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

For our coursework we created a digipak and advert. A package that was promoting our artist. It was important to make sure all of the promotional package, including the music video was related to our genre. If one of the parts didn't relate then it would make the rest very different and not very effective. I researched existing promotional packages ( e.g Eminem )so i could relate to them and be inspired for my own.

My package is coherent and the house style is black and white. This black and white effect has been constant throughout my package and has allowed them all to link. If the music video was shown alone, through this house style my other materials could be recognized. I used black and white in both my advert and digipak, but i also included some coloured text in order to make them stand out more and send an important message. I didn't think we needed any colour in the video because there was no text that needed to be added and i didn't like the idea of part of the video being in colour while the other isn't, as this would have sent off a different message than what we wanted to achieve.

In order to keep the house style accurate i made sure that my fonts and colours were the same throughout.

I used the font STENCIL for the titles and the main focus points. This font looked like the font you would find sprayed onto a graffiti wall which added to the urban idea and street feel. The font was slightly different on the inside panel (named : Mv Boli)  because I wanted to create the look as if he was saying it. I though it was appropriate to change the font so that it added something different to the pack. This font was then used on the smaller writing of copyright, (found on the CD and the bottom of the back panel). Throughout the promotional package the main colours used were: Black, Grey, Red and Yellow.




The black writing's CMYK on the advert was:

C= 75%

M= 68%

Y= 67%

K= 90%

The yellow writing's CMYK throughout was:

C= 9%

M= 3%

Y= 97%

K= 0%



The red writing's CMYK throughout was:

C= 0%

M= 99%

Y= 100%

K= 0%


The grey writing CMYK throughout was:

C= 56%

M= 43%

Y= 44%

K= 10%

In order to make sure all the pictures where the right shade, i changed the colouring via saturation so that i could be sure the level it was desaturated. This meant it was easy for me to make this coherent.
Despite my digipak being a little entropic (a man in a glass box) i think it still relates because of the scenery being an urban town. I wanted my digipak and advert to be more creative and entropic. The Eminem album cover of Recovery inspired me. His video also being set in the streets didn't involve him in a glass box in the centre of town. I thought this would work well. I made sure the same clothes were being worn however in order to make an resemblance. It would have been very difficult to create this idea on our music video at the low budget we had. If we had a bigger budget and more professional equipment/knowledge it would have been easier to produce. But i still think that my package relates in its own way.




I originally throughout of doing my package in the studio however we decided in the end when we were producing our music video that natural lighting would be best to show of our street themed. We thought it would have given off a different vibe if we had set up these power lights. All of my promotional package has natural lighting, which despite making it look low budgeted adds to the street theme and matches the darkness of rap music. However we decided to challenge this at the end of our music video by changing the brightness on the camera as we thought the extreme brightness matched the slow downed music towards the end. We thought it was a good ending to our final music video.

Overall  i believe i have created a coherent product that has a house style and even created a brand for our artist. I got very good feedback from my hand materials and even betters feedback from the video. I used the same shots of close ups and long shots in both my advert, digipak and video in order to make the package coherent, which was noticeable to the audience.

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

When creating our music video we were inspired by many of the existing artists and their videos. One particular artist who inspired us more was Jayz . His 99 problems video inspired us to create a street themed video sticking to the aspect of lip sync rather than creating a narrative. The use of black and white in both our video and jayz' creates the more street look and diverts the attention to the performance rather than the colours of clothes and area.

Jayz- 99 problems

Fouadsymphonics- I'm not concerned

When watching other videos we got an understanding of the different shots that were acceptable within our genre. We included a lot of establishing shots in order to show the urban area and the situation of our video. We also used lots of closeups which was more risky regarding the lip-sync but overall created a more realistic performance. These closeups were used in JayZ 99 problems which added to the realism and 'amateur' style.

The pace of editing was very important. It was an extremely important thing for us, creators of a music video to keep up with this fast pace. If you look back at a previous post (Shot pace ) you can see the pace of the music videos that we looked at. i wrote these down so we are able to compare to this popular and effective videos.

