Evaluation

Introduction

Our target was to create 2 televised adverts promoting a product or service along with a web pop up and radio jingle, for the project I worked alongside my best Emily Allen who is always an A level media student. We decided to create an advertising package for a cleaning product named “Viz”, the product of course is imaginary however we wanted the advertisement project to make the product appear as if it could be on the market. It was easy to work with Emily and make decisions as we both get on well but also have clear ideas and similar tastes.

We already had ideas of how we wanted the adverts to appear and a strong idea that we wanted the school`s gospel choir to sing out radio jingle, similar to this is the idea that we wanted one advert to be in a old fashioned format and then other to contrast against this and be a more modernistic style.

Question 1) In what does your media product challenge or develop forms and conventions of real media products?

We chose to produce an advertising package for a cleaning product that we had creatively come up with called “Viz” we came up with the name after looking into other similar products name on the current market, for example “Daz” and “Vanish”, we then went on to discuss what they represent of the product or why the product may be called this, once we made this connection we then followed the process through to ensure that our product had a suitable name that would make the product, if a real one appear in the market as a real product. “Viz” came from the word invisible, which came from the washing powder making your stains invisible, this could be compared to a real washing powder product called “Vanish”, which we made the link comes from promising to make stains vanish. After we got the name we went on to take forward characteristics of real media televised adverts in order to ensure our outcome conformed to the conventions of real media products. The characteristics for this media product are:
· Close up of a product and emotional reaction to product
· Always have a catchphrase/slogan that is associated with the product
· Tend to stick to one location (all focus is on the product)
· Use humour(brain finds it easy to remember humorous things)
· Almost always finish with the brand name or slogan

When creating our first TV advert, we took into consideration the generic features we found adverts to have and took these into consideration when creating our various products. We decided to film out first TV advert in a kitchen and keep to the same location to ensure all the focus was on the product, we chose to film the advert in the kitchen as firstly this is where the washing machine was in Emily`s kitchen but also as when watching adverts for the product “Vanish” on the TV I saw that they were almost normally filmed in the kitchen. We chose to film the advert in Emily`s kitchen feeling this was the least modern kitchen and would give us the effect we wanted to achieve.
In our second TV advert which had a more modern twist, showed actors being members of the public stating their view on the product from pretend home videos we shot.

Our secondadvert was suppose to be a gospel choir but after being let down this was our plan B. The home videos we shot had to be different locations to ensure not all the videos did not appear to come from all the same family, the last we shot involved my dad who read out a cheesy poem in a comical voice, we took this idea from our research on the Mr Muscle adverts which means we conformed to the norm, but also is shown the brain finds it easier to remember humorous events or products.

In our first advert we used a transition that represents a clock from when the washing is put in to the machine and taken out this transition can seen to be used in many TV adverts as it is an effective way of portraying time going by, but also meant that our advert was using the conventions of real media products. Another shot where this is seen is at the end of our two adverts where at the end of the advert sequence we shows the logo for the product this is making the last image the audience sees the logo and product meaning it will stay in their head and make them think about the product hopefully go on to buy it.

BUT also in almost all televised adverts we see the logo or product name the last shot to be shown. In our auxiliary task we also tried to use a great range of media conventions, for example in the web pop up we used a flashing image which is the products logo as because it is flashing it will catch the most attention from the audience and almost make it memorable. However when researching to current web pop ups and with personal experience of seeing them, I always remember most of them to be flashing in some way in order to catch the attention of the user. Although when it came to composing the jingle on the day we had decided to record it with the gospel choir they told us they could no longer perform therefore we had to find someone else who would sing it for use, because we could only find one person it was not the sound we was going for and included no background music which challenges the norms seen in current radio jingles that almost always either have a background tune or many people singing to make it bold. We still used the jingle as we was grateful to the girl for doing it on such short notice and still believe that it sticks to the generic features of a radio jingle; which is singing a short song about the products benefit and repeating the name of the product so that it is remembered by the audience.

Question 2) How effective is the combination of your main product and ancilliary tasks?

