Written Evaluation - My Question Contribution.

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

 As a group, we picked to use the song “Good Time” by Owl City and Carly Rae Jepson. The song is a mix between Owl City’s Electronic and Carly’s Pop music genres to make synthpop.

In the video, we followed Andrew Goodwin’s theory. We included thought beats in the video to make it more exciting and to keep to the pace of the song. We used the star image of both artists whom can be seen singing both of their parts and acting in the video.

Throughout the music video we’ve tried to link the scenes into the narrative of what is being sung, the main narrative of the song is in the name as well; they are doing what allows them to have a good time and are singing about it.

The Original “Good Time” Official music video shows both Carly and Owl getting prepared for the outdoor party then traveling to the great outdoors to have a good time. Throughout the song both of the artists are separate doing their own preparation for the night, and only in the later parts of the song are they finally performing together, we tried to re-create this in our music video by having both singers having a verse to themselves and the main event at the end being an outdoor party at a firework celebration. 

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

When trying to gather feedback from viewers of all genders, ages and stereotypical backgrounds I posted our music video on to Facebook, however we got a few likes but no comments. This is mainly because Facebook has decreased in popularity and the main majority of students now use Twitter instead which we cant post music videos in to tweets. Instead to gather audience feedback we decided to gather a small group of students and have them watch our music video. We then handed them each a questionnaire to get their own feedback and also interviewed them with a few main questions we wanted to find out such as the lip syncing, their favourite part and least favourite part and took notes as they expressed their thoughts and opinions. We didn't add these main questions to the questionnaire as we didn't want the group of students to become bored with a long questionnaire.

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

During the planning stages for the Digipak and advert, Gareth and I had to compromise and make sure the two products linked with each other. We wanted to keep it within the genres of Pop and Electronic in keepings with the two main artists.

After seeing the planning of the music video; seeing that we were going to go with night time and fireworks for the grand finale at the end of the song it was decided that we should base the digipak and advert around this.

During the planning thought process I was going to try and create a very typical colour scheme for the work, picking blue to represent Owl city and pink to represent Carly Rae. Gareth needed to plan to create the digital art for six panes and with the colour scheme already chosen whilst I had to come up with what images which I edited could be used in the advert and how I would put an effect to them, we both then started to use photoshop tutorials to find new techniques that we could later implement into the creation of the digital art. During the tutorial for Gareth that was to create a fire orb, he came up with the idea of creating a Katharine wheel firework and placing it on the back of the Digipack where the song listing and copyright information would be. It would of been created so it was quite big, and then place it on the back where you could only see one quater of the image witch would be placed in the top right; He also intended on having sparks flying off to the edges of the back cover.

This however proved to be initially difficult to merge blue and pink into the Catharine wheel and also to create the sparks, and at this time I had not decided on the constant background colour being black.

From his ideas I had to try and link them to the advert. I decided to do the same as Gareth and look through a few Photoshop tutorials at home and then immediately include them into our digipak. I took a copy of the background Gareth used with the blue and white sparks to represent Owl City and Carly Rae Jepsen placed on the black background. I decided to include an image of both of the singers on the advert but instead of them being too bold and not looking very professional I decided to alter the transparency so the sparks in the background were still noticeable. Due to me being absent the lesson after I sent my progress to Gareth who then added the text and logo at the bottom. He then resent it to me to see if I was okay with the final editing he completed, to which I agreed to as they represented the video and were clearly representative to each other with the same colour scheme.
When thinking of a design for the advert I decided to look at previous adverts to promote other bands and singers to gather ideas from theirs. I was sure to include an image of the band so the audience could see who the singers were, which also linked with the digipak as it also included an image of the band. I also decided to include comments from top radio stations and magazines to show how even top music producers and reviewers would rate the album along with the bands name, logo, release date, and website.
Overall after comparing my advert to the digipak and other famous adverts I think the outcome was pretty good and resembles the product we are promoting.