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

When we were choosing our band to do our promo we chose to look at unsigned.com and see if we liked any bands from this site. After looking for a long time we found a song that appealed to us and we all agreed that it would be good to use. The song was catchy, acoustic and easy on the ears and it didn’t get boring to listen to. We had a look on myspace as well, myspace and unsigned.com are suites were bands that are not represented and signed can put up there music up for advertisement and in the hope that they would be spotted and listened to and signed. In the end we found unsigned.com as the most useful and better site to browse and search for our band that we were going to do a promo on. We had to use these sites because of copy rights and the exam board would only allow an unsigned band to represent and use. When we chose the band ‘’The Nites’’ and when we chose that we were going to use the song ‘’No Reason’’ we emailed the band and to ask permission or to inform that we were going to use it and take the song and give it our own video and then publicize it. They emailed us back in a few days and gave us a nice and welcoming reply saying that they would be happy to let us carry on with our promo and that we would send them the finished copy of our promo.

During the research phase we used the video website, Youtube to explore different examples of promos for inspiration. We found that Ed Sheeran and Munford and suns were very inspirational to us and our music promo. The genre was very similar to Munford and suns and we also liked the simplicity of Ed Sheeran and his videos.

Little lion man was especially influential in our research for our promo. We thought that the lighting was great and we took some ideas down from watching it. Youtube is for free which makes it a popular choice for viewing promos as most music channels are only available on digital TV networks such as Sky. So Youtube was very useful in our research because of the vast variety’s of music videos we looked at and grabbed ideas, we saw what worked well and what didn’t.

These were some influential videos and people when we were doing our music video research.

During the construction of our production, we used a big variety of technologies to help make the production process as easy as possible. The technologies that we used were 2 Panasonic cameras, photo-shop to edit and produce our digipak, final cut express and more to get the best out of our photos and tweak the ones that we have. I developed my cutting skills in Final Cut by using the markers on various clips to help sync the lip movements to the music.

This is screen grabs of me using final cut, trying to get new shot ideas. I played around with the tools for a long time until I got the hang of them and decided to try some different shots with it. You can see with the screen grab above that I am attempting to put layers on top of the other to create a really nice effect, that symbolises an almost memory like effect, this effect has worked really well and ended up in our actually finished promo.

 The screen grab below is me attempting to mix to different shots together into the same shot. I believe that this has worked, I found this difficult to do and pull off well, it took a lot of tweaking. This shot shows the narrative and performance at the same time which we feel works really well because the singing represents his memories of the breaking up with his girlfriend. There is a lot of emotion on the performers face and voice which is portrayed by the narrative being shown as well. On the right of this shot we also played around with the effects we could use on final cut, the effect that is being tried there is an almost pencil out line effect. This looks good but however does not fit the conventions of our music promo.

We have also used the internet quite a lot during this project. We use blogger to post our current progress and also add important information like research that will be needed. We have used search engines such as Google to help us find our bad and also background information on them such as song lyrics. At the end of our project we posted our material online on Facebook and Youtube so anyone around the world can see our video and comment and rate it. By posting it on these popular websites, our potential audience will significantly increase.

3. What have you learned from your audience feedback?

We did a questionnaire to get ideas of what people expect from a good music promo. Are questions are closed questions so that we could get some graphs up and look at our results. It contained questions on location, there preferred genre of music and there age range. It contained questions on location, there preferred genre of music and there age range. We showed our chosen track to the class and they filled out the questionnaire. We also took our questionnaire home to give it to people at different ages so we had a larger demographic. This audience research was important as we could see what people wanted to see and expected from our chosen song.

Questionnaire

1: How old are you?

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2: What’s your favourite music genre?

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3: What gender are you?

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4: Do you think narrative (a story) is important in a music video?

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5: Do you think performance (seeing the band play) in a music video is important?

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 6: What do you expect to see in a rock video?

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7:  Does music have to have a link to the song and its lyrics to be a good music video?

