In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Our media product does a mix of both conforming and challenging current trends and forms in media products. The music video goes against the typical style and conventions commonly found in music videos of the Electronica/ Dance genre. It does this through several ways, one of which being the lighter, happier atmosphere, not commonly found in Electronica videos. Also, continuing this challenge against typical Electronica, is the use of Will's puppet. The puppet contrasts the normal dense, heavy atmosphere held by Electronica videos, but also sticks to the way Daft Punk present themselves through their videos, for example in Technologic and Da Funk, the main character of the video is not human, nor do they have a clear identity. Our video uses conventions commonly found in music video, such as a variety of camera angles and shots, particularly close ups. Also the video is not made up of entirely static shots, it contains a fair amount of camera movement , making the video appear to be more fast paced, less boring, and more inkeepng with typical conventions of music video. Our video also contains a variety of performance, abstract and narrative features. This is common for many music videos and it is becoming increasingly less likely to see new music videos showing just one of these aspects.
How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
I think that the style of the Digipak suits the video well. The light blue representing the Electronica genre of the song, and giving a real digital edge, linking to the theme of the video and song (Particularly the song name). The main image of the Digipak being an old commodore 64 does well to demonstrate the way we are escaping the norm of the Electronica genre, moving away from the modern, clinical style of current Electronica videos, and instead focusing on the older, retro side of technology. This is also to represent the love for technology back when it was first becoming popular, and relating this love to the song title and Daft Punk's approach to their music. The use of Daft Punk's logo on the screen of the commodore is there to relate to Daft Punk's other album covers and adverts, making it instantly recognisable. The font used is also sticking to the retro, digital theme. This retro style is carried on throughout the digipak, the inserts showing images of retro commodore and spectrum games. Wittily replacing the characters of the games with 16 bit graphics of Daft Punk links to the humour we've tried to present in places of our video, through the use of the puppet. The advert links well with the Digipak, especially because of the use of the digipak cover as the main image in the advert. This was done to follow the conventions of Daft Punk's own adverts, as previously blogged. The colours in the advert follow the same trends as the digipak, linking to the same parts of our production. I think that the use of font on the advert could have been more effective if it had been more digital looking, for example use of the font 'OCR A EXTENDED'.
What have you learned from your audience feedback?
Our original plan was to gather audience feedback at the completion of our product and then apply the feedback to the product. By having finished the product apart from the changes they suggested, we figured it would make it easier to gain feedback and edit what was suggested. Unfortunately due to our own lack of time, organisation and ability we were unable to finish the product until late into the editing process. This is very much a shame as audience feedback is very important to us and would've greatly helped us improve our video. Throughout the creation of our product we have received some small comments, mainly from our teachers, with suggestions to improve their dislikes of our video. At first we were told that our project was too adventurous and too similar to the Owl City - Firelflies video. We promptly ignored this and continued working. Today the teacher that told us this told me that we were right to ignore them and we have proven them wrong, which I must say, was very satisfying. Since the completion of our video, we have asked our target audience of 17 - 21 years old, what they thought of our video. We received very encouraging responses with few criticisms, which was very pleasing to hear.
How did you use new media technologies in the construction, research, planning and evaluation stages?
In constructing our product there was a lot of use of technology. When filming our video we used cameras, which, while not being high-tech, were still a challenge to use efficiently and to the best effect. On the Mac's provided by the school we were supplied with the editing software Final Cut Express. This near industry standard software was at times challenging to understand, but rewarding when you took the time to explore it. Through using this technology I learned and developed a lot of new skills in editing. For research the web was very useful. Web 2.0 has made it very easy to find information, video and images across the Internet. Through this we have created this Blog, found images for our research and used online freeware to create snazzy presentations. One of these online software products is called Prezi, this program took a while to get to grips with but once you did the results were awesome. The ability to create zooming, sweeping and high quality presentations adds another level to the presentations we made with it. Also among the online technologies we used was slideshare. Slideshare is a really useful online tool for turning Microsoft Powerpoint presentations into web and blog friendly Flash presentations, allowing easy presentation of the storyboard and other planning and research. The use of video, audio playback and images has also been of great reward during this coursework. In the evaluation stage I really should have used more technology, but unfortunately due to time constraints this was impractical, which is a shame as I would have loved to have combined several media types to create a really engaging evaluation.
Overall I think that the project has been a real insight into media creation. The use of technologies has really expanded my knowledge and skills, as well as giving me a brief insight into the flaws with such technologies. I am very pleased with our production as a whole, there are places that could be improved, but some of them are due to hardware constraints, for example the image quality could have been much much higher. The ancillary tasks have been, unfortunately, a bit neglected through our focus on the main product. If I was to do this again I would be much more aware of my time management, and aware of the spread of work between the group members, so that not too much falls on some members whilst other are left not doing as much (though admittedly through their own choice). I greatly appreciate the chance to do this project and have really enjoyed it.
Luke Leadbetter
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