Essentially we wanted to create a media product that advertised a cleaning product name “Viz” that we had come up with. We wanted all of the outcomes; the two televised adverts and the auxiliary tasks which was the radio jingle & web pop to conform to real media products norms. Ideally we wanted to show a contrast in time between the two televised advert one being fairly modern and the other being an old fashioned style but advertising the product in high quality, in our minds we also wanted the web pop up to appear as if it was a real media product and the same with the radio jingle.

I think we created the time difference between the two media products and this is shown in the videos, by using different effects and editing the old fashion one in black and white along with using a fuzz effect as if the television had not been tuned properly or where the advert was so old had become worn. I think the modern advert was achieved by the use of firstly stating the advert was commemorating the 20 year anniversary of “Viz” but also by making the video use homemade videos, showing how technology has moved on with people now being able to make their own videos at home and send them easily, which would not have been so easy maybe 20 years ago, also by letting others have their opinion on the product it is similar to more recent adverts like that of other products on the real media market where the adverts simply are the public`s opinion.
We got most of the ideas for our advertising campaign from the extensive research conducted for all types of adverts for all different products; this meant we had a real idea of how to make an advertising campaign and how to make the advertisements appear as if they were real media products. Our main task which was the two televised adverts have a strong intellectual links with our auxiliary tasks which were the web pop and radio jingle. Throughout all the tasks the products name is mentioned and on the main task and web pop up they both show the products logo and a slogan mentioned in the first TV advert which is “Viz always leaves your clothes stain free”, this similar to real advertising campaigns that ensure parts of the different adverts all have a house image or slogan that appears on all so that certain items are associated with the products, increasing the products popularity and how memorable it is.

This link is also in the radio jingle where the slogan has been put in to the jingle again giving the product a house style as such (certain things becoming associated with the product) We have also tried to continue the same colour scheme for example in the logo we have used the colours: blue, black, yellow and purple therefore so that we did not incorporate too many colours, we decided to use the colours from the logo on the web pop up as well, decide to use the colours yellow and purple as the outside of the logo is blue and clack meaning the logo and the web popup will not blend in together and the logo will stand out.

If I could make any changes I would firstly start by re-recording the radio jingle with the same single singer but with a backing tune so that the jingle is bolder and conform to real media products norms, or I would get together a larger group of people to sing the jingle again for the same reasons. As I feel that our radio jingle is the weakest part due to being let down at the last moment by gospel choir we was unable to produce much at such last minute notic. However I now realise instead of waiting for the gospel choir to be together and able to sing Emily and I should of came up with another idea to record the radio jingle so that either way the jingle would sound realistic. Although I do like the words we use to the jingle and the girl`s singing I just don’t believe that the jingle is bold enough to stand out on a radio but does live up to the other generic features of it being “cheesy” and “catchy”, also it being a small song singing about the benefits of the product repeating the products name a numerous amount of times, in order for it to stand out.


Question 3) What have you learnt form your audience feedback?
Audience feedback became a vital part through the whole construction of my the main tasks and auxiliary tasks we created for the commercial product we came up: “VIz”.

When first designing and brainstorming initial ideas of our film trailer we discussed our ideas with a teacher Mr Best, who said that although he thought the idea was fantastic he believed that it may be hard to produce the high quality we wanted due to the very low budget we had to work with. Therefore we took this feedback into consideration and re-think our ideas and thoughts so that we could work with the low budget pointed out to us.

Throughout constructing the main tasks, which were the two televised adverts we asked our classmates for feedback as we went through putting together the video and if they like the various transitions and effects used.

When constructing advert 1 a class mate suggested that if we took the colour from it, it would portray and older style effect . We took this into consideration and therefore make the video appear to be in a black and white effect after watching the video through, Emily and I both agreed that by receiving the criticism it meant we went forward to edit the video and make it better!

Another piece of feedback was that the advert was very “cheesy” and appeared as if they advert was of “low budget” , this piece of feedback showed that we had created the advert to how we ideally wanted it to appear.

When filming I suggested to Emily that we film the shots from various angles so that we had lots of footage to chose from and would be able to ask class members what they felt were good shots and angles and also if we received a piece a piece of feedback stating that they did not like the one of the shots we would have the chance to choose another.

