Evaluation of Advance Production

Final Poster

For our final cut we of the magazine advert we changed the font to match the font on the digipack to highlight continuity, we also added our website so  the fans can look up and read up more about our band we also added our logo ‘cupcake productions’ as this makes it look authentic. I was worried that overloading our poster would take the focus away from the image of Maya but I believe we have the right balance and I am really happy with the outcome.

Final Cut of Digipack

We have finally decided to use pink in our colour scheme as our target audience is girls and this is a very girly colour we have also used black and gray to keep it looking professional and classy. The images below are represent what our digipack looks like; front page is of all three of us sitting on the our name ‘Sugardolls’ and then we each have our own page inside and then the back page with the song names, our website, our logo ‘cupcake production’ which we have used throughout AS and A2 in order to make it look authentic. I am pleased with the overall look of our didpack as I believe it suits our target audience and looks classy.

First Lesson After Easter

So we have had two weeks off for Easter and now we are back we need to complete our evaluation which we were unable to finish before half term! During our lesson on Tuesday we were able to upload our footage, as before we were using the wrong camera and wouldn’t upload. We than started to edit we took moving images from our production and placed them in the appropriate places which relation to what we were saying, to make our evaluation more visual. Although we didn’t finish this in our lesson on Tuesday therefore we will be staying after tomorrows lesson to complete it.

Evaluation Questions

For our final piece of our coursework we need to evaluate our whole production and produce it in an interesting and creative way rather than a written essay. Our teacher showed us a number of ways which we could do this to give us some ideas, we have decided to make video using our voice over with images of relevant clips from our production.

We were all given the same elevation questions to answer, these were;

1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
2. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
3. What have you learned from your audience feedback?
4. How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Evaluation Question (Feedback)

Our of our evaluation questions consisted of us asking our target audience some questions about our final production and ancillary tasks to find out their opinions on it, we made sure we asked individuals who had never seen our production before so they were looking at it with fresh eyes and no background knowledge of it. We all asked three different people the same questions. I asked three of my friend two that go to my school and one that goes to a different school in the area they are all 18 therefore they fit into our target audience. There’s were;

1.    Do you think the theme and idea of the video is clear?

Alex; ‘ I like the theme and the angle you have taken to it, using the young girl really makes you think about the music video and it keeps you intrigued throughout as you want to know what happens’

Megan;‘ it makes you realise that beauty isn’t all about appearance as you realise it is a stange to see a young girl doing what you expend an adult to do therefore i believe it puts out a really inspiring message, it works really well!’

Hollie; ‘It is clear to see that it is about beauty and self-esteem’

2.    Do you think the production, digipack and magazine advert would appeal to our target audience of teenage to adult females? Why?

Alex; ‘Yes as it is about beauty and has a girly theme which is reflect in the font and colours which you have used’

Megan; ‘I really like the magazine advert as it makes you take a second look and think therefore it works well and will definitely appeal!’

Hollie; ‘I think it does appeal to both teenagers and adults as although it is girly it is still classy’

3.    After seeing the music video, magazine poster and digipack, do you think there is enough continuity to link all three together?

Alex; ‘I think there is although the band isn’t on the poster; Maya is which having seen the music video is a hard image to forget’

Megan; ‘The font really helps with the continuity; I really like how you have placed the band members on the band name’

Hollie; ‘They do all link together, nothing appears misplaced. You can easily link all three together’

Alex

 Megan

 Hollie

Final Cut of Production

Week beginning 5th March

As our main producing is now complete (phew) we now need to put our focus on our ancillary tasks! We retook our pictures of the digipack as we didn’t think they were working well. We decided to stick to the colour theme of black and white in reflection to what we wore as this is simple and classy. We decided to change where we took the picture as we art gallery was free and this has much better lighting so also used artificial lights an stood in front of a white background. We chose to pose just smiling and varied it by taking some on chairs so Paige could edit this out and put it on top of our name ‘Sugardolls’ which was our original idea. As we had time left after we took the images Paige began to edit them and as we didn’t finish she had the programme at home so she continued to edit them there so we can finish our ancillary tasks to show on Thursday.

Feedback on 3rd cut

We showed our 3^rd cut of our production to our class in order to receive feedback from them and our teacher. Mrs. Allison gave us a feedback sheet which can be seen below, this was able to show us that our production falls mainly into the ‘proficient’ section but it does include some parts of basic and some of excellent level.

The main three sections are teacher believes we need to improve are;

1.       Mrs believes it is hard to tell that in this shot that Maya turns into Millie, we have reshot this several times but she still doesn’t believe it is working well enough. Although she doesn’t like it, she said she understand what we are trying to do and as a group we believe it is an extremely interesting shot so we are debating if we want to change it or not.

