A2 Evaluation A REMINDER: DO NOT HAVE A LARGE CHUNKS OF TEXT ILLUSTRATE PROFUSELY ALL THE WAY THROUGH VARY PRESENTATIONAL METHODS – OR YOU WON’T PASS USE FILMED PRESENTATIONS – OR YOU WON’T GET A C OR ABOVE USE PODCASTS USE SPILT SCREEN WHERE POSSIBLE BREAK UP THE QUESTIONS INTO SHORTER ANSWERS AND MORE BLOGPOSTS MAKE SURE YOU LABEL ALL ANSWERS TO MAKE LIFE EASIER FOR THE EXAMINER THE EXAM MAY BE EXTREMELY DIFFICULT –BANK MARKS WITH GOOD COURSEWORK GET IT DONE ON TIME!!!!
Transcript
A2 Evaluation
A REMINDER:DO NOT HAVE A LARGE CHUNKS OF TEXT
ILLUSTRATE PROFUSELY ALL THE WAY THROUGHVARY PRESENTATIONAL METHODS – OR YOU WON’T PASS
USE FILMED PRESENTATIONS – OR YOU WON’T GET A C OR ABOVEUSE PODCASTS
USE SPILT SCREEN WHERE POSSIBLEBREAK UP THE QUESTIONS INTO SHORTER ANSWERS AND MORE
BLOGPOSTSMAKE SURE YOU LABEL ALL ANSWERS TO MAKE LIFE EASIER FOR THE
EXAMINERTHE EXAM MAY BE EXTREMELY DIFFICULT – BANK MARKS WITH GOOD
COURSEWORKGET IT DONE ON TIME!!!!
In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
• Your product may well have done a little of each. Clearly, you need to refer here to the existing products that you researched and analysed, referencing them against what you have done, explaining why you have followed (or otherwise) the conventions). You must refer to your ancillary product as well as the main one. Use screen shots, possibly an excerpt and, for the ancillary tasks , compare your visually with the products that inspired you.
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• This next point isn’t a question but you would do well to consider it under the first point or the seconds – or a bit of both…
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• How did you attract/address your audience? You need references to theory here –Naomi Wolf, Marjorie Ferguson, Uses and Gratifications - you are exploiting the theory of Uses and Gratifications because your target audience will identify (though it may only be wishful thinking) with the lifestyle it promotes. Some of you have used people of a similar age to your audience to add to this appeal. Your audience will look to your product for a sense of personal identity and possibly aspire to be like some of the people featured or their lives and problems may reflect the lives and problems of people you know. Your theories need dates. Google them
In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
• Think about representation here – particularly the representation of gender and class
• The presence of women is often solely for the purposes of display and the purpose of this display is to facilitate a voyeuristic response in the spectators, which presumes a male gaze, regardless of the actual gender of the spectator i.e. a powerful and controlling gaze at the female, who is on display and is, therefore, objectified and passive - paraphrasing Laura Mulvey (1975).
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• “Is the female flesh on display simply a cynical; exploitation of the female body to increase (predominantly) male profit margins, or a life-enhancing assertion of female self-confidence and sexual independence?” (Pete Fraser, 2005)
How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts? Part 1
• You need to consider what you’ve learned about the way the media produce, distribute and share material. You need to consider the synergy between the products and remember, your work will constitute only part of a promotional campaign for the product/artist and you will need to stress how this works – i.e. the need to buy advertising on television or radio; the need to have a PR department that can push your artist to radio and TV stations so they can get airtime and their work played; the use of the kind of posters and print advertising you see in magazines and billboards. Your artist or movie will have a website created by the production which will feature song samples, trailers, video extracts, photographs, interviews, features, competitions, opportunities for fans to air their views so they feel they are being given some kind of ownership of the product so they’ll be more likely to buy it. You will absolutely definitely need to say in the age of Media 2.0 that you world will be promoted virally on the Internet and on mobile phones, particularly as your target audience is of an age range that favours this kind of technology. You might release your work in advance to specific outlets – e.g. exclusive music video on…? Or how about a teaser trailer campaign leading up to a special screening of the movie (or even just the trailer) to a popular horror site like http://www.bloody-disgusting.com/ so they can post reviews that you can feature on the trailer? Or arrange for the trailer to be shown with popular movies in the same genre. Your movie may be low budget, but so was Paranormal Activity and this is what the filmmakers did there.
• From past experience, don’t be too critical of yourself. If you say, “I could’ve cut out a particular photograph better,” my reaction would be: “Do it now and don’t be so complacent.” If you say, “I didn’t have enough time to do such and such,” then it’s clear evidence you’ve wasted time and you’ll be docked marks. In other words, if there’s anything you haven’t done, get it done now – and quickly.
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• This response MUST be illustrated all the way through with examples from your work or existing product when you make reference to it and it must included filmed responses. If you don’t have a filmed response, you won’t get a mark of C or above and we will be reluctant to enter it in case it results in the marks of the other students being pulled down.
How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts? Part 2
• Google Paranormal Activity and see the way it was promoted and became the success it is. See http://movie-critics.ew.com/2009/10/07/paranormal-activity-marketing-campaign/. http://www.chud.com/articles/articles/21095/1/PARANORMAL-ACTIVITY039S-MARKETING-HAUNTED-BY-THE-GHOST-OF-WILLIAM-CASTLE/Page1.html. You would hope this kind of publicity and releasing the trailer on YouTube would lead to the word being spread on the internet, especially amongst horror fan sites and blogs and influential message board sites like http://www.aintitcool.com/. However effective the combination is, you need to point out that what you’re doing would only constitute part of a larger campaign. Even if most people download music, people who do this still make use of cover art (which comes with the download anyhow, so the cover art is still relevant in the age of downloading. You are providing cultural meaning for the music/film trailer through commercial images and aesthetics.
