Filming the evaluation

Yesterday in the lesson we filmed our evaluation. We answered the following questions; In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages? How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts? What have you learnt from the audience feedback? We gave detailed answers for the questions and the film will be put on the blog at a later date. We filmed the evaluation using a tripod and video camera. We used a mid-shot as we had to fit in all of us in the group.

Completed Video

Here is our finished video. We have got rid of the sound at the end and added in the title card.

CD cover - Final Piece

The Final Piece for the CD Album Cover.

Website 3

I've made a few changes to the page concerning fonts and links.
There are now three fonts on throughout the website :
-Honey
For anything that says Pixie Lott or links to the home page.
-Holla
For the Links at the top and the links to Facebook and Twitter
-Androgyne
For almost everything else.
Other fonts that are used were chosen to represent a brand or company name.

I've added 2 links in the bottom right corner to Facebook and Twitter to be more conventional with this genre. I've also made it clearer on each of the black page how to get to the home page and also on the 'latest pix' and 'videos' pages.

Website 2

So this is the published website!!
www.wix.com/ACGL44/Pixie-Lott

-The bow is our own imagery, which i used Paint-Shop Pro to edit and Kodak to upload it.
-All the links work, including adverts and info boxes, although most links go to blank pages. On every page 'Pixie Lott' in the top left corner will link you to the home page.

This is the video page. Once we have completed our video and commentary i will add both onto here. I've put the picture of Lucy (our Pixie) on the left hand side, with a similar border (Me and Lizzie agreed the 'real' border looked more appropriate for the picture) and font as the home page, in the same way Duffy does on her webpage, as a way of filling the space.

Website

This is our website progress so far. We used Wix.com as we thought it looked more professional than iWeb and there was more variety of effects, layouts, backgrounds etc. I've also put a poll up so you can decide which website you prefer.
1 Home Page.
-Black background, links to gallery, news, tour etc. The carousel at the bottom is moving.
-I'm going to put a slightly faded box behind the left hand column in order to make that clearer (much as pixie does on her website). And maybe put a line to define the top row aswell.
-I've tried to match the fonts, and where they don't they are in a similar style. I think this matches the imagery, however, my only concern is the website doesn't quite capture the message of the song. So i might have to change the imagery.
'Latest Pix' Page
-Its the same format as the home page and i have also moved the album to the left to be further compliment the format. This will also make room for some adverts i have mocked up. One being a Pixie Lott fragrance we named 'Daydream', the other for Next (although I'm not sure this clashes with copyright laws so we may need to come up with our own store name).

2 After this i made some changes and asked my family for their opinions.

My sister (who would be in our target audience) suggested putting a bow on the main picture, however, i would need to do it with our own imagery. Consequently, I've made a prototype with imagery taken from the web.

Semi- Evaluation

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

Our research stage included a focus group of about twelve people. The aim of this was to help us decide on a song and style of video for our music video. Although we did get a lot of feedback from this as to what song would be best for our music video, we only used one specific type of audience for our focus group; year 13, females, all friends. It may have worked better if it was a random group. Saying this it was a success and it would have been hard to find different people to be all free for the time slot we had to carry out our focus group. The people in our focus group also gave us ideas on how to present our music video and how to shoot it. We got the ideas for our costumes from audience research aswell. The music videos we chose to show the focus group were Cheryl Cole 'Fight for this love', Christina Aguilera 'I got trouble', White Stripes 'hardest button to button', Katy Perry 'Waking up in vegas', Pixie Lott 'Boys and girls' and 'Here we go again'. We gained further audience feedback through polls on the blog; we asked which music video the audience prefered and the majority prefered 'I got a feeling' by The Black eyed peas which is a party based video. We gave them a choice of two website designs and asked them to vote which one they prefered. Website two got 100% of the votes and so we chose that one as our website. Then we asked whether the audience prefered a bow on our webpage or not. Although the majority of the voters voted against the bow we chosed to keep it as we thought it was in keeping with Pixie Lotts style.

On our website we have included advertisements like Pixie Lott does on her official fan site. There are boxes to create a clear format and a black background to highlight imagery. However, the imagery is less urbanised as it wouldn't match our video and we've used less vibrant to attract a slightly older audience i.e. our peer group.
We have less lip syncing in our video as we wanted our video to be a little more concept based. We took inspiration from the Adidas advert when we used drawing on the paper on the wall. We also used the fonts styles from Cheryl Cole's webpage and a combination of styles from Duffy's website for our website. We have used ideas from the Keisha 'Tik Tok' video suchas waking up in the bath, paper cups, and people slumped over sofas. We got our idea for the dramatic low angle and pans from the Florence and the machine videos.

For our research stage the only forms of technology we used blogger.com to keep a record of all our research and pictures of our progress. For our editing we have been using a mixture of Imovie and Final Cut. Last year Ayesha used Final Cut but it was too complicated therefore we felt IMovie would be more beneficial. We have used Paint shop pro to edit photographs and Wix.com to create our website, although we did use Iweb briefly. Apart from that we used the usual HD camera, tripod and digital stills camera.

As well as making the music video we had to produce two ancillary tasks. We chose to create a webpage and album cover for our artist. All the parts of our task are interlinked and we go into more detail in our evaluation which will be on the blog at a later date. The three fonts we used for the website were all similar and they all matched the country theme of the video and images. This runs throughout all the tasks. The props we used were used in all parts of our tasks. So if we put something in our video it would most likely appear somewhere in our ancillary tasks aswell e.g. the shoe and the countryside setting. Our final edit of our music video appears as a link on the website and the imagery from the CD appears on the website.