Question 4

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

New media developments are changing the face of media production, research and distribution. This has been made possible due to highly quick and efficient hard ware and software developments. An example of advancements in new media technologies that improve planning is the website www.youtube.com the site features thousands of videos made by media companies and by regular people who want to produce and distribute their media texts for free. This website turns media consumers into media producers and the number of videos on this database is increasing daily. When given the brief to design a promotional package for an unsigned British band, You Tube helped me to research into existing media texts by searching the website for a similar music video of the same genre, in seconds I can review successful media texts and learn what works well and what does not. Another powerful tool at my disposal is a website called www.blogger.com this is an online blogging site where anyone can sign up and have a small webpage where they are free to post whatever they want. I use blogger to keep my ideas in check and review my thought pattern to review and re touch ideas. However this website is also useful due to the fact that I can also access previous student’s blogs and view their methods and paths in creative production. Unsigned band websites also drastically increased my research speed, and I could browse various different genres and pick and choose to find a genre or band that fitted my initial ideas. Without the development of new dedicated video and unsigned band sites this process could have taken weeks instead it took hours. Advancements in media technologies drastically helped me personally to creatively and quickly research and distribute my own ideas.

When begging the filming process I was given a digital video camera to record my footage onto. This was incredibly helpful as I could watch my footage back instantly and see how the lighting and mise en scene looked on camera. It also meant that if a shot was unsuccessful I knew immediately, therefore I could re take the footage as many times as I wanted and view it back saving a huge amount of time. Also because it was so easy and cheap to take footage I could experiment with different shots and angles to achieve a more creative music video. Digital footage is also very easily duplicated which meant that work can be saved and backed up so one master copy no longer exists, and work isn’t easy to lose or damage. Another advantage I had due to digital technology was my still camera (canon eos 500) This camera is very portable, so I could carry it with me where ever I went and if I saw a location or a costume design I could photograph it to remember the places and styles, this was very helpful as I could easily track my planning process.

After filming the actors in various locations in various different styles of costume I could begin to edit the raw footage in a programme called Adobe Premier Elements, this process was very easily done and only took half an hour. Digital footage is easily transferable and done very quickly with a high quality outcome. Once the footage was on a computer I could begin to cut down pieces of footage and put them into the positions that I wanted. I could also add transitions such as cross dissolve and fade to black. This made the footage seamlessly link together with a subtle smooth transition. I could also vary the speed of the video clips, I used the time stretch tool to make the beginning dancing scenes slow motion, and I also used this tool to speed up the guitar playing to get it in time with the music. Another aspect of time stretching is time reverse where you can easily reverse footage and get it to play backwards. I used this technique in a small shot sequence where monopoly money is grabbed off a table.  Without the development of digital technology I could not have edited my video in this way. I also added titles to the beginning of the clip made easy by digital editing software. Throughout the post production stage I was being given continual criticisms and comments to help me improve my video. Once the video was completed I quickly and easily uploaded it to www.youtube.com.

 I instantly got feedback from the actual band, who told me they were very happy with the music video I had made for their song. I could also use my social networking sites such as www.facebook.com to share the video and gain feedback. Peers and friends viewed the music video and I received very constructive comments and feedback. I then went back to adobe premier elements and made a few small changes and re uploaded the video to www.youtube.com. The response was very positive and people were pleased to see I had taken their advice on board. These new media websites improved my distribution and feedback time massively and I had a huge response in a very short time. New media websites such as Face book and you tube are hugely sociable meaning people can share and express their thoughts freely and openly generating a massive sharing and media capable community. I could also use www.blogger.com to post my video and gain tutors responses on my ideas this media website was also a large help as I could post each idea after each idea and let peers and teachers know my thought pattern and where I aim to be with my media texts being produced.

In conclusion, I used advancements in media technologies to complete my entire project without these technologies I would have spent months on each stage of development and production. The technological updates and upgrades saved me a huge amount of time consuming work and also allowed me to produce a better end result for a cheaper amount. 

Question 3

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

To gain audience feedback and information from an audience I handed out questionnaires to 15 people in a corresponding media class. All of the candidates where between the ages of 16 and 17 of white ethnicity male and female. Considering this group of people fits our target audience then this feedback will be highly valuable.

The graph above shows the amount of people who gave a certain score out of 5 for how relevant they felt the question was to my digipak. I found that females found my video more appealing I am not sure why specifically this is. However I believe that this could be down to the female singer who isn’t exploiting her body. In my point of view I successfully created a strong female character who is one of the boys yet her femininity remains intact. This creates a strong role model for women to follow. The reason the men may not find this video particularly appealing is because there isn’t much footage of the male actors, there fore the audience cannot see themselves reflected in the media text I have created. Or maybe it is the representation of women themselves in the video, men are used to seeing the music videos on television chart shows such as on MTV where women are very often dressed in a very sexualised manner with little clothing and dancing provocatively. This video is not the usual style that is reflected on standardised music channels.