Once creating all of the tasks we asked the member fro various pieces of feedback here are some

>“The web pop up appears in a simple layout, but is similar to other web pop ups especially with the use of the flashing logo”
>“The first advert is very over the top and advertises the product well”
>“The adverts have been edified together in a professional way that suits the theme of the adverts”
>“the radio jingle should include a background tune as it does not sound like a real radio jingle”
“The second advert appear to be much more modern compared to the first advert”
>“In second advert where the member of company is speaking I think they should have been filmed somewhere else as it appears to be roughly done and not realistic due to the back ground”

:

From this I have already stated throughout the evaluation that if I had the chance I would re-do my radio jingle either recording the single singer with a background track or have a larger group of singers to make it sound bold and realistic
I also would re–film the part where I speak pretending to be a member of the company introducing the home made videos I film this footage in a more professional location or with a plain whit background.

Question 4) How did you use media technologies in the consrtuction and research planning and evaluation stages?
For this question i decided to present the answer in the format of a power point showing anoth media technology used but also i believe this presented the answer in a better structured way. However so that i could upload the power point in to my blog I used a friends slideshare.net login so taht i could convert the file. I had to use her login as the website is blocked at our particular school.

D:\How Did You Use Media Technologies In The

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Composing Jingle

After coducting research in to various radio jingles and comming up with the genric features that we believe them to have:

>"Cheesy"
>"Repetition of the product/service name"
>easy lyrics
>memorable

We then went on to begin to think of the jingle lyrics we ouls like to use an dthe tune we would want it performed to, after overhearing a girl in the corridor humming to the tune of "Joyful,Joyful", we both though that the beat of the song would be perfect especially as it is popular sang by gospel choirs so would fit to our idea and also with a simple beat would mean that i shouldn`t be too hard to come up with lyrics.
Initially we though of having a whole song about the product however decided against this idea when look at the findings of our research we saw tha almost always the jingles were just a vert short song about the product and repeating the products name a lot. As we wanted to make the product appear to be a rela media product on the market we decided to use these features. Here ar ethe lyrics that we came up with tha alrthough are informal and short we thought this would give the audience a chance of remmebering the jingle and product.
“Viz viz viz viz viz
It works all the time
It gets off the grime
Viz Viz Viz Viz Viz
No matter how,
tough it may be
It will make, clothes, STAIN FREE!
VIZ!”

Why did we decide on the gospel choir?
Well our traget audience we felt would be 18 - 76 year old owmen mainly as it is stereotyped that women do the washing and this has come from the "1950`s housewife" we took this into account and decided that music sung by a gospel choir id ver jubilant and powerful and also makes you wnat to sing along, becaus of the feel that gospel choir music gives off we thought it would appeal to a range of ages. Also gospel music has religios connetations linking to purity , to white showing cleanliness proving to be a great link to our produt.

A BIG problem occured that being the gospel choir pulled out of being recorded at the last minute due to this we had to find a fats replacement so that would have something ot be our radio jingle. A girl in the year offered to help us out and we jumped at the idea especially as she is an AMAZING singer and has performed parts in such musical productions: "Annie","Wizard of OZ" and "Oliver".
Her name is Molly Taylor, who is 18 years old.

Making the web popup

After conducting research into web pop ups that were one of my auxiliary tasks we knew we wanted to make the products logo the main part of the web pop up and then from this we would use the colours that appear in the middle of the logo which are: yellow and purple this is so we stick to a colour scheme but also so the logo stand out. We began by producing the web pop up on word and this is how it appeared:

We kept to a simple design as this is what be discovered was a generic feature when researching web pop ups and have also left a space on there as this is where the logo would go that we wish to flash, we came up this as when looking in to out researched pop ups and from personal experience we found that most of them have a flashing image that attracts the attention of the audience to the the pop up and will also emphasise the product being advertised.

