QUESTION 4 PLAN

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

Technology is an important factor in the media industry and it’s important for media institutions to understand how to use technology correctly to address their target audience. In the production of my media product I used several different technologies to appeal to my audience, this has also helped me to find new technologies to use during my evaluation questions and audience feedback.

The first use of technology during our project was to set up a way of posting and keeping up to date with all our progress and research. We decided to set up both individual blogs to keep up to date with our own research and then a group blog to keep records of what we have done and what we are planning on doing. These blogs were set up on blogspot.com, which made it extremely useful to share images, documents and videos that were relevant to our project. As we had already used blogspot for our foundation portfolio we found this part of technology fairly easy to use.

When conducting both group and individual research we were able to present this information in a variety of different ways. The main way we did this was through text posts on the blog itself but we also used videos which we were able to embed into the HTML code of blogspot to make the video playable on the blog. Using videos such as ones from YouTube is a good way of using a visual aid to help get the information across, these videos allowed us to list the conventions of different music videos and also how they fit the genre and how we were going to employ or defy these boundaries.

When planning all our overall video and the filming shoots it was important for us to keep in contact easily in case something changed. We did this by using social networks to message on a group chat we had set up. By using facebook in this way we were able to easily keep in contact with each other outside of school so we were able to efficiently plan and develop our ideas. We also used facebook to conduct our audience research. Audience research is an important part of a media institution as it tells you what your audience is thinking and how you can adapt to suit your audience more. We did this by firstly posting our music video on to the website and allowing people to comment on what they like and what we could improve on, and secondly we individually posted our own digipak and magazine advertisement to gather comments.

During the filming of our video we used a Canon HV30 video camera, this was the first time we had ever used a video camera so we looked up for tutorials on the internet and practising ourselves. The main way we practised was during our pre-liminary task in which our group created a condensed version of the trailer for the film “A Walk among the Tombstones”. This helped us understand how we could develop our creative control and work with a high quality of footage. We were also able to use a tripod during our filming; this was useful because there were a lot of landscape pans in our video so the tripod helped us keep the footage smooth and steady. The tripod was fairly easy to use as it had a spirit level attached so the scenes were level and stable, we were able to adjust the legs easily so they were the same height and suited the type of camera shot we wanted. I also used a DSLR camera to take still shots of our band scene, costume and equipment we used throughout the process. I used my person Nikon D3100 camera, which I already knew how to use appropriately.

To edit and develop our footage I used the Mac software iMovie, I was already able to use this program as I had used it for other projects but I had not used it to edit such a long video with a lot of different footage. As we also used this program for our pre-lim task we had a basic understanding of how it worked and what tools were available. In comparison to our pre-lim task our main task was not only longer and bigger but also features music and musical instruments, the most difficult part of this was linking the music with the instruments. To learn how to properly match the music with what the instruments are playing I looked on YouTube and on different sites across the internet. From this research I was able to focus solely on the hit of the drums in the song and line them up with the hit of the drums in the footage, this made it a lot easier to line up the rest of the film.

To export our movie we export to disk and select where we want it to export to. This allows us to create multiple copies and transfer it to different platforms so we can firstly gather audience feedback and secondly upload it to our own blogs. Once we had gathered our audience feedback we were able to make the appropriate adjustments and then re-export it and overwrite the first copy.

To make my ancillary tasks, a digipak and magazine advertisement, I chose to use Adobe Illustrator. I wanted to use this software as I felt quite comfortable with my skills on it and I would be able to use it easily to create my desired product. I also wanted to use it because it is vector graphic program, meaning its using for more cartoon like images such as the one on the front of my digipak. Meaning its more specialised towards vector images rather than Adobe Photoshop which is ideal for bitmap images. Using a variety of tools such as artboards, text, shape, graphic, and pen, I was able to create my digipak and magazine advert. The next step was to share these and gather audience feedback. To do this I transferred them from AI files to PDF files meaning I was able to share them on social media.

The next step was to answer my evaluation questions. As there were only four questions I decided to use a variety of ways of presenting these rather than just a word document. This included using the website Prezi, which is an online presentation program which allows you to create presentations and share them on the internet, I had already used this website to create my evaluation questions for my foundation portfolio but I think this is a really professional way of presenting this information. I was able to develop my knowledge further using the image importer, shape tool and text tools. I also decided to use iMovie to create a movie to present my evaluation; this was a great way of incorporating my style model videos and sections of my music video. As I had used this to create the music video I knew the tools and editing capabilities already. I also used GarageBand. GarageBand allowed me to create a podcast where I can talk the audience through my thought process and allows me to incorporate images to visually show the audience what I am talking about. I knew the basic skills of GarageBand and using this program for the purpose of my evaluation helped me develop my skills and knowledge of that type of software.

