I’m Kerrin Gilbody, and this is my evaluation of my A Level music video production task.
The brief for the task was to produce a music video and promotion pack for a local band, in which we were given St Neots band, Starfish.
Within out groups, we distributed production roles, consisting as myself as the producer, Emily as Director, Paige as Designer and Jamie as Editor. We felt we distributed the roles well depending on each of our abilities and weaknesses. Once we had established this, we set about contacting our band and researching music video ideas and conventions.
Having carried out much research on real media products that are similar to that of our rock genre band, we noted that many of the conventions consisted of isolated settings, live performances and dark colours. We applied these conventions to our media product by choosing to use an isolated location of a factory warehouse to film our bands live performance video.
We looked at bands such as Greenday, Stereophonics and Takethat to gain an understanding of the genre conventions. However, we also tried to portray our bands own image and lively personality alongside these conventions in order to promote Starfish as a band. We did this by, asking them to wear their own clothes for the music video, to portray a casual band look, and also allowing them to perform the song just how they would if they were performing to a live audience.
In terms of our production brief, we were also given the task to put together a promotion pack for the band; this consisted of a DVD cover, magazine advertisement and DVD menu page for a DVD of the finished music video.
In order to ensure that the genre and target audience of the band came across in these promotional ancillary texts, we combined similar effects to these and the main product.
We used photos from the music video to promote the band in the DVD cover, advert and DVD menu. This therefore, would not only promote just the band, but the main music video itself.
We used continuity throughout the ancillary tasks, by using the same or similar font styles on all the promotional texts, as well as using the same colour and style of writing. We also researched band’s music video DVD covers, and looked at adverts for band promotion. We took the conventions of these, as well as the previous conventions from the main music video, and applied these too the promotion pack. An example of this is shown in our magazine advert, as we used limited text and imaging to make the advert easy to read, but still affective due to its simplicity and large image of the band. We felt that because of the continuity throughout the tasks and understanding of conventions, the combination of our main product and ancillary texts works together very effectively.
Before completing the main music video product, one band member from another group’s band came to view all of our music videos. This enabled us to gain clients feedback of our videos, which would then be able to assist us in completing them.
We received very positive feedback from the client, as he stated how he really liked what we had done so far. He commented on the use of effects throughout our video and how the music reflected the images very well. This audience feedback enabled us to listen to the comments said and see if any changes could be made to the video, however, in this case, we were not given any negative feedback.
After completing the first draft of the music video, we received more feedback from our band themselves and like the band member before, we again received only positive feedback, saying how they really liked what we had done!
More feedback we received was from our class members. After watching our video, we received both positive and critical feedback, which turned out to be extremely useful for the completing of the video. Critical feedback included comments on the reason behind why we used the effects we did and maybe that they were used to often. As a result of this, we are going to amend the video to cut done on the effects used, in order to make it more easily watchable. More feedback was that we could have done with more shots, as we had a fairly fast song, giving us the opportunity to use more and quicker cut shots. We are unfortunately unable to act upon this feedback, due to the fact that we would have to film new shots. However, receiving this audience feedback enables us to understand what people want to see, and also allows us to think positively about what we could do differently if given the opportunity to do this again.
Through the course of our production task, we used many variations of new media technologies in order to complete all areas of the course. This included the research and planning stages, the main production and the evaluation stages.
Throughout the research and planning stages I used a blog to record and note the research I had conducted as well as communication evidence between both myself and the rest of my group and myself and the band members. I found the blog extremely useful as it allowed to me to easily show what research and planning I had done in a simple manner.
In terms of communication between the group and band members, the main form of communication was by email. However, we also used methods such as texting, phoning and social networking sites like Facebook.
Within my research, I used the internet as well as own primary research to plan ideas for the main product. I further used most types of word programmes in order to record the research before uploading it to my blog.
For the final evaluation stage, I first typed up my evaluation, taking into account the conventions used throughout the task, the ancillary texts, audience feedback and technology used. Once completed, I set about recording this evaluation on camera, in order to portray my ability to use new media technologies as well as showing my communication skills.
