1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Firstly for our music video we researched different directors and found different elements of their work that we liked and disliked. This helped us recognize things that we straight off did/didn’t want to include in our own videos. From here, we analysed different music videos and directors on our blogs that influenced us for different reasons. We also used audience feed back via questionnaires to help us decide on the content of our video. We studied the conventions of music videos (especially Goodwin 6) and kept these ideas in the back of our minds when making and planning the video. For example one of Goodwin’s 6 is a link between lyrics and visuals. As you can see, in this clip we have a punch bowl. This links to the lyrics in the song “punch-drunk love”. This is a subtle link, however a more obvious one to lyric and visuals in our music video is, as you can see, at the beginning when our lead singer first sings and mentions the word ‘girl’, we then see a clip of her. This is not only a convention but makes a clear connection for our audience. Another one of Goodwin’s 6 is that “the demands of the record label will require lots of close ups and clear shots of the artists”. This too is another convention we have taken on board and developed. We liked the idea and process of creating98 our ‘band’ and did this via the website, digipak and music video. Therefore we took on this convention (as effectively being the record label as well) in the music video having close ups and clear shots of the band. From us, being the record label, this would help our ‘band’ become a more successful young pop/indie group. Our lead singer obviously has more close ups and holds the story line within the music video. It is quite typical, and therefore a convention we too followed, for a lead singer of a band to be the main face and most well known member, especially to begin with. Perhaps over time when our ‘band’ would be more well known, future music videos could feature more of the rest of the band members (E.g.- involving them in narrative). A convention, however, that we challenged, within the music video, is that Goodwin 6 stated music videos often have voyeuristic treatment of the female body. We challenge this convention, as we have no voyeurism exploited whereas we have a more romantic and ‘cute’ love story rather than sexual references. Our music video was narrative and performance based and therefore was conventional and slotted into one of the 3 typical types of music videos. We used elements of postmodernism in the video where we have 2 shots of people (including lead singer) from a non-choreographed point of view. This shows the fun element of the party and is postmodern as it s not a ‘real’ clear proper shot.
When creating our website we enabled the help of previous students A2 websites, actual band websites and audience feedback. Within our questionnaire we asked the question “What would entice you to visit a bands website?”. Some of the most popular answers to these questions we took on board and included them in our website. For example, ‘Free stuff’ was a popular answer, so we therefore have included a free download version of the song (punch-drunk love) that is acoustic. Audience feedback helped a lot here as this would benefit the band by bringing people onto the bands website and in turn increasing there fan base/popularity.
A convention, we found, when reasearching other bands websites is that they have a gallery/photos sections. We liked this idea because not only did our audience feedback suggest they too liked galleries, but it would also make the band more recognizable and eventually increasing there recognition.
We challenged the normal convention of having music videos on a bands website by adding more than just the music video to the ‘videos’ section of our website. Here we also, unlike some previous students and sometimes unlike actual bands websites, we made and added a ‘behind the scenes’ video of the making of the music video. This helps the fans connect with the band and make them feel part of there ‘journey’.
When planning our digipaks we analysed real digipaks and what was included and why. From here we decided what we wanted to include on our digipak. This is where our audience feedback, again, became useful. We asked in our questionnaire what they would want to be included on it and the most common answer was lyrics. So obviously we took note and included lyrics within our digipak. We picked what type of digipak we wanted to create and then made it using Photoshop. We found a common convention was having a little booklet inside with pictures and lyrics in. So we took created a booklet to go inside the digipak.
2. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
We created a ‘brand’ for our band that reflected the song we chose. ‘Punch-drunk love’ has a pop-rock feel that we wanted to spread throughout all three of our pieces. A particular genre of music always has a particular style and substance to it so we embraced the pop-rock/indie theme associated with the song. A way of starting this is with the overall look of the band themselves. We researched into the types of clothing the band should wear. We did this by looking at pictures of The Summer Set themselves and by audience feedback. From the overall ‘look’ of the band (being important for pictures used for the digipak and website) the style for these two things then flowed. For example, when picking a website for the band, some looked quite ‘DJ’ orientated with bright illumines colours. This we knew didn’t suit our theme. Which was quite laied back and ‘rural’- which we reflected in our music video itself- with parts being shot outside. We did, however have a common colour of red run throughout all three products. The red in the music video was shown in all three locations. In the two outside locations our lead singer is subtly wearing an element of red and in the house party he and a band member are wearing red, followed by a red kitchen and red punch. The red overall is to reflect the thought of the punch drink and to the thought of romance and love. We therefore after including it in the music video included it in both the website and digipak to create a common theme. As said another theme, was the idea of rurality. We see this in the music video and is again reflected in the pictures taken outside on both the digipak and website. The rurality idea comes from what can be seen on their bios page on the website about the way they have grown up and formed outside of urban life, in tern this creates another link. Our name is Unplugged Records and is our bands ‘record label’. It is a common link and seen in all three of our products. There is a sense of synergy within our products. For example on our website there is a link to iTunes whereby people can buy the song and music video directly. We always had this idea of having a link to buying the product on the website. However we used our questionnaire to acquire knowledge about what was the most popular way of buying music. It became clear that it was via iTunes, therefore iTunes was the link we submitted onto our website. As said iTunes would also sell the music video, as we know live in an age of iPhones and iPods where this has become more popular. However, we also have the video available to watch on our website under the ‘videos’ page. Our digipak also links to our website by advertising it on the back.