QUESTION 3 PLAN

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Music Video

For our media advanced portfolio we decided to create a music video of the indie pop genre, aimed primarily at 13-19 year olds. To gather audience feedback I firstly showed the first cut of the video to a focus group, two males and one female, all within my target age group. This was to get some verbal comments about the video as soon as they had finished watching it, to ensure that it was fresh in their mind and that they would remember what stood out to them the most. These were the comments I received:

“Really great overall, the mixture between band sequences and landscape shots was really interesting and not something I had seen put together before.”

“The scenes of the band playing were really good and definitely added a more musical element; the only problem was I didn’t know who the video was made by or what record label they were signed to”

“The instruments were synced really well with the music and it actually looked like a real band, the postcards are really great as well they add another visual aid which helps convey what the song is saying”

Also, I put the 1^st cut on YouTube so I could get more comments from a wider variety of people. Obviously I tried to keep the majority of people within the target audience. This went really well and I managed to find what I could improve upon. This included changing the end of the video to show our Irwin Media logo to make the effect of the combined main product and ancillary products better and more connected. We also added a scene so it would make more sense to the audience as they didn’t understand who was the band and crew and who wasn’t. So we added a scene where the band and crew would hold up a sign saying “Jack’s Mannequin - Dark Blue - Band and Crew” and they were waving and directly addressing the audience. This is important as it gave the audience a better sense of community and importance in the bands life.

Digipack & Magazine Advert

For my digipack and magazine advertisement I got audience feedback by showing a group my work and getting their comments on it. This was really insightful as I got to understand what they looked for when buying a digipack and the factors that influence them to buy a digipack. To find out what the most important factors that contributed to whether people buy the digipack ornot I decided to do a small survey in the focus group I had put together.  I put together a list of the factors that were on my style models and showed these style models to the group. I then got them to raise their hand if this was a factor they felt would be a strong contributor to whether they would buy the album. Here are my findings.

40% of the people in my focus group felt pre-released singles and already known songs a strong factor, 35% felt that reviews and recommendations would contribute to them buying the digipack or not, and only 25% of people felt the album artwork or the artist were the strongest factors.

The comments I received on the digipack were mostly positive and people felt like if they saw the digipack in the shop they would look at it more closely if they hadn’t already saw it in an advert, in magazines such as NME, Billboard and Q. Here are some of the comments I received:

“The bright and bold colours of the digipack work well and match the Irwin Media logo colours, which completes the package”

“The digipack is very unique and features some brilliant original artwork, I feel like more and more digipacks are becoming cartoon like and this is a great example of this trend”

“The message in the inside sleeve is a great touch and is really effective with the personal feel you get from the video, the combination of this really makes you feel important in the bands journey”

QUESTION 2 PLAN

How effective is the combination of your main product and your ancillary tasks?

I think that there is an overall synergy between my main product and ancillary tasks. The theme of my magazine advertisement and digipak is consistent and the audience will be able to recognise the artist instantly. Synergy is a marketing strategy which related to products working together to advertise something to an audience. It is often used in the music industry because it creates an identity for an artist and is a proven sales technique.

Because our video is a band and crew on tour video it’s hard to create a relationship between the video and ancillary tasks. But I managed to create ways of combining the products to create contrast so my products will compliment each other.

This allows us to appeal to all the different needs of our target audience. In our video you can see what the band our really like and what they experience on a day-to-day basis, giving the fans an insight into their favourite artist.

I did this by using the song used in the video on both my magazine advertisement and digipak as a feature song. “Featuring Dark Blue and Television” is used on my magazine advertisement to show that the products go together.  These songs also feature on the back cover of the digipak.

We also decided that we wanted to include our logo in the video to show that it was from an Irwin Media artist. We did this by showing this at the end of our video along with on the digipak and magazine advertisement.

After looking at a variety of digipaks from a similar genre to our artist, I found that a lot of artists are trying to contrast against their videos by using a much more graphical digipak against their realistic videos which I found really interesting. So instead of taking screenshots of the footage or organising a completely different photoshoot I decided to trace an image which I had already taken using the pen tool on Adobe Illustrator. This gave me a close up of a face, which appears in the video as part of the crew, which creates continuity between the video and the ancillary tasks.

QUESTION 1 PLAN

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

The media products I have chosen to make were the music video with a digipak and magazine advertisement. I chose this brief because I felt it was most suited to my skills that I have developed throughout the foundation portfolio and allowed me to expand my knowledge of the media industry by starting to film and improve my skills with video cameras.

