Evaluation Interview

This is our evaluation interview

Evaluation Presentation

This is our evaluation presentation

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

From the beginning of the year (September) we have been using many different media technologies for our research, planning and evaluation. During my research I was researching film trailers as this is what I was going to be producing, we were going to be following the codes and conventions of a horror genre, for my research I used the internet to watch many film trailers, I researched ones such as ‘SAW’ and ‘The Wrangler’. When I had found the ones I was researching I watched them over and over again and took notes about the effects that they used and why they were effective. The ancillary texts for this project were a front cover of a magazine and poster, I began my research for these, however when I was half-way through my partner dropped out and I joined Greg. Greg had already chose his band and had done a lot of research, as I joined at the beginning of the planning stage it meant I was researching and planning at the same time which meant that I didn’t get a lot of research done however I was familiar with music videos, magazine adverts and front covers for the genre. We began planning, we downloaded a storyboard template which helped us to make our storyboard, and we then discussed the different ideas for things to include in our advanced portfolio. Whilst doing this we had to be thinking about the print products, as I was not familiar with Adobe Photoshop yet, I used publisher as I was familiar with this software as it is very easy to use. After we had decided on a basic layout to use I began teaching myself how to use Photoshop, we found the font that we wanted to use for the band name ‘Pulled Apart by Horses’ and I used the ‘magic wand’ tool which allowed me to select the text without the background being included, I then changed the colour of this to suit the different backgrounds that we had tried. At this point the red and black colour scheme hadn’t been decided yet. I firstly chose black as I thought it was quite a sinister colour and would reflect the nature of the band due to its connotations however this proved to look quite plain and not very professional, after many trials and errors we decided on a red and black gradient with an image in the middle. When producing the music video we used Adobe Premiere Pro, I filmed the whole video as Greg starred in it, I had to improve my camera skills as I hadn’t used it a lot last year as I was in the opening sequence. To do this I refreshed my memory on the different camera shots that we could use and looked over the storyboard. We then used Adobe Premiere Pro which I had some skills in, for example I knew how to cut the shots and import shots in, I also knew vaguely how to use some edits, me and Greg decided on the edits together however he tweaked them a bit. The internet played a huge part in most parts of our project as we used it to get some fonts for the digi-pack which we would have liked to have all the way through the digi-pack however we were unable to do this as the website could only convert a small amount of letters at the same time and doing all of the song lyrics would have took too much time which we needed for the editing. For our evaluation we used PowerPoint which we were already familiar with. 

What have you learnt from audience feedback?

We tried to receive as much audience feedback as possible by showing people in our class, our friends, our teacher and our parents. To get the feedback we emailed the link to our blog and asked the people in the class to watch it and give their comments on the print products as well. An example of audience feedback that we received and carried out is the feedback that we got on the magazine advert.  A class member suggested that we used a glow around the digi-pack to ensure that the colours didn’t merge so we did this. Originally we used a white glow as we thought that it would complement the white text on the bottom, however we tried this and it didn’t look right so we used a red glow, although the whole advert was red it brought out the photo and helped the colours not to merge. Our teacher also commented on our blog posts telling us how to improve, for our music video he suggested that we include more edits, which we did. We were pleased with this after we had made the suggested changes as it made our music video look more professional. I also showed some family and asked them similar questions such as how could it be improved and do you think it looks like a real music video. We took into account what they had said and made some changes, an example was someone did not understand that there was a supernatural force chasing Greg and they didn’t really understand the storyline, this led us to find the night vision effect which shows the audience that it is not something real and it suggests that there is something chasing him. When we were making our first rough cut we found that we didn’t have as big a range of camera angles that we wanted, we then went out to re-shoot some and got some more point of view shots which involved me running with the camera, these give the impression that something is chasing Greg. We are pleased that we got plenty of audience feedback however we didn’t get as much for the digi-pack as this was one of the last things we ,made meaning that there wasn’t a lot of time available to get audience feedback on it. Although we got some which included changing the font colour; which led us to use the different effects including some white and a shadow, we feel that the digi-pack could have been improved by some more audience feedback. 

