Evaluation

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

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

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

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

Audience Feedback

This video was taken at home (apologies for the poor quality) after showing my mum the music video. I thought it would be interesting to get the views of someone who hadn't taken media in college, was of a different age and sex, but was still within my target audience. (she is an arctic monkeys fan.) The video was so brief because I couldn't really ask her all of the questions I asked the other media students, and so I could only get an overall opinion of hers. However it was very helpful in bringing a couple of issues with the video to light. She mentioned that she didn't quite understand the storyline, and while this was sort of an aim of mine it wasn't meant to have a negative effect on the viewing, it was supposed to highlight the fact that the main character was a heavy drinker and a confused person and he didn't quite know where his life was going, although know that I have had this feedback i think that perhaps this metaphor was a little to extended and ultimately, has proved a bad decision for my target audience. Even though it is a convention to have a somewhat confusing storyline if not, none at all.

She also pointed out to me that at times she felt there was too little narrative (which added to her confusion) This was actually not part of the initial plan, but due to the fact that I had trouble with the performance and little time to get any extra filming done, I had no choice but to use only what I had filmed on the first time out filming the narrative. This has definitely taught me a lesson about scheduling and planning things much better to get the desired results.

She did however feel (like most people seem to after watching the video) that my singer Sam Gainsborough, was a perfect fit for the video he had the perfect attitude, lip syncing was great and he even looks like the singer from the arctic monkeys. So I feel choosing to exploit the convention of having a performance within the video and then develop it further so that I was just using the singer was a very big part in what made the video good. However someone in my media class told me that they really disliked the fact that I didn't have the full band, they mentioned that they felt just having the singer was taking away from what the Arctic Monkeys were really about which is essentially a whole band effort. 

She also pointed out that my lighting choices were very good, and I was particularly proud of the lighting in the performance. I fell that it added to the already dark tone of the video and again fit in with the genre conventions because of this. similarly my choice to film some of the video in black and white was a way of me developing some conventions, in my initial analysis I saw one video entirely filmed in monochrome, and one entirely in colour, so I thought it would be a nice idea to try and mix the two, and it even allowed me to add a very subtle twist at the end where the singer, who was in colour the entire way through, was pictured in a close up, in black and white. Developing this convention I feel did pay off, as it was noticed by someone who hasn't been taught to notice these things and they enjoyed the variation.

During lessons I got feedback from classmates as I feel these will make a good comparison with the feedback i got at home as I would have thought they would be more technically informed and more able to recognise how I have constructed my video and what for.

In this feedback session I found that again my singer was a hot topic, I found that my audience enjoyed the fact that I didn't use the full band and felt that the brave decision to just use a singer paid off. As well as this they also felt that exploiting the conventions of having a narrative was good, and rather than not understanding this they got that I was addressing the idea of there being a drug culture in todays youth, which actually revealed to me a good point about my audience in that it seems like younger people understood this whereas my mum who is just outside of the audience I was aiming for did not. However one thing my mum did pick up on that the others didn't was the fact that I used different colour styles between the narrative and performance. 

As far as my narrative sequence goes, someone else in my media class felt that the framing was off, they said to me that although it wasn't bad, at points it was too shakey and almost uncomfortable to watch. This uncomfortable effect was actually desired whilst I was editing but the student felt that it wasn't a positive effect at all.