Comentary draft

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

When creating our music video, a lot of the conventions we used came from real shopping channels, this is due to the fact that the main narrative of our music video consists of a shopping channel/channels spoof, so many of the forms and conventions were accociated with real ones. The basic narrative of our music video was; a typical, modern day, slob is sitting about watching shopping channels, he see's a band for sale on one of them and orders them by phone, they then turn up at his appartment and begin to play, putting a surreal twist into the video. The band performance segments of the video used a lot of the forms and conventions of other indie/rock style bands, as did the dvd cover.

The mise en scene used in the video is conventional of that seen in shopping channels and other music videos. The TV presenters are dressed in shirts as typically seen on shopping channels, they are holding up the kind of useless items you would accociate with these channels, this is all used, not only to stay within the conventions of a shopping channel, but also to exagurate them to make the video more spoof like. The band are wearing normal, indie looking clothing and playing instruments so you can clearly distingish them as the band, they are also all seen performing together and standing together on the dvd cover.

The editing perhaps played the biggest part in using and developing forms and conventions of real media products. During the shopping channel parts of our video, graphic overlays were used like those seen on real shopping channels. The graphic overlays which our group created often used bright, clashing colours, and contained lots of relavent jokes in the text, the purpose of this being to satirize the real thing. The "price earthquake" scene was again, to make fun of the real thing, mocking the false enthusyasm and sensory overload you somtimes get on these channels.

The camera work differed between each part of the video to follow the usual forms and conventions of other media products, the shopping channel parts were mainly filmed in a still shot, with close ups on the products like you would see on a real shopping channel. The band and appartment scenes were filmed with a range of shots, in the early scenes before the band arrive at the appartment, all the shots are still conventional shots following the basic rules of filming and editing like the 180 degree rule. All the band scenes used less conventional editing though, with shots at differont angles and moving "handheld" shots with zooms, as you might see in simelar music videos.

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

I think the combination of our video, digipack and magazine advert worked quite well, as they all tied in with one another. Obviously the video was the main product which the other two had to tie in with, which I think we achieved quite well. The dvd case features a picture of the band, wearing the same outfit as they were seen in during the music video as well as screenshots of the video on the back. The poster ties in with both the video and dvd cover, featuring a design simelar to the graphic overlay seen in the music video, and a picture of the dvd cover as a completed dvd.

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

The audience feedback was big part of the creating process, it helped us plan what needed to be done and to see what kind of an impact our video was having on people. The feedback recieved on the rough cut was mainly positive except for the comments saying it was hard to follow/understand without the missing footage which at the time, we compensated for with text, explaining what would be happening in the scene. We responded to this by filming all the necicery footage, and putting it into our video at the right place.

The feedback recieved on the final video was all relativly positive which we were quite pleased with, people were saying that the ideas and humor worked well, the only real negative comment was that it looked slightly amateur/tacky, however this was a success in itself to us as we had been trying to simulate the tacky nature of shopping channels and incorperate it into our video.

The feedback on the dvd cover and advert was all pretty positive which we were quite pleased with and fealt like we chose a good design.