Friday, 11 December 2009
Marvin's Evaluation
In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
1.We feel that our video challenged the regular conventions of a typical indie video as we originally took our idea from lily Allen’s video LDN where it demonstrates a very clear contrast between typical London life and a rose tinted version that shows it as much nicer. We feel that we have created something similar with our video with the trigger for the changes to be this nerdy boy and a hat.
We spoke about a few other ideas before we agreed on the final one but we found flaws and issues with them. We thought the idea we chose was primarily achievable and represented a good visual style with a lot of scope for some adaption.
The way that we have challenged others in this genre is by going with a lighter sided view of life and added some comedy in there also which I feel goes with the type of video we created. In a lot of indie videos you don’t see as much of the artist as you do in our video but we feel it works well because he is telling a story throughout
Also in the digipak we didn’t go with the conventional style of the genre. You can see this as we used bright colours and had smiling shots of the artist in a jokey fashion.
We spent a lot of time researching the genre and products from the genre in order to be prepared before we started our project so that none of our shots or images or anything looked really out of place or unplanned.
We used a mix of generic conventions with our own visual style
How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
2.We feel that our video fitted well with our poster and digipak as they all featured the artist heavily. For instance lots of close up shots that are head on except on the poster as we thought that as this is likely to be the first thing released that we should have some mystery to the artist. But we used the same fonts that we feel are bold and yet give the artist a fun image by using bright colours on the font
We kept something in all of our products that binds them all together the hat that I also think is very appropriate to the genre and the image that we are portraying for the artist.
Also by keeping the continuity throughout all the products we are giving a clear visual style to the audience and we feel we have appealed well to the target audience by using typical genre images in some parts.
In the music video we played a lot on the character he was the main focus in all of the tasks we wanted to show his personality and characteristics. We also wanted to show that the band had a fun image that fits with the genre.
We showed this by making our character portray a nerdy kid isn’t very popular or cool. I think this adds to the humour of the band that fits with the genre and the image we were trying to create for the character and the band. Also we used the usual image for the band by using the sort of clothes you would generally expect from the indie genre. For instance the shirt and generally trendy clothes. Also I feel that one of the best things that we use throughout the project is the props. Because by using the hat we have created a visual symbol for the band and character. Which we made sure features in all of our products as we think its something that features in a lot of indie bands and artists. Other props we used were a guitar for the cool kid compared to the ‘guitar hero’ guitar of the nerdy kid to get a subtle contrast which we thought worked well. We considered using the guitar in the digipak but then we revised our ideas and said that it didn’t feature enough in the video compared to the hat also we saw the hat as a switch so when the nerdy kid puts it on he becomes everything he wants to be. We also did comparisons between the car and the moped and the fan mail and the bill. So I think we used props well throughout and it made the contrast effect we were looking for more achievable. In the digigpak we utilised a shot face on with our artist but we caught him off guard we didn’t want him posing for it as we wanted to make our artist look friendly and everything from the project is not on for show as if its just footage and images from normal life for him and we did that in the poster as well. The artist is looking the other way also so it gives a sense of mystery as well which we wanted as it would be some people’s first sight of the artist. But overall we think that there is a clear correlation between all products and the artist comes across as friendly, fun and approachable.
What have you learnt from your audience feedback?
3.Overall we thought we got good helpful feedback throughout the entire project. We got helpful suggestions such as ‘use more lip syncing’ and ‘use more locations’ so we went and reviewed the footage and comments and decided to act upon these things which we feel has made our product better.
But there were times where we thought the feedback we received was not up to scratch. Such as when peers were reviewing our rough cut one person mentioned we used a lot of lip syncing and at the time we had barely used any. Also someone mentioned that the hat used is irrelevant but then we explained how its part of the artist’s visual style and a signature item from the artist. We also received some verbal feedback regarding other products. Regarding the digipak we received some comments from peers about the institutionalisation that we needed to include such as a record company logo and parental advisory and various others. As for the poster we had some peers saying how we should include some quotes and reviews that would make our product look more official and professional.
We also created feedback from our own group by holding regular production meetings involving everyone from the group
Overall as a group we found the feedback extremely helpful and worthwhile as it helped us improve our projects and in some cases make sure we didn’t forget things.
How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
We utilised new media technologies in every aspect of our project except drawing up our storyboards but we still need to get them on the blog.
