This is our music video, however we could only add the video by youtube at the moment who have removed the music for copyright reasons so we are trying to find ways to upload it with the music.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/29479683/Tainted-Reality

Tainted Reality

Evaluation

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

Our media product justifies the media’s portrayal of the classic rock girl band and how by exploring different ideas we created a band that went against the stereotypical image of a girl band. The song ‘One way or Another’ that we took much consideration over, compliments the image that we intended our girl band to fit the criteria of. Our girl band challenges the conventions and typical stereotypes of girl bands and instead of conforming to the classic pop girl bands that seem to be so common in today’s society we wanted a change of style and a chance to justify why we chose our girl band to fit the stereotype of a rock girl band. By using research and mind maps to support our decision we agreed it was vital to support and challenge the “image” that created a response to the “girl band” image evoking our video to have the classic outfits that complimented each individual member rather then the traditional representation of the girl bands wearing the similar styled clothes. We discovered when researching girl band videos that they use a lot of varied colours and we decided to go against this standard image by choosing contrasting colours. However we did agree to use the traditional angles, shots and close-ups that are typically seen in girl band videos. By examining other music videos in which we specifically noticed certain techniques and ideas which gave us a chance to fit the conventions of what is needed within a music video and how we could develop our video further to fit those conventions or challenge them.

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

The combination of our main product and our ancillary was very effective due to the fact that we created a theme that would run between each product. This help make our band recognisable to our target audience which was teenagers and young adults. It also enable us to build a strong image for our band. This theme was the use of the contrasting colours black and white, which made the images bold and eye-catching to our audience. Our products all compliment each other by the similar use of colours and positioning of images, we intended for our products to appear more visual than use text that would divert attention from the imagery. We deliberately chose images that revealed our bands faces so that the audience would be able to connect with them and feel familiarity with the band members.

3. What have you learned from your audience feedback?

From our audience feedback we learnt that we needed to present our girl band in a visual way. They felt that there was not enough close-ups of our band members and were not given the chance to establish each member. Another criticism that we received was that our storyline was not followed through enough and needed to be more specific, for example ‘why was the girls in that surroundings?’ and ‘why were they concentrating on capturing the male character in the narrative?’. We took this all into consideration and decided to reshot a lot of our video as we were not happy with the result. When doing this filming we ensured that we developed our narrative further and had many close-ups of the band members and instruments. After making these changes we received positive feedback from people as it revealed a more successful approach to the video and included the correct visual image to contrast with song lyrics. “Better understanding of the narrative and I understand what's going on”, “I like that the girls costumes match in each shot”, ”I really like the guitar close-up shots” this is just some of the feedback comments we received. Overall we are much happier with the final result and feel we reacted positively and productively to the feedback we received.


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

Before beginning our media product we researched music video’s on the site YouTube, it gives people a chance to access artist music videos. This provided us with ideas on how a music video is presented and what sort of image we wanted our video to have. We originally researched traditional pop girl band and decided that we would like to go against the typical stereotype and challenge the conventions by creating our own individual girl band. We felt this would appeal to a different market as well as the normal girl band audience. In addition to this we explored the different layouts of posters and cds by viewing them on search engines such as Google and Yahoo this was of course vital to our ancillary texts because we needed them to include similarities to other posters and cd covers. We also looked at specific girl band websites such as The Saturdays and Girls Aloud to widen our knowledge of the different media technologies they use to promote their image and to explore their presentation of how they interact with their audiences. We feel this really helped us create a concrete image of what we really wanted to achieve and develop. Once we had this we then downloaded our song ‘One Way Or Another’ from ITunes and played it on an IPod player in the background when filming our video to enable our singer to get the lip singing in syncing, which is the most recent way to download and play music.

When we had all our photos and filming we then went on to use video editing software such as I-Movies to edit and form our music video. In addition to this we also used photo editing software such as Photoshop to create our Poster and Digipack that was going to promote our band to our target audience. Overall we used a lot of new media technologies to help us constructed our bands image and video.

http://www.thesaturdays.co.uk/

We have now officialy finished our music video and very pleased with the final result. We feel that the storyline is understandable and that you get a real sense of what sort of band we intended them to be associated and interpreted with. We have panning shots, closes up and mid shots which help to establish the band and alternate between each shot. I feel we have achieved the look we were going for which was a more of an indie/rock girl band instead of the typical pop girl band. I believe this will appear to a wide audience and is a change to the normal bands you see.

Music Video Crit .

After finishing the first lot of editing for our music video we took part in a crit which would create the chance to improve out music video and even refim if we were in dire need to. We recieved some positive feedback and was given several suggestions on how we could improve our music video........

*Improve on the narrative. for example have more of a storyline and why the band decided to do what theyre were doing.

* Close up shots.

*Shots from a wider varietty of angles.

Now we have finished filming and editing we will take part in a crit to see what we can do to improve our Music Video, so far from the feedback we have already recieved we need to work on close up shots and the narrative, so we are planning to reshoot in a weeks time a few more shots to include.

New imagaes of the Girl band ........ Tainted Reality