Daniella - Evaluation Question 1-4

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

The Enemy's existing music videos usually evoke a gritty feel and commonly consist of simplistic themes, a vague storyline and often feature the band themselves. Their music videos as mentioned are usually simplistic, meaning that there's never a lot going on and doesn't leave you confused so we decided to keep to this for our version. We have only one character in our video, the ballet dancer, and the same girl is used throughout the whole thing. The video is narrative, so it goes alongside the lyrics telling a story which has an easily followed beginning middle and end. 

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

The general theme has been kept throughout the making of both the ancillary tasks and our music video. We have made sure that both run alongside each other, making sure that both will attract the audience that we are aiming to target. We had already established that The Enemy's music appeals to people from the ages of teen+ and anyone that likes edgy Britpop and Rock music. Our magazine poster features the girl in the video stood outside a terraced house in her ballet outfit. This shows that she's a general working class girl that just wants to fulfill her dream which is the story in the music video. 

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

After posting our video on social networking site facebook, it allowed people to watch and share their comments. On a whole we received a positive response which shows that our intentions for our music video worked well, and people enjoyed watching it. Even though the response was good, we know ourselves that there are things we needed to improve on such as camera angles and the general filming.

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

During the construction of our media task, the main technology we used was a camera to film our narrative video to go with the song we chose. Occasionally using a tripod to get a still image but most of the time we would just hold the camera, we felt this gave a more true to life feel to the video. iMovie and Photoshop were frequently used computer programs during the making of our product helping us edit pictures and video clips to get the designs we desired. Having not used them a lot before I have now learned how to use them to quite an extent. During the research and planning stage we used Google and YouTube quite a bit to help with finding out information on the band and other aspects that we needed to know in order to complete our media tasks to a high standard.

Like A Dancer Music Video

Ancillary Task - Magazine Advert

Ancillary Task - Back Cover of Album

Ancillary Task - Front Cover of Album

Ancillary Task Experiments

Once we had our photos, we wanted to play around with them on photoshop, changing different elements of the image. This image is an example of one of our experiments where we changed the colours and style of the image. We liked this edit because the girl stands out against the background, however we thought it was a bit too much for our final design.

Ancillary Task

For our ancillary tasks we needed photos for our CD cover and music poster. We then came up with the idea of using The Enemy's original design but making it our own version. This meant we would use a terraced house location, and have the girl in the music video do some ballet poses.

Posters

These are posters for singles by The Enemy. They all feature simple photos, so it would be easy to imitate one in the style of these when making a poster for the song to our music video.

Throughout the video there will be scenes of the girl practising her moves for the end performance. It will be focusing mainly on how difficult she is finding it to get the moves right.
By showing the different poses and body movements, we are hoping to create the emotional effect that someone can have towards their ambition and lifestyle.

This is the stage that the girl does her big performance on at the end of the video. The lighting has been changed to create more of an appropriate mood for the performance.

CD Cover

For the Ancillary tasks, we will be making a poster and a CD cover.

                                                                                              This is the original CD cover for The Enemy's most recent album that features the song 'Like A Dancer' that we are using for our music video.
We want to make our CD cover similar to the original, just making it more suited to the one particular song.
Our idea is to have the main image on the front as the girl that we are using in our video stood in front of a row of terraced houses in her ballet outfit. 
This will not only show the relevance to our music video but will also single out the girl against everything around her, which helps express the idea of the girl going through a lonely period of time to make sure her performance goes right in the end.

This is an image taken from a part of the filming we have done which shows the girl warming up. She is warming up before her big performance which happens at the end of the video.

For the Ancillary tasks, we will be making a poster and a CD cover.