3. What have you learned from your audience feedback?
Before we started the process of making the products, we did a questionnaire. This asked but in turn answered some simple questions that would affect things a lot. For example in our questionnaire we asked what concept type of music video is preferred. The answer came back that a narrative and performance base was more popular. This too, we agreed on. However if we had of had a big majority preferring, for example just a narrative, then this may have swayed us to change our ideas to fit what our audience wanted.
After roughly finishing our music video we wanted some more audience feedback. We did this by gathering a few members of students (we chose students as they in particular are our target audience who we are aiming the video at – aka young hopefuls). As you can see we recorded them watching the video and their reactions. We then asked them a few questions, including what they would change. This was very useful as it confirmed some ideas we had portrayed as being correct. For example the lighting effect at the party. It was useful to hear a critical comment about the lead singer in the tree. We would have loved to have then changed it as it didn’t work, but unfortunately we didn’t have any other clips. This is something we would go back and change if we could.
If we could do this project again, we would have made better use of the HD camera. We were lucky enough to use it and although its quality is very good we think it would have been even better if we had the right lighting on set. The audience pointed out that they actually really enjoyed the postmodern clips within the video. We wish now that we had included more of them. To get round this aspect of not knowing it was enjoyable till it was too late would be to have audience feedback sooner than we got It (i.e.- before we finished it)!
4. How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
When researching we used YouTube a lot to embed videos onto blogger, this made sure we had high quality videos and meant we could fit them exactly to the size of our blog. Wikipedia and Google was used to research different directors. We scanned our questionnaires and storyboards onto blogger. Blogger wasn’t new to us, as we had used it in year 12. However this year we had the ability to make it more creative, for example we used our own picture as a background and edited the frames and text to fit the colours of the photo. We used excel to analyzed our questionnaires to produce averages, pie charts and bar graphs. Screen grabs were used during our research to help annotate our findings. We went on location shoots, took pictures when filming and posted these onto the blog.
During the construction we got the change to use the HD camera, which was a new experience for both of us. Along with this the dolly became incredibley useful. This required a small lesson on how to work both bits of the equipment with Mr. Phillips. We uploaded the footage to iMovie and from there imported it into final cut. Final Cut was again new to both of us and so we enabled the help of YouTube videos. We struggled to begin with but it got easier the more we got used to it. We learnt how to quickly razor and ‘in’ and ‘out’ clips with shortcuts. This made the process quicker and easier. We also used a normal camera for backstage clips. This was useful as it meant on location two things could be done at once. iTunes was our source for the sound track and this was an easy process as we both have iTunes accounts. Facebook was a way in which we communicated with everyone involved in the production of the music video. We used a group email as everyone, minus one, had Facebook and used it regularly and would get the message quickly.
Disk wizards was a useful website that enabled us to downloaded a template of a digipak. This was useful as it saved time and gave exact measurements. This was helpful when making the digipak in Photoshop. Photoshop was relatively new to me, although Danni had, had experience with paintshop pro, which she applied to Photoshop. In the end, we both took on roles of designing the booklet and digipak. This has widened our knowledge on Photoshop as we learnt different aspects and how to deal with layers. Wix was used in the construction of our website. Although neither of us had used it we picked up the functions quickly and managed to add new pages, pictures and videos.
We downloaded the ancillary texts to the iDVD, this included making a menu page.
In our evaluation we have used photo booth to record our audience feedback, which we then imported into final cut and added to this, our evaluation. We have used screen grabs and footage from our piece. This has helped highlight what we were talking about. We have used different effects to show these screen grabs/footage to make it more interesting.
Using all these techniques shows our abilities and creativity and has enhanced our work. However, including all of these has meant we have had to be organized in terms of what and how something got done (e.g.- who puts blogs up and when).
