1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
The conventions of my media product depend greatly on it's genre. in the pop genre the actors used are usually good looking to appeal to the audience. The videos also typically include a lot of miming or lip syncing to focus on the artist.
There is usually a simple narrative or story which cuts between this narrative and the artist performing. The artist is usually included in the narrative, either by telling the story or being involved in it. The artist is seen engaging the audience, either by simple miming to the camera or just by using different close up shots e.g. lips or eyes. Pop videos are also used to illustrate the meaning of the lyrics and visualize the music in a very straight forward way, in other words there is usually a direct link to the narrative chosen and the meaning of the song, the video is usually edited to the beat or rhythm of the music. For mainstream, major record company artists, the music videos is their most important tool in selling the artist. It is important that the artists image in fact becomes more important than the song, this is why the star's own personal or quirky style is usually present throughout to make them unique and special, their fashion is also usually representative of their target audience too. With regards to the technical side of pop conventions, the camera shots are usually different and fast paced. This means a variety of long, medium, close up and extreme close up shots will be used throughout the movie. It is usually the close up shots of the face, or lips when lip syncing that sells the artist to the audience most. The movement of the camera is also usually very varied, with the use of still tripod shots and overhead crane shots to establish settings as well as pans and dolly tracking to follow the story. Not only are all these shots edited to the beat of the music, but usually very fast to keep audience interested and wanting to watch it again to catch bits they may have missed first time.
We have included all these conventions mentioned in our video.When choosing our actors we decided upon a very pretty, photogenic girl who we knew would appeal to our female audience as a role model as well as to our male audience as a form of love interest.
The same goes for the good looking actor we used, the girls will look up to the female more if she is seen with an handsome boyfriend as well as fancying him and the male audience will also look up to him. We used lip syncing for the entire first chorus and various other points when Natalie sings 'I'm all out of faith' or 'this is how i feel'. We also included her miming the line 'perfect sky is torn'. We used lip syncing as it is a good way to expose the artist and will make the audience think of them singing it when they hear the song, we didn't however want to use it too much as it would boring to just watch her singing the entire song, this is where the narrative convention came in and we used the rest of the song to tell the story. The presence of a storyline is evident at the very beginning when we see the girl stood by herself whilst her other half walks past her in the background and through out the video he is shown as he blanks her and act as if he cannot even see her.
2. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
Each of my ancillary tasks have a close relationship with my music video. I feel this because of the relevance I have used in my poster and album cover. The text on the advertisement and album cover is eye catching and tells the audience directly the name of the band. A advertisement can offer a clear simple message, a basic image to catch the audiences attention and short to the point text. This is exactly why my advertisement is a good combination with my music video,as the audience are presented with a small simple amount of information which leads onto finding out about the band, and therefore watching the music video, for example on Youtube.com.
My album cover is very much the same as in it is simple with only the name of the singer and the song title displayed. The audience would see the album cover on the Internet for example iTunes, or in a shop like HMV. This has relevance to the video because of the simplicity.
The above picture is our completed front + back cover.
above is a picture of our inside of the cover sleeve.
Once I’d done enough research for my magazine advertisement, I decided to play around with a few ideas of my own. I’d already completed my album covers by this point, so I thought it would be a good idea to use the same designs but edit them slightly. The front of the album cover is very simplistic and I felt that it would be too simple to just use the same design, so I knew that I needed to add something to make it more interesting. By keeping a similar design of the album on the magazine advertisement, it makes it easier for the reader to see the album cover on the shelves inside the shops.
The song is very calm paced, and it has an easy tune and simple lyrics to sing along to. Therefore, I wanted to keep the information on the advertisement as simple as possible, which is why I just wrote the name of the artist and the songs name. By keeping the image on the advertisement as big as possible, it is very eye-catching and makes it a focal point which will allow the reader to remember it and therefore remember the album cover too. One of the comments in my audience feedback said that because the song is easy to remember, they would buy it.
3. what have you learnt from your audience feedback?
Firstly we had to do lots of research to identify with the audience conventionally like to watch. i did this by looking at previous music videos of the same type of genre like 'The Scripts - man who cant be moved' and 'Kelly Clarkson - when your gone'. i had found this useful as i understood what the conventions of typical break up music videos would have to look like and we could apply this to our own video or even change it a little to make it unique and look more like our work.
The audiences feedback did not only help me with the initial ideas but also with the ideas in which i already had and or the ones which we were thinking about, so this helped us back our ideas up even more. Members from our media class helped us by giving us their opinion on different transitions that are available to use on Adobe Pro Premier to put into our video to enhance the performers performance, also we used different types of dissolved between shots and this was also admired by our audience since they liked the way we had added in the dissolves as it added in that torn effect. We asked a few members of our media class which we thought looked best not only did allow us to know what the audience thought but it also allowed us to know from a media related view.
This image below is a good example where we used cross fades.
when in the process of making our DVD's front cover we had an issue as whether to keep the writing of the word 'Torn' on the face of our character or just to have the word printed onto the t-shirt. we decided to ask students in our media class what they thought would look the best, which gave us an understanding of what the audience wanted to see visually on the front cover. They decided they liked it without the writing on the face as it just makes the image look messy. This can be linked into hasbawns identity theory where it says how identity is changeable like a shirt, not like the human skin.
After finishing the media cover we sent out a questionnaire to help ask the audience what they thought of our cover sleeve.