But the main one that we used to document and collate our ideas is the website blogger. This helped us to get all of our research and ideas in one place. That enabled us to create better work. Also we used it for show casing our final work and evaluations. It was very helpful for when evaluating as you can look at your starting ideas and it helps you to see how you have progressed and it makes it easy to compare ideas.
Another website we used was YouTube as it has an endless amount of music videos to draw inspiration from. Also we used it to research into big bands from that genre to make sure that our video fitted to our target audience. Also it’s able to upload your final piece of work there so that it’s possible to view.
We used the program final cut express for all of the production of our video and commentary. It’s a very useful program as it lets you get to all of the footage that you have collected and cut out bits that you don’t like and edit and play with bits you do so. It gives you a professional look to your footage and gives you the best chance to make something really good. Luckily for us we had were familiar with it so we were able to get straight in with it.
We used Photoshop also to create our digipak and poster. This program we all found frustrating at times as it looks fairly complex and found some symbols and buttons confusing but we spent a lot of time creating them and we think the hard work paid off as we created two products that fitted well with the video and genre.
There was also the equipment we used to get the footage and images so we could use them in the programs mentioned we used a stills camera and a video camera. We found them very easy to use and very efficient in their job.
Evaluation
In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
I think that our music video is a good one for the indie genre. This is because it is different to the typical indie music video as they normally are based around a performance, with a bit of a storyline going on in the background. However we thought we could contrast this and did our music video based around the performance, with a bit of performance in there as well. We thought of an idea which was fairly similar to the Lily Allen video of ‘LDN’. However, instead of the one main character walking around with everything changing around them we would show a change in a nerdy boys life as to what set of clothes he is wearing. So for example when he is dressed in one set of clothes he would be the nerdy kid with the ordinary life. But when his clothes change he turns into the popular, trendy kid who people like. The video emphasises the change in one boys life when he is the normal/nerdy kid he has an uninteresting life and isn’t seemed as being ‘cool’. But when he is in the change of clothes and has the hat on, he becomes cool and is seen to be a famous singer who people want to be. This challenges the typical conventions of indie genre music videos as they normally consist of performance or a storyline based around being at a party or being in trouble etc. The ‘nerdy’ character also challenges the typical look in an indie music video. This is because he is seen in ‘uncool’ clothes, drives a moped and plays on guitar hero. Whereas the other side of him dresses cool, drives a car and can sing and actually play guitar which is the stereotypical appearance in a video for this genre of song. When we edited our video we added in colour filters, so when it was the ‘nerdy’ character we made it darker and for the cool side we made the colours brighter and more vibrant. We did this because people who did not know the storyline which we had planned might not have understood what was going on if we hadn’t and might’ve just seen it as a mixed up story with no real plot going on in it. For our Digipak and magazine advert we decided to just use the normal, expected type of content, this was because if people were to see the magazine advert with a quirky picture on it, they would not understand what type of music it was and they would maybe not want to buy it quite so much. So we played a bit safe on this side of our project and just made sure we could make something that is seen as a typical product.
How effective is your main product and ancillary texts?
For our two ancillary tasks we had to complete both a DVD Digipak and a magazine advert which was related to our video and worked well with it. We created the products in a group, but me and Marvin designed the magazine advert while Alex made the Digipak for the tasks.
The combination of our music video and our ancillary tasks worked quite well and you would easily be able to see that they were from the same piece of work. This would be obvious because we just showed our main character in our magazine advert which is the only character which appears in the video. This was so it would easily be indentified to our video and people would be able to see the connection. The magazine advert also showed the name of the artist and the song name clearly on the page. We did this so that it was the first thing which you saw on the page and noticed. This is similar to what we did on our Digipak, where we just had a main character on the front with the artist name and the track name. However, on the back of the case we showed information about the bonus features which we put in our pack. Also on the back cover of the pack we showed some small screenshots from our actual video. This was so that people could get a glimpse at what our video would be like and be able to see a link between the video and the DVD for it. We thought about using screenshots from our initial music video, but then we thought that they would be too blurry and they would not give the right image that we wanted. So we decided to take a camera out from college and take separate pictures using that, which were separate and matched what images we wanted for our magazine advert and our Digipak. Overall I thought that our work all was clearly connected with each other and I think that they worked well together and effectively.
What have you learnt from your audience feedback?