In time we noticed our video was a lot shorter than those we looked at therefore we had less shots. Due to us wanted all of video lip synced to keep up with the redundant expectation we felt a narrative wasn't needed therefore was harder for us to have more shots than we had. I believe that we created a  video that was appropriate for our target audience, we did this by regularly checking with them via social networking sites when our video was bring edited. This allowed us to check we were on the right tracks and didn't waste any time.


The mise en scene was something we tried to make an important factor. We felt the mise en scene would either make our video realistic or very fake therefore trying to make it as real as possible meant we had a bigger advantage. The use of the Alleyways, Tight conformed areas and brick walls meant the location would be related to the genre and therefore allow the mise en scene to be more believable. The costume however was slightly different. Part of the costume is the dominant representation of rap artists, hoody and jeans. We wanted to have this because it meant people outside the target audience could still recognise the genre. We also chose to include a knitted jumper and jeans because this is slightly different and relates to the personality of our performer, something which we tried to portray throughout.


The main problem we had was that because we wanted our video to be recognisable through the genre of rap it made it difficult to think of ideas that were different and unrelated but still relating. When we pitched our idea there was lots of concerns regarding the simplicity of our video, and the fact it would be boring. We took this on board and tried to create a unique video but still keeping it known. Despite our final video being very redundant i think that the use of individual dancers and other performers add to the unique and adds a small part of entropy.

Our video is very similar to a real media product and if we had the professional equipment i believe that we could have created something better than the already existing videos out there. Our video looks very professional for a low budgeted video and i think this adds to the genre more. The simplicity of our video adds to the street theme and almost creates a brand for the rap genre.

With the donation being a young man standing in the middle of a town wearing a hoody and rapping. This fits the stereotypical idea of rappers. However the conation shows this stereotypical view is wrong. it shows him in various outfits, some that challenge the dominate representation. The lyrics suggest his opinions as he tries to communicate to people through his music. The I'm not concerned chorus suggest something may be up in his life that he has stop caring about. This deep connotation shows that the stereotypical view of 'young hoodies' being careless, angry, rude, malicious and generally a pain is challenged as we see a new side to these 'young hoodies'. This use of challenging the dominate representation of young hoody rappers allows us to play around with theorists such as Raymond Williams, who said there were three ideologies, emergent, dominant and residual.
Steve Neale on the other hand, suggesting that 'difference is absolutely essential to the economy of genre' We have challenged this quote because i believe that despite our redundant video we have interested the market and the target audience.

Overall i think our music video has a wide range of shots similar to those already used in existing media products, the lip-sync is up to standard, the fast pace of the video makes our more investing as there is not narrative to make the structure of the video. According to Andrew Goodwin's theorem are video classes as disjunctive because the images shown don't relate to what he is singing about. We do however have a couple of shots were the imagery matches the lyrics making part of it amplified. But there isn't enough of these shots that the video become boring and predictable.
All of these characteristics make up our music video and make it recognisable to the target audience allowing them to make up there final decisions and opinions.

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

We undertook different ways in order to get a good understanding of our audince and their views. We first of all posted the video to facebook and asked questions to our target audience. This way is very simple but allows us to get the information. Below are the screen shots of the facebook comments.

When we got the facebook comments we were very pleased with them as they were all positive. However we thought that this wasnt a very good way of getting feedback because we could push them to give us negative comments. We didnt really have the power to control the extent of the message. Despite this we are very happy with these comments. We noticed from these results that the black and white effect was most popular with the audience as well as the scenery as this gave off the correct vibe.

We then played the video to the class and got them to write down any of their views both good and bad. Below are the scan ins on the comments.