As we can see from the female feedback, the ratings are much higher with the majority vote in the top mark section of feedback. Also women added comments to the bottom of the questionnaires saying that they picked up on a loose relationship between the drummer and the female lead singer which the males were oblivious to. This small piece of narrative can be explained by the encoding decoding theory by Stuart Hall with the male’s an aberrant reading was apparent and they translated the text differently to how I the producer intended, yet the females decoded and interpreted it as I proposed to do. Another reason I feel women found the text more successful is due to narcissism and finding themselves reflected in the text or perhaps even feeling jealous of the lead singer being with the band or one of the boys, yet keeping her femininity intact.

I have learnt from the audience feedback that women find my music video more appealing due to how women are represented. I showed the women out of the ordinary, being a provocative scantily clad woman. I chose to represent women as one of the boys fitting in and joking around with them yet still obviously being a woman. I also included a small theme of romance between the drummer and singer. This improved the appeal because teenage girls between 16 and 17 are in and out of small relationships and they can easily relate to the themes conveyed where as males can’t relate to this theme as easily. Due to the fact the majority of my video is based around the female character there isn’t much action for the males to engage with I believe this is why that men didn’t rate my video as highly. However from the audience feedback I received I could change and develop ideas for possible improvements to increase the amount that the male target audience can engage more with the action. 

Question 2

How effective is the combination of your main product with ancillary texts?

When developing the music video I had a strong theme of money and youthful activity and enjoyment. This is partly because of my target audience and also because of the ska genre itself. Throughout the development and post production stages I was thinking about ways I could create cohesion with the digipak and magazine advertisement.

I started to research photographers and artists such as Andy Sapey and Andy Warhol. These photographers where hugely influential in the end result of my digipak. I did a workshop with the photographer Andy Sapey who helped me greatly learn how to photograph bands and musicians on stage or in a studio, this gave a massive swing to how I initially wanted my digipak to develop. Once my music video was completed I used screen shots from the music video for the front and back panels this instantly created a link between the music video and the print productions. This newly created link means that either the music video is quickly linked to the print productions or if viewed in the other order you know you are watching the correct music video through the synchronicity of print and video productions.

My chosen track was called ‘Money grabber’ which made it easy to transfer the themes across from one text to the other. It also brought me a large amount of inspiration within creating a synergy effect between the two. Given the current economical state, and government I had a huge source of corruption in the British banking and money system. With the riots going on in London and the spending cuts across the nation a huge money grabbing theme was reoccurring across the UK. Due to these ideas I was inspired to create a heavily political digipak featuring ideas and themes of economy and the corruption. Yet I asked my peers what they thought of this idea and they thought that it would have been inappropriate and would have lost the ideas reinforced in the music video so I decided to research existing ska digipak’s and print productions. I found that ska albums often featured large amounts of pictures of the band playing practical jokes and generally a comical theme was carried throughout, I tried to feature a slapstick approach inspired by researching Charlie Chaplin however I did not succeed.

I decided to take it back to basics and took photographs of the band and constructed them in different forms and locations around the panels. I used various different tools on Photoshop to achieve my desired effect, and would repeatedly gain tutor feedback to see how my progression was going, I wanted to keep up cohesion between video and text and was afraid that the more I changed my ideas this theme would be lost.

The magazine advert was more difficult to construct, because I was running out of fresh ideas. I decided to place the front cover of the digipak on the front of the advert to make it clear to the potential audience what the album was going to look like and where they could get it from. I had difficulty finding a font that worked successfully on the advertisement as the font from the digipak was too small and cluttered on the advertisement so I had to change this several times until I found a font that would work to my idea. My magazine advert is designed to be published in more popular music magazines because I wanted a larger audience to view the advert and to buy into the band. The magazines however would not necessarily be bought by my target audience making my magazine possibly not as far reaching as I would have hoped.

Once completing all panels of my digipak I was very pleased that they reinforced the music video and that the music video reinforced it. I had created the link and cohesion I had been looking to create and form across my texts.

Question 1

A promotional package for the release of an album for an unsigned British band or artist, to include the following:

- Music Promo video

- Cover for its release as part of a digipak (CD/DVD package)

- Magazine advertisement for the digipak (CD/DVD package).