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The questionnaire that we used to gather the information that we felt was necessary research contained questions surrounding the three products that we had to complete, enabling us to know what the audience looks for in the product, so we can meet the audience’s needs.

My results are shown in graphs below; from these results, I can see that their needs to be quite a few shots of the band within the music video, and the video needs a fairly strong narrative to keep the audience interested. The music genre of song we chose tends to fit with the audience’s opinion well so therefore our song should be reasonably appealing to many different people.

After finishing our promo we uploaded it to the popular social networking site facebook”, and the video site you tube. Uploading our video to Facebook meant that our friends and family members could see, play and comment on the video, and uploading to you tube meant strangers could do the same.

We have also filmed people from our class to get audience feedback, I think this is really useful to do to get good and useful information because these are students and teachers of media so they know what to look for and don’t give us constructive points, rather than a ‘’well done this is really good’’. We found that the filmed audience feedback was very valuable to us and that we even changed the promo because of some influential comments by some of our peers and one of our teachers.

Here is some of our audience feedback that we filmed, we found this very beneficial for us. These are just some screen grabs of our feedback.

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

This will be the front of my digipak. We have used simplistic ideas for our front cover, such as the blank brick wall and there just being the two artists in the shot. It’s a very chilled out shot because the way the artists are just leaning against the wall and not doing anything.

The conventions of this shot show with simplicity of the shot, the music its self would appeal to a larger audience because it reflects the every man.

This is shot has been adjusted in Photoshop. We used different effects on the shot until we found one that we liked and thought would be affective and useful to our digipak. We went through a variety of different effects and took a lot of time to find one that we all agree on. The effect on the wall looks very good, works very well with the lighting of the wall and comes off really well.

The aim behind the music promo, Digipak cover and the magazine article is to be part of a promotional package for an album release. They must therefore work together to promote the band’s album effectively. The CD cover we chose a font to write the band name, album name and the track listing on the back of the Digipak.

Magazine cover:

Digipak :

1^st row - Outside panels:

2^nd row – Inside panels:

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

My task was to produce a music promo and create a digipak for the song, I also had to create a magazine cover. The band we chose was a good band that we found on unsigned.com ‘’The Nites’’, we liked there type of music and thought there genre fitted well with us.

 

‘Distorture’ is the name of this album and portrays a dark mise-en-scene. Suggesting a darker genre maybe rock or heavy metal, this would then appeal to a certain target audience and be successful in that genre.

 

                                                                                

This is a good example of a digipak. Digipaks are very important and promote clues and signifiers to what the music genre will be like. They need to be well thought out and have a clear message and portrays the music genre. There are so many different music promos and there all unique but they all follow similar conventions, the conventions also can be split up into sub categories. An example of this is that you can have camera shots which could include - close ups, band shots on key members, zooms, high or low angle shots and also a 360 degree circling shot. The mis-en-scene is another sub category and is very important, the mise-en-scene in most music videos commonly consists of unknown locations, deserted locations destroyed or urban locations. Other typical you will find are narrative such as band shots, Intertextuality such as post modern and also representation such as gender and instrument solos.

This screen grab from Ed Sheeran’s music video shows how he has used unknown locations and it also shows a rural background with a large empty space.

The editing process for a music video is a very hard process. The most important part of the editing is the editor needs to make sure that lip syncing is in time. This is to fool the audience in to thinking they are actually singing the song. This is a challenge for every editor and sometimes mistakes slip through into professional productions. For example, in Rizzle Kicks ‘’Muma Do the Hump’, there 2 or so occasions were part of singing that is not in sync. The editing of a music video usually follows the same style.

When we were planning for our music promo, we thought about the conventions and applied them into our own. The song we used is called ‘’No Reason’’ by an unsigned band called The Nites. The genre for this song is acoustic / Rock. The features used in our music video included mainly that of the acoustic genre. These included unknown locations and mostly two shots of the two band members. Before we started to create our music video we looked at various genres of existing music videos. We researched music videos and discovered which ones would show our music video on. The genre of the music will affect the style of the video.