From this we realised that some people thought the dancers location was very random and wanted her to be more established in the worcester area. Despite this we actually filmed it in the same location as the other male singer. The also thought she didn't really play a big part in the video. We could have changed this by adding more shots of her within the video and taken out some of the lip-sync. Our audience also pointed out that part of the video (towards last bridge) was a little bit out of sync. If we had more time we could have changed this as it wouldn't have taken long to edit. Once again the black and white effect was very appreciated with the audience as well as the locations. We are glad these were appreciated because we wanted to create this constant theme throughout. 


After doing all this we decided it was a good idea to film various people watching the video and then film their response to some questions. We thought this was more of a good idea as it increases our knowledge of technology as well as we feel we would get a better response. Below is a link to a youtube video that I created. It was edited on iMovie.

I only ended up filming one person in the end because of the lack of people who wanted to be filmed. The person i filmed was very positive regarding my video and didn't really have anything bad to say. He isn't in the targeted age group which means its more and more effective as it shows that our video is appropriate for older audiences as well as those targeted.

http://youtu.be/7rhGSaneVnQ

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

Here is a list of the technologies I used as well as new things I learnt about them, things I found difficult and what we used it for. 

Panasonic HD DV camera

We used the Panasonic HD DV camera in order to film our music video. I used this camera in AS media therefore I knew how to use it. This was an advantage as some people were unsure of these new cameras. I really like the cameras because they are very light and compact as well as allowing us to produce some HD quality footage.  The only issue I have with them is that if the settings have been changed by somebody else then at times it may be difficult to change back. At one point we had a problem with the exposure which we were unsure about how to change. However luckily this doesn't happen very often. We also noticed that because of the footage being HD the battery power didn't last very long. This caused us problems when we wanted to do a whole day of filming. However due to this restriction we worked out the best way to come around this was to film in blocks, so that it wasn't too tiring for the performer as well.



Canon EOS 450D DLSR camera

The canon EOS 450D DLSR camera was a very familiar technology for me being a photographer. I used this while doing my production of my DigiPak. Because of my familiarly I found it easy to produce good quality photos. I used manual settings which included the shutter speed, aperture, ISO and focus. I prefer to use all the manual settings so I have full control over my images and the final outcome.










Adobe Photoshop


I only really Photoshop during my DigiPak. Photoshop was the main programme I used that allowed me to achieve the full extent of my Digipak. For my Digipak you will see that I created a man in this glass box effect. This was a very difficult thing to produce and took many experiments and attempts in Photoshop. When creating my print work I wanted this 3d look of him being trapped in a glass box. This was a very complicated process and required me to do many things. First I opened the bottom image in this case a building (bottom left of my digipak) and changed it to black and white by using the low saturation tool. I then opened the same image over the top and once again changed this to black and white. I did this so it allowed me to place glass filter over the top without completely wiping the previous picture. Once they were joined together with the glass filter over the top I then opened the image of our performer. Because this picture had a lot of extra imagery in it I needed to get rid of this. I used the eraser tool so that I could clear that layer wherever I wanted, allowing me to create his shape the way I wanted. I then once again put the glass filter over the top so that it looked liked he was in a box. I then selected the small area of his head using the lasso tool. I then selected the 3d tool and this allowed this part of his head to be detached and come over the top of all layers- creating the 3d look. It was a very long process but I think it looks very effective and works well. With the rest of the panels I did a very similar thing of erasing the area I didn't want so I could get the effect of him looking out onto the town.



Adobe Illustrator






I used adobe illustrator very frequently in order to experiment in creating a 3D box for my Digipak. I ended up creating the 3d box on Microsoft word and print screening this screen and edit in Photoshop, as illustrator proved to complicated for me to use.












Microsoft word





I used this piece of software when I was trying to create my box for my front cover of my Digipak. I struggled to make this 3d box in other software's so therefore felt it would be easier to create a box using insert shapes. and then screen shot it over the top of my background picture. Once I did that I had the picture saved in memory to allow me to open it in paint, save as JPEG and then opened in Photoshop.












