Closing Post

This is my closing post,

My main Research and Planning goes from June 2010- January 2011

My final Print Production texts are in December 2010

My final Music video is in February 2011

My evaluation is in March 2011

This Blog is now complete and is ready for assessment.

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

3. What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Audience feedback was really important during these set of tasks, we needed to make sure that we were sticking to our target audiences likes and dislikes. It gives them the time and space to voice their individual opinions and point out the positives and negatives of the product.

Our target audience was:-

Aged 16-21

Individualists & Aspirers

They have part time jobs at minimum wage

They have second hand cars

Read NME magazine

and are predominately males.

A good qualitative method is Facebook, it was a huge success for most people because it allowed easy access to each others image and uploads, and facebook has a large audience so we were all able to find our target audiences on there.

I posted our video on facebook and asked people to comment on it-

Facebook does contain our target audience but sometimes people are afraid of being too negative towards the work because they are friends and it isn't anonymous.

So we asked peers in the class to watch the video and write down on pieces of paper their thoughts about it, and it could be anonymous. We gave them one specific question which was about the Cinematography and whether they thought it was appropriate for the genre. This way, people were not afraid of saying what they wanted.

Feedback from class peers

Pros

- 'Really Interesting shots, good use of technology'

-'Looks professional'

-'I think the sped up parts link in well with the beat of the song'

-'Really good performance shots, really good angles, lighting is very effective'

-'The cinematography is great, i particularly like the sequence at the beginning with the traffic coming into focus.'

Cons

-'Narrative doesn't really make sense'

-'More lighting could have been added in some areas'

-'Unsure about the narrative here'

-'Some shots are too long, not sure the actor fits the genre, sometimes the lighting was too dark'

-'Some shots seemed quite pointless'

We learned from this that most people didn't understand the narrative of the video, and we also agree that the lyrics don't have much to do with the song. We originally wanted to achieve Goodwins theory of 'links between the music and visuals', and create an amplifying video for our audience because after research we found this best for the indie/alternative rock genre. But our audience feedback proves that we could of perhaps thought more about thy lyrics and making a stronger link with the music.

One of our group members also posted the video onto The BBC 606 forum, so that we good gain some more constructive feedback. It has to be acknowledged that the audience on the forum are of a different Cultural Capital than our audience on facebook. The age ranges are different and our facebook audience had a more but it was important to get all sorts of feedback.

The hypodermic needle theory suggests that the audience have to be passive and open to new things. The video would have to have a direct effect on the audience for this to work.

Our media video didn't particularly inject out audience with anything to change how they thought about things. This was probably because we didn't have a particularly strong narrative to our video and only simply wanted to create another layer to the song- an amplifying video. It is more difficult to create something very new and for it to have a direct effect because of developing technology such as media 2.0 which allows audience to have more of a say.

Overall we learned that our video didn't have a very strong narrative structure and that it didn't make much of a link between music and visuals like Goodwin suggests. In future we will consider this more. Also, that in some shots it is too dark to see what is going on. This came from our idea of wanting to challenge some of influences ideas and work at night time instead of day, but if we did it again we would consider more lighting and perhaps working in daytime.

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

We had to create a promotional package that contained our music Video, along with two print tasks a Digi-pak and Magazinne article.

These two texts had to have a coherent house style that worked with our audience.

I placed my two print designs on facebook and asked:-

Are they Coherent?

Do they link well together?

Do the Styles match?

My feeback was:-

'I feel these are extremely coherent designs, combining the tones from the flames with similar hues within the headlight blurs. The black background as well as the bold, open centre sans serif font appear in both designs, forming a coherent package. and similar but varied images of the flame are shown throughout. My only criticism concerning house styles is that this focal image flame does not appear in the video text (as far as i can remember). Otherwise, awesome.'

' only criticism, not 100% on the line that says "W*ith* exclusive bonus track" - colours and font blend a little making it hard to read. Coherent style throughout, but achieved by repetition of a single image, even from different shots seems a little jarring but i dont have any frame of reference, just mah opinion. Looks ok though, wouldn't be out of place as album art.'

From this feedback I found that the criticism was only do with the repetition of a very similar image and that this image didn't appear in the video.

Overall I think I was successful in making my package coherent and continued a good house style throughout, my only criticism would be that I would link it slightly more to the video.

Video:-

Overall , after analysing all my tasks, i found that there are elements of coherency throughout all three.

Such as the dark night time feel, and the use of blacks, and the lighting created by cars or other objects.

If i were to do this again, i would make sure there was more of a coherent link between my video and print tasks because i feel that is one area where i lacked.

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

Our music video took a lot of inspiration from the Kooks videos:

- 'Sofa song' & -'Always where i need to be'

We watched these videos and analysed all the different aspects of the videos, such as effects, shot types, lighting, themes, costume, mise-en-scene and editing.

'Always where I need to be' was a particularly big inspiration for us, we like the city location which was shown in the video by good establishing shots:-

Theirs:-

Ours:-

We thought this was a brilliant way of connoting the urban indie feel that we wanted to achieve, so we included this in our video.

We also liked the hand-held, haphazard shot in 'Sofa song'

Theirs:-

Ours:-

We challenged the ideas in this video in the way that we worked at night time. Both our influence videos were in daylight, but we wanted to work at night because we had ideas about strobes of lighting and the idea that night connoted a more lonely, solitude atmosphere than day time did.

