Evaluation Questions - Max Smith

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

Our Music video uses the conventions of other pop music video’s. Bright lights and a main focus on the lead singer. We decided to try and stick to this as it works well in a lot of rihanna and Will.I.Am’s other songs. The use of abstract effects is a strong theme in both artists.
Arguably our group developed this a little bit by using a lot of pre production things, like UV paint, as opposed to putting it on afterwards using programmes such as Final cut, or after effects. This is not a huge step forward but something which makes it stand out amongst other music videos in which the bright colours and abstract features aren’t present when the artist is performing.

2. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancilliary texts?


The ancillary text is important to our music video because it provides some more insight into the process which lead us to what we’ve achieved in this years coursework. From the steps where we were looking at rihanna’s music video’s in a class room, to dancing about wearing uv paint and glowsticks. The slow growth of idea’s and reasons we chose to do the things we did and how we achieved different effects is what really makes this music video stand out to me. Things like the half a second of rewinding bubbles seem really simple when you watch it but lining up the frames is something which really takes a lot of time and luck to complete.

3.What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

Our audience feedback helped us learn that keeping a constant theme (in this case abstract) was one of our strongest points. I feel that if we had decided to create one abstract scene, and one mundane theme our end product would not have turned out nearly as interesting or fun to watch.
It also helped me realise that people do appreciate the idea of doing pre production editing and the amount of pre planning and shopping for mise en scene to get a final clip which might only be 5 to 10 seconds long.

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

We used green screening to have a look at using them as an effect. This helped us decide on how we wanted out music video to end up. We decided against the idea of green screening because of time restraints and how long it would take to make a final product which isn’t constricted by those limitations.