Advanced Portfolio Evaluation

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

Radiohead as a band are controversial in themselves,and this is hugely reflected by previous artwork drawn by lead singer/ song writer Thom Yorke. Many of Yorke's pictures have been featured in album covers and their album contents. Some of Yorke's work became iconic images that are internationally recognised as representation of Radiohead. Drawings such as the 'minotaur' are well known symbolism of Radiohead.
Radiohead's album art, music video and music are very unique and creative as it pushes the boundaries and explores creativity and imagination that is otherwise left untouched. Radiohead's use of simple but extremely clever album art, in both present and previous years presents perfectly the controversial attitude and appearance they acquire.
Radiohead are renowned for their creative and somewhat strange music videos however they always meaning and stories that are told in sometimes disorientating but always effective ways. This is what we tried to accomplish in accordance with our music video and Digi pack and in consideration to previous magazine adverts and music videos by Radiohead I think our Digi pack, advert and music video illustrate Radiohead's style and attitude perfectly. Our Digi Pack is controversial as to the normal perception of music and it's artists but Radiohead are controversial and utterly none mainstream. In our music video we experimented with the camera to create distinctive and even awkward angles and shots, we tried to create something that is simple but different and had a story behind it that, as a viewer you can grasp as you watch the music video.


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

There was alot of software needed in order to complete this project. Although I only briefly used Premier I was deeply involved in creating the Digi pack in Photoshop. I found photoshop hard to work around so i had to experiment with it until I found a few types of filters and distortion tools that I was happy with then I combined them all together to create the Digi pack.
The camera and tripod were a little complicated to start with but once you were familiar with them they made filming alot easier as the tripod helped make some very smooth pan shots and the camera was really effective off the tripod when we did shaky cam, it created the type of images we wanted perfectly.
In order to do research into the music genres, the band and into music videos we had to use social networking sites and fan websites to create discussion boards and gain valuable information straight from the fans about how they expect and want things to look like.


What have you learned from your audience feedback

To get as much audience feedback as possible we used focus groups, interviews, questionnaires, social networking sites and fan made websites with discussion boards to gather as much research as possible and to get a general idea of what people thought of our music video.

Digi Pack Research

By researching previous album cover artwork and magazine adverts for Radiohead I was able to recognise that all of Radiohead's previous album covers are seemingly random abstract objects or images that are morphed into images that are totally obscure and illustrate Radiohead as a band brilliantly in the sense that they are utterly unique and are creative in ways that many other bands are not, and because of this they have generated a huge following. Through using simple pictures and objects as the album covers and deforming them into something meaningful and clever Radiohead have created some of the most notorious album covers to date, but not always for good reason for example Radiohead's first album 'Pablo honey' was once dubbed one the worst album covers by Radiohead by The Guardian newspaper. Radiohead's album contents and lyrics are always hugely reflected in their album covers for example OK Computer (1997) and Kid A (2000) were about modern alienation and this was shown perfectly through Stanley Donwood's artwork. The songwriting on In Rainbows was more personal than that on Radiohead's other albums, with singer Thom Yorke describing most tracks as his versions of "seduction songs", because of this I tried to create an album cover and contents and a magazine advert that reflected Thom Yorke's idea of sensuality for In Rainbows and yet had similarities of previous album covers that represented Radiohead for the unique band they are.