In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
We used several forms and conventions to help us with our music video. The first was the Destiny’s Child Video ‘Girl’ which really led to the inspiration of our music video. When watching the video we found that a lot of the same elements that where in the Destiny’s Child video matched what we wanted our own video to look like, this included the narrative, genre and style. The target audience was also very close to ours. We really like the idea of friendship and that no matter what happens you can always talk to your girls about it, this became key in our music video. Once we settled on a base narrative we went on youtube to look at more music videos to pick up any research about that sort of genre that would be helpful to us in making ours. We found that with a female solo artist a lot of close-ups and main focuses where of her, the camera was pretty much always on her so that was really key to us, we took that in and made sure that when we shot ours we would shoot close-ups and keep the artist as the main focus. We also found that they all had some sort of narrative to them, which again included the main artist, not someone else, so we followed down that road also. The genre of our music was very pop solo artist, with the whole telling your feelings through song type of thing then in the end everything working out, we played with this in our narrative stage trying to really capture the true meaning of the song and genre. The pace of the song was fairly slow, which is normal for a love song so we made sure the cuts of our edit fitted in time with the music, getting faster snaps when the music sped up when she hit her long note in the song. Over all I think other conventions really helped us achieve a piece of work that would fit right in with other music videos that carried the same genre, I also think we wouldn’t have gotten as many close-ups in if we hadn’t of watch music videos over and over.
How effective is the combination of your main product & Ancillary texts?
We knew from working on our music video we wanted to keep the same theme though out the work, so we looked at female solo artists album covers to figure out what sort of shot we would most likely use for out digi pack. After looking at that we decided to have a close up shot of Keke J on the front of the Digi pack in black and white, this still in keeps with the same style we used in the music video, keeping it the same genre. We wanted to show more of an artistic creative style for the front cover so we looked at different fonts than the normal ones to make the cover stand out and be different. When doing the photo shoot we took a range of different shots so we would have a range to choose from. This worked out really well because we actually had done a photo shoot before starting work on the Digi pack and when we decided to go for one those photo’s as the cover we then used the others to make up an artist booklet with signed photos of the artist that would be included in our Digi pack. The poster was a great way to advertise to the target audience what would be included in the Digi pack, it also gave an online option to find out more about the artist. The poster makes the artist look fun and popular, the font on the poster really makes it stand out and would grab a lot of people’s eyes. I think that all three products work really well together and they all link to each other, which sort of makes them a package. I really thought we caught the mood and genre of the whole image of the artist. The songs we put on the back of the Digi pack where all songs from the artist Keke J, which helped add to the genre because they all had the same theme in common. We added more promotions on the three products to get more people to buy them, for example we said that the first 200 copies that where sold would get a free pair of Keke J limited addition head phones and we included a bonus track featuring Drake another popular music artist. This was advertised on the poster and the Digi Pack.
What have you learnt from the audience feedback?
The audience feed back we where really keen to hear because we wanted to know if we where heading down the right direction or not, it also gave us a chance to watch the music video we had so far and see if we could spot any mistakes or changes we than needed to make note on and change. Over all it was all really good the video wasn’t quite finished when we showed it for feedback so of course there was some confusion on where the narrative was going. The comments we got from the video where over all good, they really liked the style and genre of the music and they thought we matched the tow up nicely. They said that the lip sync was really in time and they really liked the performance given in the video. Comments where made about the pace of the edit being to quick for the pace of the song which we took on board and after seeing it our selves we agreed with this comment and went back and changed it. Another comment made was about out narrative and where it was going, even after explaining it they still thought it needed more. We did consider putting more elements in the narrative maybe adding a male into the story but in the end we where running out of time for filming so we thought instead of rushing it we would stick to our original plan and make sure the shots worked together. This turned in our favour because everyone preferred what we did rather than the other idea we tried to add in, they said when it was finished it worked a lot more than they thought it would have. Over all the positives outweighed the negatives we got which we where really pleased with. A small comment was made about out locations and if we had planned for any more, they said it would have look more effective if we had one more location but we where pleased with the locations we chose, we already had four locations so we where happy with our music video location wise but still took the criticism on.
How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
Blogger was key for when we where planning out everything. It really helped us manage our time and helped us organise filming time and photo shoots. It also gave us a place to keep all our ideas in one place and it was easy then to reflect on the ideas we had and ether make them better or add and develop them. Blogger I would say helped us the most as planning was very important to this task and I don’t think we would have achieved to the same standards as we did. Final cut express was a really in detail software which help us get snappy shots more effective and made it fairly easy for us to sync up the lyrics to the miming in the performance. I was really happy with the software and found it easy to operate around. I played around with some of the tools at first so I could get a feel of what I could use then when I was editing the video I found it easy to get the intended effect on the video. I really liked how our video turned out and I think the editing and effects we put on it helped. We had a lot of comments on how the black and white wash looked really nice in the studio shoots, it separated the locations out and made it more clear I was in a studio. It also help separate the narrative to the performance to a certain content which then made it easy for the audience to follow. We used different software’s when it came to doing the Digi pack as we didn’t have photoshop on computers at home, but we did use the software when doing the front cover, we made the picture clearer and then edited the writing over the top of the cover. It was good we had access to these programs, as the advertisement of the product is just as important as the music video was, if hadn’t had these software’s the product wouldn’t have looked good as a whole.
