Evaluation

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
We had to produce a music video, along with an album cover for the band’s album and a poster to advertise the release of the album. We researched into videos which were of a similar genre so that we knew what the conventions were, and therefore use the best and most popular conventions in our video. For example, in punk videos there are normally long shots or close ups and few in between, they are also quite fast moving. A modern example of a band which uses this idea is Alexisonfire with their video This Could Be Anywhere in the World, as seen below:

There is a mixture of narrative and performance as Steve Archer’s theory says that there is a need for an understandable relationship between the two, and our audience research showed that most people like to see both. The long shots and close ups are used mainly in the performance as in the narrative many different types of shot are used depending on the narrative used. An example of this is an original punk band, The Clash with their video Should I Stay or Should I Go which has both live performance and their routine of the day before a gig. In our video we decided on a narrative which would illustrate and amplify the lyrics, as Andrew Goodwin's theory says. We looked at the lyrics for our song and decided on having performance for most of the video, but certain lyrics have been illustrated, for example ‘when we walked into the party’ will be a party scene, and some lyrics have been amplified ‘your older brother said we're way too loud’ is a shot of a man shouting down a megaphone.

Those are the ways in which we have used and developed the conventions of a real punk music video. To challenge these conventions we have shots of people doing things that relate to the lyrics but in a different way within the narrative so that the audience will remain entertained. We knew that the audience wanted to see something different but funny due to our market research. With this market research we also found that most of our audience will be men aged around 17-25 as this music appealed mainly to them, Laura Mulvey says that the presence of a woman is mainly for display, therefore we decided to put in a few women with writing on their bodies to amplify the lyrics and appeal to the men. An example of a video which uses this theory is by a band called Good Charlotte with their video I Just Wanna Live as they have the entertainment factor of them dressed up as food, however there is no relation to the lyrics, there are also girls dancing though they are not the main focus of the video. Another way in which we are challenging but also using the conventions is that we are have used a black and white tint, and but have put the narrative in colour so that it separates the two different kinds of shots. The black and white adds to the idea of a low budget video, which our audience also asked for. We thought about this after we saw a video by The Clash which uses a blue tint over the top to make it look more low budget, though the blue tint fits with their video as it is filmed at night; London Calling.
How effective is the combination of your main product and the ancillary texts?
To accompany our main product of a music video, we also made the front and back of an album cover, a poster to advertise the album and the band, and finally the inside pages for the insert of the album. For our ancillary text of an album cover we have used a photo taken during a break from the filming of the performance, we asked the band to pose but not to make it look formal. I then used photoshop to edit in a Polaroid using a brush I downloaded and added text, along with the symbols seen on all CD covers. Taking inspiration from the album covers of bands such as The Clash and The Jam, it is simple, black and white with a picture of just the band on the front with coloured text, and on the back a photo from the bands performance, taken during the filming for the video of a drum kit. We used the same font and colour on the back so that it matches. This will link the cover and the video and should make it more recognisable. However the other ancillary text brings everything together as the poster has dates of release, a photo of the band and the album name and band name in bold contrasting coloured text. These texts are very important combined with the music video as it is the promotional material and without it not many people would know about the album, video or maybe even the band. The inside pages have pictures of each member with their name and the instrument they play in the red text, I edited the photos so that they were in black and white and added 'noise' to them to make them look older, there is also a page of the whole band in the middle which is in colour. To make this one look older I changed the colour levels, this separates the black and white photos to give something different.
What have you learned from your audience feedback?
Our audience feedback showed us that our music video and ancillary texts were successful in appealing to our audience and fitting with the genre of punk. Once we had put our project onto a disc, we held a screening in one of the media rooms in a lunchtime and asked males and females in our sixth form to watch it and fill out a questionnaire, as they fall into the target audience age range. This is where most of our audience feedback came from, with the majority of people saying that their favourite parts of the video were the eyes and the writing on the paper and that they mostly understood the video, however if they could hear the lyrics better it would have made more sense to them.