For example for a Pop song you would expect to see the performer on stage which highlights the glamour lifestyle they live. The Rock/acoustic genre has conventions such as unknown locations, band performances, instrument solo close-ups and generic shots of the band rocking out. With the acoustic side in our video, it gives conventions of a story and a maybe needs a narrative.

 

We looked at lots of other music videos, we came across Munford and suns little lion man. We liked this video as it is a similar genre and was well shot and directed. The location was just right for what the song was and what they wanted, the lighting made this video even better. The different types of shading and silhouettes are used really well and are effective. We took these similar ideas and used them in our video. 

These are stills out of our music video, it is clear that we have used the same ideas and conventions to Munford and sons video ‘little lion man’ we are very happy the way the shots turned out. We have a mix of different shots, close ups, silhouettes, two shots and a few long shots of cross over where two images are over lapping, which is a clever editing trick that we pulled off really well. We used the stage idea in our music video, but it’s quite low key and not too big. This gives it an unknown location and adds a little mystery and keeps it original.    

This is a shot from our music promo, this is a close up of performance and shows passion in the song that is being sung. The lighting in this song has worked very well, it is quite dark on the right but kept the singer well lit. We used this idea from a lot of music videos, a lot of videos do many close ups to mix things up and get a lot of good angles from there promos, as have we.

This is a shot from our music promo,  this was one of our few mid shots of cross over where two images are over lapping, we were happy the way this particular shot turned out. We didn’t get this shot from somewhere else, this was an original shot that we made. This shot shows narrative as a fading imagine, making it seem that it is a memory of the girl laughing and having a good time. This signifies that it was a past memory of the perspective of the singer and there relationship is fading away. You can defer from this shot that she is on the singers mind and is of great importance to him.

 

This is a shot from our promo showing a two shot of the two band members. This could also be seen as an establishing shot, this screen grab is from right at the start of the music promo. It sets the scene and the audience can confirm where it is, that it’s quite simple and its quite a dark place. This shot is setting the scene and getting to grips who is playing and singing. The lighting has worked out really well for us because it highlights the performers and kept it relatively dark round the sides, which was the effect we were going for, that way the attention is immediately drawn to the centre of the stage and the two performers.

This shot of our promo is a silhouette shot. It works really well, because he is concentrating on playing the guitar and is a low angle shot of him. The lightening behind his head is quite bright and creates a good effect on him. When he moves around as he is playing the guitar, there are different lightening strengths and the variation in this shot makes it work well. This particular shot gives off quite a dark mise-ene-scen because of the dark colours and shading, its an interesting shot because you can barely see the guitarist and adds a bit of mystery.

These are shots of our location for my music promo, the shot on the right is a long shot of the stage and the area that we transformed into the darker and better lit stage that you see in our promo. The set up took about an hour to get right, we tried lots of different things and played around with the lightening until we were happy with what we could see.

Here is a screen grab of the Ballroom after we had used the lights and props we brought with us.

The music promo for our chosen band, we also had to create a Digipak and a magazine advert as well. Before we could decide what both should look like we looked at existing magazine adverts and CD covers for influence.

                                                                                

This is Ed Sheeran’s digipak for his latest album +. I like the idea and concept of it, I like the way how simple it is and after hearing his music from the album its very calming and simplistic which would indicate why he chose to do a simplistic cover. The colour of the digipak is eye catching to anyone and it is also relevant to the artist because of his ginger hair. The shading is very clever that highlights his face, it’s a quite serious photo, which maybe puts across a serious vibe to his songs. The album name again is very simplistic and not being made a big deal of in the digipak as it is put in the corner in the bottom right. This could again be a indicator to the simplistic side of his songs, simplistic in the sense that it’s just him and a guitar and nothing else – organic songs.

My digipak!

Finished magazine cover!

Our finished promo!