Questionnaire cover sleeve:
1. What gender are you?
Male Female
2. What age group are you?
11-13 14-16 17-19 20+
3. Do you buy music DVD’s?
Yes No
4. Have you ever bought a DVD/CD as a result of the cover?
Yes No
5. What influences you to buy the DVD/CD?
Circle the appropriate:
Appearance Design Artist/Star Genre Popularity
6. Does the picture link to the video?
Yes No
7. Is the imaging used for the front cover eye catching enough?
Yes No
8. By looking at the cover sleeve, is it recognizable what song it is?
Yes No
9. How would you rate our cover sleeve?
Mark an ‘x’ where you stand
Bad Excellent
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After creating our music piece we decided to make a questionnaire to gather feed back from the audience to understand what was good and what needed attention about our music video. as our music video was unconventional in terms of applying to Todorovs narrative theory, Todorov suggested that stories begin with an equilibrium or status quo where any potentially opposing forces are in balance. This is disrupted by some event, setting in chain a series of events. Problems are solved so that order can be restored to the world of the fiction.
Video Evaluation Questionnaire:
1. How old are you? 11-13 14-16 17-19
2. What gender are you? Male Female
3. Was the story line clear? Yes No
4. Do the lyrics link well with the storyline? Yes No
5. A music video helps me decide whether I like a song:
Mark a ‘x’ where you stand,
NEVER-------------------------------------------------------------------OFTEN
6. The locations used linked in well with the song:
Yes No
Why?................................................................................................................................
.........................................................................................................................................
7. Was the performance convincing?
Yes No
Why?................................................................................................................................
…………………………………………………………………………………………..
8. How would you rate our video?
Poor Average Excellent
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Additional comments…………………………………………….
Having sent out this questionnaire we were able to see what the audiences view was on our piece such as, out of the 14 people who filled in the questionnaire 3 people rated our video at 7, 7 people voted it at 8 and 4 voted the video a 9. This allowed us to see that they liked our video. Questions such as ‘Was the story line clear?’ where all 14 people answered yes, helped us to realise that our video followed on and met the audiences needs.
The fact that throughout the pre production, production and post production stages of our music video and ancillary tasks we kept consulting the audience for feedback and asking them what their oponion was on our work and what way it would look best, helped us to achieve our high standard of work.
4. how did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
At the research stage of our projects we decided to watch and analyse similar products in the media. For our music video we used the video sharing website YouTube to stream music videos form the internet. This is a good example of new media technology as a couple of years ago to complete this task we would have had to watch a music channel on television and wait for out music video to be screened. However not all videos are available on-demand on the internet. When researching for our film opening we used youtube aswell to be able to watch film openings on demand. We also used the BBC iPlayer to watch soap operas and dramas of similar genres to be able to understand the typical representation of certain social groups. We colaborated and shared our ideas at the planning stage using online blogs. I used the popular blogging service wordpress as it allowed me to share pictures, video and other media quickly in a neatly presented manner. I was able to download a WordPress application from the Apple iTunes Store and blog on the go using my iPod Touch, MP3 player. This meant that whenever I was inspired be something, no matter where I was in the world I was able to share this inspiration with the rest of my team.
At the planning stage I used a program called Google Calendar which allowed me to keep on track when i was at the planning stage,where and when we planned for our group meetings and filming schedule to make sure that there were no clashes with personal arrangements. For the film opening we used adobe premier on the apple imac computers, the software was simple but was easy to get the hang of and very good at inputing and removing types of transitions we wanted or didnt want, also it was very easy to link the lip syncing to the music using this program. This software provided us with the tools and ability to create a professional looking music video. We filmed both of our products using GS 500 panasonic cameras.
During the filming of the music video I took pictures using my Fuji Film FinePix S5700/S700 Digital Camera with 10X Optical Zoom.
Using these types of technology has helped me to learn about the fast paced nature of the media industry from recording to editing and to the final product, this was very helpful within the post production of our video.
At the feedback stage we also tried to get peoples opinions by giving out questionnaires and asking a 20 volunteers to come and watch and then grade our work with respect to the questions we have asked on the sheets. In previous parts of my blog i have already posted the questions we had asked our volunteers. the results came back in our favour as we had lots of opinions from different people saying how it was all done well and our scenery was decided nicely and fits in well with the lyrics to our song.
Since we used imac computers to edit and add in effects, when i uploaded the picture we had decided to use for our front cover it looked like this at the first glance.
This was before any editing or any effects added using the programme photo shop, This is during the process of clearing the photo more and playing about with some of the effects.
This image was made using photoshop on the software adobe premier. the tool used on the program is the extracting tool which takes away all of the background leaving a clear white background which i was then able to alter using other tools.
i decided to use a filter called ‘stamp’. This shows a direct contrast of colour (black and white)and the colour also represents the contrast between the two characters and how the had to become torn from one another. By using this filter i was also able to black out the man, this suggested that this man could be any man and she would have had no ‘faith’. it also linked to the lyrics ‘not some holy light' as he wasn't the man which she first thought he was. This also gave a chance for the audience to relate to the song and to the feeling of being torn, it was used as a blank canvas for the audience or buyer to fill.
When finishing our video, at the post production stage at the last point where we were doing the finishing touches on our video, we used video after effects program where we made the final touches and emended our green screening which we had done. I had made sure there wasnt any green markings around the outline of the actors which would ruin the video, this took over a week to perfect.
Also during our video, the part at which the female singer sings torn at one point in our video, we had used a video effect to add the effect of the ''perfect sky'' being torn. This is shown in the image below.