Further research was carried out on the older end of our target audience, with the video shown to working adults in the media profession, aged in their 20's and mainly males. They said that they liked the black and white tint on the performance and the lip syncing was done well. There were few criticisms, with only 4 people saying that they did not understand the running down the street as they could not understand the lyrics. Other than this, people seemed interested in our video and understood the humour as I watched their reactions whilst they watched the video, they thought the song was catchy and that the certain parts of the lyrics which were hard to understand were not an issue. The reason we were able to fulfill the wants of our audience was due to our audience research at the beginning of this project, before we started storyboarding, and by watching videos of a similar genre so we could use the popular conventions. The main conventions people said they wanted to see were the band performing, naked ladies which we have used in an appropriate way, and 'random s**t' which we have used in the man running down the street and policeman. As shown in my audience research blog post. After we had shown our audience the music video and they had filled out one side of the questionnaire, we asked them to look at our ancillary texts and answer questions on these. The results for this were also mainly positive, with people giving an overall rating for the album cover and poster between 4 and 5, at the top of our rating scheme. Out of the 14 sixth formers we asked, only 2 said that the poster would not make them want to buy the album or listen to any of the bands music, however both of their reasons were that they do not listen to music of the punk genre. Every member of the audience agreed that both ancillary texts fitted with the punk conventions, saying that they liked the black and white photos with coloured texts, that their clothing matched the genre of music and they fact they could see the two fitted with the music video. The general market response was very good, having every member, apart from the two people who are not fans of punk music, saying that they would attend a gig if the band played close to home and would buy or download the album or single.

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

In order to construct our music video we used many types of media technologies, some which we had used before, and some which we had to learn how to use this year. First of all we had to research into the conventions of a punk music video, therefore I started by watching videos on YouTube and looked at the statistics and comments left by the viewers. As shown in this blog post, you can see that the people who left comments on the Gallows video, a modern band, referred back to original punk band members and the genre of music which shows that we had to appeal to both fans of modern and original punk music. To do this we used the wide angle lens, used in modern rock videos such as You Me At Six-Gossip as it looks like a fisheye, a more modern editing and filming technique. To appeal to the fans of original punk music, we used a black and white filter which looks as though it has noise and therefore looks like an older camera has been used to film.

We also used a forum on the internet called Edition 38, which Chris is a member of, and posted our questionnaire in the music section which gained more responses than we thought which was very useful. The results for this were also posted on this blog by Chris as he was the only one with access to the forum. During filming we decided to use Chris' Panasonic HD camera as this gave us the opportunity of filming whenever we needed to in high quality due to our school only having one HD camera available. However to film the performance section of our video, we booked to use the school's HD camera so that we had two cameras of the same quality and could get more shots in one run of the song. It also meant that when it came to editing, we had more choice of shots to match together and some would flow with the lyrics. Before every shot we did a few practices so that we could test the lighting and overall look of the shot. In order to get a shot with a high enough angle for the scene of a man running down the street we used a monopod and waited until there were no cars, the lights from shop windows and street lamps were enough to light the shot correctly.

For other shots which needed to be steady we used a Jessops tripod, for example the short shots which amplify the lyrics.

This helped us to get these short shots to match with each other better when it came to editing, and connects all the short shots together, giving the video a better flow. When it came to lighting our video, we used three different methods. The first was for the performance, for this we used an industrial halogen lamp and placed it behind the drummer so that the performance was backlit and stood out from the rest of the video which used spotlighting and lighting to one side. For the scene of the party we used a strobe light set up in the left hand corner of the room, meaning that this was lit almost in the foreground. The last method of lighting we used was the spotlight for the short shots filmed in the drama studio with a lighting board. As seen in the video of Jasmine below

Finally, we had to edit all the shots we had filmed into a whole video. To do this we used a software called Final Cut Express 4 on the Apple Mac's. This involved many problems which we managed to solve, for example loading the footage from the cameras onto the Macs, as there is a different technique to uploading HD film. We also had a problem with the clip below as the first attempt did not flow as we had wanted it to, there was no way around this and therefore we had to film again. With this new clip we rewinded it and cut out the sections in which my hand is showing, we then sped it up and placed it all together:

Another very time consuming task was the 'only as far as the eyes can see' writing, however overall this was worth it as many people said that this was their favourite part of the video. To do this, I wrote each letter of the word down while Chris and Jasmine pressed record on the camera and paused it while i wrote the next one. This meant that when it came to editing each letter had to be cut and placed together. This added something different to our video, and helped us to respond to what our audience said they wanted to see. I wrote it in capitals and uneven writing so that it gives the impression of rebelion and carelessness, in fitting with the punk attitude.

Finally, we put all our clips together and made sure that the audio fitted in time with whe visuals.
For our evaluation, we needed to know what our audience thought of the video. Therefore we held a screening one lunchtime in a media room and used a SMART board and projector to show it on a large screen as we thought this would have more impact than asking our audience to watch it on a computer screen.