2.       At the end of our production we have accidently cut Paige off to soon so she doesn’t say the last word, therefore we just need to extend this and make it longer so she signs to the end of the line as at the minute it looks uncomfortable.

3.       In our 2^nd lot of masks we have used cross dissolve however we do not believe this looks the best and we have discovered that in our 1^st lot we used dip to black which we believe works better therefore we are going to change the 2^nd lot to dip to black as well.

Ancillary Task - First Draft

We have decided to use the first image of Maya on our magazine as we believe the fact that her pink lipstick stands out more than in the black and white picture. We had also added our band name in  a similar to the one we had previously designed as well as the name of the song and the release date. Our first draft can be seen below:

We were debating to add more information to our poster but then we don’t want to lose the dramatic effect of Maya by overloading it with other information however I do think it is important to add the company logo.We are going to change our band name font into the one we have designed which is presented below so there is continuity with the digipack:

We decided we wanted our digiack to be simple therefore we stuck to the colour scheme of black, pink. When designing our digipack we can across a problem in editing the image therefore for the time being we have decided to leave them as they are to just give a feel of how the digipack will look. We will most likely take some more pictures, as no one particularly likes the ones we have at the moment also Millie has dyed her hair back blonde so this will be a better match with the music video. The images we have taken so far can be seen below;

Week beginning 20th Feb

In our lesson on Thursday our 3^rd cut of our production and the first draft of our ancillary tasks are due, we knew we had to check over our production and start to put together our digipack and magazine advert. As Paige edited out pictures, Millie and I decided to put together the ancillary tasks and produce the writing and layout together.

We had many ideas of what image to use for our poster, we had previously planned to see an image of us three but we decided we wanted it to be more shocking than this and eye catching therefore Millie and I came up with the idea to use an image of Millie’s little sister Maya, as she appears throughout our music video therefore this will ensure continuity between them. We decided to dress her up with make-up in order for her to look fake meaning she looks ugly which sticks without theme that beauty if found within.

The images below are the shots of Maya which we are choosing between for our advert.

Research

I carried out research into what professional digipack’s look like and what they consist of. I couldn’t find one of the girl band that sung the song ‘Ugly’ which we are using so instead I decided to compare a digipack of a solo artist to a band. I found there to be continuity between them even though there music does not really fit into the same genre. They both had an image of the artist/artists on the front cover and the songs which are in the album on the back. They stuck to their chosen colour scheme through the digipack and liked this into their banc name which was in large font on the front page with the album name underneath.

The inside pages both consisted of images of the artist/artists individually with the lyrics to the song on the opposite page. From this research I have found that continuity in the digipack is key and you also have to show of the artists throughout the digipack.

Week beginning 6th Feb

In our production lessons this week we started on our ancillary tasks, we have decided as a group that for both the digipack and magazine advert that we want to include members of the band members. We think it would add style and class to all wear similar coloured clothes most likely of a pink/nude tone so we match And look simple yet stylish. We then took a variety of images in front of the green screen in order to make it easy to change the background. We took pictures standing up and sitting down on chairs and tables as Paige is able to edit us and put us on top of our band name ‘Sugardolls’ using Photoshop. After we had all the shots we uploaded them to the computer and over the next couple of days Paige will edit them so we are then able to use this image on our ancillary tasks.  

Week beginning 30th Jan

In lesson this week we carried on with our planning as we had no set idea for what our ancillary tasks will look like;

The plan for the digi-pack can be seen below;

 The front cover of the digi-pack we are planning to have our band’s name as the centre of attention and then us three sitting on some of  the letters the plan for this can be seen below;

Inside our digi-pack we want to include a booklet as we believe this is will attracted our target marker more by giving them an insight  into  the band members. This will include a large picture of each band member individually and a quote from each of us relating to beauty. We will also have a page of our signatures as this is often common in did-packs. And the back page will be a image of all three of us together.

The back of the CD cover will be the song titles but this will also include our production label and a barcode to make it look realistic.

We have also decided to make two magazine adverts the plans for these are below;

Research

Cher Lloyd - Want U Back

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inwAc-ZBpx0&ob=av2e

I carried out some more research on music videos, Cher Lloyd new music video is very interesting and contains many elements in it which we have tried and also which we ad through about for example moving images on a still picture and the idea of being on the front of a magazine which can be seen below;

I believe these work really well especially the magazine clip, we have been struggling with this as we found it hard to position ourselves in the shot and make it look like we are really on the front cover. After watching this video I have gained some inspiration as to how it can work successfully. It is also interesting to see how just and simple outline ot features give the audeince and understand where the image is for example teh second image you can see elements on it so you know that the image is like a picture being taken on an Ipone also the last image appears to be on a Ipad, these are both really intersting how they have constrcuted the shots and just you can see how small features give the audience an understanding.