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

My production uses the Ska genre because I researched costumes alongside locations and classic codes and conventions of the genre by viewing more successful existing media texts. For example I originally analysed music videos from bands such as Madness and then began to develop a more detailed search into bands with a more similar and close genre such as Reel Big Fish. Although the bands I researched were massively different within the same genre I could choose to mix and match different aspects of ska into my video, for example the dress code in the opening sequence was much closer related to Madness.

 however as the video progressed and changed so did the styles later on we see the drummer dressed in a much more modern style of ska clothing for example jeans and a colourful tee-shirt and grey hooded jumper, inspired by Reel Big Fish dress code.

Although I used the costume ideas from these existing videos I did not necessarily copy the ideas of locations. In the video ‘One Step Beyond’ by Madness there is a very heavy implication of patriotism and a large amount of British iconography which in it’s Ska style reinforces genre whereas with Reel Big Fish a more American cultural feel is applied to the videos due to the fact they are an American band. My music video doesn’t have a huge national influence which is perhaps where it looses some of its effectiveness, ideally I would have included imagery from London for example red double decker busses and red phone boxes as these are British icons that dominate British TV drama’s such as Doctor Who and Spooks. And would have created a much more Ska feel, as with the ska genre reflections of a sense of patriotism and pride for your country.

In Ska music videos such as; Baggy trousers by Madness, we see the band joking and dancing around, this would be described as music videos demonstrating the genre as Andrew Goodwin states in Goodwin’s music video theory. Using this theory I made my video my original and relevant to the genre, through aspects such as synchronizing lyrics to visuals, I used this idea in my music video, the chorus is ‘she’s a money grabber’ therefore I had imagery of people grabbing monopoly money off of a table

When creating the digipak I wanted to continue this idea of lyrics to visuals however I was unsuccessful and was told through peer and tutor evaluation that two of the four panels were not as powerful or successful as I had first intended. I used an image of monopoly money (as used in the video) scattered over a table with hands reaching towards the money, this was to achieve the reoccurring theme of money grabbing.

My second panel on the inside cover featured images of the band members that we had used however due to one of my actors not belonging to the school it was incredibly difficult to get hold of her to take a photo that matched the other three images I had already taken. Therefore I had to rethink this panel. I began to research existing photography featuring multiple models and people. I discovered a photograph of the Marx brothers taken by the highly experienced professional photographer Andy Warhol.

I decided to try and replicate this image through Photoshop and was pleased with the result I had achieved I handed this image in to be assessed and I got very positive feedback. This then inspired me to create another more unusual montage of the actors used. I put all four band mates in the corners of the digipak and used the blur tool to swirl them all together into a spherical image, this idea came to me when looking for a way to highlight the CD and draw attention to it. I am very happy with the result.

Goodwin’s theory helped me greatly when trying to establish a genre, especially as ska is such a wide and varied musical style, using the Goodwin theory allowed me to link the genre into the music video.  

When beginning to create the music video I had to take into consideration, the target audience demographic. I researched what ska listeners and fans were like. I had a large amount of difficulty doing this because as it turns out Ska audience demographics are vast and have huge differences, as there have been many tones and waves of ska over different generations, this means there are people of all ages in the fan bases anywhere between 14 and 40. I decided to narrow it down to Ska fans between the ages of 14 and 20 the young ska enthusiasts of both genders. I challenged a generalised rule of voyeurism, the lead singer in the video is a young teenage girl however I have not represented her as a sex icon as the videos of Beyonce for example baby boy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aq_E_T6ySpk

 Instead I represented her more as a tom boy, the fact she is dancing and spending time with all boys, and not wearing short skirts and revealing tops, thus I challenged the music industry and the way in which women are sexually exploited to gain success.

Another aspect of planning I had to tackle was the representation of youth. The youthful market or demographic are often represented as violent drunken and outrageous, for example channel 4’s teen drama Skins.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PghdpMcCCQk

 I didn’t want to represent youth in a negative way to avoid this I stayed clear from imagery such as alcohol or drugs or sex to avoid any false or negative representations. However teenagers and young people are often associated with underage pregnancy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbCxxNNeYAc

 I wanted to show sexuality and heterosexual relations. I did this loosely through the narrative which involves the drummer looking into the mirror a cross fade then brings in the lead singers face making it appear as if they are getting ready to meet each other, I am a little disappointed that I didn’t reinforce this idea however I am still confident that this idea will translate.

Final Digipak Designs

To finalise my productions I have changed the font on the advertisement and I have also changed panel's three and four to Marx brothers inspired photographs from Andy Warhol. 

Story Boards

Final cut for my music video