Evaulation by Ashlea

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
During the planning and research stages, we decided we wanted to produce a very conventional product, as we were greatly inspired by other products of an indie/acoustic genre and thought that by including typical conventions, our product would be more successful and appealing to an audience.

The convention of using photos as a representation of how time has changed is used in many other media products of this genre, e.g. the music videos ‘Dream catch me’, by Newton Faulkner and ‘Bad day’ by Daniel Powter. By including numerous shots of him playing the main instrument of the song, him wearing indie clothing and close ups of the artists face and guitar, not only were we able to create a stronger identification of the artist, this helps communicate the genre of our product to the spectator.
This mise-en-scene can be compared to many real media products such as the Jack Johnson Album cover e.g. the guitar and natural environment setting, which like our product, focuses on simplicity. In our music video, we also included frequent cutaways to scenery and outdoor settings which helped us create a more picturesque side to it and execute the same laidback feel. Many indie/acoustic videos use cutaways for the same purpose, and Jason Mraz’s music video to ‘I’m Yours’ is a key example.
We were inspired by the costume style of the band The Kooks as in most of their videos they dress quite quirky and have a clear indie style. As they are a young, well-known popular band we decided our artist would have a similar style, for example he wears a loose checkered shirt, and the Kooks’ signature clothing item of their videos; skinny jeans. As this is quite a modern, stylish fashion amongst young people, we thought this would strongly appeal to our target audience; teenagers and young adults, with an interest in this music genre. The artist is also wearing a festival wristband, which would be recognisable amongst many young people who are into indie music, which gives an audience stronger identification of the artist, his style and the music genre.
Our product is mostly very conventional to professional ones, however I didn’t notice many split screens in videos of this genre, instead, they are mostly used with up tempo or mainstream tracks e.g. the music video to Daniel Powter’s ‘Bad day’. However we used these anyway as the use of split screens are a great asset to our video as many shots such as the pub scene help narrate the storyline, comparing past with present.
When looking at the camerawork of the video ‘Dream Catch Me’, we specifically liked the frequent use of slow panning shots as we thought these would work well with the slow tempo and would enhance the solemn mood of our song e.g. when the artist plays the song’s instrumental part.

How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
We wanted to produce ancillary tasks which would effectively help an audience identify the indie/acoustic genre of our product. Our ancillary texts have a strong relationship between each other and our main product as they include similar visual characteristics e.g. colours used, filters etc. The same dark, colourless effect was used in both music video and ancillary tasks in order to create continuity and for a spectator to identify a more obvious relationship between them. We used frames from our music video as central images of our ancillary tasks, as we thought shots of the artist in the field, were particularly strong and conveyed the meaning of the song well. Through using similar mise-en-scene of both ancillary tasks, this distinguished characteristics and a stronger visual representation of the artist, music and genre, as a spectator buying the product will be able to see the same clothing worn by the artist, and editing of the image e.g. dark filters etc.
The digipak and magazine advert had to look a little more stylized than the music video and needed to be more eye-catching and attention-grabbing as it was a still image and motionless. We tried to achieve this by still keeping the similar colour scheme to the video, but adding yellow on top of darker backgrounds which added a lot more emphasis to the text of both magazine advert and digipak cover. We stylized the image on the digipak cover a lot more, putting a more obvious, dynamic filter over it which looks more striking and professional.
Another strength of these three components is they all show voyeuristic treatment of the artist, keeping in tone with the song and its melody, and show how the artist is unaware the audience are listening to his thoughts and feelings. I think the back of the digipak is very effective, as it’s a voyeuristic image of the artist of the artist from behind has a blurred, unfocused effect over it, complementing the cheerless, melancholy mood of the song very well. We took inspiration from the album cover ‘Hold back my heart’ by Michael Johns as it had a similar message to our chosen song, used similar neutralised shades to our video, and the focus is voyeuristic image of the artist playing his instrument. From the picture below, it’s clear to see we took inspiration from the yellowy, ‘rusted looking’ font used.
Referring to Goodwin’s points, voyeuristic treatment and objectification of mainly women are generic conventions of media products, however in the case of our product; the artist is the person being objectified. For example, from the magazine advert, the image has been cut only showing a sector of his body without his face, which shows a more objectified impression of him to the audience as this is the only part of him they are invited to look at. However we manipulated the image in this way mainly to show the equal importance of the guitar and the artist, as the relaxed hand positions on the guitar, artist’s casual clothing, and tattered guitar strongly contribute to quite an unglamorous, laidback, indie feel.

