Evaluation
For our three media products we have a magazine advert, Digipack and a music video for ‘An Oak Tree – get cape wear cape fly’. This is an indie/pop song. Most indie/pop music videos would feature the band or singer but our doesn’t, however using animation makes it unique and surreal which you often see in this genre video.
On magazine adverts typical features that we noticed looking at professional products were, rating from a known radio station or television program, information of where to buy or where to go like a website, a release date and a photograph of the band or artist. We included all of these features for our advert and for the picture of the band we had our four group members posing as a tree. For example, our finished advert has five stars – kiss fm written on it. Also, we didn’t edit this picture as we thought the readers would need to be able to recognise the band if they did not know them by name. Because the picture was not from the video we also included characters from the video to relate the two.
Our digipack contained logos and information for viewers on the back cover, e.g. an age rating and production logo, track list, etc. We also had the background from the video on the front, back and spine of the digipack also with clouds so it was all the same theme. The font used also uses the same sketchy animated theme as it is a cartoon like handwritten font and the picture of the band has been edited and has had the colours changed and filled to block colours on the computer. On the front and the spine there is the bands name ‘Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly’ and the song name that we used, ‘An Oak Tree’. All of these features are what we saw on professional digipacks when we researched them.
When thinking about creating the video we listened to the lyrics to our song we started to get lots of ideas. We looked at professional animated products, for example television adverts. One advert that stood out was a Ben & Jerrys animated advert. This felt like it showed a short story to the product they were selling and the way it was all animated and editing was very interesting and eye catching and always had your attention. The advert had a very obvious link to visuals and sounds and this inspired us for what we wanted to create. Features in our final video were, the use of bright colours, surrealism and it was very unique. Being animated with a cartoon theme it was very important to include the bright colours. Being animated meant we had a lot of choice in what we could create, for example we had a singing oak tree which shows the surrealism and how it was unique. A common feature to have is lip sinking with the footage of the singer and the track on the computer. We didn’t have a band member featuring so with the oak tree animated we could lip sink the mouth to the words. Like Goodwin’s points mentioned, we linked our lyrics with visuals for example when it says ‘stripping back to the bare branch’ we see the trees branches come through and loos his leaves.
The combination of all our media products creates a very strong indie/pop theme and genre. Because we used the same photograph on our ancillary texts it shows a clear link between the products even though one product is not the same background and pictures as the music video. The colour scheme for the digipack and the music video are the same how ever the magazine advert has as a bit more subtle and realistic colour scheme but still relates to the promotion of the song ‘an oak tree’. As the band is not well known we felt they needed to be seen on the magazine advert because the digipack only shows faces and the music video doesn’t include the band at all and it is important for the audience to make a link between the three products.
During the process of making our music video we had two stages where we could receive audience feedback before submitting our final video. This helped us to see what other people saw when they watched it for the first time as it is easy to get buried into work without realising some things. We received feedback on pitching our idea and were told what people thought about it and then we received more after submitting our rough-cut. It is important to get feedback from our target audience as we are trying to make the video appeal to them the most. Using this we were able to make changes to ideas and what we had already made. One thing that was pointed out to us was how the background didn’t fit in with what we had created on the computer to go into the video. We took this on board and changed our background which sets the scene of a park, to typical block colours for the sky and grass and added cartoon flowers into the grass. After making the change we realised how the older background didn’t fit in. Also after showing our rough cut we were told to make the pace faster. We used close-ups of the tree and other things like leaves and music notes to help created a faster paced video. I felt this worked as the choppier shots made it more interesting and changed the scene so it didn’t get too boring. We received one more lot of feedback after submitting our final video. Our audience noticed how all the visuals matched the lyrics and also commented on how it was unique. Our main criticism was about how the pace still didn’t feel fast enough for the song. If we had the chance the changes we would make would be to created more shots to make it more choppy and have more things going on in the scenes.
To be able to create our animated video we would have to use, Photoshop. Using Photoshop to create each animal or character in different layers meant we could draw a picture then save each layer so when it comes to animating we could move one layer at a time. To begin with it was difficult to use Photoshop as there is so much to it but once we learnt the basics it was easier to create different things and we discovered other features of the software and found out how to do things in an easier and quicker way. We also used Photoshop for the digipack and magazine advert. After creating our Photoshop images we then had to transfer them to a programme called Final Cut Express. In this programme we could put our images with sounds track. We could move each layer from Photoshop in a sequence which was saved and when played was an animation. To document our progress we were able to get screen grabs of the programmes we used and put them on our blog in a website called blogger.com. using blogger meant documenting all our computer was easier to do and we could also have it public for other people in our class or for our teacher look out and then comment on. This was also a good way of displaying and explaining what problems we faced creating animation. We could also import the images created for the video from Photoshop to the blog. After finishing our video we had to use a programme called QuickTime so we were able to publish our video on the internet using Youtune.com. We also had to publish our video to put it on to out blog. Having our video on Youtube meant anyone anywhere could watch our it. The biggest problem we faced with animation was rendering. In order to watch our video whilst making it we had to render the sound with the music and each animation together. This took up a lot of our time and we could have got more in our video if we didn’t have to wait to watch what we had just animated. But we managed to get round the problem and save some of the time by using another Mac to animate on then use a USB stick to transfer as we could not use final cut express whilst rendering. Without the use of all these websites and programmes it wouldn’t have been possible to make an animated video which is all computerized. It is so much faster and fewer complexes to anyone to create a video of there own and have it published over the internet now we have so much software available
Looking back on the video and how we had to create it I think we done well. We learnt a lot of things about the computers and software we used. If I were to repeat it again I think we should try computerized animation and creating a scene from hand then capturing freeze frames at the beginning after we had an idea so we could see which one would have worked. I was very happy with final outcome for all three products.
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