Animatic Storyboard

This is the animatic storyboard which we had produced during the planning stage, to help us construct the music video for our A2 Production:

Final Music Video (Shattered Glass - Britney Spears)

This is our final music video for our A2 Coursework production, which is Shattered Glass by Britney Spears.

Evaluation of Media Products

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

The music video which we had created had used several of the typical conventions of professional music videos used in the music industry, as well as following common, similar themes and narratives typically used in the genre of music we decided to make our music video for.

Whilst planning and researching we thought that if we used both a combination of narrative and performance within the music video it would help break up the story, which would make it more structured and easy to follow as well as making the video more interesting to watch.

During the performance parts of the song (which was mainly the chorus parts), we had decided that it would work well to have the female character in the video lip synch the words to the chorus, this had worked particularly well as the actress which we used had a particular look about her which helped fit the criteria of the female character which we were trying to portray in our video (a young, glamorous girl), the technique of lip synching is a common technique used in professional media products.

We had also used the enigma technique, in which certain information is withheld from the audience as the story progresses, this led to the audience wanting to watch more of the video to gain an understanding of why the female character was stalking the male character. The use of an enigma is a very common technique used with narratives in music videos, this helps hook the audience and sometimes create suspense and tension.

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

The combination of the ancillary texts and the main product are effective and work very well together, managing to create clear links between each other.

The use of dark colours in the female characters costume and the setting in which she is singing in help create a dark mood with the song, reflecting on the effect that the artist of the song is trying to convey to her audience.

For the inside covers of the DigiPak that we had created we had used still images taken from frames in our music video to try and make an obvious link between the video and the DigiPak. The image of the male and the female character together having a picnic is an obvious link between the DigiPak and the music video.

The front cover and the magazine advertisement both use an image of glass shattering as their background, which helps establish a visual image of the lyrics of the song. The use of the theme of “Shattered Glass” within the song is not taken literally meaning the physical act of shattering glass but more of a deeper meaning, in which the man breaks up with the woman suddenly and abruptly shattering their relationship like glass. The woman stalking him can be taken as tiny shards of glass cutting him slowly, making him feel guilty to the point where he breaks down and is forced to pick up the pieces. The image of the shattered glass however is related to the name of the song and helps creates a visual link between the song name and ancillary tasks.

In order to create a feel of variety and to avoid repetition in our ancillary tasks we thought it would be best if we took extra photos of the female character. So with this idea we carried out a photo shoot in similar locations with a dark, cold feel to them, which could be used on our ancillary tasks, which would also help create a link between the music video and the DigiPak and Magazine Advertisement.

How has audience feedback helped you in evaluating your media product?

The use of audience feedback was useful in the fact that it helped us evaluate our music video with both positive and negative feedback, which helped us understand what we could have done better if we were to make the video again.

Whilst editing our video we were slightly worried about the narrative of the music video which we used and whether or not it would be easy for the audience to follow but we also argued that the breaking down of the video by the performance would make it easier for the audience to follow. The audience feedback which we had received upon the viewing of the video did in fact show that the narrative and performance had worked well together.

It was also suggested by some of members of the audience that if we were to improve it we should have had the female character performing more as it worked well due to her fitting the criteria of the character very well.

How did you use new media technologies in the construction, research, planning and evaluation of the product?

Throughout the duration of creating this product we used a wide range of media technologies in producing it:

Research and Planning

For the research and the planning of the coursework we had used:

- The internet: This helped us research professional, industry standard music videos used by mainstream artists, as well as helping us research the artist of the song we had chosen along with similar artists.

- iMovie: Although a piece of basic editing software, it had helped us greatly in editing our animatic storyboard, which helped us with the timing of the video greatly.

Construction

For the construction stage of the coursework, we used a wide range of digital technology in helping us construct our product, the technology we used were:

- Digital Camcorder: This was used in filming the actual footage needed for the music video.

- iMovie: This was used to edit the footage which we had filmed and put it together

We had also used technology in order to communicate with each other, some of the technology we used was mobile phones and social networking sites such as Facebook in order to organise dates and locations to film.

For the ancillary texts we used different technology we had available to us, these include:

- Adobe Photoshop CS3: This helped design our images which we had taken for the DigiPak and Magazine advertisement.

- Digital Photo Camera: This was used to take the photos used for the ancillary tasks.

- iMovie: This was used to extract the still images from the music video.

Evaluation

In order for us to evaluate our product we created a blog on www.blogger.com On the internet, this helped us evaluate the parts of the video production and the processes we underwent throughout making it as we made it and allowed us to keep a type of diary of events. We also used iMovie to edit the audience feedback that we received from our classmates.

Audience Feedback

After showing our final version of our music video to our class we asked several of our classmates questions about our video to help us evaluate our video and to see what was good and bad about our video and what we could do to improve our video if we were to make it again. We asked our classmates several questions and filmed their responses, which can be seen in the video down below:

DigiPak and Magazine Ad

As our final products for both the DigiPak and Magazine Advertisement we thought that these were the best products that we created for different reasons:

Front Cover:

Back Cover:

Inside Cover:

Inside Cover 2:

Magazine Advertisement:

DigiPak Trials

In order to gain an understanding of how we could link our DigiPak and Magazine Advert to the Music Video that we created different examples:

We felt that this didn't work very well overall, the reasons we didn't use this our:

• The cuts in the image were supposed to represent the theme of Shattered Glass, however the outcome of the image created a Halloween effect, which we thought didn't go well with the overall representation of the message we were trying to convey to our audience.
• We felt that the image didn't blend in very well with the background.
• The empty space by the side was good as it provided space for the song listings

We felt that this did not work as a front cover for several reasons:

• The front cover looks to plain and basic.
• The image was not a good representation for the DigiPak.
• We felt however if we got rid of the writing this would be good to use as one of the inside covers.

This is one of the first images that we produced for the front cover, however we felt that this did not work at all:

• The colours didn't work at all
• We believed that the photo quality of the image was not good enough. As we took a still from the video, as opposed with the other images where we used an actual digital camera.

We thought that this didn't work very well as a front cover for our DigiPak for several reasons:

• There is a lot of black empty space making the cover look really plain
• The use of the borders manages to make the image look more interesting
• The use of still images from the video manages to create a link between the video and the DigiPak.

Album Cover and Digipak Photoshoot

After looking at our possible digipak photos we decided to expand our choices by taking another day to take some more photo's for the covers.

We decided to not use the video camera but a digital camera so that the quality of the still's would be much better.

We tried to use different locations and camera angles to give us a variety of choices. First we decided to try an extreme close up to try and emphasise the emotions portrayed on her face. To get a variety we decided to try it in black and white and also in colour.

Also the same with pictures of the singer up against the wall we tried different types of angles but also in black and white, and then colour.

Here is a slideshow of the photo's we narrowed it down to in our choice for our digipak.

We did this slideshow to show that we haven’t just taken one picture and used it for the Digipak and album cover, it shows that we have taken a variety of shots in different sceneries so that we could select the best shots for our promotional products. To create the slideshow we used iMovie HD and loaded the pictures onto it and arranged them accordingly.