Evaluation Question 4

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

When going through the process of making my music video, I realized I would have to make my product different to other videos from the same genre because if it was the same as all of the other options available, there would be no reason for people to choose my product over other bands. So in the creation of my music video I was sure to challenge typical conventions found in music videos so that mine would feel fresh to the public.

I soon realized after researching into folk rock music videos, that the majority of them lack a lot of narrative and instead focus around the performance element either in a studio or a live based performance. So I knew immediately that I could break that convention and put some focus into the narrative of my music video, which would make fans of the genre surprised when they started to watch my video. I also feel by choosing the story line I did for the narrative, I made sure that the video would stick with the audience after they had stopped watching my video. However, I did stick to the convention by including a performance from my band, so i feel like I got the best of both worlds by having both of these things in my video.

Whilst creating my bands digipack, I included some shots of my band members using their instruments mid song, I did this because I realized that a lot of Folk Rock bands have their artists on the cover for their albums, so I thought I would use this convention because I wanted my audience to recognize the album as something they might like. However, I realized that a lot of albums from folk rock bands had a lot of colour on them, so I decided to go with a black and white colour scheme to make my digipack stick out from the others, this also helped to go along with my theme of a classy/cool feel to the whole thing.

A big convention I challenged in my media product is the use of fake instruments instead of real instruments in my music video. As folk rock bands usually focus around the performance element to their music videos, they always use real instruments as the videos are often serious and grounded in reality. However, I felt like I wanted my band to be quirky and different from the rest so that they would stick out more. Using fake instruments helped with this, because other than that, the video is quite serious. This creates an interesting contradiction which I believe makes my band seem different from the rest.

Evaluation question 3

Evaluation Question 2

Evaluation Question: What have you learned from your audience feedback

Evaluation Question : What have you learned from your audience feedback?

To find out what my audience thought of my Music video, Website homepage and Digipak.  I constructed a questionairre consisting of 10 questions. I chose questions that I thought would help give me the best understanding of how much my audience enjoyed my media texts.

Question 1. "How old are you?" 

I decided that this was a relevant question because I wanted to know if the feedback I had received was from my intended target audience. 80% of people who answered the survey were from the ages of 17-21 which was the target age group that I set for my media texts. The other 20% were from the ages of 12-16 which I feel is still useful information because I can see if the music video could reach an even wider audience than I intended it to do. 

Question 2. "Which of these music genres do you regularly listen to?" 

This question was to find out if the people who answered the survey were usual listeners of rock music, because if they were not fans of that music genre, their information would not be as useful to me as people who listened to rock music. Every single person who answered the survey said that they regularly listened to Rock music, which means that the answers in the survey would be useful. 

Question 3. "Overall, did you enjoy my music video?" 

This question was to first of all find out if my target audience enjoyed the video as this would give me a clear idea  if I had achieved my goal of creating a good music video. 90% of people said Yes, they didn't enjoy my music video whilst 10% said no, they didn't enjoy it. The person who said that they didn't enjoy my music video did select Rock music on the question about which music they listened to, but they also selected pop and rap and said that they were between the age of 22-26 which put them outside of my target audience. Overall, I feel like I connected with my target audience well as the majority of people said that they enjoyed my music video.

Question 4. "Which of the following did you prefer from my music video? The Narrative or The Performance?" 

I decided to ask this question because I wanted to have a better understanding of what my target audience connected with more in my music video. 90% of the answers were for the narrative of the music video, whilst 10% preferred the performance. 

Question 5. "Was you able to clearly follow the narrative of the music video?" 

I put this question into the survey because I was interested in knowing if my music video was able to relate to the target audience and if they would be able to clearly follow the narrative involved. 100% answered with yes, which makes me confident in saying that it was able to connect to my audience and was easy enough to follow. 

Question 6. "Are there any improvements that you think could be made to the music video? If so, put them below" 

One improvement that was mentioned was the use of more effects in the video to make it more visually stimulating for the audience. I feel like this is a good idea as it would have helped me keep the audiences attention. Although, I did mess around with a few effects in the process of making my music video and felt like none of them added anything to the video, and instead took away from it.

Another interesting improvement mentioned was the use of black and white in places to make it link more to my other media texts. I decided to keep the whole video in colour because I believe that the effect of the silver man would be lost if the video had no colour to it, and felt like just having the performance element of the video in black and white would have made the video feel to inconsistent, however I can see how having the video in black and white could have made it more relateable to the digipak and website.

Question 7. "Do you think the website for my band looks easy to navigate?"

