Video, Advertisement and Digipak

Task 1 - Conventions of real Media Products

In What Ways Do Your Media Products Use

Task 2- How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

How Effective is the Combination of Your Main Product2

Task 3 - What have you learnt from audience feedback?

For this task we asked a focus group what their opinions were about our music video. We asked a group of 16-18 aged males and females as this is our target audience so would be interesting to hear about their thoughts and opinions. We showed them our music video and showed them our digipak and poster and asked them some questions and listened to their opinions.



A couple thought the lip syncing wasn’t very good which distracted them, concentrating on that fault drew attention away from the main message/video, however most said this wasn’t an important or existent issue for them.

Almost everybody noticed that lead singer was sexualised; shown how she was looking at the camera, how her make up was done, her costume, and the rope all helped with emphasizing this point.

One didn’t see the point in our video because there was no valuable narrative because there was no real story line.

They all thought that jump cuts and use of editing connected well with song and made the song more enjoyable, cool effects used, such as, blurring-went with the whole club scene, always moving, music matched the jumps and that made it more enjoyable for the viewers.
They noticed the contrasts between the two locations - better than having just people clubbing, weird locations but made it interesting and made them want to watch it again.
Few noticed it may have been to do with drugs but a few said that hadn’t crossed their minds. A few said they didn’t understand why there were animals, although most of them said it didn’t really cross they’re minds because they got the feel it was meant to be surreal rather than realistic.


Things that could be improved: more narrative, more variety, different locations, as it was slightly repetitive and would have been more appealing if there was a wider range of locations.

Their opinions on the poster were they liked the mouth open with piercing because it showed the band was out there, young image, rock, out of control and a few said they liked that the poster went well with the lead singer’s image.

Attitudes/what they thought they stood for:  provocative, rebellious, stereo typical teenage image, dark, mysterious, grunge.

They thought that the typical target audience was ages between 16-25 both genders.
A few said they would have it on their iPod, most would listen to it at a party or expect it to play in a club.
The males in our focus group said they would watch them live as it would be loud and a good time.

Females said they might possibly go for experience as it would be fun but not for the music.. not natural, organic acoustic music which they weren’t overly keen on.
A few didn’t understand why Abby was being attacked and didn’t think the two girls were connected.

One noticed that there was contrast between the two girls- white dress, blonde hair contrasting with black dress, red lipstick, black hair and most people agreed, boys noticed cleavage, males more focused on sexual elements whereas girls wanted to know a bit more, although they Liked the casting of the two girls and the contrast between them.
After hearing other people’s honest thoughts and opinions about out music video I feel much more confident with our achievement. Everybody said the editing was done well which we felt was very important and this they felt would be a reason to re watch it over. A few people thought it needed more locations which most of us would agree with and if we had more time with filming we would have taken this more into account.

I’m pleased with results to responses and I can relate to the comments made and any negative points can be taken into account. If we had to do it again, I would say we possibly could have focussed more on narrative elements and on a more meaningful storyline. We also could of arranged to have more cast to have in our different locations.

Our music video has been posted on Youtube and these are a few of them comments that people have written below. Again, it seems that most people like the editing as there were many positive comments received about that. However a few of them comments were from friends, which means its not as reliable as it could be, therefore if our video becomes more popular on youtube we will hopefully recieve more comments from people externally. 

Task 4 - How have you used new media technologies in the construction, research, planning and evaluation stages?

Using new media technologies I was able to work on constructing, researching, planning and evaluating my products for my advanced portfolio.

The reason for our research was to solve any new or existing problems, prove any new ideas, develop new theories or changing ways we went about things when constructing our media products. One technology we used frequently was Youtube. We used Youtube in order to view other videos of the same genre. Having the option to do this made us more aware of our typical target audience and what we needed to change or keep so we were able to reach out and attract this audience. Via Youtube we were also able to upload our own videos, such as our preliminary task and our storyboard/anamatic where anybody was able to comment. This meant if they had any opinions or better ideas they had the option to share them with us, because ultimately they’re the ones our project is aimed too so this was something useful which helped connect us to our target audience. I also used Youtube to embed videos onto my blog to record research so that it was permanent. This meant that when I did research on my own, the rest of my group were able to see what I had done, such as finding videos from different genres of music analysed how image is constructed and technical conventions of editing, camera work and mise-en-scene which I used a Youtube video of Rihanna-'Only Girl in the World' for compared with Funeral Party who were similar artisits to our preliminary task. This helped my final product because I was able to use some of the technical conventions in my own music video.

