EVALUATION

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

For my music video, I decided to choose the song ‘Broken Hands’ by the band Lamb of God. I then had a choice between four different types of music video: performance, abstract, animated and narrative. After carefully listening to the structure, the genre and the meaning of the song through the lyrics, I originally decided to make a music video primarily based on performance. However, when it came to planning my storyboard for the video I thought that I could put in some narrative or abstract shots in based around the meaning of the lyrics. When thinking about performance, I decided to go towards the stereotype found in almost all Metal music videos, getting a band to perform the song. I felt like I didn’t know enough about the codes and conventions of real media products so I decided to research some Metal music videos so that I could get some inspiration and ideas for my own video. Once I had watched all of the videos, I found that the performance was the primary purpose of the video and a couple of them had small amounts of narrative and abstract shots based on the lyrics. The ‘Set to Fail’ video by Lamb of God is entirely in black and white with the band performing the song and a crowd of people surrounding them ‘dancing’ to the song. This gave the idea that the band are good to see live, the lack of colour makes you pay attention to the artists as they are and making you concentrate on the song more than them being subjected to what they are wearing and how they look by their audience. I thought this idea was very effective and wanted to use it in my video as I thought that my narrative side of the song could be in black and white so that the audience could differentiate between the performance and the narrative. However, when I started filming the narrative part of my video I found that I had focused too much on the planning for my performance and too little on the narrative so I found it hard to visualise the shots clearly and carrying out the filming of the shots.

When researching these codes and conventions of a real media product I found that the one of the most important parts is the cinematography and the editing in the video. This is because you needed medium close ups and close ups of the vocalist singing the lyrics, close ups of the guitar when playing the solo and establishing shots of the band playing the song. The shots were also either out of focus or on an angle and they used a steadicam to emphasise the genre of the music. In terms of editing, the shots were very short and formed a constant montage keeping their audience alert to what is happening in the video. The reduction and increase in the duration of the shots kept the video interesting and made those particular shots stand out in the video. I adopted these ideas and put them into my music video to create originality, and made my video fit into the stereotype of metal music videos.

My first objective was to figure out how I would carry out the performance in terms of making sure the drumming, the guitar and the vocals match perfectly throughout the song. My original idea was to get the vocalist to memorise all of the lyrics and the rest of the band members to learn the song all the way through, so then I could take one shot of all the band playing the song several times and then pick out the shots I wanted in my video. Unfortunately, the people I chose to do the performance did not have enough time to learn and practice the song enough to play it all the way through. Therefore, when it came to filming the performance, I decided to film the band members individually and got them to play as much as they could until they could not remember the next part, then I would get them to perform the other parts of the song from separate shots. Although this took longer, it still looked very effective when editing the shots and I managed to keep the continuity of the performance.  

These pictures are an example of how I used my influenced media products to reflect upon my music video. Although I could have improved on the mise-en-scene of my video, I feel that I have captured the right idea of a performance based metal music video. The mise-en-scene in the media products consists of dull, dark colours such as grey and black to suit the genre of the music. My video did not fit to these colours because I struggled to find a good place to film the performance and couldn’t get the light balance right. My location for the video consisted of using a dance studio in a local school, using my house and the street I live down. I also struggled with getting the shots to synchronize with the music and I had to film and edit many shots in order to keep the idea of my music video. But, after a while I got used to synchronizing the shots and keeping each shot in the beat of the music so that the video stays fluent. 

The narrative/abstract side of my video related to the meaning of the lyrics, giving the lyrics of the song more meaning in the video and giving the audience more than just performance, which can sometimes get quite tedious in a music video. The lyrical meaning of the song is about people keeping hold of past memories and then trying to forget them but they keep coming back, making them paranoid and forcing them to chase it down. The lyrics ‘pick up the pieces with your broken hands’ in the chorus show that the pieces are your troubled memories and you’re trying to stop them, but you can’t because you’re unable to stop thinking about it. You then end up chasing them down and they realise that they are just a reflection of themselves. The idea was to use someone to be that reflection and then when it came to what the person looked like, I put his clothes on so it looked like a clone of me. 

