Reflections of our Evaluation

Now that we have finished and I have had a chance to look back at our evaluation I am happy with the final outcome. I think we managed to get everything we needed to into our discussions even though we only had a limited amount of time due to other groups overrunning and our group having to be slotted in later, trying to finish quickly so that Mrs B's class wouldn't be on tape.

I think we all had a fair amount of discussion time in the evaluation as well and it shows that as a group we can work together and also work individually on our own as we all did our own research for the questions too. Even though now I look back I think we shouldn't have been so worried about the evaluation because once we got started it went really quickly, I'm glad we did as much preparation as we did and I think it really shows in our final piece.

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




In this answer we mention all of the equipment that we used and what we used most of it for. Holly led the discussion of this question and once we said all of the equipment we began to say how they had been useful to us and the new things that we had learnt throughout the project.

I think that this question went pretty well as we each had our own opinions and bits to say and we all learnt new stuff about the equipment throughout the project which we individually found useful.

Below is a picture of us with all of our equipment that we used.

Evaluation Question 3

What have you learned from your audience feedback?




Our audience feedback turned out to be really good which is what we were hoping for. The only real problem being that people didn't really completely understand the concept of the music video, but that's not too big a problem as it makes people want to watch our video again, which most people said they would when we asked them. The audience also liked our album cover and website, with the only criticism really being that the front of the album cover was maybe a little bit boring.

I think that we managed to answer this question really well with Amelia leading the question and starting the discussion and then splitting up the feedback between us by good/bad, music video, album cover and website. Splitting it up like this meant that we each managed to talk and we didn't talk over each other too much trying to get it our own opinion.

Evaluation Question 2

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



As I lead us to start with in question 1, Laura began the discussion for question 2. Therefore, although Laura led the discussion I think that I contributed well to this question and tried to help with useful inputs to help evaluate our products. In the end we agreed that we managed to combine our products together well as we used the colour scheme from the video on the album cover and the website as well. We also had links, pictures and a blog about the album cover on the website and had backstage pictures of our shoot to tie in the shoot with the website. By using the colour scheme I think this showed our band as individual and quirky which worked well for us.

To improve the combining of our products we could've, again, had a viral marketing campaign on the website as this would've brought the album cover in even more.

I think we answered this well as Laura had real album covers with her for evidence which showed good organisation and we worked through pretty much everything we wanted to say.

Evaluation Question 1

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

Part 1


Part 2


For this question, as it was the longest one, we split it up between the four of us. We gave Amelia the music video using Goodwin's to analyse it, Holly the music video with Vernalis's theory to analyse it, Laura the album cover and I did the Myspace.

When it came to the MySpace we did pretty much stick to the conventions of a band MySpace because there is not many ways in which you can change it without it confusing the audience by either not knowing how to navigate around the page or not fully knowing who the band is. A way in which we challenged the conventions slightly was by having individual bio's on the blog as this is not always something that bands have, but as we are a new band we thought this would make a nice little addition to our page and allow our fans to get to know us better. It also gave our page a personal touch which we felt made us seem more British than American.

A way in which we could've improved the MySpace was by having a link to merchandise somewhere or actual merchandise on the page apart from the album. Another thing we could've added which would've been good was a viral marketing campaign. Unfortunately though we did not have time for this which is a shame.

WE FINISHED ON TIME!!!!
and we are very happy with our finished products, just hopefully the audience will like them too!

Deadline Day

Today is the day of our production project deadline. Unfortunately we are not as far ahead as we would've liked but we are determined to finish on time and believe that we will. At the moment we are re-grading our music video with brightness and contrast, colouring in and tweaking the final bits on our album cover, and still trying to find a way to steal a banner for our MySpace.

So what's left to do is:

• Get Mrs B. to look at our music video again to check if need more grading and then screen it
• Get album cover signed off
• Either add banner onto MySpace or give up on idea
• Add the individual bio's and group bio onto blog that we have written
• Add links to YouTube, Facebook and Twitter
• Add viral marketing idea if possible

So although it seems like we have loads left to do I think we will still get it all done on time.