the images were used well, they disapporoved of the use of HMV as a adveritisment sponser due to recent events occuring and said that the colours could ve improved in photoshop. Although they didn't comment on whenther the logos for both Fight The Bear and the main headlines were done well, I think they could see the simalitys between the two products as they both have the same record company logo for Island Records, the logo for Fight the Bear being in large red font and taking up a quarter of the page and both myself and Toby appearing on  both the front and back cover and the advert.

3.

According to Prantanna S of www.go4expert.com , "Branding is a vital aspect of marketing strategies. Companies are trying hard to build a brand value that is sustainable over a longer period of time. A brand is a name or identity with which the customers can associate them with the company. A brand name will help the manufacturers and products to stand apart from the usual crowd". I kept this mind while trying to think of music companies that would normally assoite themselves with Independent Music, I chose Itunes beacuse they have posted albums and songs of other indepenendent artists such as Mumford and Sons so it should't be that hard getting the're attention and as for  HMV, it's probably(as of December 2012) one of the largest music publishing companies in the UK and one of the few that doesn't operate soley online so my products can be displayed publiclly where people are most likely to notice them which gives it an advantage in the music retail market.

Evaluation Question 3

Question 3= What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

Throughout the entire AS and A2 coursework periods , I have never used Facebook in any of my tasks for personal reasons which has made trying to get responses from audiences rather difficult. Although I have used questionnaires before in the past to try and see what my audience wants, the method has it's limits as there aren't always enough people to ask questions and the handwriting can be hard to read sometimes.



However during the audience feedback stage, after finishing the video I managed to save it on my pen drive and I have  managed to attach the finished video onto an email on Microsoft Outlook and have sent it to a certain number of my fellow media students asking them to answer questions about my video and to send replies and feedback via email. The reason why I chose to use Outlook is that it's the most divisive communication program used throughout my college which makes it a lot easier to communicate with a wider range of people.  I asked them five questions covering topics such as how the narrative was handled, who it would appeal to and why and their personal opinions on the overall video.

Looking back now however, I don't think it was the right desion to use Outlook as I only managed to get four replies back as again, I didn't get a wider audience as I had hoped for and the responses we received were much less detailed then we thought as they mostly consisted of a few words for each well-detailed question. Anyway, the main overall concuss was that the audience thought that although the performance of the main character played by myself was sypamahtic and relateable and, they pointed out that the lip-syncing in the musical sequences didn't always match the lyrics of the song. The reason why it is like that is because the song is sung in a  very fast paced and energetic beat which  I think made it difficult for Toby and I to edit together as the artists sing really fast so I don't think we can improve it unless we did the video in fast-motion. As for positives, They thought that the overall music video itself was appropriate to the style we were aiming for, the indie/alternative rock genre and they felt that it was overall, trying to be informative although the opinions for whether it was successful or not were mixed.

In conclusion, although the ideas for the overall project were creative and I had a lot of fun during the filming and editing progress, if I could do this again, I would use a Facebook group to try and gain a wider audience  to try and get more opinions and advice on how to improve my ideas and to respond more quickly to criticism. I would also make more use of my free periods to film more footage and try to improve on lip-synching sequences as admittedly I didn't use my free time as well as last year  and I would like to work with a larger group so we could contribute more ideas freely as I don't think my group was large enough.   

Evaluation Question 1

Evalulation Question 4

Evaluation question 4 from CPugh2005

Improved Digipak design

I've also managed to include a few little adjustments to my digipak as well such as spacing out the copyright details and website address and making them a little easier to read.

Improved Advert Design

Following suggestions from my target audience I have made a few last minute changes to my adverts such as increasing the text size of the rating information, changing the font colour to match the colour scheme of the music logos such as HMV's Purple and ITunes's Blue colour schemes and have reduced the size of the logos and repositioned them to the bottom of the advert.