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• Where possible link to real-life products and campaigns.
What have you learned from your audience feedback?
• You need to devise another questionnaire to help you with this - one that you could post on your blog. Is your audience one stable and easily identifiable group? Has the audience reacted in the way you expected? What has it found particularly effective about the product (include both tasks)? Why is feedback important in the media industry; how has it helped you construct your productions and how could you learn from feedback after the production is finished? Talk about the way your final product has been affected by showing the progress of your work to your target audience –i.e. make it up or pretend I’m your target audience and think about what I’ve told you to change.
• Remember, if you don’t keep the customer satisfied, you don’t get financial reward and that could jeopardise a small production company or your career in the industry.
How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
• It’s important you consider the blog itself as a media production. Unlike previous years, you are not just creating a production that will only be seen by colleagues, teachers and examiners – you have actually published your work on the web where an audience of millions can see it. Using your blog, you have self-published and some, perhaps even many, of your audience is capable of doing the same, thus breaking down the idea of what constitutes an audience. In the age of Web 2.0, new digital media “have fundamentally changed the ways in which we engage with all the media” (David Gauntlett, 2007). Don’t forget the planning/preparation stage –YouTube, Google etc. Don’t forget to talk about your use of different platforms to present your information.
• You also need to talk about your use of cameras and still and moving image editing software to create your media production, giving some specific examples of how and why you constructed particular images or scenes, texts, edits and so on, to reach your target audience.
• If you’ve worked as a group, your contribution and that of your partners must be made clear.
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• You MUST use subject specific terminology – i.e. using the correct terms when writing about the processes you went through on iMovie or Photoshop; talking about the camera angles/distances correctly/ discussing conventions and what colours etc have connotations of, especially in terms of your target audience.
• Ensure that you haven’t used ANY images that you’ve downloaded from the internet; this includes backgrounds or background patterns.
• www.emusu.com - a promotion and digital distribution resource. It will help you consider your music promotion work in the digital age
• Genre quotes: • (Tom Ryall, 1998) “patterns/styles/structures which transcend individual films, and
which supervise both their construction by the film-maker and their reading by an audience”
• Steve Neale (1990) argues that Hollywood’s generic regime guarantees meanings and pleasures for audiences
• Neale (1980)- much of the pleasure of popular cinema lies in the process of “difference in repetition” – i.e. recognition of familiar elements and in the way those elements might be orchestrated in an unfamiliar fashion or in the way that unfamiliar elements might be introduced e.g. Scream and its sequels: certain elements are similar in all three films, yet new ideas and material are incorporated into each sequel.
• Neale (1990) – Genre is constituted by “specific systems of expectations and hypothesis which spectators bring with them to the cinema and which interact with the films themselves during the course of the viewing process.”
• Jonathan Culler (1978) – generic conventions exist to establish a contract between and deviation from the accepted modes of intelligibility. Acts of communication are rendered intelligible only within the context of a shared conventional framework of expression.
• Ryall (1998) sees this framework provided by the generic system; therefore, genre becomes a cognitive repository of images, sounds, stories, characters, and expectations.
• Genre has come to represent, as John Fiske (1988) has said, “attempts to structure some order into the wide range of texts and meanings that circulate in our culture for the convenience of both producers and audiences.”
• There is a relationship between the lyrics and the visuals (with visuals either illustrating, amplifying or contradicting the lyrics).
• There is a relationship between the music and the visuals (again with visuals either illustrating, amplifying or contradicting the music).
• Particular music genres may have their own music style and iconography (such as live stage performance in heavy rock).
• There is a demand on the part of the record company for lots of close-ups of the main artist/vocalist.
• The artist may develop their own star iconography, in and out of their videos, which, over time, becomes part of their star image.
• There is likely to be reference to voyeurism, particularly in the treatment of women, but also in terms of looking (screens within screens, binoculars, cameras etc).
• There are likely to be intertextual references, either to other music videos or to films and TV texts.(Andrew Goodwin, 1992)
• Music video quotes:• “They now provide pictures for the songs in our heads. Goodbye,
imagination… No need to think, to embellish, to create, to imagine.” (Joe Salzman, 2000)
• “Often, music videos will cut between a narrative and a performance of the song by the band… Sometimes, the artist… will be a part of the story, acting as narrator and participant at the same time. But it is the lip-synch close-up and the miming of playing instruments that remains at the heart of music videos, as if to assure us that the band really can kick it.” (Steve Archer, 2004)
• The presence of women is often solely for the purposes of display and the purpose of this display is to facilitate a voyeuristic response in the spectators, which presumes a male gaze, regardless of the actual gender of the spectator i.e. a powerful and controlling gaze at the female, who is on display and is, therefore, objectified and passive - paraphrasing Laura Mulvey (1975).
• “Is the female flesh on display simply a cynical; exploitation of the female body to increase (predominantly) male profit margins, or a life-enhancing assertion of female self-confidence and sexual independence?” (Pete Fraser, 2005)
Links• As ever, look to successful work by previous students to help you.• I would recommend blogs by Hannah Wood, Sarah Dick (music videos),
Alex Thompson, Callum York, Taylor Johnston, Jayme Hudspith (short films), Taylor Cowton, Tilly Mitcham-Rowell (music videos), Laura Bruce, Amy Oughton and Ashley Billingham (horror trailers)
