Gareth - Evaluation

Media Evaluation

Our chosen song by the filaments falls into ‘Ska Punk’, which is a genre of music which generally uses music video that challenges many conventions. Seeing as this would be hard to create a different feel for this kind of song, we decided to stick to the ‘Ska Punk’ conventions throughout our video, which portrayed rebellious teens, which have a strong bond together, but no care for others. But in doing this, we clearly have made our music video go against conventional videos, and how most products attempt to be seen, which means are target audience will be niche.

You can see from our video just our actions aren’t conventional for normal music videos, but i feel it fits perfectly with the characteristics of ‘Ska Punk’. We tried to stick to this firstly in image, and secondly in persona, which I feel again we have manage to successfully portray. In addition to breaking and following these conventions, we also tried to develop them when inputting our own touch of humour into the video, generally Ska Punk is controversial, but taken seriously by the artists, which is where we thought we could add our own twist and work on the rebellious group theme. We thought portraying the group as inseparable would be better for the viewer as this would be easier to relate to, and bring a more humorous side to the group, and again i feel we have done this well, without fading too far off the original set characteristics of Ska Punk.

Other than the video, we thought it would work best in trying to stick to Conventions when coming to the layout of the Magazine and DVD Covers. But the images used are anything but conventional, we’ve managed again to put out own feel the them, which I believe that you can relate to and feel throughout all 3 of the ancillary products, continuing our humour/group bond throughout. You can see this when it comes to the magazine cover, we decided to rein act the famous photo of ‘Yoko Ono + John Lennon’, which we have done without mocking the photo, but bringing our feel of humour to the product.



I feel the combination works great. We’ve managed to successfully portray the Ska Punk conventions, with our own twist of developing this with humour, throughout the video, and the continued onto the magazine and DVD with our own touches, like the copy of ‘John Lennon + Yoko Ono’ which brings a real effect when looking at our pieces, along with continuity. I really like our design on the DVD we have created, we had many ideas at first, but eventually fell upon an idea of using a photo within a photo. You can see from the product, we firstly took a shot of Rojiar holding a camera phone, with our two figures in the background, we then removed the phone, and took the exact same shot. This ment when we came to editing, using photoshop we could apply the second image, onto the first image, which we did in place of the Camera Phones screen. The bonus of doing it this way is it brings better clarity to the picture, along with the wanted fading effects in the background, which we all think works really well. Ontop of this we thought it would be nice to get snaphots of out-takes, or unseen footage we had we came from either footage we planned to use, or luckily stumbled upon. I think this is a great back for our DVD, seeing as most of the photos are from extra un-used footage, it shows how much we really put in this, and again enforces the bond we have as a group.




Gladly we’ve had very little negative feedback, most people seemed to appreciate the work we have put into the three products and feel the bond throughout. The main correlation with our feedback was to do with our editing to the beat, and how it brings our video together, if you look throughout, using final cut we have manage to cut scene on specific beats, or use the footage and actions in it to flow with the song. In addition most agreed that we have followed the Ska Punk conventions successfully, for example we show the rebellious side when spray painting, or breaking the window (we had permission to do), not only this but our strong bond and image that we’re in it together, we can be brought out in the group scenes when lip syncing to ‘the BPC’. Others seemed to feel we have input this into our products well.

The main negative comment to our video was to do with the lip syncing. As you can see ‘B.P.C’ is an upbeat song, which from our perspective made it hard to follow, you can see from the rough cut that we have edited many scenes of our lip syncing, to try to keep the pace to our video which i feel we have transformed well, but in addition to this we’ve pulled some attention away from this by creating so many short other shots that stop you waiting for the next, and keep the viewer watching and waiting for the humorous side of the group, which again pulls the attention away from the lip syncing.


Our main use would have been the Apple Computers and the multiple useful applications that come with them, like Photoshop and Final Cut. Both of these have proved useful when coming to the editing side of out Magazine and DVD. We came across many problems during these processes, which both Final Cut and Photoshop combined were used to sort, like the layering effects for both products, you can easily select and move specific things around the two with no hassle. Again with Final Cut, the ability to cut and choose footage helped significantly, for example we would have bulk scenes of 5-15minutes, and this allowed us to use a tool to cut and drag the wanted footage down onto the sequence. Secondly there’s the internet, where we gained access to our blog, which in turn helped us manage to keep on top of deadline set, and stick to our main targets without fading off course.




In conclusion, I am overall really happy with our 3 products and wouldn’t change a thing about them, we have managed to successfully portray the image wanted throughout, which I personally didn’t think would have been possible at the beginning, due to our resources. Along with this I didn’t think we could perform the multiple stunts, for example the naked run, which was just a fantasy in my eyes. I feel we have also stuck well to our original plans, only adding ideas, rather than swaying off from our ultimate goal, which I believe to have had an impact on the final result showing are persistence and belief in what we wanted from our final product. Moreover we have really shown with our commitment and dedication to our products, mainly our Music Video, obviously by some of the stunts we performed like jumping into the river, or running half naked through the high street, we have gone to large lengths to get our footage, and ultimately, it’s paid off.