We received various feedback from both our teachers and other pupils in the class during this project. Most of the feedback which we have received has been mainly useful and we have taken advice as to what they’ve said and made an improvement in some way. The first piece of feedback which we received was at the very beginning of our project. This was when we were doing our pitch to the whole class. Andrea (our teacher) said that our idea was a good one and if we managed to pull it off it would look well and would be different to everything else that is typically in the indie genre. An example of a good bit of feedback was from Andrea where she said that the initial colour filters which we had on our video would not be obvious enough to people watching the video and did not know the plan of the story which we had thought of. We all thought that this was a valid point and could see where she was coming from. So me and Marvin then changed it to make it obvious to other people by making one side in black and white and emphasise the colours in the other. Another relevant piece of good feedback which we received was from other people in our class who said that we had not included that much lip syncing in our video. This was true and we thought that it would definitely improve the quality of our video and make it a bit less story line based. So, in the next lesson we had we decided to take a camera out at college again and just focus on getting more footage of me singing the song and lip syncing it. We are grateful for that piece of feedback as our video would have been very boring and all would have been the same if we did not shoot this extra bit of footage for our video. Another good piece of feedback we received was the one from Andrea regarding the shot of the 2 people chasing the main character down the street. She said that we should completely remove it. We thought about this idea and thought we could play on the comedy factor of the shot. So we thought that we would speed the shot up a lot and make it seem more of a comedy shot on purpose than a shot which just looked stupid by accident. However, we did receive some feedback which we didn’t feel was correct or relevant as such. Some people in our class had said that the trilby hat which we used was not relevant to the lyrics which say ‘ski cap’ but we had changed the initial idea of the ski cap and we thought we could use the trilby hat instead to emphasise the change in characters and it would not be worth reshooting our whole video to just please one group.
How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
In the research stages of our project we mainly used the internet to look through similar videos of the same genre to have a look at what has been done and what has worked well for others. We also used other magazine adverts and DVD’s when we were creating our ancillary tasks. We were given these to look at by our teacher. I found these useful because I was initially confused as to what we were supposed to make, and seeing an example of what we were supposed to do was inspiring as it gave me a clue as to what was needed. In the construction stage of our project, the first and most import piece of technology which we used was the video camera. Without this we would not have been able to film our work. The equipment was good because all our video was clear and when we used the tripod with the camera all the shots were steady and they looked good. Another piece of technology which we used in the construction stage was Final Cut. This was also a very good product to use as it made us able to edit the footage which we had captured and then put it in the order which we wanted it to be in. This programme also made it able for us to edit all of our footage. This was very important in our video as we used a lot of colour filters in our video and without them our video would not have made sense. During the planning stage of the project we mainly just spoke to each other and to our teacher so that we could arrange things. However we also used our blog to quite a lot of detail and found it good so that we had written records of when we had planned to do things and what we had done so far. Finally, during the evaluation stages I used Word so that I could process all my work and so that it could spell check for me etc as well. And then I uploaded it all to the blog onto the internet. Overall I would say that the most useful piece of technology which we used was the Final Cut project. This was because our work would not be half as good as it is without the use of editing and filters etc that we got from Final Cut. But also, if we did not have the use of the internet we would not have been able to do as much work either because we couldn’t have found our research or we wouldn’t have been able to put all our work in one place (blogger).
John Kendall
Evaluation Questions
1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Our media product uses several conventions of real media products. For example, we use bright colours and modern clothing, things that are often used in indie-rock style music videos such as ours. Many artists have a particular trademark item of clothing or instrument that they use. We have given our main character (John) a hat that you see him wearing in most shots. We challenge the convention of the more serious music video though. We wanted our video to be more fun and quirky to watch and, although it does tell a story throughout, it is also interesting and funny to watch.
When we initially discussed our idea we talked about how best to use conventions of music videos in our own project. A common music video convention is that there is a relationship between lyrics and visuals. By listening to the song we wanted to use we found particular lines that would be good to link, for example, on the line, “I had my first beer too” we had a shot of our main character drinking beer.
Another music video convention is that there will be lots of close-up shots of the artist, often including a particular visual style or item that the artist is associated with. In our music video we made sure that there were several shots where you only saw our main character singing without anything going on in the background. This meant that the audience had to focus in on the character making our artist more recognisable as a result.
We did the same for both our ancillary tasks. The magazine advert shows a side-on view of our main character where, although you can’t actually see his face, you see his trademark hat. The digipak features a front-on shot of our main character (as usual wearing the hat) so that this visual link continues to be made and so that the artist become more recognisable to people.