I decided to ask this question to see if people thought that the homepage for my bands website

looked easy enough to use and was not too difficult to get around. 100% of the answers said that Yes, it looked easy enough to navigate. 

Question 8. "What improvements could be made to my bands website?" 

One improvement which was mentioned was the use of more content. I agree with this statement, because I feel if I had included more content to the homepage users would be able to use the website for longer. 

Another improvement was the use of a photo gallery and more social networking features added. This would be a good way to communicate more with the audience of the band and give them more things of the band to look at and spend their time on. 

Question 9. "Is there a clear link between the music video and website?" 

This question was added to find out if people would be able to associate the website of the band to the music video that they created, because it is important to make a brand that could be easily spotted by the target audience. 90% said that yes, there was a clear link. Which makes me confident that the target audience would be able to recognize the bands style and associate it with their products.

Question 10. "Do you feel that the digipak clearly links with the music video and are there any improvements that could be made?" 

90% of people who answered this question said that yes, the music video clearly links with the digipak which means that the target audience is able to spot a product created by the band.  

The only improvement suggested was the use of colour on the digipak,  but this would go against the "Classic" style that I was going for with my Band's house style. 

The finished music video

My digipack and website

Creating the logo

To create my logo, I started off by using the website "www.FreeLogoservices.com" to get the picture of the man flying. Although he was originally orange, so I had to change the colour so that it fit my house style. 

I decided that this service would not work for me to make the whole logo, because I needed to add more pictures. So I copied the picture to Microsoft Powerpoint and decided this would be where i put everything together.

I then went to the website "www.Clker.com" which provides loyalty free clip art which I then used to find a picture of the earth for my logo.

I then added the picture of the earth that I liked onto Powerpoint with the flying man.

I then needed the font for my logo, but I realised the one I used for my digipack was only available on the website "PicMonkey" which is a picture editor. So I went on to Picmonkey and took the font that I wanted which was called "Tall, Dark and Handsome"

I then added this to microsoft powerpoint and added it into the logo.

And this is how I created my logo for Lift off.

The logo

This is he logo I have decided to go with for my band. My band has a very old fashioned house style. The whole of the album art work is going to be in Black and white. So I decided to make the earth in my logo be in colour, as it is representing the modern day and modern day music, and the black and white man is blasting out of the earth representing the fact that he is escaping the normal kind of music of today. I used the same font that I used for the text on my Digipack, so that the house style is consistent and people will associate the font with the band.

Third day of editing

Today is the third day I have edited.  I have shown my footage to the other people editing different versions of the same song. And have got some feedback.

The main point I was given was to try and edit different clips for different sentences in the song. I believe this is an achievable goal, that I will work at to complete over the next week or so.

Second day of editing

I did not believe that I would have enough time to fully edit this music video together, with just the time given to me in lesson, so I decided to come back for a couple of hours to try and get some more work done on the video.

Whilst editing the video I realised that a shot I had was way too long and dragged on.  The shot I am talking about is where Chantelle walks past the tree, and it pans backwards and the man is standing there. I decided to speed up when it pasts the tree to try and get a few more seconds of time for footage

First day of editing

Today is the first day I have been editing my version of the music video. Whilst editing I encountered one problem, and that was the actual song its self kept getting cut up and messed around with by accident, and it was messing with the continuity of the song. To get around this, I moved the track up to the first audio line and locked it so there was no way of editing the song.

Digipack editing numbers

These are the numbers that i need to go by for all of my pictures for the digipack

Saturation - -100
Temperature - 100
Sharpness - 20
Clarity - 40%

Text size - 250
Colour - White

Mark Ronson - Just music video analysis

Another idea we considered using for our music video, was using the same person for every instrument in our music video and to do this we would have to use the "cloning" tool on final cut. The music video for the song "Just" by Mark Ronson has the same person playing every instrument in the music video.  And I think this would be a good video to analyse so we can see how they pulled off cloning.

There was only 1 or 2 shots where you could see everyone of him playing their instruments, I believe that this would resolve in less editing as they would have to put one less of him into that shot. If we go down the route of cloning, we will have to do a similar thing to give our selves less work to do due to time constraints. 

We also explored the idea of spoofing other music videos in our music video, and I realised that the music video for "Just" by Mark Ronson does this as well. In the music video, there is an obvious parody of the video for the original version of the song "Just" from the band Radiohead. It is important to realise that the video does not make fun of the original concept but is more of an homage to it. 

Filming update

The group has decided we are going to film the performance element of our music video on the 15th of January, and then after that we will be all finished with our filming, and will be able to focus entirely on editing our music video after wards. Although we have left our selves some time so if we decide we need to re shoot anything we will have time to do so.