Evaluation by Charlotte Timm

This assignment consists of evaluating our media projects that we have created during the last few weeks. Those projects were a music video and two ancillary texts;one being a magazine advert of the band and the chosen track and the second being a Digipak of the music video and track.
To evaluate the music video we are using Goodwin's Music Video Analysis Theory factors.

First of all I should explain what our music video consisted of.Our chosen track "Lights & Music" was by a current Australian band named "Cut Copy". This band would probably be associated with the "Indie" genre as it consists of multiple members in the band and have a soft rock theme, however this band uses upbeat and electronic sounds to differentiate itself from other popular bands.
We chose this track as it had a "happy-go-lucky" feeling to it, and creates a friendly/humourous theme in our minds. This may have been our biggest influence to what our music video narrative would be.

Our narrative was a basic concept of a male individual getting ready for a night out, to have a good time. Throughout the story it demonstrates the character being intoxicated and demonstrates a stereotypical youth's habits. It is often seen in music video's to have a narrative following a particular character throught the song to unravel their mission/adventure/day or life.
However in this case, we had been previously watching popular music video's and had viewed one that stuck in mind. The famous British band "The Prodigy" had a chocking and explicit music video for their track "Smack My Bitch Up" not only did the track's name find to be offensive but so did the video's context.
What we liked about this video is that it followed a character through the whole video and unravel a story.
In our music video we failed to bring much performance, which would have probably been expected for a Indie type song. But including performance to our narrative proved to be hard to find relevance. Instead we used minimal characters but the one.However to captivate the audience we used the idea of looking through someone else's perspective. We did so by filming a large percentage of our footage at eye level as to represent the camera as the character's eyes. And of course we needed typical music video genre characteristics such as close up's of the main character;this also helped us to demonstrate the characters intoxicated state. We also demonstrated this by using medium long shots to show the characters body language and movement.

After completing the music video we had to create a magazine advert, so in effort to create a realistic magazine advert we looked at already existing magazine articles and advertisments and found that they used minimal visuals and less information then expected.
However we create our's by including an image of the band; to create recognition, it's name and a few of their track's names, a release date and areas to buy or download the album/tracks. Including where the tracks can be bought such as stores (Virgin,HMV,Amazon) or Itunes premotes stop to illegal downloading. We kept the advert simple,hopefully intersting enough to grab the reader's attention and encourage them to pursue more intrest to the band and it's music. Our second ancillary text was a Digipak, digipaks are a patented style of CD (compact disk) or DVD (digital video disk) packaging. Our Digipak was bright and vivid,captivating the audience. However it was only so because of the band's logo,which we chose to use. Not only is this logo used in posters but it is used in every item available for the public to purchase. Therefore we only felt it was aproppriate to use it to create a theme. We used the logo in the front cover and inside the Didgipak,to clearly demonstrate who this Digipak is by and what it is selling. We used the same colours used in the logo into stripes to list the tracks available in the Digipak. We also added the DVD logo to our product to make it more realistic and to inform what the Digipak consists of to a potential buyer.

After completing all of these products we had audience and peer to peer reviews. As expected this gave us an evaluating perspective to clarify what was good and bad. This was incredibly helpful as it emphasised our strengths and weaknesses of our project. For example, as expected our peer told us that we missed performance in the video and that our Digipak should have used darker writing to be more ledgable. This gave us the chance to correct what could be corrected.
Peer review was deffinatly the most important as the comments given were valid and precise.
Through out the whole making of our product we relied and searched for all our information on the Internet. We constantly blogged our progress,and meeting deadlines.Sites such as Youtube, to watch already existing video's and to load our own helped us. Wikipedia gave us information on the band and where they were from alos giving names which we used in our magazine advert.We also used Myspace to contact the band asking permission to use their track for our project, unfortunatly we had no reply. We has access to great programs such as AS Photoshop and Final Cut Express to edit and create our music video and ancillary texts.