A further music video convention is the convention of looking through or at something. We used this in both our music video and in the ancillary task. In our music video we have used it when our main character was looking in the mirror. We placed the camera so that we could see John’s reflected face in the mirror while he sang the lyrics. In the magazine advert we also used the notion of looking. In the picture John is looking away from the camera and it almost looks like he is actually looking at the, “Too Famous to get Fully Dressed” title. As the audience you find yourself drawn into looking along his line of sight.
A convention of magazine adverts and digipaks is that they grab the attention of people who are just browsing through a magazine or along a row of CDs. We have done this by having large, bold titles on both of our products each in a particular colour – red and white. This reflects the red in the t-shirt worn by our main character and crates a further link between the character and the advertising for the artist.
2. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
I think that the combination of our main product and ancillary texts is very effective. Both clearly link as both feature pictures of John wearing the same clothes he wore in the music video including his hat, a key theme that I discussed in the previous question.
For our ancillary tasks we went out with the stills camera and did a photo shoot as we realised that if we tried to use screen grabs then the pictures would be really bad quality. Ironically most of the pictures that we actually used were ones that we took accidentally. For example, the image on the front cover of our Digipak was supposed to be John leaning against a post, however, the post fell over when he leaned on it leading to this picture. We thought it looked quite lively and interesting and had much more ‘soul’ than any of the staged pictures we had done. This we thought would catch the eye of people looking to buy the digipak as it is a fun image that keeps with the unpredictable nature of our video. This also represents our artist as a fun; modern and interesting person and helps people connect the artist with the indie genre that he performs in. Similarly, the image we used for our magazine advert was a ‘mess-about’ one taken as we were getting used to using the camera. Again, however, we felt it looked more natural and interesting than any of the staged photographs. The back cover of the digipak is designed as a play on the, “Too Famous to Get Fully Dressed” title.
The other images that we used on the back cover of the digipak are screen grabs from the music video so that people can see some of the content they will be buying and can get a feel for the music video. We choose these images for a couple of reasons. The image of John drinking is because it is an image linked to the lyrics of the song (“I had my first beer too”). The other two images are there to future connect the audience to the main character who is, as always, wearing his trademark hat. This would help our audience (15-23 year olds) connect with the character, as the audience would be able to see the character taking part in activities such as drinking or playing the guitar that people within our target audience would commonly do.
We linked all three products by making sure that all of them featured the hat that John wore in the music video. This means that people can link all the products together with the same artist and the hat can act as a trademark for the artist. Furthermore, by using modern, stylish clothes such as the hat and t-shirt we felt that our music video and ancillary products would connect well with our target audience of 15-23 year olds.
We have represented the artist as a stylish, happy-go-lucky type of person; again something that we feel would help enhance his appeal to our target audience as they would feel better able to connect with him than if he wore, for example, a leather jacket and cowboy hat. We have made sure that people know who the artist is because, apart from him, there are only a couple of extras in the video. He is the main character and does all the lip-synching showing the audience that he is the artist.
3. What have you learnt from your audience feedback?
After uploading our music video roughcut onto the blog we showed it to other people within our media class. They all watched the video and wrote some feedback on our blog for us to read, comment on and film when we filmed the additional material we needed. We showed it to people in our class because everyone is our class is aged 17-18 years old and therefore are the exact age of our target audience meaning that any feedback that they give would be exceptionally valuable to us as it would be, “from the horses’ mouth” and really up-to-date meaning that we could make our product genuinely interesting and attractive to people within our target age group.
From the audience feedback I learnt that we need to focus more on lip-synching than we had originally done. We realised that when doing lip-synching it is advisable to exaggerate the words you are singing because otherwise you can’t really see what is happening.
We also learnt that you need to keep the audience interested by varying the location or the story slightly so that it never gets too boring or predictable for the audience.
Being able to use our class as a sample group was a great opportunity. As I said in the last question, our target audience is 15-23 year olds. Most of the people in our class are 17-18 years old so well within our target range. This meant that we could get direct feedback from the type of people who would bee listening too, and watching, our music video and who would actually read our magazine advert and potentially buy the digipak.
Some specific peer feedback that we got was that we needed to film in more locations. From this we learnt that although our character might be doing different things, the audience would quickly get bored if the environment stayed the same. To remedy this, when we next went out filming we used different, new locations so that we would have more locations to use in our final version of the music video.
Another piece of feedback that we received was saying that instead of an all-male cast we could have had some females. From this we realised that maybe by having an all-male cast some females might feel like they couldn’t connect to the music video or the artist and that we were potentially alienating some people who could otherwise be fans of the artist. We tried to remedy this but unfortunately were not able to get a female cast member to re-film any scenes that meant that we had to leave the video as an all-male production.