Steve Neale said; "genre consists of instances of repetition and difference", which we have tried to achieve here, we want to use some of the same ideas in our video as our inspirations but make it different so it is enjoyable for the target audience.

Using similar fast paced shots of the traffic throughout gave it a fast paced feel, which is quite a redundant idea.

Print work:-

After researching alternative and indie print texts, I developed my own ideas for my print work.

I found that not all print work has to include the artists themselves, it can be photography or artwork, i found that with this genre, they were photographs of a slightly entropic nature, but keeping in touch with the 'earthy' 'urban' theme of the indie genre. However, it is noted that within the indie genre, the artists do like to be seen with their instruments on print pieces, which i have challenged, because i do not have that on my own. However, in our music video we had our performer carrying his guitar, which uses the idea of the artist carrying the instrument.

Found-

Mine-

As you can see the house styles of each set is quite similar, they are all very dark texts, connoting a mystery haphazard, urban life feel, However the Kooks have used the artists on the covers, whereas i havn't, i did this because i wanted to challenge this idea and have a small level of entropy in my work.

I felt that my print work was a little less creative due to the fact that we had stick to generic advert and digipak conventions so that it was recognised as a marketing product:-

These conventions include,

Barcode

Record Label

Copyright details and

Track listings

Final Music Video-

Stop Motion

This is a small stop motion scene that we did whilst out filming some other areas for our video, this could potentially be used.These are the same video but with two different visual effects :-

Cast

This is our only Performer:

Nathan

One of my group members has spoken to him about filming and when he is available, and we have found that he isn't as free as we had hoped, but we aim to be available when he is so that we can get all the shots done.

Nathan is the lead singer of the band, and so performing the song should not be a problem, has has also done small gigs in front of crowds so he isn't camera shy. We were also able to take a few shots of him in the college studio.

We are then also relying on the business of our city to do the crowd shots and traffic shots, because we didn't really want actors for this as it may not look as natural. But we do have contacts in case this doesn't go to plan. Our potential problem is night time filming, and there aren't many people around in the city center at this time.

Photoshop Experiments

Looking at some of the editing done in The Kooks music video, i wanted to try some for myself on still images using Photoshop.

Negatives/ Solarizing

I began with this image from google.

I then went to 'Filter'

Clicked on 'Stylize' then 'solarize'. I then also did 'CTRL, SHIFT and U' to turn the image greyscale.

This is the outcome:

Video Experiment

This is small clip that I did whilst in the car, its just a small video of my journey outside the window, I think it makes for an interesting clip and would look good in the video to connote the fast movement of the world and living.

We would perhaps do it in the city as opposed to country side areas.

The sound would also be cut, and perhaps turned into black and white.

Research

This is a video that has highly influenced our music video, and so I looked at some of the effects in this video, the editing, the shot times and also the costumes.

It starts with a short silhouetting effect, with the brightness of the window behind the performers, causing us to only see the outline, this runs for 2 seconds. We want to try silhouetting with out music video, in an alley way with car headlights.

Then there is a short negative/polarized establishing shot of a tall building, this connotes quite a random, industrial strange feel. I will experiment with this using Photoshop. This appears for about a second.

The next is another establishing shot of the city, looking quite grimy and every day, connoting quite an urban, busy, large atmosphere. this lasts for about a second.

We then have the performers crossing a busy street, the saturation looks quite high in this shot, so maybe this could be something we experiment with.

The performers are also wearing tight jeans, large coats and posh shoes, connoting an Indie feel, which is what we would like to try and achieve.

The video goes on to show the performers within their city, moving about the streets, taking car journeys and just almost living their every day lives. Mixed in is their performance, with their instruments and they are actually performing the song within this. I think this combination is great and connotes a natural, urban, indie vibe.

They experiment with stop motion, which is something we would like to try in our video. It makes a quirky clip and each shot is cut in time with the music making it interesting to watch and also a little comedic. Connoting a fun, haphazard relaxed video.

The video uses a lot of fast movement with the camera, we also want to do this because we want to try and create a busy, hustle and bustle feel within our location to contrast is with the isolation we also want to create with our performer.

Planning- Story board

Over the recent holidays our group got together to plan our storyboard and discuss our filming plans. We also Spoke to our performer briefly about our plans and will keep in good contact with him through our mobiles, facebook and blogs.

We have done a story board to illustrate our ideas for the music video.

Here we want to illustrate the hustle and bustle of the night time, using a slow shutter speed to catch cars moving along the roads. We then want a car to move slowly towards the camera and have its headlights come on when the more dynamic part of the song kicks in. We then have crowds of people moving around perhaps in faster or slower motion but this will be changed in post production. We then want to have medium close ups and close ups of our lead singers face looking up at taller buildings to connote isolation and vulnerability.

Here we would like to film our main character walking around a city and looking at crowds of people to connote isolation and loneliness, we also want to film cars passing him and speeding up the footage to suggest time passing around him and how fast the world moves. We then want the actor to hold the camera as he walks and sings to have a hand-held haphazard approach.

We would like our performer to sit on the steps in front of a grand building such as the cathedral and sing, to connote his vulnerability again and then we would like to experiment with a small amount of tasteful stop motion on a high industrial car park.

We here want our performer in an Alley way , walking towards us, with a headlight behind him, to cause a silhouette effect and suggest a sense of mystery and an unguarded and unsafe atmosphere.