Jack Nguyen Media Evaluation

As a group we aimed to apply Goodwin’s six points to our media product. Goodwin’s six points were shown in our music video for example, the genre characteristics of our song ‘Jainy’ is a very mellow, slow paced ballad this reflected on how we constructed our music video therefore we simply filmed the artist the artist playing the piano with a spotlight and added animation of our artist and his love interest.. To apply to Goodwin’s points about needing to sell the artist, we showed variety of close up shots of our artist also he is feature in all of the video; we also used tracking shots which then zoomed in to make a close up shot. In some aspects we challenged forms of real media products by adding pencil animation to parts of the music video to give it a unique yet sophiscated style, doing this could attract various types of the audience like adults to teenagers. Also adding this style of animation to our music video, is challenging the conventions of this genre of music, we hoped by doing this has connotations of the auteur theory which is a notion that directors have a specific signature that we can recognise their work from. Hopefully our style can feature in other music videos and be recognised. We recreated a modern version of Romeo and Juliet’s balcony scene due to the fact that everyone knows this famous scene, therefore doing this; our music video can appeal to all types of audience. Also with our song being a love story we thought that we would incorporate the most famous story of all time, again appealing to all fans of the book/film and to all fans of music.

As part of research we all as a group gathered ideas for our Digi-Pack, we looked at CD covers with the same genre as ours, and we found that the artist is always sitting down and with them, is their signature instrument like In Jack Johnson’s ‘On and On’ album. Our first idea was to incorporate a notebook style for our DVD cover; we did make a rough copy of the DVD cover however we felt that it didn’t have continuity between our main product and our Digi-Pack. Due to the fact that one of our original idea for our music video is to have zoomed onto a book full memories between the main character and his lover this led to the animation. However we discarded this idea later on as we thought we couldn’t complete the book full of drawn pictures by the deadline which was set therefore we done animation on Photoshop we all agreed that doing this way would save us a lot of time and it still looks professional. We finally decided to go with a mixture of animation and real life images for our Digi-Pack; with the back of the DVD cover it features a piano which is a running theme throughout our main product and our ancillary tasks. On the front we used a shot from our music video of the artist playing the piano; we then animated it to keep it with the concept of animation and real life. This is because we first aimed to zoom in a notebook. The continuity from our music video to our Digi-pack is shown through the images we put on our video. The artist on our DVD cover is in the same animation as shown in the video and transformation of real life to animation. The main focus of both the DVD cover and the poster is the artist; this is due to sell the artist as much as possible conforming to Goodwin’s six points. We used the same font for both the DVD cover and the poster to show continuity between the 2, also so that Five For Fighting can be recognised as a band from that logo. We received good feedback from our peers on our Digi-Pack they said how they liked the continuity between both pieces with the image, font and the simple colour of black and white really reflected the genre characteristics.

The feedback we had from our peers on the blog has been extremely useful for us as a group this is because they pointed out things that we had to improve for example they pointed out that on our rough cut of our music video the animation in our music video pointed out that on our rough cut of our music video the animation in our music video wasn’t very clear and was difficult to see. Therefore we researched many ways on how to improve this firstly we tried to use a parchment over lay on it to make it look like it was old paper but as a group we decided that it didn’t look as good as the pencil effect. The second option was to use a charcoal effect however that was too dark and didn’t look right as well. Finally we found out that the setting of our rough cut was low, so we increased it and that improved the clarity of the animation doing this the audience could now see the narrative in our video. Also they commented how the performance was ‘Boring’ as it was one similar shot form the side so for our final version we used the dolly to take some tracking shots to have a variety of shots for our music video. As a group we feel that the feedback we received from our music video was very positive, as they like the continuity between the animation and the live performance. They also felt that our music video demonstrated the genre characteristics of our song with them commenting the simple lighting used and the performance consisting of the singer and the piano. Overall I feel that feedback is useful to every aspect of making a music video from the initial idea to planning to making and the final product as we can see what the audience opinion on our concept of our music video.

New media technologies was shown throughout every single process of our media product starting with the internet where this was the key of researching the characteristics of our genre. We found various artists which fitted our genre and we researched their songs on YouTube like for example Elton John’s circle of life. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8ZnCT14nRc

The use of internet enabled us to research a way for our animation; Jon found a website which was a action command prompt which transformed a large amount of pictures with a pencil effect in a matter of minutes. We could’ve wasted valuable time doing the photos into animation one by one if we didn’t find out about the action command prompt. Photoshop was the programme we used for our digi pack and animation, using this programme was extremely useful as it has all the fonts, effects and style needed to make our media product professional. The overall construction of our music video was used on Final Cut Express The pre-millary tasks were extremely useful for me as I’m not as advanced with the Mac, this helped me understand how to lip sync audio with a bit of film as before I wouldn’t be able to do that, overall I am very pleased with the final outcome of our media product.