Critical Evaluation

1) In what ways do your media products use, develop or challenge the forms and conventions of real media projects?

Our media product follows the established conventions of existing media projects in that our video illustrates the lyrics of the song using the visuals and that the video illustrates/amplifies the lyrics of the song. Our video also has inter textual references such as the mad scientist being based on ‘Doc’ from the ‘Back to the Future’ trilogy as well as numerous references to classic videogames such as ‘Pong’, ‘Pacman’ and ‘Mortal Kombat’. Rather than following a set narrative from start to finish, our video follows a narrative at the beginning and the end of the video where as there is no real narrative in the middle section, which on its own would make no sense but works extremely well when combined with the lyrics of the song.




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

I think that the video and ancillary texts fit very well together in that there is the running theme of ‘Nerds’ or nerd references both in the video and the poster/digipak. This is done through the use of the 3 main performers in our video being on the cover of the digipak, which was done to create a visual link between both products. The overall design of the digipak was made up of images that relate to the classic videogames ‘Tetris’ and ‘Super Mario’. The poster was designed to be the same style as the front cover of the digipak with the difference being that there is only one character on the poster as opposed to 3 on the digipak.

3) What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

From the audience feedback, I learnt that the style of video we had chosen and the type of content we put into the video and ancillary texts were given a lot of praise from the people that have viewed our products and filled out a feedback questionnaire. Although the feedback was generally positive, we had noticed that a portion of people found the narrative a little difficult to understand and also that the props could have been better.

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

In the construction of our media products, we used computer programs like Adobe CS3 Premiere Pro, Photoshop CS3, Fireworks CS3 and Illustrator CS3. These were used to actually make and modify the video, promotional poster and digipak. Premiere Pro was also used to add the effects to the music video such as the news ticker. In order to film the video we used a Sony X-12 DV video camera, a tripod for the majority of the shots and also a steadycam for other shots that needed the camera to move but stay steady at the same time.

To research the music video and ancillary texts, we used websites such as youtube and myspace which were to find music videos to analyze so that we had a better idea of what was needed in our own video in terms of camera and editing work. We also used google to search for digipak and promotional poster examples in order to be able to make professional looking ancillary texts.



In order to complete the written segments of the coursework, I used Microsoft word to initially get the work onto and electronic medium where I could save the work and back up the files in the event of data loss, I also used the website ‘Blogger’ to publish my coursework online to be moderated.