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

In my opinion, the two ancillary texts work well together as a combination of my main product. However, I put much more time into my music video and did not concentrate enough on my ancillary texts. I only managed to put one draft up for my digipak and felt as though I had rushed both of my ancillary texts. I also did not put much research into my ancillary texts and only had one magazine advert that I used for inspiration. For both my magazine advert and digipak, I used Adobe Photoshop CS3 that I had access to from my home computer. My original idea was to take a photo of all the performers as a band and have it as my back cover. I was going to take a landscape long shot of the performers stood next to each other and then cut off just over half of the picture so it becomes a medium close up so that I can fit in the track names below. I later decided to not carry out the idea and just have the list of the tracks on the back cover with a metallic worn effect as the background giving it a rough and sketchy look, making sure I follow the conventions of a Metal genre digipak.

When choosing the font I wanted, I used the website www.dafont.com to look for a font that would be suitable for my digipak. I wanted a neat looking font but wanted it to be worn away around the edge of the letters. I managed to download the font and install it onto my fonts so I could use it in Photoshop. I found that this font best suited my idea and I used the top one for the name of the band and the bottom one for the name of the album. This font was also very helpful as I could also use it in italics, letting me use what looks like two fonts but sticking to the same font for both my ancillary texts. 

 I changed my original front cover in my digipak because I thought that I could add more colour to it and possibly change the font of the text. I then decided to change the name of the artist/band, as the original name did not fit with the genre of my digipak. I changed the name from ‘Encryption’ to ‘Mortem’, which is Latin for death and so I thought this name fit in much better than my original. The main image had been taken from a drawing that I got my brother to draw out for me. I then scanned it into my computer and opened it onto Photoshop as a separate layer. I wanted this particular image because I wanted my album to have a religious based theme. The image is an upside down cross which represents the devil, this is a stereotype given to metal music from the mid to late 70’s by bands such as Black Sabbath and Iron Maiden. I wanted the back cover of my digipak to have an extract of some of the lyrics from the song I used for my music video. I thought this would be an effective use of showing the album track lyrics as a form of promotion for my music video. 

My second ancillary text involved me creating a magazine advert to promote my digipak. I used my influence from a magazine advert on the band Lamb of God’s ‘Sacrament’ album. I thought that the best part of the advert was the background of a church and I wanted to do something very similar but in my own approach. I managed to find several photos of a church on my computer from different angles that I took about a year ago. I then chose one of the photos that looked most like the one in my model ancillary text and opened it onto Photoshop. I then gave the image a black and white effect to make it look more neutral and then covered the photo in a dark red colour with the opacity at 62%. Once I had my base colour I then contrasted the colour so that the bottom of the image faded to black, I then made a copy of this and altered the levels to make the image sharper yet distorted. The levels let me adjust the bright parts of the image to stand out and the shape of the church to be more defined. I then added the text into my magazine advert.

 I decided to use the same font as my digipak because it would keep my house style the same and I thought it was a bit pointless shifting through more fonts to find one similar to my digipak font. I then decided to add a record label at the bottom of the advert to give it a more professional look and make it seem more realistic. The record label I used is linked to the artist I got the song off because the band were signed to that record label for four of their LP studio album releases. I then started to create a star shape so that I could give the album a rating. I used the magazine ‘Metal Hammer’ to give the album a five star rating showing the audience that the album is definitely worth purchasing. I decided to embolden the ‘Album out now’ sentence because I wanted it to stand out from the other white text and emphasise to the audience that it is available for them to purchase the album now. I also found when researching that magazine adverts purposefully embolden parts of text to let it stand out in the image and over the rest of the text in the image. I made the primary colour of the font in my advert white because the background was already the font colour for the digipak. The alteration in font colours makes both the texts stand out from each other whilst maintaining the same house style for them both. 

 

  

 Finished product and influential text of magazine adverts: 

3. What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Over the entire course, I have learned to use my audience feedback to improve my music video and both my ancillary texts to fit in with what my target audience want from my finished products. For my finished ancillary texts, many people commented that my digipak followed the conventions of a typical Metal CD album. This feedback was positive because it was what I was aiming for when starting my ancillary texts. They also thought that my video fit with the idea of a Metal music video and felt that the editing and cinematography fit in well with this. However, almost all of audience feedback pointed out the biggest flaw in my video, the mise-en-scene including the location specifically. The feedback I got throughout the year was suggestions on reshooting the performance in a more suitable location for my genre but unfortunately, I could not find another place to film my performance. My original idea for the location of the performance was to be filmed on a field but the weather was not suitable and it ended with me having to use my backup location, which was the studio.