Week beginning 9th Jan

Today we refilmed our mask shots as teh orgional ones we had filmed when put togther didnt flow as people hands were in shot therefore we decided to put the mask on a stick so we would no longer hand continuiity problems with the hands. This also made teh maks more steady, in order to keep the timing correct for when teh mask should rise and then put down we counted for each pupil so we know it was the same for each of them. We used many different students and stood them infornt of black card in order to keep the background the same.

After we had filmed and uploaded our mask footage we contiuned to plan for our ancillary task, we researched magazine adverts for persiosu bands new song. Some of the adverts we foudn are below:

We look at adversisment for girlbands so we can see what they have doen as see if it gives us any inspiration. In all of them teh band members are the main image with just the band name and teh song’s name therefore it is simple. The band members clothes are co-ordinated with eachotehr to created a sense of membership they also all have simplistic backgrounds so the band stands out.

Week beginning 2nd Jan

In our lesson this week we stared to plan our ancillary task, we needed to first come up with our band name. We have decided on ‘Sugardolls’ this isn’t the most original name we wanted it to sound girly and fun. After discussions Paige came up with the idea that we want us three to sit on our bands name this has been roughly designed so we have an idea of what it looks like.

The digi-pack needs to include a booklet about our band, we need this to include quotes and information about teh band members as well as images of our band members together and individually.  

Plans for Ancillary Tasks

A magazine advertisement for the digi-pack (CD/DVD package)

For photographic images: One idea we have had is to make the CD look really big central in the page with us three band members surrounding it but we will be small for example we can be leaning against the CD. This helps to make it the CD the main part of our advertisement and hopefully it will stand out.

This advertisement needs to be bright and colourful so it stands out but we will still want it to stick to the same colour scheme as the digi pack so it helps the consumer to create a relationship between them.

Typography and text: We need the text to be in exactly the same font as what we have used on the digi-pack. One font we have spoken about is ‘Comic Sans MS’. The text needs to be large enough to catch the consumer’s eye but not too big that it overloads the advertisement. Information that we need on the text is the name of the CD, the name of our band, reviews of the CD from celebrities but this would be smaller. Another important bit of information that is needed is the relese date.

Layout decisions: Balance of images to text needs to be equal with most of the text at the bottom of the page and reviews in a smaller font. We want the CD to be in the middle and fairly large so the consumer knows that the CD is the main aspect of the advert.

Genre codes and indicators of audience targeting: The clothes and colour schemes we will be wearing and using will be an indication of the target audience, we will need to wear fairly stylish and girly clothes to relate to teenage girls.

A cover for its release as part of a digi-pack:

For photographic images: After various group discussion and research we have decided that we want to make the front of our digi-pack unique therefore our favourite idea is that we want to have a close up of Maya on the front as this is not what you expect to see on the front of a CD case especially for a girl band. This is likely to intrigue them as they will wonder what the song is about.  

Although we are having a shot of Maya on the front throughout the digi-pack we want individual pictures of us three as well as group ones. Two album covers which we have gained some inspiration from is seen below, although these are not targeting the same audience as us they do not include themselves on ten CD cover;

Typography and text: The font needs to be clear and easy to read we have decided that we want both the name of the CD and our bands name as we want to keep it simple and not confuse the consumer with an overload of information.

Layout decisions: Our digi pack is going to heavily rely on the images of Maya as well as the band as thought it we are going to have pictures of each of us and a little information about us so the consumer can familiarise themselves with us as a band.

Genre codes and indicators of audience: Clothes we will chose to wear in the photo-shot which the images on the digi-pack will come from will represent our style and genre therefore this will indicate to the audience what type of group we are.

Week beginning 16th Jan

In our lesson on Tuesday we needed to edit our re-filmed masks and shots of Maya which were filmed at Millie’s house. The masks shots are a lot more successful now and it has made a big improvement to our overall production as it no longer looks messy and it flows much better. When re-filming we put the masks on a wooden stick making the shot tidier as hands couldn’t be seem and consequently the mask was help in the same position. The shots of Maya look a lot better as we replace the one of her walking which can be seen below;

This is also what our time line looks like now as it is almost finished and the editing is become a lot tighter;

Week beginning 16th Jan

In our lesson on Tuesday we needed to edit our re-filmed masks and shots of Maya which were filmed at Millie’s house. The masks shots are a lot more successful now and it has made a big improvement to our overall production as it no longer looks messy and it flows much better. When re-filming we put the masks on a wooden stick making the shot tidier as hands couldn’t be seem and consequently the mask was help in the same position. The shots of Maya look a lot better as we replace the one of her walking which can be seen below;

This is also what our time line looks like now as it is almost finished and the editing is become a lot tighter;