Q1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

a)

b)

c)

d)

Q2. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

Q3. What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

To gather audience feedback, I used 'Google Forms' to easily create a questionnaire with a variety of answering options, with open and closed questions to collect both quantitative and qualitative information from 11 people, some fitting my target audience, and some not. This was to gather a variety of opinions, interpretations and thoughts from people, as well as to collect data from my intended audience. 

I collected data from a variety of people, most of them fitting into the target demographic of female teenagers, with 4 of the respondents being male and 7 female, as well as 6 of the respondents aged between 15 and 22, and 5 being over 26. This data is useful to compare the later responses, to see how these types of people felt about, responded to my music video and interpreted it. And in addition to finding out participants' demographics, I asked what kind of music, or musical genre, they usually listened to, to find out their interests and later ask about their thoughts on the video and the genre of the music, as well as whether they thought it fit the genre or not. This question I asked as an open question to allow for the respondents to put as many genres of music as they wanted and not feel or be limited by the genres I had chosen. The most useful answers to this question are the ones which mention indie and rock, as indie-rock is the genre of the music and music video. However, the other responses are useful as well for what they think of the quality of the video, asked in a few later questions 

It was useful to see what the respondents thought the target audience for the video was. All of the respondents picked between 15 and 22, mostly 15 and 18, a young, teenage audience. This shows that the viewers think that the video is suited to a younger audience, which means that the elements used to appeal to a teenage audience were successful.

These questions were to find out how the audience interpreted the story and what stood out to them, using open answer questions to gather more insightful information than a closed and possibly leading set of interpretations for the respondents to pick from.

Stuart Hall said that people interpret texts in different ways, even if one message is portrayed, not one understanding will be reached. This can be applied to my music video as a media text, as while the message of the music video was clear, because of the similar results to this question, the interpretations are slightly different. Some people have interpreted the video in ways I hadn't thought of, this is also why I made this an open answer question. The interpretations are similar across different demographics of people, meaning that the message is clear. Most people understood that the video was about relationships as a basic theme, however some people interpreted the video, more specifically, to be about moving on and loss. 

This question I asked in two parts, what the respondent's found most memorable about the music video and slight elaboration, keeping them open questions to prevent leading answers and letting people write what they felt about the video.

A few people found the visuals memorable, while other people found elements of the narrative memorable. A couple of people found the relatability of an aspect of the narrative memorable, which is useful to know as they are part of the target demographic and shows that they were able to form an emotional connection to the story and the character, which was what was intended by providing elements for the target demographic to relate to and empathise with. A few people added interpretations of the video in this part as well as the last question, such as "symbolises her impatience" and "frustration", meaning that these participants found the themes and messages memorable, suggesting that they found the video interesting enough to find meaning in it. Others found the visuals pleasing to look at, finding them clear and stylish, suggesting that they think the video's quality is memorable.

For this question, I provided a few statements for participants to agree or disagree with to find out what people thought of the story, characters and quality of the music video. Most of the respondents 'strongly agreed' that the song fit the genre of music the song was, of which most people thought was indie, then rock, meaning that there were enough characteristics of the genre of the song to suit the song. Some people were unsure whether it did (yellow), which either suggests that these people are unfamiliar with the genre they picked in the previous question asking to say which genre of music the song fitted, or that they can't find any obvious genre characteristics in the video, which could be positive or negative, and according to Stuart Hall, people will understand media differently.

The results were a bit more mixed for the questions regarding the relatability of the video, which is understandable as a few of the people who completed this questionnaire weren't part of the target audience and may have found it difficult to connect and empathise with the character and her story, this is shown by the fact that the participants related more to the story than the character. But mostly it's positive, which shows that there is some emotional connection to the character and story from the audience, and that the aspects in the video such as using a character similar to the target demographic in a fairly normal situation has worked in creating at least an understandable or relatable music video.

The responses to the statements regarding quality and enjoyment were very positive, with only one person disagreeing that the video kept them interested throughout (green). No one found the video unclear in terms of the narrative, which is also suggested in the previous question asking about messages and themes, so the music video was easy to understand, and most people found the video interesting to watch, likely because of the quality of the product, the visuals and style, which is suggested by the answers to the last question of the survey.

Lastly, I asked the participants to select words out of a list, or add their own if they wanted to, to describe the video the way they felt. This was to collect information about how the viewer feels about the video, as well as whether they think it is a quality product or not, by providing them with a range of both positive and negative words to choose from. On of the most common choices was stylish, which tells me that the participants thought of the video as a quality product, especially as 4 of the respondents said it was professional and 6 people found it interesting. 8 people chose stylish and 8 people also chose youthful, which could also show that the video is well suited to the target audience of teenagers. Overall, the feedback from this part of the survey was mostly positive, with one person picking a negative option 'generic', which could be interpreted to imply that the video is only generic because is displays genre characteristics, or the concept and elements of the music video has been done many times before, but I can't be certain because of the information being quantitative, which is a down side of this method of collecting information. 