Adobe Premiere Pro


Premiere Pro was the software that we used the most over this year. We used it mainly during our video production, as well as during the planning. We used Premiere Pro when learning about lip sync. We filmed a short video of us rapping Jay z and Rihanna and then edited the footage in Premiere Pro. We learnt how to match up the music to the words. However we found this task very easy because when we filmed it we were exactly in time.
When we moved onto the main task it got more and more difficult. We decided to undertake a rap, we thought at the time this was a good idea. But about 2 hours into the editing we realized it would be very difficult. We used the crop tool to allow us to cut our clips down so we didn't add unwanted footage. We didn't want to use too many special effects as we thought this was unnecessary when trying to portray a rap video. We did however use the black and white tool to change the coloring of the clip. We had to add this effect to each individual clip and then render it. This took a very long time considering we had about 100 shots. However once we did it , we didn't have to render it again which meant we weren't waiting around doing nothing. Other than the crop tool we didn't really use any other tools. Our video was made using simple techniques. The only problem we had when regarding our video and this software was that occasionally the sound would cut out (was something to do with the computer speed). this meant it was difficult to do the lip sync as we had to guess where the music was. This was incredibly annoying but we managed to cope and make our final product.






YouTube


YouTube was used when we were researching all the different videos that inspired us for our final video. It is a free site and easy to access so it was possible for us to undertake it. We also used it to publish our video at the different stages of production so we could get audience feedback from our target audience. this meant we could see and understand there opinions and learn how to improve the video. When we finished the final video we published it to YouTube. Doing this meant we could embed the video to our blog, and see the reviews of our target audience.






Facebook

Facebook a social networking site allowed us to connect to our target audience in a free and easy way. We made a Facebook group so we could upload posts, videos and any ideas to our audience and get feedback. this Facebook group is easy to make and was very reliable in allowing us to get the answers we wanted. We used Facebook to plan the video, so I could communicate with my partner, Megan Gorman. To get feedback while in the middle of our production and to get feedback once we had finished. Facebook is the new, free and quick way to connect to our audiences.





Blogger


Blogger was very useful in presenting my coursework. Its a free site and has allowed me to show my ideas and plans in an organised way. With this organisation it meant I could see easily what needed to be down and how to achieve it. It has also made it easy when trying to explain ideas to our performer. By showing him my blog he could understand what i wanted in a quick and easy way.








Iphone

We only really used an iPhone while we were out filming our video. We used the iPhone to play our song from which made it easier for our artist to rap along to. This portable device meant we could play it out loud (but not too loud to disrupt others) and in good quality so it was recognizable to the performer.
When planning for my video and digipak i used my iPhone. I connected up the calender from the computer to my phone so i could organize things on the go as well as see what we planned. This meant we were more organized. I also downloaded the blogger app so i could post blogs whenever and wherever I was to allow more freedom in completing the coursework.






Soundcloud

Soundcloud is an online website that allows artists to post their music for free and get it listened to anybody. We found our artist through a friend who referred us to Soundcloud. This site allowed us to listen to all of his music and learn about him before even meeting him. We didn't really use Soundcloud after that as we had the original mp3 to play the music.

final music video

this is our final music video

Video

We started to film today in Worcester. Our performer was about half an hour late but luckily he told us in advance so we didn't waste any time. While we were waiting for him we organised which locations to visit first and with which outfits, this allowed us to be more organised with our time.
When he arrived we started straight away. We played the music from my phone so that it wasn't too loud to distract the public but loud enough to be heard by the musician. We went to lots of different locations and did even more varied shots which meant if we having any gaps when editing we have stuff to put in. Overall i think the filming went really well and we finished quicker than expected.
We didn't think the filming would go well as we had never experienced this before or ever attempted it at this level, so overall we were really happy with it and gained lots of confidence for when completing the rest of the video.

Research and Planning-ShotList

I made a very detailed shotlist on excel that allowed me to right all the shots i needed as well as more information like location and times. Doing this will help when filming and editing.
I have enclosed pictures below because excel wouldn't allow me to publish into this post. Each picture is split up from verses and chorus.