In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Starting with the promotional video that we created, I believe that it fits really well in with the forms and conventions of the media that we studied and researched into. As it begins and ends with an advertisement, and has combined live footage of the band with a unique, funny and personal interview with the band members. However, our interview developed from three ideas that we noticed looking at the other promotional videos. These ideas were the fact of having an interview weaved into the footage like The Killer’s video, the focus on the connection between the band members and their care free attitude they present which really fits well into our genre as it presents the Indie culture to the audience. On the other hand, this interview does challenge the forms and conventions of real media. The interviews that we research appeared rather formal where the band members would sit (normally on a brown leather sofa) and talk about their music. This we found rather boring and hard to concentrate on as it did not appear interesting the audience. Therefore filming our interview in a noisy pub and having an informal conversation and laugh challenges the real media. Furthermore, as the interview took place after the gig, all the noise in the background created a buzz in the atmosphere which reflects great on the band as the aus=dience enjoyed it. Maybe this could have been more evident to our target audience.
Our magazine advertisment relates to some of the real media as it we looked through a great deal of printed promotions to see what would work best for our project. We found that as our band was an inspiration of Indie culture and the care free attitude that our advertisement should not be over the top but simple yet noticable. This fitted well into the forms of Indie genre advertisements too. However, looking at other iconic and more famous bands, we noticed that they included pictures of themselves on their advertisements compared to the smaller bands that would cover the space in drawings to make theirs different. We included a picture of our band too which develops from the media we looked at and challenges the conventions of small Indie band advertisements. Furthermore, this may not challenge the conventions as much in the Portsmouth area where we live as the band are becoming rather well known.
Additionally, the DVD cover relates closely to the magazine advertisement that we designed as we matched the designs, ideas and colours for each topic. As it was hard to find DVD covers that closely related to our subject we had to look at a wide variety of DVD covers ranging from Pop and R’N’B music to films. We then combined this with the research we looked at for the magazine advertisement to come up with the designs for our cover. I believe that the DVD cover does use real media conventions but also uses slightly Pop conventions too. Yet again it will challenge the forms of real media too by using the photo on the front cover. However, an arguement for this would be that it is more acceptable to put the band’s picture on the front cover of the DVD as it has to be able to grab attention on a shelf of a shop more so than a CD would as DVDs are not as common amoung bands compared to CD production.
How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
The ancillary texts of our project are the magazine advert and the DVD cover which combined with the main product of the promotional video resulted in a powerful trio. It was very important to our group that we found a theme to link all of our ideas and products together so we research into the band through their website. The layout for the band was very monochrome in black and white colours and had a rather simple design. We wanted to put this into our designs as it would suit the band and our products would also relate to their site, creating more promotion. However, this was hard to portray in the video clip because instead of everything having a white background, the background at the venues were dark so it didn’t link colourscheme wise to the rest of the projects. Additionally, another thing we notice with our band – The Hype – was that they use the Union flag as a logo. Therefore we used this in the titlle for the advert and DVD cover but I was unable to transfer it over to the video. Instead we used red curtains (so it would relate to the concert) at the end with red text advertising the DVD release so it still kept within the colourscheme. Apart from the red white and blue colours of the flag, we only combine black – using black and white photos – as The Hype have a retro/mod/60s sound so it related back to them times. It also related to the style of The Beatles poster that we researched. On the topic of photos, we ended up using the bands existing ones from their website. This was due to not being able to have bright flashes in the first gig that we filmed so we tried to use screen grabs from the videos to use for the poster and DVD. However, they appeared blurry in Photoshop and did not link very well together. At the next filming location, we were able to get pictures of the band playing live. Unfortunately where the venue was so small and crowded we were unable to get a great shot of the whole band playing together which meant we would have to use separate shots of each band member. This did not work very well because we had to squash the pictures in next to each other and this reduced the quality of the images and made it look very unprofessional which would reflect badly on MJC Productions. So in the end we wrote to the band asking for their permission to use their existing photos which were taken professionally in a studio which they agreed to. As an after thought we realised this was a good idea anyway as it would relate back to their website and the photo would be more recognisable to the public as they use the pictures a lot when advertising their own gigs.
We also thought that it would be a good idea to film in a few different locations to put into the video promotion so it would present to the audience that it was about their tour and not just one particular concert. We only managed to get to two different gigs. However, where we were so close to the band filming (due to a small venue and big crowd) the sound quality was poor in the second filming. We were going to use this anyway and just run the song over it but we were unable to get an MP3 from the band which left the film unusable. On the other hand, looking back to The Killer’a promo again, they only displayed one gig in their work and the quality of sound was more important than displaying two different venues.
What have you learned from your audience feedback?
When showing friends and family the magazine advert and DVD cover they felt that the advert looked a little too plain and simple which is when we added the colour and extra information. Additionally, the DVD cover had a great response but when showing it to family members with younger children they wanted to make sure it was suitable for them so we added an age limit on the cover of Parental Guidance. Then we felt like this was complete. Moreover, we had comments that they linked together well which is what we were most worried about. We found that they linked well due to the black and white pictures and the colour scheme from Union flag. As I commented on earlier, we had to use the band’s existing pictures and four people that was shown our media actually recognised it so I think it has worked in our favour.
In addition, a member from my group, Becca, posted our work on her Facebook and asked her friends to answer four questions about them:
- In what ways does my digipak, including my poster, DVD cover and promotional video remind you of real media?
- What do you believe the strengths of the whole project are?
- What do you believe are the weaknesses?
We found that the promotional video worked well as it followed the song from beginning to end but with convenient breaks to add the interview in so it kept the audience interested. Also, that the live footage fitted the genre well. The strengths were found with how we linked all our work together and weaknesses in the filming and editing.
However I do find this hard to believe on the results of the promotional video as I was left by myself to edit it etc. as James was in hospital and Becca did not turn up to college and therefore had no influence into the prduction of the promotional video and when I contacted for help I received no reply. However, saying that James helped with filming before his operation but more communication was needed within our group for the production of the video as we all had an input with the magazine advertisement, DVD cover and blog although Becca did try to take control of those situations.
How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
First of all, the main technological equipment we used was an Apple Mac computer. As we used these following applications:
- Photoshop: to construct our magazine advert and DVD cover.
- iMovie: to construct our promotional video.
- Microsoft: to put all of our research and planning into a document together.
Another aspect that we used on the computers was the internet. We used the following websites:
- Youtube: To research into existing promotional videos.
- Blogger: To evaluate all of our work at the present time, writing about our plans, research and construction.
- WordPress: This is where we started our first blog but eventually just used it to put our evaluations on.
- Myspace: To research into Thy Hype, to plan filming with them.
- Google: To researh into real media.
Moving away from the Apple Macs we used video cameras and tapes to produce our film. We also used a Nikon D90 to do this too over half term, saving it onto a memory card. We also used the Nikon camera to take photographs too. When filming onto a tape we had to transfer this onto a hard drive to begin constructing the video throough iMovie.
The last piece of technology we used was a scanner to transfer the work that had been done manually into digital.
In conclusion, without the Apple Macs we would have not been able to use such advanced applications that can let you edit every aspect of our work (within reason) and the internet to get a wide view on the real medias we had to look at to be able to produce our own version of a music promotion project.
Gemma Carden.
Gemmamedia's Blog 