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

Pulled apart by horses are from Leeds, England and have been formed since 2009, they are comprised of lead vocals and rhythm guitar player Tom Hudson, lead guitar player James Brown, bass player Robert John Lee and drummer Lee Vincent. The band have immediately grounded themselves as really raw and heavy band, famous for fast driving hard hitting songs, delivered with aggression and humour. Due to the fact that the band are ‘raw’ and ‘heavy’ we thought it would be useful to extend the horror aspect to them which is shown in some of their single covers as they have images of skulls etc. We decided we wanted to extend the horror aspect, to do this we chose a strong colour scheme of red and black in both our music video and our ancillary texts. We chose these colours as they both have connotations of danger and horror. We researched many digi-pak covers and found that many included the band name at the top and the album name at the bottom with an image as the background, we took influence from this album cover however we thought it would look better we made the typography bigger.

 We also used similar typography throughout our project for example the font used on the front and back cover of our digi-pack is similar, we used this as it fits with the stereotypical ‘horror’ fonts. We got this font from a font website that only allowed us to change a certain amount of characters as a time, meaning it took quite a while to do even the song names; ‘High five, swan dive, nose dive’ took 3 different sections. If we were able to have longer on this project we would use this font for the lyrics inside the digi-pack however it would have took too long. To overcome this problem we used the font showcase gothic which was simpler than the ‘horror’ font from the website. We used many different edits to change the fonts, throughout the digi-pack we have used the same edits the font is red, black and white; the white created a good effect and ensured that the text did not blend in with the photos that were on the backgrounds of the digi-pack. For the background photos in the digi-pack we used some of the excess footage, this was useful as it meant we saved time by not having to go out shooting anymore. However if we had longer for this project we would have gone out to shoot some more edits, we wouldn’t change the storyline however we would get more shots of the band scenes and the chase scenes so that in the first section there would about double the edits, by doing this we would be conforming more to the codes and conventions of a music video and speeding up the pace of the music video which would increase the sense of fear felt by the character (Greg). Overall the combination of both our media project and the ancillary texts is good as the colour link is very strong; this shows the audience that these are Pulled Apart by Horses products as the link is distinctive.

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

I began the year aiming to make a trailer and therefore did lots of research into horror movie trailers; however my partner dropped the subject so I had to swap groups and join with Greg. A music video wasn’t my first choice however I have enjoyed doing this, I have enjoyed both parts; the print based products and the practical product. Due to the fact that I joined Greg’s group late meant I had missed most of the research time. I did some research and found that many music videos either had a storyline or were of the bands performing, when planning our practical project we decided to combine the two codes and conventions which is how we came up with the idea of the person being chased by something supernatural, then having frequent cuts to the band performing; this helped our product to fit with the codes and conventions which helped it to look professional.  The band have described themselves as “Kurt Cobain snorting Ozzy Osbourne's blood whilst combing his hair with a chainsaw”. This shows that they are quite edgy and original they have an aspect of horror t them due to some of the song lyrics and song titles; in our planning we decided that we wanted to expand this aspect which is why we chose the ‘evil dead’ influence. In the ‘Evil Dead’ and the ‘Evil Dead 2’ there is a supernatural force that is used, in the film whenever it is used a point of view shot is shown, we used this as influence and chose a supernatural force chasing the character in our music video. We used a point of view shot however it was unclear what was being portrayed. To overcome this problem we used a simple night vision effect which shows that the ‘force’ was something unfamiliar. The reason we chose the ‘Evil Dead’ in the first place is because many other horror films are high budget and have extravagant costumes and face paints; due to our lack of ability to have these we chose the evil dead as there is very little effort into showing the supernatural force; only the camera shot.  Another thing that we used to give a horror effect is the colour change in the band scenes, we changed the normal colour to red and black as red and black have connotations of danger, death and horror; this is why we felt they would be good colour to use as we were going for a horror look also the ghosting effect was good as it helped the product look realistic. These may not normally be used in professional music videos in the music industry, however we thought they gave a good effect and helped the audience to understand what the storyline was about. In some aspects however we have deviated from the normal codes and conventions of media products in our area as we have a used a strong red and black colour scheme which we hadn’t seen in our research, we found that bands in the metal genre used normal images with very little edits. However we wanted to emphasise the horror aspect to the band by using the red and black colours both of which have connotations of danger and death.  We included quite a lot of frequent cuts which sped up the pace of the video in order to match the speed of the song; if we were able to have more time we would have re-shot some band shots which would mean that we could add extra edits in at the very start of the music video, we feel like this would benefit us as it would grab the audience’s attention more at the beginning, however we feel that the amount of edits we have is okay and works well. We were very pleased with the font that we used for the magazine advert title and the digi-pack song titles, we felt like this developed the normal codes and conventions of metal bands as in our research we saw that some bands used similar fonts however not as intense as ours but we are very pleased with it and feel like it is very effective.