Tuesday, February 25, 2014
Tuesday, February 4, 2014
What have you learnt from your audience feedback?
Our target audience were teenagers and young adults ages 15-25 mainly. They should enjoy indie music as that is the genre of the band we chose. We attempted to reach them firstly with the song we chose, its very popular with in the indie genre, and also by our ancillary texts having younger people in the images it is more appealing to the younger generation as they can identify with them. The colours used on the ancillary work was appealing to them as its seen a few times in similar media texts. I could imagine people seeing our video on MTV and on youtube, and the poster in magazine such as NME!
Saturday, February 1, 2014
How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
During the creative process of this project we have used and learnt about many different technologies which has made each part of the project that bit easier to create, organise and plan. We used an online blog site throughout the entire process called 'Blogger' which is web blogs, otherwise known as weblogs, where you can publish videos, photos and text. The great thing about Blogger is my project was all in one place! For this project we used Blogger to present our research and planning, how we created the video and the ancillary tasks, and then finally we used to publish our evaluations. Blogger is a very easy way of logging the creative process in a logical order and its very easy to find previous posts if they need updating/editing. Blogger also allows you to Embed YouTube videos and Prezis and also slideshows which I wouldn't be able to do if we printed it on paper.
During the research and planning part of the coursework we used 'Microsoft Excel' which allowed Jack and I to compile all our findings into one place and easily make graphs and tables to show our results, which we could then analyse easily and refer back to when needed, being able to put screenshots of them on our blogs also made very easy for us both to look at as and when we needed to.
We used all sorts of online sites when working on our project, but we mainly used YouTube for the research and planning section as its very simple to use and has the biggest collection of music video than any other website. All you had to do was type in the genre/author/name of what it is you are researching and it will come up with a whole host of music videos for you to view. This was especially useful when doing our research into similar media texts as we had thousands of videos to view. We were also able to upload our music video that we had created using Youtube. Using this convergence allowed us to have a place to keep our video for as long as we wanted it there. Also having it on Youtube allows people to comment and leave feedback which is very useful for us to have feedback from our target audience. I also used Prezi which allows you to create an interactive power point as part of my evaluation. It makes it a little more interesting for the reader and Blogger allowed me to embed it into my blog for ease of use.
When creating our Animatic story board and editing our music video we used the software 'Final Cut'. We scanned our hand drawn story boards into the Macs and then took screen shots of them and put them into final cut and put them in order of how wanted the video to go and set how long they would play for representing how long that particular shot would be. We had to edit our song to make it shorter and we also used Final Cut to do this, using the razor tool we cut our parts of the song and then ensured it would all blend together with the blend tool. Furthermore we learnt how to add text into the video clips using photoshop.
We used 'Adobe Photoshop' to create out subsidiary tasks, which were the music magazine advert and also the Digipak. Photoshop very simply lets you insert images and texts which was crucial to allowing our products to look professional. Photoshop also allows you to edit the images as you want, i changed the contrast, brightness and photo shopped some flaws on the skin to create a more professional looking image. Photoshop breaks up all the editing you do into layers so you can see what it is you've done and can easily change it.
We had to use hardware such as the Macs which had all the software I touched apon previously which allowed me to use it all for free in the college.We then used a Nikon DSLR camera to film all of our footage for our music video and to take photos for our subsidiary tasks. The camera we used was very technologically advanced allowing us to produce high quality images and video clips. We could also pull focus and it had a large memory which meant we could get all the shots we wanted at once without having to worry about running out of space. The camera also had the capabilities of easily connecting to the Macs for ease of transporting our footage.
Wednesday, January 15, 2014
How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
Our products hold many similarities. For example, we use the same type face on 'dirty paws' and 'of monsters and men' on both of the products so the album is easily recognizable from the poster which means it is easily recognizable from a poster to the music video also which was something we really wanted to achieve as I believe it makes it easier for fans to follow the bands music career with easily recognizable band consistency. We also used the black background with white font through out the products which again is keeping to an easily recognizable style. We used the same picture on our poster and album cover which showed the band, we believed this was a good idea because followers of the band would immediately recognize the band members and become interested in the product. We made all of our products with the same title, the song was called dirty paws as was the album which we felt was a good idea so again it is instantly recognizable instead of trying to sell an album called one thing from an album called another. This is what current media products in the industry do also so we knew it worked.
I feel that all of our media products communicated the same mood, the facial expression on the image conveyed a solemn expression as is the mood through out the video but we didn't communicate the fact the video contained the story of grief of a soldier as that wasn't what the entire album was about, only the one song it was best not to advertise that too heavily.
I feel that all of our media products communicated the same mood, the facial expression on the image conveyed a solemn expression as is the mood through out the video but we didn't communicate the fact the video contained the story of grief of a soldier as that wasn't what the entire album was about, only the one song it was best not to advertise that too heavily.
Tuesday, January 14, 2014
In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
In
what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and
conventions of real media products?
The product we created challenges and also uses the conventions of current media texts. The mise-en-scene of the video and also images on the digipak and poster are compliant as the costumes worn in the video are stylish and currently fashionable, the actors used look like what we would like our target audience to look like, so hopefully our target audience would see this and be attracted to the video. After looking at different music videos we came up with different conventions that we want to use in our final product. We looked at different music videos that were suited to our genre of music and realised that many of these music videos are narrative and so we wanted to do a narrative music video.
