A2 Music video Heathens

Below is a link to my finished A2 media production. I chose to do a Music video based of the song "Heathens" by Twenty One Pilots.


Music Video

A2 Questions review

A2 Question review

For my evaluation on my A2 project I have to answer  four evaluation questions based on my production and how I think it went overall, as well as how my additional work like the ancillary texts went. The first question that I had to answer was "In what ways does your median product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products.?"
I would answer this question by essentially comparing what we included in our project . This includes  the way in which we presented and portrayed the atmosphere and feeling that we wanted the audience to feel. I will then compare this to how big name films and songs do the same thing and see how we challenge and develops on already existing conventions in real media products.

The second Question was "How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?" In this i would start by describing the types of ancillary texts that I chose to create. I will also talk about how and why I chose them and how well they combine together to create an effect with the main production 

The third question is "What have you learned from your audience feed back". I would answer this question by essentially listing all the feedback that we received for our A2 work and categorising them into positive and negative. I will also comment on how I would have improved my A2 work based on what was said in the feedback. 

The fourth question that I have to answer is "How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?"This question is essentially asking whether I used any new techniques for A2 that I didn't use in AS. I would start the answer by listing the new techniques I used. These include new equipment and different camera techniques that we tried out. I would then talk about the new editing software that we used which was I-movie. I would also talk about the reason why we decided to change and use different techniques and equipment.

Evaluation Question 1

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

There were several new technologies that we had used for our A2 project. One of these was using a question survey for our audience research. I used the question survey in order to get a better understanding of my audience and what they wanted to see in my media project.

For example the photo on the left shows one of the questions used in my question survey, which asks the age of the participant. From this I found that the average age of my audience is 17 years old. This meant that I had to adjust my film for this age group rather than trying to create a film that covers all age groups. This also allowed me to focus on a specific genre for the age group rather than trying to incorporate multiple sub genres to try and please all age groups.

Another example of my questionnaire survey is this question which asked the participator which genre of film was their favourite. Despite the most popular being comedy, we still chose to make the genre action, as we thought it would be easier to create, plan and film. Although it could have been an option to make comedy a sub genre, we thought it best to stick to one genre, due to the age group being 17year olds as stated in the previous survey question.

One other piece of new media technology that we used in our production was I-Movie. With our AS production we used a different editing software that was recommended by our school so we just went with that. However now for A2 we chose to use I-Movie as it was a software that we were both comfortable with and had used before which also meant the editing process went much quicker. I-Movie is also easier to import from computers and to youtube which is another reason why we chose to change editing software.







One other new piece of technology that we used was
a new camera. For our AS production we chose to use the 
Canon LEGRIA HFR706 Camcorder. We chose to use this camera because it was on the cheaper end go the market, but still had great specs that would allow for smooth and good looking filming. The  Canon LEGRIA HFR706 was also a good choice because it is easy to import and export from the camera to a computer and vice versa
which allowed us to quickly upload our project once we had finished it.

Evaluation question 1
Above is a link to our music video with an in-depth audio voice over for the music video, explaining the motives and decisions we made.

Evaluation question 2

What have you learned from your audience feed back?

After publishing our finished project onto YouTube we asked people to watch it and give us some feedback on how they felt about it and what they thought we did well and what they thought we could have done to improve it. We had a wide range o feedback from people with many different viewpoints on the project and what could have been done to make it better.

One of the most frequently things that was pointed out as being well done was our use of effects like slow motion and replays of clips within the scene. These effects that we used were seen as effective and gave the project the feel and atmosphere that we were aiming for. The slow motion for example, we were told in the feedback from our audience that we received that it let the person watching it that the scene had some clear meaning and message that was slowed down to allow people to pick it up.


One other scene that had particularly good feedback was one of the scenes at the end that involved both characters fading into view simultaneously and then having one of them fade away again as the other character remained in focus through the shot. This was seen as a very effective use of editing and timing by our audience, as they said it gave the project the vibe and atmosphere that we intended it to have. Because the song we chose to make a video on had a low, stalking and uncertain message and vibe to it, we chose to try and implement that into the project with different effects, and with the audience feedback that we received, it seems it was achieved.


However there were some points that were highlighted to us that we didn't do as well as we had hoped in. One of these points that was brought to our attention was some of the transitions in the project. There were various  point during the video where the transition between scenes were not very smooth and were noticeably unclean. This had an effect on the audience as they were not able to fully enjoy the video because they were focusing to much on the mistakes and rough transitions.


Another point that was made about one of the less well done parts of the project was the location that the video was set in. There were some parts of our location that we felt matched the atmosphere of the video really well, for example the grave yard. The issue with it is that we used the same location in our A2 as our AS. Whilst the individual scenes did not have the exact same location as the AS video, the general location was the same just with slightly different places in the scenes. This was brought up by our audience who said that they would have much rather our A2 have a different location altogether so as to keep it different from AS and to try something new. Unfortunately due to the location of where we live, we didn't have much opportunity for a range of locations, so we had tpo make do with what he had. Despite trying our best to not have the video with the same background as AS, it appears we didn't do a good job of changing it up enough.

On the whole however, the response from our audience feedback was positive and only mentioned a couple of things that could of been improved. This gives us a lot of confidence that we did a great job on our production and made a good quality video.

Evaluation question 3

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

Below is a link to my third evaluation question which I made in the form of a Prezi presentation.

Evaluation Question 3

Evaluation Question 4

How effective is your combination of your main project and the ancillary texts?

Below is a link to my fourth evaluation question which was done on a PowToon presentation

Evaluation Question 4

Ancillary text 1.

Below are some screenshots of my ancillary text which was a website based on my music video. It includes a home page, tour dates page and an "about" page. The website was designed with the band 'Twenty one Pilots' in mind and therefore has relevant information about the band and dates of concerts. 

Website