Closing blog post.

Dear Moderator, I present to you my humble coursework. The blog is now complete and ready to be assessed. I hope you enjoy it, thank you.

Question 4:

How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

The part of the project that required the most technology was the music video.

Obviously this required a video camera, editing software, a computer and a video hosting website. These were all universally useful because without the camera there would be no video at all. The editing software was infinately useful in synching up the video and creating visual effects and without youtube as a hosting website we would not have been able to show it publicly.

Technology actually helped when it came to creativity due to the easiness of using the videoediting software. There was also lots and lots of creativity allowed when making the cover and advert images thanks to photoshop.

I don't think technologu hindered us much during the filming or editing, the only things that really limited our capabilities were lack of a high budget and perhaps less personel working on it. Technology seemed to make everything much easier then it would have been in the past. I even managed to get in contact with the artist really easily over the internet.

The only real problem I could see with the technology would be that sometimes it got a little complicated, but that didn't matter, because we got the hang of the technology really easily.

Question 3:

https://prezi.com/secure/fe6c452ac984a3fe3ce341c341f9a57e47b7a5f8/

The response to the video was largely positive. Many people, including those who were not a part of the target audience, enjoyed the video in one way or another.

The target audience identified the video as being original and in many ways ulterior in style. Those who would be assumed to not have the culture capital to understand or get the video were able to appreciate the thematic elements in the video and the effects and concept. The only negative feedback was the associations that one person made towards other texts that he did not enjoy. However these were unintended.

In fact, the person that made this distinction also recognised our videos superiority to the other text. He mentioned that we managed to create depth in our video surpassing that of the book.

This is what we intended, because there were supposed to be multiple interpretations of what the video was about and what was going on in the video, and the fact that the depth of story was mentioned confirms that the video has created a sufficient amount of depth.

In summary the audience has read the text in the way we intended, which is to form their own interpretation. They also appreciated many of the concepts we created and despite a lack of culture capital many people also managed to not exactly understand the video but at least appreciate it. This means that the video was accessible in many ways and also filled our creative desire to form mystique around the video and song.

Question 2:

How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

Question 1:

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

Our media product was influenced heavily by the the conventions, or lack thereof, of independent artists who often afford themselves lots of creative freedom and attempt to break genre conventions. Because of this our media texts were heavily influenced by a range of artistic 'philosophies' as opposed to aesthetic principles.

Many many music videos often use narratives with specific timelines, stories and characters involved or just performance. Our media text attempted top blend the two and make it as entropic as possible. It is a piece of work that is entirely open to interpretation. Since our audience was one who would consider themselves philosophical and artistic they would enjoy a video which contained a slight amount of mystique and the least ammount of redundancy possible, as they would find a simple narrative or performance video boring. The album cover itself isn't much different to most, but the use of colour and photoshop to a very large extent shows the artistic nature of the artist in question.

in terms of originality I think we've been mostly original. The main theme we came up with was to look purposefully amateurish and seem like the footage was done on home video. This could be linked films which use the 'found footage' style of narrative. Where the film itself is portrayed to be real and the narrative is actually woven in to the fact that it's being filmed, drawing links to films such as 'The Blair Witch Project'. The idea that the narrative is told almost entirely through the body language and facial expressions of the actress also shows this mysterious quality to the genre, as are trying to work out who she is talking to and what she is saying.

The dangers of challenging lots of forms and conventions though were that if you go to far away from what's comfortable and you risk alienating the audience. Whilst may people would enjoy the innovation the risk of failing miserably and just appearing pretentious or tacky. Forms and conventions, whilst they can appear generic, are there because they worked in the first place.

Conversely, because forms and conventions can work so well they are obviously overused and may appear generic or boring or unimaginative. And appear unoriginal and unimaginative would be the kryptonite of any artist, so conforming to genre conventions to a large extent would be dangerously predictable.