Evaluation Question 4: how did you use media technologies in the construction of research, planning and evaluation stages?

I have used a number of technologies to record and represent our music video. Without these, the music video wouldn't of been able to be filmed or recorded. The first media technology which I used to record making our potential media music video was Blogger. Here, it has allowed me to publish my research and planning for my music video. With this media technology, I was allowed to look back at my blog posts and refer back to them to see what conventions i would need for an indie music video. Blogger has also allowed me to be more organised, so that I can see what my time management posts are like and what I need to do and when. When looking back through my blog, I can see the developments, for example from my rough cut to my final cut I can see a clear difference which blogger has helped so that I can see what I have done different and the changes which I have made to the music video. 

We used a video camera to film our entire music video. We filmed both the narrative and the performance, we wanted to film with the same camera so that there was no quality difference between the performance and narrative, as this could have looked slightly unbalanced and wouldn't link in with our indie genre.  With this video camera, I used a tripod so that the video camera wouldn't shake within the performance, which would overall look quite unprofessional. However, for the narrative we wanted to film with the video camera in my hand to give a road trip feel and also to make it look like it is a persons point of view.

We then used final cut express to edit the footage which we filmed. This software is professional which allows you to pick from a variety of options to help your video gain quality and look like a real music video. We used this software on a Mac, this was fast and allowed us to edit without any problems. As we put together a mini music video earlier in the year, this helped as we already knew what to do with this software, which made it easier for us to edit straight away without figuring anything out first. Final cut express allowed us to capture all of our footage and also combine both the narrative and the performance elements of the music video. We also used another type of software called Photoshop. Within this software, I was able to edit my digipak photographs and print advertisement photograph. This software heed me to put this all together such as the writing, images and logos. Photoshop is a professional software which many use to gain a high quality image or design. You can edit photographs with filters, colour, saturation, brightness, contrast and many more options and elements. I overall chose this software to use in particular over others such as Indesign, as I am most familiar with this one through the other subjects which I take such as graphics and photography.  

Another media technology I used was a website called Slideshare. I used this to upload my office presentations as blogger will not upload these straight from your computer. The reason why I liked to use Slideshare is because it didn't make my blog repetitive and boring with long blocks of text. Also, by using power point presentations, it displayed my work clearer to the viewer. Another website which I see quite a lot was Youtube. I firstly used YouTube to research current indie music videos and analyse them with detail. It also allowed us to find the unsigned band who's song we used throughout our project to create a music video to. We also used YouTube to upload our rough cut, final cut and audience feedback. This is an easy website to use so we thought that this will display a high quality and fast clip of our music video. 

Evaluation Question 3: What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Audience feedback has helped me greatly to improve our music video and to also see what I could do to relate to my indie genre. I have asked a range of audiences, all of which are my targeted audience or who relate to the indie genre.

The first audience feedback which we firstly asked our targeted audience about was our Pitch which we presented, which was full of ideas which we had for our potential music video. After we had presented our pitch, the audience was able to write down on paper what they thought would work and what wouldln't. We then collected the results which helped us to change our planning for our music video. Within our pitch, we firstly planned to go to the beach and document our road trip. However, when recieveing our audience feedback, this made us realise that our potential music video would maybe be too overexagerated and far fetched as we would not be able to film our music video in a day as we may need to keep going back to film extra scenes. 

The next audeince feedback we gained was for the rough cut. We wanted to know if our music video was firstly right and fitted in with the indie genre and also if they could understand the storyline which we had. We brought together a group which we thought fitted in with our target audience (this was important as these were the type of people who would view our music video) and played our rough cut to them whilst videoing their reaction and comments on how and what ways we could improve our music video. The sorts of things which were mentioned through our audience feedback was how the lip syncing was slightly off and how there wasn't much performance within our music video overall. After hearing this feedback we made huge improvements to our editing of the lip syncing. However, we still felt that it was slightly off, so we decided to refilm the whole performance part again as our targeted audience felt that there wasn't a lot of it. We filmed the performance within the drama studio as our audience suggested that it may be better so that they could then see the clear difference between the performance and the narrative. When we had finished with filming our performance and edited it together, we instantly saw the difference on how better it looked and higher quality.
I also think that for my print adverts, audience feedback helped me greatly to chose what colour scheme, fonts and images to use and which would appeal to my targeted audience.  They overall thought that i should edit my photographs slightly and maybe to put a filter onto them so that they appealed slightly more to the indie genre. there wasn't anything drastic to change as they already liked the idea of all print adverts and music video linking together. Having audience feedback has helped me as they are almost getting what they would like to see in stores and having it their own way. 

Evaluation Question 2: How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

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

Where have your ideas come from? How were you inspired to do what you did?

