My project evaluation as I am now at the final stage of my project.
When beginning my EPQ, I had a number of ideas that I wanted to look into more and make aims and object to work towards and have in mind whilst researching and producing. These original ideas which I then made into my aims and objectives were that I wanted to work hard on my editing skills on Premier Pro and After Effects but more specifically the use of image editing using Photoshop. I set this as an aim as Photoshop is a major aspect of digital marketing and will help me in my later life and the career I want to pursue. Another aim I had was to make my advertising and marketing realistic and authentic compared to what is seen in general music marketing. I felt as though, if my advertising and marketing campaign was to promote an artist and their album I wanted it to follow the codes and conventions seen in other artists' work. I also had aims of keeping my work sustainable and affordable as I felt that I had overspent in previous projects. Finally, I outlined wanting to receive feedback from my supervisor, peers and target audience and use these findings to update my work and overall ensure that I meet each of these aims. I think that overall these aims were appropriate for my campaign as they were going to help me progress well and ensure my campaign is detailed enough.
I think that I have met these aims well as I have shows a clear difference in my editing skills (these can be seen on slide 7/8 of my presentation) and whilst can say I definitely did struggle with improving these, I would say that I have definitely met this aim and I am personally majorly impressed and happy with these improvements. At the start of the year and the beginning of my EPQ I could barely even add an image as a layer and find different fonts and now I have experimented with colour grading, adding different blur effects, creating logos, expanding images using generative fill, layering and deepening and adding shadows to text. For my aim of keeping my project authentic and realistic, I think I have met this aim well as I have used many different existing product analysis' for various stages of my campaign, this included looking into album aesthetic, album advertisement, artists social media and the use of marketing devices. This has helped me ensure that my campaign is structured the same way other popular artists conduct their marketing for a new album. I met my aim of keeping my work sustainable and affordable as the only thing I purchased was my album cover and i used props I had at home and outfits that already belonged to my artist. And finally, I met my aim of receiving feedback from my supervisor, peer's and target audience by having check ins and interim deadlines to which I received valuable feedback by my target audience. I gained feedback from my peers and target audience by asking questions in a survey. This again helped me to update my work to ensure that overall I have met my aims. An aim that I think I didn't meet as well was to use After Effects. My use of After Effects in my work was quite limited at the beginning of the year and did want to work on this further. Whilst I used a large amount of After Effects in my practice EPQ, I mainly focussed on my Photoshop in my campaign. As I did to aim to use After Effects and did not meet this aim I want to use After Effects in my next project.
I think that one of the biggest successes in my project was the improvement in my editing skills. Again At the beginning of the project I really couldn't do a lot using Photoshop and now I am really happy with how my images turned out. I did this by using YouTube tutorials mainly as they showed step by step instructions of how to apply different effects and filters to my work. These YouTube tutorials also generally featured what to do if something didn't work or went wrong. This was helpful as I was able to go back and re do things. Applying the effects and filters I have taken from these videos contributed to the success of my project.
A skill that I have used and developed was my planning and making arrangements with my actress and meeting my interim deadlines. By over spending and often feeling overwhelmed with things to in my last few projects I wanted to plan my work effectively. I needed to make sure I had set days to film on as both myself and my friend who played Valentina were dealing with lots of coursework and exams. I made plans to film a number of weeks in advance and booked equipment a number of days before filming as I knew that I would be heavily relying on this equipment. I did an equipment test very early on to see what camera I would be using and what produced the best quality for my work. I also needed to plan all of the different tasks and forms or research I needed to carry out, these additionally helped me reach my aims of making my marketing campaign realistic. One thing I think that I could have planned better was ensuring that I had enough b-roll footage for my advertisement as I do feel that just having my artist sit on a bed and read off of a script it was not effective at all.
Overall, I am majorly impressed with my performance in my EPQ. I think that I have met my aims and objectives well, I have backed up everything that I have made to link/relate back to my contextual focus, technical focus and my unique selling points. I think that I have majorly improved my editing skills and also completed what I set out to do and gave me a taster into what I would like to go into in the future. There are defiantly performance aspects that I could improve, this would include increasing the use of After Effects in my work as I wanted to use it and didn't. This would help increase my editing skills usage as well as once again help me improve my skills.