Also we noticed that the narrative storylines of the music videos that we watched were very melancholy and downbeat and that’s what we wanted to show to the audience. Watching the different music videos, we saw that there were different ways in which we could show the title of the song and artist. Some music videos have the titles in the corner, which I feel could sometimes go unnoticed so we wanted it be obvious to the audience what the song was called and who the song was by. After observing the music video for the acoustic version of ‘We Are Young’ by ‘FUN’ I saw that they used a title sequence that was controlled by the beat of the music and we both thought that this was really effective in making an audience watching a music video as it challenges regular conventions of music videos which makes it stand out from the crowd, and so as a result we used a title sequence that was different from other music videos.
Another convention that we followed was images/cinematography. Most narrative music videos that we watched used cinematography that captures how the characters feel and what mood they are in and because we want to tell a story we felt like showing the characters emotion through the cinematography, as using speech would distract the viewer from the music. Using shots such as close ups, establishing shots, long shots and mid shots make the audience feel a connection with the characters, which we believe, is vital for a music video. We also used other cinematography techniques such as a focus pull as it makes the video look more professional.
Our first subsidiary task, the poster, uses conventions of current media texts; the style of the poster is in keeping with the digipak for the album as well as the video its self. We used the same colour scheme throughout both the subsidiary tasks and also on the video its self. We also added hints of baby blue in the ‘M’ on the type face used for the band name, this stops it from looking too plain and makes the bands name pop off the black background. I hadn’t seen this done on a typeface before but I had seen a pop of colour used in another way and it was very effective. We used a black back ground with a white typeface, giving it a modern feel, which is a fairly common among current media texts. The layout we used, having the album photo the main focus of the page with the text above and below it was us using conventions of current media texts as it was one we had seen else where and thought it was the most effective way to draw peoples attention, rather than loading it with information to read we kept it to the bare minimum. The typeface we chose we believe looked like something we’d see in our genre of indie music but the typography used for the bands name was more edgy and modern so we defied convention with that but if anything it made it more noticeable and attractive to our genre as it is different and that is what people typically associated with the indie genre.
Our second subsidiary task the Digipak definitely uses conventions of current media texts but there are some slight differences. The front and back cover very much are similar to current music texts in the lay out, style and images. Its presented very simply to ensure it eye catching and not overwhelming and the chosen colour scheme is simple yet effective. We saw the black and white colour scheme on the album 'Yeezus - Kanye West' and we thought it looked very effective. We wanted to represent the mood of the song which is quite melancholic so the images used portray that.
The product we created challenges and also uses the conventions of current media texts. The mise-en-scene of the video and also images on the digipak and poster are compliant as the costumes worn in the video are stylish and currently fashionable, the actors used look like what we would like our target audience to look like, so hopefully our target audience would see this and be attracted to the video. After looking at different music videos we came up with different conventions that we want to use in our final product. We looked at different music videos that were suited to our genre of music and realised that many of these music videos are narrative and so we wanted to do a narrative music video.
Also we noticed that the narrative storylines of the music videos that we watched were very melancholy and downbeat and that’s what we wanted to show to the audience. Watching the different music videos, we saw that there were different ways in which we could show the title of the song and artist. Some music videos have the titles in the corner, which I feel could sometimes go unnoticed so we wanted it be obvious to the audience what the song was called and who the song was by. After observing the music video for the acoustic version of ‘We Are Young’ by ‘FUN’ I saw that they used a title sequence that was controlled by the beat of the music and we both thought that this was really effective in making an audience watching a music video as it challenges regular conventions of music videos which makes it stand out from the crowd, and so as a result we used a title sequence that was different from other music videos.
Another convention that we followed was images/cinematography. Most narrative music videos that we watched used cinematography that captures how the characters feel and what mood they are in and because we want to tell a story we felt like showing the characters emotion through the cinematography, as using speech would distract the viewer from the music. Using shots such as close ups, establishing shots, long shots and mid shots make the audience feel a connection with the characters, which we believe, is vital for a music video. We also used other cinematography techniques such as a focus pull as it makes the video look more professional.
Our first subsidiary task, the poster, uses conventions of current media texts; the style of the poster is in keeping with the digipak for the album as well as the video its self. We used the same colour scheme throughout both the subsidiary tasks and also on the video its self. We also added hints of baby blue in the ‘M’ on the type face used for the band name, this stops it from looking too plain and makes the bands name pop off the black background. I hadn’t seen this done on a typeface before but I had seen a pop of colour used in another way and it was very effective. We used a black back ground with a white typeface, giving it a modern feel, which is a fairly common among current media texts. The layout we used, having the album photo the main focus of the page with the text above and below it was us using conventions of current media texts as it was one we had seen else where and thought it was the most effective way to draw peoples attention, rather than loading it with information to read we kept it to the bare minimum. The typeface we chose we believe looked like something we’d see in our genre of indie music but the typography used for the bands name was more edgy and modern so we defied convention with that but if anything it made it more noticeable and attractive to our genre as it is different and that is what people typically associated with the indie genre.
Our second subsidiary task the Digipak definitely uses conventions of current media texts but there are some slight differences. The front and back cover very much are similar to current music texts in the lay out, style and images. Its presented very simply to ensure it eye catching and not overwhelming and the chosen colour scheme is simple yet effective. We saw the black and white colour scheme on the album 'Yeezus - Kanye West' and we thought it looked very effective. We wanted to represent the mood of the song which is quite melancholic so the images used portray that.
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