Evaluation

When making our music video we felt a need to be original but also conform to the conventions of real media products. Our idea was to present a ska/punk band of three boys causing trouble and having an enjoyable time on the way. They got up to many activities in the music video, this followed Goodwin's point of following the genre characteristics; ska/punk bands are often rebellious people, so we tried to portray the actors in this way as much as we could. The actors did this by giving out a strong energy to live up to the standards of the upbeat music. Dancing, pranking people and acting immature. For example there is a scene of two of the actors playing in a children's park. More ways we followed the genre characteristics was by filming in appropriate locations; jumping into the river cam, garages surrounded by graffiti and green areas for the ball activities. All the filming locations proved to be successful as they were easy to assess and related to our theme. Further following Goodwin's points we included close up's of the artists to meet the needs to the record label. The lyrics and the visuals linked when the artist's are shown in a split screen with 'B.P.C' written on their stomachs. A relationship with the music and the visuals is also present when hitting the fruit with the bat; the fruit was hit on a beat.
We were inspired by popular internet personality, 'MC Devvo' - a satirical fictional character. He frequently uses profanity and is generally unpleasant and confrontational to people. We touched on this idea and found his work to be a good starting point, based on the humour content. We also followed the use of real media products by watching Blink 182's video 'What's my age again'. Using the three male characters was present in both our music videos.
As well as following some conventions we also developed our ideas by pushing the boundaries; the running scene was hard to film as we didn't want to attract too much attention from the public, just enough for the audience to notice that the characters are shocking the public, not to get into trouble. We raised the rating to an '18' certificate as some of the language and acting would not be suitable for younger audiences. After all the target audience we were aiming at was males in their early 20's, we wanted to appeal to an audience that would find this sort of humour amusing.

A combination of three products were used to create our final media coursework; the Digipak, the magazine cover and the music video. They all had to be combined together. To do this we made sure the humorous theme from our music video, e.g. running in public in man thongs, running into each other with inflatable balls and dancing with a popular Cambridge milk shake character was included. The humour we used to for the magazine advert was a twist on the popular image of John Lennon and Yoko Ono. We developed the idea by using Liam and Callum as replacements, they wore their gold mask and man thongs also. We made an effort to use the gold bed cover as it complimented the gold mask appropriately. For the Digipak we decided to use an image of someone taking a photo of the two 'runners' as the front cover. The back of the cover features parts from the music video that sum up the product as a whole. Humorous parts like the boxing scene, jumping into the river and the trolley scene are pictured. The font we used is also continued, the font isn't conventional, it is similar to a graffiti style of font which connotes rebellion; a theme that is persistent with our products. The artists are represented in the same way throughout our products, they're also represented as mischievous boys; they have careless attitudes and enjoy having fun. From the amusing antics in the music video, to the courageous posing for the magazine advert and all the ideas drawn in the for Digipak, we have deliberately made sure they're shown in this way. The combination of the products are effective as we have a continuous theme throughout.

Receiving audience feedback always helps with developing ideas for a media product. Teachers and peers have commented on our music video, as well as giving us ideas for our magazine cover and Digi pak. The students in our class found the ideas impressive, they felt our blog looks well visually as we've included all our inspiration. Other positive comments that were made mentioned how we have stuck to our original ideas that we planned for, and have a lot of footage to work with. The various scenes we seem to have so much of helped when teachers mentioned the video would look better the shots were faster to make the video more exciting. We went on to do this, and were able to from the large amount of different footage we had. It worked out positively in the end as our video now shows how we wanted to present it; in the most captivating way. Suggestions were made to include something comical for our magazine advert and the Digipak, so it follows the humorous theme of our video. We listened to all of the feedback (that was told verbally and also commented on our blog) and made sure to incorporate it as much as possible; after all the audience needs needs to be most impressed by the work as they're going to be the ones investing in the products.
We decided to do extra filming in the half term to make sure we had enough footage to work with. The difference that was made from the draft video to the final were: changes of characters (Gareth replacing Rojiar) as we felt having an all male group made more sense to our idea; as we used blink 182 as our inspiration, using three boys followed this. Gareth went on to recording one more verse. We also re-filmed Liams verse as the lip syking was slightly out of time when we first filmed. Other random footage was also filmed, e.g. fruit throwing, 'vandalising' scenes and dancing. The re filming did take up a majority of our time, but it was definitely worth it now that we've finished the final product.

To produce the media products for our music video task we needed to use media technologies. When researching, using the internet for ideas was incredibly useful; sites like 'youtube'
and 'google' helped us search for music videos, pranking ideas and products we could buy as props. This was helpful because it kept us organised and on top of our planning.
When constructing our products; we used different technologies than the planning. To make the music video 'Final Cut' was the programme we used to edit the different clips of our video together. It was a suitable software as it's easy to use and enabled us to make the video appear more interesting than just putting the clips in un-edited; we shortened clips to make them more snappy, made the lip syncing in time, inserted titles and were able to cut down the music to fit with our visuals.
When making our digi pak and magazine covers we used 'Photoshop' as photo editing software to make the images. Photoshop helped us create developed and professional products that could be used for advertising. 'Myspace' was another internet site we used to contact 'The Filaments' when informing them about us using their song. We also used Myspace to listen to their song at home so we could learn the lyrics for filming, viewing their picture to get a feel of their 'punk image' also helped us live up to that.
To evaluate our work we published our findings on 'Blogger', a blogging site to upload our inspirational photos and videos. We also put up ideas that we had for our products, such as possible magazine cover ideas. Our most inspiring video - Blink 182's 'What's my age again' was also analysed and put on the blog. Blogger also helped to develop our ideas as our class members were able to view our uploads and comment on them.

To conclude, I feel we have achieved what we set out to produce. We've all enjoyed making our products, from the filming of the running scenes to photographing the images for the magazine
cover. Our music video is a great improvement from our work last year.