Evaluation

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

My project as a whole both conforms yet challenges conventions of typical tv channels. In some ways it challenges them simply due to the type of programmes and music it would have on there. The sub-culture of tattoo's, rebellion, and alternative music and dressing in a non conventional way means that whatever is involved with that whether it's a radio station, a tv channel or a music video, it would push the boundaries of conventional media products and the interests of the majority of society. Because i took an 'alternative' styled approach to the project i learn a lot when it came to the obvious difference between music channel genres and also how few and far between punk rock channels there are. 

Though on the over hand, my products do conform to the stereotype of rock/alternative subcultured products, the colour scheme is dark and monochromic which is expected as the stereotype which is made daily is that "alternative people like the colour black". The brick wall i used as a background and subtle hints at vandalism show the generic anarchical view people think 'punks' have. The print advert for the ancillary projects, with the cat's open jaw as the image, plays on this rebellion too, a connotation of fierceness and passion. 

I think that following this conventions was necessary to gain interest and recognition from an audience, for example if my website looked like the colourful Viva website then people would assume my channel deals with the same music genre and social interest as those channels do and would then be confused when they see heavy metal music reviews, punk rock show videos and programs on tattooing when they go on the website. 

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

The combination of the 3 paged website, the animated ident, and the print advertisement is a good combination to have done. The website was the main project and i believe you can see this through the amount of thought and work done on the pages and the website is consistent throughout, sticking to the same themes, similar layouts and a consistent colour scheme which is all effective on its own. The print advert to go with that is something just to grab the audiences attention with the abstract look of it, in some ways the image in the background has nothing to do with the website apart from the logo thought beyond the superficial view and thinking about it more so the audience will realise it does have a relevance to the channel. The logo on the print advert makes it consistent with the website so it isn't too abstract and confusing for the audience, this is what makes is effective. Then choosing the animated ident rather than the two page spread made the project more interesting and let me be more creative and so i enjoyed a lot more which i think you can see through the finished products. The ident is stop motion which is rising in popularity at the moment in advertising as it is an easy and simple yet effective and intriguing way to grab the audiences attention. Making the ident by scribbling black marker pen and chalk on a piece of paper sounds amateur and scruffy though the rough around the edges look is what i was aiming to achieve throughout my whole project. The fact that what progressively appears throughout the ident looks like the 'ALT' channel logo ensures that the audience would recognise this as an ALT identity advert and so this is effective in the way it is recognisable.

The combination of a website, a print advertisement, and a animated ident makes my project diverse and interesting and exciting to look at. It's enabled me to learn a lot about new media technologies and the conventions of websites and music channels. Doing a website for my main project and doing an animated ident also shows diversity and a wider range of new media rather than if i was to do another combination, for example instead of doing the ident do the two page spread for a tv listings magazine. 

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Here is a video of me talking about this: 

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

The use of new media was most apparent and required as i chose new technology based projects to do, the website and the animated ident and even to make the print advert. Both the print advert and the website designing involved me using a very popular software, Adobe Photoshop. This allowed me to combine the image for my print advert with text, i could move the text around and seeing how each positioning of text worked without worrying about cost of printing and then not liking it and having to do it again which would have been apparent if i was not using new media technologies. I also used Adobe Photoshop to work on the website before actually making it a working website (html). Photoshop allowed me to create the rollovers, i.e to make the state of text and images when the mouse is hovered over them on the website before doing this on Adobe Dreamweaver. 
Adobe Dreamweaver was completely new to me as i had no knowledge on the software before this project, though after some research of my own on the internet and some teaching and help from college staff, Dreamweaver enabled me to put my 3 pages website up on the internet. I used Photoshop to slice everything, save for 'web and devices' then transfer onto Dreamweaver, slowly making my website. I done the same to make the rollovers, though my first ambitions were too high and expectations of what i could do were also too high and so i had to change my ideas. I made rollovers for some of the text on the menu bar, and linked the "music" tab and the "news" tab to page 2 and 3 i made on Photoshop. 
When i was constructing the ident i used Adobe iMovie, whish was another software i used in the project that i had no previous experience of knowledge with. Though unlike Dreamweaver which consisted of a confusing amount of coding and technique, iMovie was very simple and only required some common sense and being computer savvy. This software allowed me to bring video animation into my project which is a very popular form of advertising via new media. 

When doing the research i found that new media technology helped a lot, i was able to use the internet to find examples and information that i wouldn't have been able to find using old media technologies such as newspapers. With the internet i could use search engines to find a range of different music channel websites that were very similar and/or the same to my own channel, this helped me understand the codes and conventions of them and use some aspects for inspiration for my own ideas and designs. The internet also enabled me to use Youtube to find out about tv ident's and to explore stop motion animation a little more. Without these new media technologies my media research would have lacked greatly and i wouldn't have had an opportunity to get examples and develop conventions within my own project. It also would have meant i couldn' compare 'alternative' channels to mainstream ones such as Viva and wouldn't have had something to work against. 

When evaluation my work and getting feedback, the internet was useful to be able to compare my work, and also send it to friends who i do not see regularly. For example my friend whom has the same interests as me, and so fits into my target audience perfectly, is away at uni and his opinion was valuable considering he is studying music promotion and branding. I was able to email screen shots of my work to him and got his comments on the overall look of the project which helped greatly.