Firstly as a group we had decided that it was important for our video to be similar to already established music videos so that it would reach our target audience and be recognisable as an indie pop music video. We did this by looking at similar genre music videos and finding the conventions and then finding a way to employ these conventions into our music video, which would also fit with the song itself. We also wanted it to stand out and be different to get the song out there and have our artist be recognised.  We decided to defy some conventions in order for us to be different and unique in the industry.

Firstly we found the conventions by looking at already established artists from similar genres and then in comparison we looked at music videos from completely different genres. Such as pop punk band Blink 182, rock band The All American Rejects and drum and bass duo Sigma.

The All American Rejects – Dirty Little Secret   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPDcwjJ8pLg

·         Uses short quick scenes

·         Close up focus on main image

·         Band Scenes

·         Postcards used

Blink 182 – Adam’s Song

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MRdtXWcgIw

·         One continuous band scene

·         Photographs in the background

·         Close ups of photographs

Sigma – Nobody to love

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KD5fLb-WgBU

·         Continuous story line

·         Contemporary no instrument scenes

·         Landscape and people shots

These are examples of what we used in our music video to both defy and comply with conventions. For example for most indie/pop videos they use one continuous band scene with short break ups in-between much like Blink 182’s video for Adam’s Song, so we wanted to use some of the conventions that they had employed such as one band scene that was continuous throughout the entirety of the music video. They also featured photographs in the background which we thought was really interesting but we didn’t want to just copy their idea so we researched further into the idea of using something to get people to hold up or show to the camera, we found a few videos such as a local band which used a whiteboard to display what they would do with 1 million pound. Or more noticeably The All American Rejects music video for Dirty Little Secret, this features members of the public holding up postcards with their secret on which we thought was a really good idea so we decided to use it but change it to suit our own music video. This ended up being the colour of the title of the song which was “Dark Blue” so we wanted everything to relate to the dark blue theme.

We wanted our music video to represent the journey that bands make whilst on their tour around the world and we wanted to convey the band and crew on their journey in this video. To do this we wanted to defy all the conventions set out by indie music videos and focus solely on pop videos. Pop videos are becoming more and more contemporary and leaving a lot to the imagination, such as Sia’s video for Chandelier, which is all a dance scene. Our main style model for this would be Sigma’s video for nobody to love because it’s all storyline and features a mixture of landscapes and people shots.

For my ancillary tasks I chose to create a digipak and a magazine advertisement to accompany my music video. To begin, I started to do some research on current album covers and digipaks for all genres to get an overall idea on what was required on a digipak and how to make it look appealing to the audience.  This involved me looking at a variety of realistic and quite artistic covers. This included albums from Rihanna, Jessie J, Olly Murs, Coldplay, Maroon 5 and Muse. One thing was clear they all had a very prominent theme and house style through the whole album pack to make it easily recognisable to their audience which is a convention I thought would be really useful as it gives the whole album an identity and makes it clear to the audience who the artist is.

The next ancillary task I had to do was my magazine advertisement. As I started my research it was obvious that advertisements always stem from the album cover to make it more recognizable to the audience and give the artist an identity. This was definitely an important convention I thought I should incorporate in order to attract my audience.

It was important for me to use several conventions for my advert so that it was obvious it was an advert, these features included: Album cover image, release date, released single track names, reviews, etc.

Because I wanted my advert to stand out I thought I was important to develop some of these conventions to suit the adverts needs and make it more noticeable. It’s important that your advert stands out so that the audience will be interested and actually read it. These included having the cover image in the center of the page rather than at the top or bottom. 

Final Editing Touches

I have now edited all the footage together and put the music over the top. The final editing touches we have to do is make all the band and instrument scenes black and white, we chose to do this to contrast against the bright and coloured landscapes. We also chose to change all the beach shots so they looked more blue to relate to the song more. The next thing is to put a cartoon effect over the band and crew scene to contrast against the realistic scenes in the video.

REVIEW OF AUDIENCE FEEDBACK

As a group we uploaded our first cut video onto our Irwin Productions YouTube Channel. This helped us gather lots of comments for our video and what we could improve on, even if it is the slightest changes.

These comments were really useful as we got to understood our audience better.

Improvements : 

• Add a scene which shows the band and crew looking and waving at the camera to give the video a more personal feel. 
• Add the Irwin Media logo at the end to show who made the video and who the band are signed for. 

Final Shoot

Our final shoot to complete our music video is of the band and crew holding a sign which says "Jack's Mannequin - Dark Blue - Band&Crew" this is the completing touch as it will tie the whole tour journey together and finally make it make sense. This should be fairly easy as we are going to reuse most of the actors that we used in the postcard scene to make it look more continuous and like they're apart of the crew.