Production Evaluation

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

When we first started analysing music videos, we looked at songs of the same genre and also took consideration to the post production effects and the narrative of the music video, just like a lot of Prodigy music videos (The colour effects in 'Out Of Space'). The first music video we looked at was Propane Nightmares by Pendulum, a band that specialise in modern dance music, like our focus band, The Prodigy. This music video was very effective and gave us a sense of composition when shooting our own footage. It uses fast cuts, a variety of different angles and shots varying from establishing shots (to show our location) to extreme close ups (to show our character's emotion). Every time we recorded footage, we ensured that we took the same shot from a few different angles, so we could have more of a choice in terms of specific shots for specific parts of the the video and cut between them. The actual music video for our chosen song, Out of space, uses a very surreal narrative, with different colours, almost is if it were an other world, in which we used as inspiration for some of the scenes in our production. We also found that the original music video. This allowed us to play around with some surreal elements in our video, such as slotting in shots of nature, as a heavy percentage of our video is shot in woods, thus making various shots of nature relevant to our own video. However, the music video made by The Prodigy has no real backbone to the story behind it, whereas our own video for the track does have a storyline. This is where we had to think of original ideas, and gather inspiration from other music videos such as Prodigy - Voodoo People to children's cartoon show, Scooby Doo. After understanding the lyrics in the song, which we believe are telling a story of being in 'outer space', we created a fast-pace, exciting story where the protagonist has been knocked out in reality and has found this new world in his head, when he wakes up. Although using some parts of other material for inspiration we found that our own work original, as it hadn't really been done in this way before and something that would catch the viewers attention. We also made our video in almost a spoof-like fashion, and made it so that it was quite humourous, as the song's style would allow us to do so, with it's silly, but catchy beat. As a group we also thought it would be quite original to create our own outer space scene using the program's Adobe After Effects, Final Cut Pro and the Green screen technology, when we made a character from the video, lip-synch, in front of a rotating Earth in out of space (only to be attacked by our antagonist later on it the video).


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

The Main product of our coursework is a music video, and we chose to do one for the song 'out of space'. This lead our group to go for a sci-fi/astro theme for the project, by using the green screen room, as well as other worldly type locations. So in our video, a lot of prominance is given to an 'orbiting earth' effect (the opening scene, and during some parts of the chorus). This is used during the video to show the viewers the surreal elements that are included in our production. When we produced the ancillary texts, we belived that because the earth graphic played a large part in the production, it would make sense to include it in our graphic productions. So for the front of the CD cover, the first scene of the song where the characters are filmed mid-shot, sat on the couch has been used over a background of earth and space. This is effective as it combines the realistic elements of the video and the surreal elements, thus making a juxtaposition between the two on the CD cover. The magazine poster also contains the 'world' image, but this is edited with a flame graphic, because our album for our production is named 'set the world alight.'. Overall the combination of our main and ancillary products are effective because the audience are given an insight to both the realistic and surreal elements of the video, although our production isn't just a sci-fi effects music video and is balanced out with a lot of performance.


What have you learned from your audience feedback?

To provide a detailed analysis on one aspect of the video. (camera, editing, mise-on-scene). One of the main feedback points that we recieved was that our audience belived the video was "funny" and "original."This was extremly useful to our group beause it gave us a clear impression that the audience can enjoy the video, and that the humour element made the video effective. However, one aspect stood out in our video that needed improvement, this was the stop motion scene, with the charchters hiding behind trees. Our audience informed us that this scene was slightly flickering and disjointed. We discovered that the lighting in the scene slightly changes as we cut back-and-forth. Because we recieved audience feedback about this problem we believed that this could be rectified during post-production. Because we had all been heavily involved in the production of the video, we hadn't been able to notice this slight error, and only using audience feedback allowed us to be able to correct it. There were some shots that we believed might not be good enough to make the final cut, due to our extenisve review of our video. ie we thought the fight scene might be seen as pointless or immature but the audience feedback told us that this scene worked well in the video and that the acting in this scene was "beliveable/sensible" Our worries were put at ease when the audience feedback confirmed that the shot was able to be used.


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

Media technologies have played a vital role in the different stages of the media project. During the construction phase, the camera is obviously the most important technological product that we have to use. The skills that we learn with the camera, shape the way our project will end up as everything that appears on the video needs to be shot with the camera. Another important piece of technology that has been used during the construction phase is a video editing programme called Final cut pro. Although it can be daunting to approach Final Cut Pro without much experience, our group has discovered that the editing process can be simple if the right precautions are taken and it is a genuinely good programme to use for the editing of a video production. The final piece of technology we used for the construction stage was the green screen studio. We believed the use of the studio would help make our project to a high quality standard, when using factors such as the 'out of space' scenes for the lip-synching in our music video, as you cannot construct a set of space without the green-screen room, and we felt as though the input of the space scenes were vital to our music video.