Evaluation by: Julia Ferreira

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


The band we used was an unsigned indie band, and the song we chose was pretty original and had a really upbeat sound to it, and that was one of the reasons why we chose to use this song. When we decided that this was what we wanted to do we started researching and watching various music videos of such genre. I believe that our video is conventional because as seen in videos from other bands of similar style, such as rock bands and alternate rock which was known as indie rock until most alternate bands started being signed. We also realised that their videos focus a lot on the band itself, most of them don’t really have a narrative, but there a few that actually did, so we went for band performance and narrative. For this King of Spain video we actually linked the story to the lyrics, and as we had actual contact with band it was much easier because we could ask them what they meant with a certain verse of the song and so on. As King of Spain is unsigned and did not have a music video of their own, our group tried and I believe have succeeded to make this video very original.


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


The way that we have combined both was very effective because, doing the poster for their tour I actually used two images of two actual band members. So I blended them to make it look different and unique like the band itself, and I did it to try and maintain the convention of the ‘Indie’ genre. For the poster and CD cover we have kept their original logo, so that it was even more original, everything we did we tried to consult back to the band and see their ideas and thoughts of what they thought could make it even more like them. The font used for the other texts on the poster and CD was standard writing just like they have used in their website.


3. What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

From the feedback we achieved from the audience we ended up being very pleased with ourselves, because as we improved more and more on our rough cuts we got even more positive feedback. We had high doubts about the narrative, and had to change it and go back to the drawing board quite a few times, because we were not sure that the ‘Boy and Girl’ story would work well in the video, but as we kept taking in the ideas of our audience from their feedback it ended up working really well. Even though we actually were aiming for an older audience of perhaps 18-25 year old, we attracted more younger audience because we used young actors to play the narrative, so the age of those who liked our video started from 15 and so on.
Of course in the beginning we had quiet a negative feedback but that did not put us down, in fact gave us more will to make a better video, because in the begging things were sort of out of place and really ‘out there’ and not really taking in the whole ‘indie’ feeling, because ‘indie’ style if very distinct and original and our video in the begging was quite dull and did not really have anything to pull the audience’s attention.
Also what helped to get a very positive feedback was that we have used an actual band to perform in our video, and that actually brought their interest up a little more, even though it was an unknown band most people have actually enjoyed themselves watching the video.
Also with the audience feedback we have learned that we actually had no reference to the name of the song or any part of the lyrics, so we were back at the drawing board trying to come up with new interesting ideas to how we could reference the name of the song or something of the sort, so I had the idea of maybe using bright strobe light and have a very repetitive part of the song (‘I know what I want and its you’) written on pieces of paper with the light flickering over it, to give it a more underground and mysterious look, and maybe as a hidden message link to the title ‘Flick the Switch’ because the strobe light effect is just as if someone is flickering the lights on and off but at a very high speed.
So with that done, the audience said to have enjoyed the video even more, because of the different effects used, and how we where able to link the band and the narrative quite well, so in the end we were very pleased with our result, and the band King of Spain itself has given their opinion about the video and have said that are considering using it to promote themselves somehow.

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

Technology played a huge part in the making and development of this project, if I may say I believe that Internet has played one of the biggest parts, because we used it more for our research and also we had to keep an online diary of our whole project, so we have created a blog to keep all of our information, and it works like our project diary. We have used two different programmes to edit our video, first we went for Final Cut Pro 7 to import the clips from the camera, into the computer, so that we could edit them and put all the bits together in the right places, but there was a little problem because Final Cut Pro would take up a lot of our time, and we were using mostly the Macs to do our work, so we started using iMovie 09 which was just installed for our benefit and that made our editing work much easier. We have used a JVC HD camera, which was very useful and easy to carry because it was slightly smaller then others cameras we could have used, and also had the support of a tripod for more steady scenes, like when the band was playing, so that we did not have a shaky footage. We also where able to get a good use of Photoshop specially for the ancillary text, for example the CD cover and the poster, because we had to get the right format size, which was a small issue with the CD cover, because instead of it being square it came out fairly rectangular, so to fix that we had to open it up on Photoshop to fix it; and for the poster there was a need to blend a couple of pictures and change the colours a little bit and add some captions, so Photoshop was once again very helpful, specially because the computers we had most access to was Apple Macs which already had the latest version of Photoshop installed in them. It was a real shame that we did not get to make use of the green screen because of lack of space for any extra footage, but I’m happy to say that our video has turned out to be really good, and working with a real band has helped us to develop a lot of new skills, and we managed to work with a variety of different people outside of our natural everyday life, and that was a really good experience, and in conclusion I have enjoyed working with the people that I worked with, because we managed to do a lot of new things with the help of each other and we managed to make the first official video of an Indie band.