One specific response was the perfect target audience for the music video, as they said they were female, between 15 to 18 and liked pop and indie music. In the question asking for the participant to read the statements and say whether she agreed or disagreed with them, she agreed that the video suited the genre of the song, the genre of which she is likely to know about and possibly be more critical of as it's a music genre she said she was interested in. The participant answered that she found the main character and the story relatable, showing that my music video may be suited to the intended audience. She also picked out the word 'relatable' as something which stood out about the video for her, from the list of words provided in a later question. This shows that the video was well received by the intended audience, and that the target audience was able to connect with the main character and the story, probably as well because this person found the story easy to understand and interesting, which would make the story and the character easier to relate to. It was also useful to know how this person interpreted the video, being in the target demographic with music genre interests similar to the genre of my chosen song. Her responses suggest that the target audience is able to understand the basic themes and messages of the video, which they are able to relate to, as well as find memorable and interesting.

Overall, the survey provided useful and interesting insight about my music video and what the audience sees in it. The participants and target demographic responded very positively overall, with different people finding different aspects of it interesting and memorable, such as being able to relate to aspects of the video or finding the visuals pleasing to look at. The responses suggest that the video is successful in catering for the intended audience and the genre of the music. The answers for questions regarding the quality of the product are also very positive, as people found the story clear and easy to understand, as well as professional looking and stylish. 

Q4. How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

New media technologies have allowed for greater access to content useful for creative productions, such as Dafont, which has a huge and varied content of fonts to download and use for free. The site was used for the post-production stage of the process, for the titles and any other text on my digipak. The fonts were selected by recognising features of other fonts on digipaks from artists of a similar genre to the song chosen for the music video, and filtering the content on Dafont to find similar looking fonts. This site allows easy access to whatever type of font the creator wants, which aids their ability to create.

Another example of this used in the process of creating the music video was Soundcloud. Soundcloud has a large variety of content which is easily accessible and obtainable for use in creative projects. It provides a huge amount high quality music and sounds which are accessible to find through the search system and recommended system, and it allowed us to find music of the genre of our choice for the music video, as Soundcloud lets the user search by artist and song, then recommends other similar songs, or it can search by genre. These systems allow access to a greater amount of content than would have been available to use before sites like this, and Dafont, were created.

During post-production, photoshop was used to create the digipaks for the song and genre of choice. It was a program which allowed for creative freedom, with the variety of tools and features it has. During the creation of the print productions, I used tools to saturate and contrast the image and to make it more vibrant, as well as the blur tool to fix the background of the image, and the ruler feature, which allowed me to line up the text on the images. This access to the variety of tools to help with the process in post-production allowed us to be creative and experiment with the images for the digipaks, and to eventually produce what we wanted to. 

In addition to media technologies providing access to useful content and enabling creative production, media technologies also allow for easier collaboration and communication of ideas. For example, a useful feature of OneDrive was to be able to have more than one person edit a document or powerpoint at a time. This was used for the collaborative parts of the research and planning, we used it for collaborative work on powerpoints, such as the moodboard, where me and Sarah both searched for relevant images to put on the same powerpoint and write about them. This allowed for an easy and simple communication of ideas. Using that feature of OneDrive we were able to easily collaborate our ideas onto one place at the same time, as well as edit and tweak it at any time we wanted.

A media technology which I used in the construction of this blog was powerpoint, for communicating ideas. Powerpoint allows you to add text and pictures, as well as easily structure ideas. It lets the user decide the order to present the information in order to communicate their thoughts in the way they want. I used powerpoint mostly in the research and planning sections of this process to present blogposts and clearly communicate ideas, as well as use the feature of Onedrive for collaboration, of which powerpoint online is connected to. Another form of communication using media technologies was to contact the artist of the song we wanted to use for our music video, and this was done using emails, which allow for quick, long distance communication. Especially since the artist of our chosen song lives in another country, emails allowed for much easier communication than non digital or instant alternatives. 

Media technologies are also able to empower regular people to create professional looking products they wouldn't have been able to do with past technology, by democratising tools and software that enables professional standard creativity, such as Premier pro, which is a non-linear editing program that allows for creative empowerment, as it has a variety of tools and features to help create a quality product with greater ease than past technology. Because the software is non-linear, it meant that, during the post-production of our music video, we were able to edit various parts of it in no particular order, whatever was easiest at the time. This software also provides opportunities for regular people to create high quality videos, as the program allows greater accuracy and detail in filmmaking. For our music video, we were able to match the cuts to the beat of the song using the visual representation of the audio, as well as being able to zoom into the clips and adjust them to fractions of seconds. And this level of creative empowerment enabled by Premier pro wouldn't have been possible with previous analogue technology, which wasn't able to provide regular people with the tools to easily create professional looking products that Premier pro is able to do. 

We used a DSLR camera and a tripod during the production of the music video, for filming and taking pictures for the print productions. The camera shot in high definition, and the tripod reduced shaking as well as allowing us to tilt and adjust the shot to what we wanted, to produce professional looking shots. These technologies are empowering to regular people, who wouldn't have been able to create quality film in the past because of how expensive cameras and film were to buy. Now DSLR cameras and SD cards can record so much more high standard footage, as well as experiment with shots, because of the replenishable space and quality the cameras film in. In addition, these cameras are able to transfer footage onto other digital mediums and retain it's quality in HD, allowing for people to edit and create professional standard products, without having to be part of media organisations to do so. 

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