Another technology which helped us with researching our target audience is Twitter. This allowed us to go onto The Prodigy’s Twitter account and look at all the people following them, which meant they were our target audience, if not, very similar. This benefited my final piece as I was able to make the poster and digipak more accurate when designing it for my target audience.

 

Blogger also came to use as we were able to keep an online planner, which made things much easier to organise. As it was online it meant that one person in our group did not have to carry it round with the chance of losing it, it was permanent. It also meant adding new information was much more flexible as every member in our group was able to access the blog and add their new found research which made things much easier and faster.

When planning for our music video we used a graphics editing program called Photoshop. With this editing software I was able to take photographs of our band members and blend their heads into bodies found from Google Images in order to find out what our band would look like on the day of shooting with their costumes on. By doing this we came to realise that the clothes we had told them to wear did not conform to their band image.

This made things smoother on the shoot day as we were able to tell them in advance to bring a change in clothes which saved us time. Photoshop also came in very useful when designing and creating out Digipak and poster. Photoshop allowed us to be very flexible, things were easily changed and adjusted till we were satisfied with our final products. The only difficulty we had with Photoshop is a couple of members in our group were not familiar with it which meant we had to use some of our planning to teach the others the basics.

I also used Photoshop for codes and conventions of a digipak and advertisement. I got a picture of digipak, uploaded it to Photoshop. This enabled me to label it easily, such as production details. This helped me when creating my own digipak as I was able to follow the key elements in order to create a successful digipak. 

Another everyday technology which came in very useful with planning was mobile phones. As we all carried our phones around with us we were able to photograph the different stages, for example when we were choosing our location I took pictures and put them up onto my blog. I also took pictures when our group were brainstorming what to call our band and album which I wrote about on my blog.

The main technology we used for construction was Final Cut pro which enabled smooth transitions and after effects. Using after effects allowed us to create imagery which is made to make the viewer feel slightly uncomfortable, such as the mirror editing which was created to make things more interesting, to catch the viewer’s attention. Final Cut pro was advanced and as a group we were able to work together, experimenting with different techniques until we found one we were all satisfied with.

With the evaluation of our final product, Blogger was a new media technology which we used. Using Blogger we were able to distribute our music video via Youtube. This was permanent and meant we were distributing our product worldwide. Blogger was flexible and I was able to update my blog and write about the different things we did to get our final product.

This is our director's commentary, which we recorded our creative decisions made and how we were able to do these, played along side our music video, 'Warrior's Dance'.

Evolution of Digipak-Front cover

As part of creating our digipak we designed and created an image which woulld be our front cover on our album and poster. As a group we drew many different designs but we all decided this one was the right one for our digipak. We then scanned that image into a computer and sythsasised it to match our synthasised track. Using Photoshop  we experimented with merging our image into different backgrounds to see which one worked well. Below you can see the thumbnails of the different options and what we had to choose from in this prosess.

This was our final choice of background which is a peeling, painted wall. We chose this image because it has that urban feel which we were trying to create. I also put on our band name and album name to getter a better feel for it, and to justify our final decision making.
This worked well for our track because it conformed the stereotypical youthfulness and rebeliouness which are the conventions of our target audience.

Our Digipak

One thing which came with making our digipak was also creating a band and album name. To help us decide on names we wrote down words which we thought described what our band and/or music video was about and then words that followed on from those. We also used synopsis words and a thesaurus to help inspire our ideas.



Originally we decided on 'The Auspice' for our band name and 'Backbones' as the album name and so we started creating a digipak revolved around that. However we later realised it was not right for the message we were trying to project. By having a male back on the album was giving out the wrong message and would perhaps attract the wrong audience. Therefore we thought again about our choice and decided on 'Dirty Habit' for our band name but kept 'Backbones' for our album name.

When developing our digipak we researched into darker things, as this was appropriate for our band's image. These are a few of our rough sketches for planning our digipak.