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?
When presenting our pitch to our class, we were given feedback on strengths and weaknesses of our planning and how we could expand on our ideas. We took all of our feedback into consideration and it was recorded on our blog, enabling us to track progress. Our roughcut was given a lot of our feedback on how it included strong lyrics and visuals e.g. group Q1- 12 added – ‘Complementary lyrics and visuals for example when the singer sings about a girl near the cigarette machine you see a girl near a cigarette machine’ which we were happy about as we really tried to demonstrate Goodwin’s point of relationship between lyrics and visuals in our planning stages. As expected, we received a lot of feedback commenting on the gaps that we needed to fill of our roughcut, as we had a considerable amount of gaps without footage. This was due to our poor time-keeping skills at the beginning as we took too long during the planning and researching stages, deciding on how we wanted our product to look, instead of actually filming it! This was a weakness that we soon overcame, as we realised in order for us to make the best of our video, we had to finish shooting the footage we needed quickly in order for us to save as much time as possible for the editing process; which we knew would be the most time-consuming aspect of the project (due to the editing techniques effects we planned to use). One piece of feedback commented on how our star image was ‘too strong’ which at first, we didn’t know was possible, but this was because there were virtually no shots of anything other than the artist, and we would need varied mise-en-scene in order for the shots not to loose their impact, look tiresome or repetitive. We knew that we had to fill these gaps with footage of features other than the artist, however the feedback received suggested to us that we use cutaways to nature and scenery, which although would remove some shot ideas of our storyboard, would help us produce a more creative, uplifting final video. Because of this, we were thankful for the feedback, as although we wanted the audience to follow the characters journey and story step-by-step, the use of cutaways not only strengthens the shots of the artist by making them less repetitive, but adds a more eye-pleasing, sentimental atmosphere to the video and perfectly complements the mellow tone of song. We found the feedback very constructive and helpful, especially as we got a different viewpoint from outside our group. As our classmates met some of the criteria of our target audience e.g. the age range, this was very useful and indicative to how our video would be portrayed by an audience, and has helped us make the best that we could of it.

How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
During the planning and researching stages, having access to the internet became extremely helpful and internet sites such as Youtube, enabled us to watch many music videos from different artists, giving us inspiration for our own video. Not only could we access other music videos, we uploaded our own work onto it, which allows us easy free, access to watch both our roughcut and our final video. Search engines such as Google, helped us find out information for our research and we looked at many different digipaks and magazine adverts, in order to get an idea of what style, layout, and font ideas we could use. Without easy-to-access technologies such as these two websites, our research and planning stages would have been a lot harder and impractical. When creating our ancillary tasks, we also looked at internet sites such as ‘play.com’, using the top 25 music DVDs to see how different images of media products had been manipulated.
Using Final Cut was quite challenging at first, as we struggled with some aspects of editing which we had never practised before. For example, creating split screens, which we found difficult, as making the main feature of a shot stay central frame whilst playing alongside another shot took a lot of experimenting with. However we soon overcame these difficulties and after practice, it became very straightforward.

To create our ancillary tasks, we used Photoshop, which we found was a very user friendly software and although there were many different features and tools to it, everything seemed pretty straightforward to use. The only slight difficulty we faced was with the layers, which was frustrating at first as we couldn’t get some ideas to work, however after becoming more familiar with the software, it became a lot more easy-to-use. I think we’ve created quite strong, effective ancillary tasks, and using Photoshop made it a lot more enjoyable and seem less like a task, as it was easy to get absorbed in how creative it allowed us to be.