However so that we could firstly have a flash image we needed to make this using Adobe Flash Producer and also we needed to transfer our design into Adobe Dream weaver as it was not possible to keep it the same. Due to the limitations that Adobe Dream weaver holds we had to slightly adjust the design to make it possible to be in dream weaver so we could make it appear as a web pop up we had to create the pop up in this program anyway. To make the product appear neatly and all together we started by inserting a table of one column but 6 rows this was so each section of text will appear in each cell separating it but keeping it all aligned and the flashing logo will also be inserted to one particular cell as well. One we had typed the text we simply changed the fill colours of the cells by using the tool bar at the bottom of dream weaver and the same goes foe editing the font.
Here is a screen shot of the design in Dream weaver:

To create the flash file we simply opened up the logo in Adobe Flash Producer and then created another white frame one after the other in the sequence animate tool bar at the bottom.This will make it appear as if the image is flashing but technically it will be a fast sequence of the products logo and white frame is being played simultaneously one after the other.

And here is the actual flash file

Finally we inserted the flash file into dream weaver and placed the file within the correct row of the table and saved the product, here is the final one as a screen shot when opened up in the browser, it was hard to get a screen shot of the logo been shows due to it being a flashing image :

Here is also the html link to the pop up:

D:\WEBPOPUP\FINAL1.html

Edit! Edit! Edit! Advert 2

The brief states that we need two TV advertisements so we now had to take the footage we had shot for the second advert and begin the editing process again. The shots we filmed for this advert involved more than one location as we wanted it to appear as if the homemade videos that had been sent in are from all different people showing that the product is widely used rather than just by one family. We also needed to ensure that he camera was of different qualities so that the shots would appear to be video sent in from various homes stating their views on the product.

We was unable to use footage of one actress: Runi Ali as when we filmed her we held the camera horizontally and therefore when we rotated the video round in premier it appeared to have made Runi larger at the sides and shorter in height and felt this would not look good in our advert.

Once we had imported all the shots of the various actors we needed to find a transition or effect to put between the shots to link them together first of all we was going to have straight cuts to a blank screen and the straight cut to the next clip but this look RUBBISH. So Emily then came up with the idea of using the fuzzy flicker clip we used at the beginning and end of our first video to link them together, we made the clip of the fuzz much shorter and inserted it in between each of the clips, we thought it made the video look much more professional and linked the clips together better. It also showed us making links between the tasks.
Here is our first cut:: see video


We showed this cut to our media teacher Miss McAllsiter and although she liked the video was linked together she told us that it did not show off many editing techniques and also stated that sometimes some of the character speak too fast and it is hard to understand. We therefor took this feedback into account and decided to improve both we will increase the editing done to the video by slowing down the characters clips so that they appear to be speaking slower and therefore there is more clarity with what they are saying . The last clip of John Myers we decided to slow his last sentence right down so the action and speech was very slow, deep and over exaggerated we feel not only did this add humour to the advert but also emphasised his last important sentence about where the product is available.

We asked our media classmates to give us some feedback on this cut to see what else we needed to focus on improving they mostly said that the video was very "Random", "people may not understand what the actors are talking about", and that they only understood the advert because they have see out blogs.
We therefore needed to solve this problem and came up with the solution of filming me stating that "Viz" has now been around for 20 years and too celebrate we asked the public to send in their homemade videos of why they love the product the most, i then would conclude the advert stating "So that's why they loved Viz, but why don`t you try it yourself! We are going to leave you with our favourite home video clip so here it is...". We felt this gave more of an understanding to the advert and re-emphasised that this advert was a much more modern take.

HERE IS THE FINAL CUT :)

Adding effects to Advert 1

Now we had all the clips we wanted to have and them all in order we now needed to add effects however we had to bear in mind that we both wanted it to appear as if it had been made on a low budget, and to appear as if it was made in teh 1970`s so we have to make sure that we kept this in mind when adding the effects. Instead of blending clips togetehr that way make the video appear more advanced we decided to use basic transistions such as:

*rotate clock

*zooms

*pixelates

*page peals

*dissolves.



When choosing a transition we made sure we watched the two clips before putting a transition in between then so we made sure that the transistion was the right one and were sutiable for the 2 clips. For example the clip from when the product is pllaced in the washing machiene to when Beth opend the finish washing machiene cycle to reveal the stain free clothing we decided to add the transistion that represented a colocks face going round the screen to reveal the clip, we decided on this as it portrays time going by.