When we got together as a group, we decided to concentrate on the Indie genre, as this was a genre, which we could relate to.  We also decided to focus on this particular genre as we mostly had that style and thought that it would be easy for us to come up with ideas, which we would do, in daily life. We chose this song as we felt it connoted with an existing band called A-Punk, who is a world renound and successful Indie band. The Miracles song, ‘Cala Cola’ is a relaxed, chilled and stress free song, which we thought, would instantly relate to our target audience of being young and having no cares in the world. When we brainstormed a few ideas, we noticed that the beach and sun were commonly used within the indie genre music videos. For our first idea we thought that we could document our road trip down to the beach, which would link in with our indie genre, but keeping it original, as is what this genre typically likes to do. However, after explaining our idea to the rest of the class, it raised a few issues to us that we considered. They commented on how it may not be realistic to have time to film the whole of the video on the beach. This was a big problem for us as we do not live close to the beach and it would be hard to find a day, which we would all be able to go. We then decided to keep the theme of documenting our road trip but instead of travelling to the beach, we decided to capture a group of teenagers camping. We felt that camping still related to our target audience, as this is what they typically like to do. We think that this idea is still original enough to fall into the genre of Indie. The idea of camping came from Noah and the Wales ‘First days of Spring’ as this is a very well known indie genre band. However, without copying their idea, we still kept the main idea of having the main feature around documenting the journey of our road trip to the campsite.

For my DigiPak and Print Advert I have related them both together and related them also into the music video. I have incorporated the location photographs within the designs as after researching previous Indie designs; saw that their design matched with their music video. By having the print research, it would help the band be more noticed and become popular within their genre with the targeted audience.

How did audience research direct your creativity?

Audience research has helped me a lot to improve and amend our ideas and designs. Firstly, when we presented our Prezi to an audience, which we thought, may relate to our music video, a lot of ideas helped us to divert our ideas and develop them. It helped us to direct our creativity when they created comments such as not being realistic to film at the beach in one day. We brainstormed ideas by firstly viewing different music videos to be able to come up with different ideas, which our targeted audience would be interested in. Also, audience feedback has helped us to improve our rough cut. They expressed that we may need to rethink our performance, as it didn’t really look like a band had performed. After looking at our rough cut and then comparing this with existing indie genre music videos, we definitely thought that it would be a good idea to refilm our performance with using a studio. With the audience feedback, I have constantly referred back to this to help me making any other decisions such as my print advertisements.

How different are your products to ‘real’ media products?

With our music video there is definitely a contrast between ours and a real indie genre music video. You can tell this instantly by the quality of the video camera which we used, as famous productions would use a high quality and focused camera with each shot. They would also have actors and already known bands who had done this before. I think that it would have took them less time also as they would have the shot there and then. However, with us, it took slightly longer as we wanted to make sure we had the right amount of shots and camera angles. We overall did not have the time and budget to build up a professional looking music video. Although we were able to do features which they also do with their music videos. For example, we were able to provide what we would want in a music video as the typical audience ourselves. The band was able to lip sync as they would also do in a real music video. I also think that with my DigiPak and Print advert, they look also like a truly professional print advertisement as they also use software’s such as Photoshop which we had used also to edit our features.

To what extent have you been original?

I would overall say that our music video has been mostly redundant. With a lot of existing Indie music videos, we see that they have taken being ‘unique’ and original up a level with extravagant props, costumes and locations. An example of this would be A-Punk ‘Giving up the gun’ where they use a game of tennis which has nothing to do with the lyrics and also men who don’t really fit in with the indie genre. However they make it work because when thinking of the Indie genre, we instantly associate them with standing out from the crowd and becoming unique with themselves. Originality is what we focused on when trying to come up with ideas for our music video. We wanted something which no one had done before with professional music videos, but how we could link in with the indie genre. When looking back at our audience feedback, they wanted us to change the performance part as they didn’t think that it linked in with the genre which we were trying to portray. I think that by adding the redundant feature of the performance it made the key feature to fall into the indie genre category. Furthermore I would say that our music video has entropic and redundant features, but feel that it has been made original in most ways as we have designed our video around what our targeted audience would prefer to see.

Final Music Video

Final Print Advert

This is my final Print Advert.

I have altered this Print Advert slightly by adding more text and quotes so that it looks like it is busy and overwhelming for the audience to view. I am pleased with this print advert overall as it relates well with the music video and with the album so you can instantly relate them all together. I feel that it relates with the conventions of an Indie print advertisement. 

Final DigiPak

This is my final DigiPak overall. 

I have made a few adjustments, but nothing major as I felt that it related well to my targeted audience. Using Photoshop, I have raised the saturation, brightness and contrast to make the DigiPak stand out against others in stores. I have also made a tiny adjustment to add the website within the DigiPak as this is a common feature which is found on many Indie DigiPaks. Overall, I am pleased with the way it has turned out as I mainly think that it relates to my targeted audience and especially the one song video - Cala Cola. Next, I am going to refine my print advert and make a final copy.

First Draft of Print Advert

This is my first draft for my Print Advert. I have tried to link this with my album cover to make it look like they are linked when our targeted audience decide to buy the album, they will know straight away how to find it due to the background and the people used in the Print Advert. To improve this I will add more to it so that it will stand out against all of the advertisements within the magazine. Next, I will do my final draft of my DigiPak and Print Advert.