A further piece of peer feedback that we received was that, “There are to many shots with the hat which did not link with the lyrics i.e its not a ski cap.” Although we already had made several lyrics to visual connections (the drinking beers and, “nothing better to do” scenes) the audience wanted more. We were tempted to re-film parts of the music video, however, as we had already established the trilby hat as our artist’s trademark we decided that it would be too confusing for the audience if he kept swapping hats every 20 seconds and the link between the main character and the trilby hat would fade away, something we didn’t want to happen.
We did, however, get a lot of positive feedback about how we had represented the indie genre well though our main character. Many of the reviews said that the way our main character was dressed, the way he acted, and the props he had (such as the guitar) fitted in perfectly with what they saw as the indie genre. This really pleased us as it showed that people in our target audience connected with the music video much better than we had actually hoped.
4. How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
In the planning and research stages we used the Internet to research real-life music videos, bands, digipaks, CDs and magazine adverts so that we could get some ideas for our own product and for the ancillary tasks. We used ‘Blogger’ to record any new ideas we had, to analysis music videos we had seen and liked so that we could help ourselves gain an overall idea of what we wanted in our own music video and other products. We also used blogger to keep people updated with our progress and most lessons we would upload something or at least make a short post saying what we had done that day and often what he were planning to do in the next lesson.
In the construction stage we used several new media technologies. First of all we used film and stills cameras to shoot our music video and to take pictures for the ancillary tasks. We used the computer programme “Finalcut” to edit our music video, to add the film to the soundtrack and we used things such as colour filters and screen transition effects to alter the appearance of our video and to make it different and interesting rather than just one long boring roll of film. We also used “Photoshop” on the Mac to design and make our ancillary tasks. We used the features on Photoshop to do things like give our text it’s own unique style (an inner and outer colour), too add coloured borders onto the screen grabs and to add effects such as picture distortion to the images again to give our digipak and magazine advert an original and interesting feeling.
For the evaluation stage we used blogger again to allow other people to see our finished projects and to comment on them. We used a film camera to make a short film where we answered all of our evaluation questions that we then uploaded onto the computer and are using Finalcut to make it into a proper short film that we can then upload onto blogger for other people to see and evaluate.
The most useful new media technology that we used was undoubtedly the Internet. We used the Internet in almost every stage of production. This went from right at the beginning of the project when we used the Internet to look at other music videos and post them on our blog (Lily Allen’s ‘LDN’ for example) and using the Internet to look up the lyrics to our song so that we could actually mime it in the video. We then used the Internet to research magazine adverts and digipaks again so that we could formulate ideas about how to make our own magazine advert and digipak. We used the internet to store all he information about our project in our blog which included pictures, youtube videos, analysis of music videos by us and developing our own ideas in print.
We went right on through to at the very end where we now have our final music video and both ancillary tasks uploaded onto our blog. Without the internet we would have had to have spent a lot more time doing research as, for example, we would have needed to go to places like HMV to compare different digipaks in real life instead of just doing a ‘google search’ for them and comparing them in the media classroom.
We used several different website when we were on the Internet for our product. One of the first we used was ‘wikipedia’ which we used to find out about the actual artist – Butch Walker – and find out some more information about the indie genre and the conventions of music videos, magazine adverts and digipaks in general. This had a significant impact on our project as it gave us some “guidelines” to work to so that we would conform to some of the music video conventions.
We extensively used the website ‘youtube’ to watch real-life music videos of all sorts of different genres. This helped give us more ideas for our project, some of which we posted on our blog (the Lily Allen ‘LDN’ video for example) and allowed us to compare our ideas, and later our actual video, with the real thing.
We used the search engine ‘Google’ to search for general information about different music videos, bands, music genres and the like. We used it to find the websites for real artists in the indie genre like Razorlight and Feeder. From these real band websites we were able to look at music videos of the same genre as our own and compare how they conformed (or didn’t conform) to the music video conventions in Goodwin’s music video analysis rules.
Without the internet we probably would not have seen nearly as many examples of different music videos, digipaks and magazine adverts that in turn would have meant that our own products were not as developed and would not be as realistic as they are now.
Alex Rootes
Monday, 7 December 2009
Friday 4th December
We decided that we would make it slightly different from other groups so that it provided an informative commentary on our media project but was also not boring to watch.