We also decided to slow some bits of the video down so that we would emphasise the facial expressions of Beth for example when she appears to show she has an idea, this was also, so that the audience knew what was going on as the clip may be too fast for them to see she is having an idea. Slowing this part of the video down turnt out to be very effective as it seemed to snychronise with a aprt of the sing taht goes "YEAHHHHHHHH" perfectly.

Here is the video with all the effects added: see video


We then went on to simply add the fuzzy flickering clip at the begginning of the video and the end not only doe sthis state the end of the and start of the advert, and enphasises the old fashion vibe. It also could convey that the TV is tunning is especially for this advert which is something special.

As well as this we needed to add the products logo in for this we added a flickering effect to the lgo image and stated how long we wnated the image to show for this enhanced the old style effect.



When asking class members for their opinion we saw that the colour tone effect was the alrgest criticism stating that this is where the advert lost the old style effect appart from that class member stated that it was:

"An enthusiastic, cheesy model-suits theme"

"Commical, makes me smile and remember it"

"Looks like it costed little to make, not put togetehr proffessionally"




Here is our final cut! :)
see video

Edit! Edit! Edit! ADVERT 1

So we had to begin with editing advert 1 this proved to take a while as neither Emily or I had used Premier before however Emily came to grips with the program a lot faster than me therfore we decided to consruct the video on Emilys computer with her inserting the clips untill i got the hang of it and rather than just stating ideas also started using the program. We began working on the footage we had captured going through it in chronological order. The openeing page of premeier appears like this: (As seen on Emilys blog)

The first shots we filmed where that of Beth walking in to the kitchen carrying a basket of washing as if she had just come from outside, firstly Emily filmed Beth walking in from a worms view angle, we came up with this idea so it would appear as if it was from a childs point of view so we could show the superior level of the mum doing the washing and the child waiting for her to find the stained tshirt, however incase there was a problem from this angle or we did not like it when we watched it back we also filmed Beth walking in to the kitchen again but this time from our eye level. Onc back in the media room and watching the shot back we are soooo lucky that we did film the clip again from our eye level, as from the worms view angle the shot was very unflattering of Beth, we both decided to not use that piece of footage as neither of us liked it and thought it may make the advert look unproffessional if the characters are filmed from such unflattering angles. We stuck with the eye level view and as Emily draged the clip down into the timeline and set it in out i thought that this angle would probably be better nayway as it will allow the target audience: The busy mums for example relate to the advert more when pointing this out to Emily we both prefered this shot even more.













We were both dead certain on how we wanted the advert to beging with a fuzzy crackling effect as if a TV is not tuned in or has lost signal and tring to gain it bback. However this was difficult to find the perfect effect as we both knew how we wanted it to look but could not find anything to match it. Finally we came up with the idea of filming a television set rewinding a VCR, however when videoing on my TV which is a modern version of an old VCR player it did not give us the effect we wanted.






Luckily when Emily visited her nans one weekend she saw that her nan had an old fashioned VCR player and used this to her advantage by videoing the player rewinding a tape. The outcome was just what we wanted.


Once we had uploaded the clip onto premier we editied it so that it was completley perfect by reversing the shot and shortening it so the shot was not too long, we then went onto use a cross dissolve transition between this shot and the next one which would be Beth walking into the kitchen so that the two shots blended together.



Now very happy with the oppening shot we began to plough through the mass of footage and start editing various clips together in order for the advert to have a plot. As most of the clips we shot were too long and we only wanted certain parts we had to split the clip and set a new starting and finishing point, againthis screen shot we produced shown on Emilys blog shows how we did this:




Once we had decided on all the clips we wanted to use and had set the correct starting and ending points for each one we then had to begin to think of effects and transistions, as without these the footage was of poor quality, here is the video of all the footage we wanted to use without any effects or transitions just straight cuts except for the fact that we changed the colour As we wanted the advert to appear low budget so it appears as if it was made 20 years ago and therefore decided we needed to TAKE THE COLOUR and make it BLACK AND WHITE!

http://www.youtube.com/user/girlsa2media#p/u/3/BC1LGd8Xbtk