In terms of my ancillary texts, the audience thought that my magazine advert had a better design than my digipak. The main reason for this would be the fact that I had an influential text for my magazine advert that I got good ideas from and I spent more time on the advert. The one part of my magazine advert that my audience thought stood out was the background. I was pleased with this feedback, as I had spent a lot of time adjusting the right levels, contrast and colour to really make the background image fit perfectly with the foreground images.

When I asked what could have been improved on my music video, although all of them pointed out the location of the performance one person argued that the narrative could have been improved. She then expanded on this and suggested putting more narrative shots in the video. Maybe making some of the shots a bit longer so that the person watching the video can keep track of where they are with the narrative as there is ‘a lot to look at’ in my video (quoted by Rebecca Foster).

When looking at my online poll on my blog, I found that 60% were male with 60% of them within the 16-19 age category and then 20% of them saying that they listen to the genre of metal. From this poll, I found that there are people who enjoy listening to metal but taking into consideration that only 20% actually do. I then concluded that I would be working away from mainstream audiences and moving toward a more niche target audience. 

 

4. How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluating stages?

The first I did when starting this project was to create a blog on www.blogger.com where I would be posting all my planning a research towards my main product, a full-length music video. My first part of research was to find various music videos in the same genre to get ideas and inspiration for my music video. To access these videos I used www.youtube.com and luckily, beforehand I had made a playlist of various songs with music videos to which I could get my inspiration. So from this playlist, I could go through many music videos and carefully pick out the ones I thought had the best ideas and gave me the best inspiration. The videos I chose happened to be very complicated in terms of cinematography and especially editing. Nevertheless, this did not stop me from wanting to attempt some these awe-inspiring techniques. I also used this website to upload my drafts of my video, my final edit of my video and any extra videos that I felt needed putting on the website. One of the brilliant advantages to Youtube is the like/dislike, subscribe and comment options, as this is a good way of getting objective audience feedback. 

  

 

 

I felt as though the planning was very hard to explain when typing it up on my blog, so I used a website called ‘goanimate’ to show my ideas for my performance shots. I also made a list of shots so that I could tick them off once I had completed them. Once I put together my first draft, I thought that it looked how I wanted it to look and I made sure I followed my storyboard exactly. When It came to the second shoot of the performance, I decided to not follow my storyboard exactly because I knew that it took too long to plan the shots out exactly. So I then came up with the idea of filming one long shot of the drummer playing almost all the song all the way through, and then synchronising that one shot with the song on the editing software, gradually using the razor tool to cut out the shots I wanted to use.

When creating my music video, I edited the first minute and all the drum shots on Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 at college on their system. I had little experience with working on Premiere Pro before and had only used the CS6 version for our preliminary task we did at the start of the academic year. Once I started editing my own video, I soon got to grips with how the software works and managed to figure out some of the video effects and transitions as well as image control. After receiving a very helpful external hard drive, I then copied the entire folder onto it and installed the software onto my laptop at home. This was a very big advantage for me as I could access the editing software at home and I did not have to scramble over who gets to use the editing software at college each day.

Altogether, I used three cameras to film my music video. The first one was a Sony HD digital video camera with which I filmed most of the drumming, guitar and vocals. The second camera was a Nikon DX digital camera that I borrowed from a friend. The third camera wasa Canon, similar to the Nikon but the lens was naturally more zoomed in and the quality was much better in comparison.

When it came to filming the second half of my video I came across a couple of major issues. The first one was that the vocalist had lost the microphone he was using so I had to retake all of the vocal shots I took so far. The second issue I eventually resolved was that the bassist in the band could not make any more sessions which I planned out so I had to quickly find a replacement and then film all of the shots with the bassist in again. Once I resolved these issues, I got back to editing them all together and making sure that I had enough shots.

For my ancillary texts, I used the Nikon DX to take the photos found on my digipak and the photo in magazine advert was from a photo I took about a year ago and thought it would be a good idea to use. After uploading the images I then carefully chose which one would be better to work with and then went on to using Adobe Photoshop CS5 to manipulate and alter the photos and to create both of the finished products. The pictures I took where of the eye in the digipak. I felt rather confident and efficient when completing my ancillary texts as I was comfortable using the software as I have used it previously for my AS media coursework and I knew exactly what tools to use to create my images. An example of the tolls I used would be: multi-layering, adjusting the levels and the brightness/contrast of the image, using the eraser and brush tool to create a different colour, using opacity to change the colour and using a vector mask to bring out certain parts of the image.  

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