Written Commentary

Written Analysis of The Media Products.

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

I think our music video both uses and develops both ‘scene’ and ‘punk’ genre of music. It uses both genres, e.g. the bright colours and alternative clothing style of ‘scene’ and the destructiveness and mayhem and performance elements of ‘punk’. It also challenges these two genres of music by using them both in the video, this can be seen in certain shots such as when the balloons, which are bright and colourful, are kicked around and jumped on, or when the chair is broken apart by me in a bright green hoodie with fluorescent pink and yellow trainers, which is a well constructed fusion of ‘punk’ and ‘scene’. There are very few, if any, real media products that try this sort of combination as it is hard to pull off as I now know. I feel that our ancillary products do not help this fusion of ‘scene’ and ‘punk’ as they fail to combine the bright colours with the mayhem and anarchy that the ‘punk’ genre is primarily about.
How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?


I believe the combination of our main product and ancillary texts works well yet still leaves a lot to be desired. I think that the magazine advert should have been more colourful with the texts and background and should have shown more of the ‘punk’ side of the band. It also lacks a leaf with the price and a puff to say where it can be bought, it does however carry a release date but I just don’t think it’s enough. It does show the band and really sells the artists as it has some good shots of the band each doing there own ‘thing’. The DVD digipak is a really big let down for me as there just isn’t enough information and pictures on the cover. In my eyes it needed a track list, more special features, e.g. outtakes from the video, free band poster, etc. On the whole I do think that our ancillary products help to sell the band and would create interest for fans of the band and convince them to buy our product.
What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

We learnt a lot from our audience feedback. After they saw our rough cut video the general conclusion was, more footage needed to finish the video, faster shots and more construction with the footage itself, we took this into account and went out and filmed as much footage as we could to rectify this problem, then went on to finish our piece and make sure it lived up to expectations. After the final cut was viewed our audience feedback had changed dramatically. They said how they thought we had ‘definitely improved our rough cut’ and managed to ‘bring out the full potential’ of our video. They suggested using shots from our video on our magazine advert and our digipak. Which we did, however it is more noticeable on our digipak than our magazine advert. After showing these product to our audience the general feedback was that it was well put together, helped to sell the artist etc. We were happy with the feedback as there were almost no negative comments.
How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

We used many new technologies with our piece in the research, planning, construction and evaluation stages. During the research we used the internet, we used websites such as ‘YouTube’ and ‘Google’, to help us decide how we were going to get our music video to feel, we had influences such has Hadouken’s ‘Get Smashed Gate Crash’ and Red Hot Chilli Peppers’ ‘Can’t Stop’. In the planning stages we used Blogger.com a lot as it helped us share ideas when we couldn’t contact each other and it let us post our mood board and video research on so people could see what we were going for with our video. At the construction and evaluation stages of our piece we were mainly using handheld cameras, which have only been around for a few decades, and used the Apple Mac computer, and a program known as Final Cut Pro, where we could upload, edit and refine our music video and the Photoshop program were we could edit and create our ancillary tasks. These systems were essential as it really cuts down the amount of work needed to do to create a music video.