A problem that occurred in my project was finding a day that both me and my friend (who played my artist Valentina Winslow) were able to meet up and film was quite difficult due to part time jobs, both of us doing coursework and having exams and also University visits. I had two main days where I wanted to film - one for doing all of my photoshoots and one for filming my advertisement. I found that this was the best way to be able to work together rather than filming on several different occasions. At the end of filming/shooting I uploaded my footage with my friends so that we could quickly review everything and ensure we had what we needed. This meant that we could reshoot on the day instead of meeting for another day. Another problem that occurred was getting my album cover to fit in the format needed for ordering the vinyl cover online. When editing my album cover on Photoshop, I had researched what the sizing and format of images is for album covers however when I came to put this into the website to order the vinyl, it did not fit with all of the aspects I wanted in it featured. This meant that I had to go back and edit the layout of everything to ensure everything was included. Another problem I faced was trying to keep up with interim deadlines. Whilst I had planned for each stage of my project, going into the amount of detail that I wanted to meant that it took more time. This meant that I did often feel as though I was behind and a had a lot left to do. I resolved this by continuously working at everything I wanted to do and ensure I remained determined to complete my work to a good quality.
A step I could do to ensure these problems don't arise again in other projects on in any work I do in the future would be to use my recourses better. There were definitely different locations I could have used rather than filming at my house. What I mean by this is that instead of finding the time where we were both available to film at my house I could have filmed at college whilst we are both in a free period. This would enable me to edit more time affectively and also would mean I would have been able to do more written/theory work at home instead of practical work at home. Another step would be to look at where I was going to be ordering my vinyl cover from first and look at what their size guide is before beginning editing. Finally, I would maybe add time limits for each task so that I can move forward quicker and so that I can complete everything I set out to do.
One aspect of my project that I think could have gone better was my album poster. I aimed to make a variety of different print marketing products, one that went well was my tour poster as I was very happy with how it turned out, one that I could have improved was my album poster. I think that it wasn't very intriguing, it wasn't laid out very well, there were many flaws and it was not visually pleasing. I would have changed this and improved certain aspects including the added in sticker and the font.
A recourses that I did not have and would have thoroughly helped me would have been to find statistic on self grown success in the industry. I did not find any numerical data when searching for it but did find a number of examples including Justin Bieber and 5 Seconds of Summer. Having statistics of how likely global self grown success in pop music would have been extremely helpful to understand as this could be related to my brand awareness and my unique selling point. Another recourse would be that when completing my academic research using google scholar, there were a few options that were very specific to my work but I was unable to read them as I would have needed to pay. This once again un allowed me to learn more valuable information that would add to my USP and my brand.
I do not think I overcame these lack of recourses well as I was not able to find much about it so did not go further into it. A way I could have overcome this was conducting my own research. I could have done this by making a survey targeting artists and upcoming artists and share it amongst social media. Whilst this may have been difficult to gain a wide selection of valuable and reliable answers, it may have even helped to just have a few answers.
An element of planning and preparation that could have impacted my project to gain a better outcome would be to help set myself deadlines. My final few edits such as my album poster and my advertisement felt rushed which I should have thoroughly allowed the time for. If I had set myself deadlines I could have worked consistently on each stage which will have allowed me to take the time to finalise my edits to a high quality.
A key lesson I learnt in my project was to add my references and update my reflective log every day and every time I did something. In past projects I had not done this and this was not beneficial to myself as I then later had to go back and add these things back in which was extremely time consuming. I applied this in my EPQ and it was extremely beneficial for saving time and allowing me to spend more time on my actual work. Another key lesson I learnt was to reflect back on my own work to see what could be improved. I did this by doing first attempts and top slices (specifically in practical work) and then doing further research and action research into these skills and working to improve them. This was a lesson as it I was able to reflect on what I had done, what needed to be improved, how I would be improving it and then what the final affect on the viewer and audience would be. I did this throughout my project as it was good for me to visualise the improvements I had made and evaluate my next steps. A final lesson I have learnt is to remain positive throughout my project as I was very determined to meet my aims and objectives of my project but was concerned about the time I had to do it. Remaining positive is important as if I lost the determination to complete my project I would fall very behind.
A skill that I can take forward into further projects would be what I learnt in Photoshop. I really wanted to learn Photoshop as it is one of the most popular software's for digital media and content creation - which I want to do in the future. I did not have a lot of experience in Photoshop and was one of the main technical focusses of my EPQ. I will take this forward into my next project as I want to continue to develop these skills.
Finally, I am extremely happy with how my advertising and marketing campaign has turned out and I am very happy that I have been able to experiment with codes and conventions of music marketing. I am happy with the differences from my practical work from the beginning of the project to the end as I think that the improvements are very clear. I want to continue to work on improving my editing skills as I believe that editing is extremely important as it majorly impacts the final affect on the audience.