YR13 Digi-pak



YR13 Music Video Poster Final Draft



Media YR 13 Advanced Production Evaluation

 

1.  In What Ways Does Your Media Product Use, Develop or Challenge Forms and Conventions of Real Media Products?

Overall, for Year 13 A2 Media Coursework, we had several different tasks to do

based around music video production. The primary task was actually filming

and editing a music video based on an indie rock band that our group choose,

Finn Riggins. We also did a CD/DVD digipak and a magazine advert as fictional

promotional material for our music video to make it more realistic and to show

our production and editing skills. The purpose of these three elements in a

promotional package is to promote the artist and make the project look

more attractive and good to look at. The music video is the star of the show

with all the innovative camera shots and unique narrative composing a

strangely new and the fact that it is the most hyped-up aspect of the project

for our target audience. The poster captivates the audience brilliantly by using

a new cel-shading effect in order to make Conor’s face look more obscured.

 It also draws people’s eye to the project and makes them want to look up the

music video, effectively promoting it. Finally, the Digipak helps promote the

band due to its futuristic layout, such as the divided mask across two pieces of

the Digipak to make it look neat, this connotes professionalism and encourages

our target audience to check out our band.

and make them want to look more into the artist and their music, which is

good for them in promotion terms. These three overall will work together to

help increase Finn Riggins record and digital sales.

 

Examples are the poster and digipak shown below:

 

 

All genres of within music promos have their own repertoire of elements,

which is what they reuse to create their own style within a genre. An example for the Pop Genre is that they usually contain many close-ups of the artist i.e, Lady Gaga or Jennifer Lopez to fully emphasize upon their beauty, particularly when it’s a female artist. However the same applies for men to like George Michael or David Bowie.  Aside from this they include all different camera shots depending on the actual video, such as close-ups in a pop video to emphasize upon the artists beauty to long-shots to capture the full mise-en-scene and stage for a rock video. Examples of this are for example close-ups and extreme close-ups to emphasize upon the singers or music video’s protagonists emotions and beauty. Close-ups are appropriate for this due to their explicit facial and emotional detail when put into action. This is especially true with female singers such as Beyoncé or Jenifer Lopez. They also incorporate frequent long and mid-shots in order to capture the full mise-en-scene and the costumes of the actors to give the impression of a large-scale, big-budgeted music video to the audience. Finally they often use bird-eyes view as an establishing shot at the beginning of music videos, i.e in Wiz Khalifa’s Black and Yellow music video.  They overall use lots of camera movement to emphasize the pace of the music video and to make the audience feel as if they were with them as they are singing at a concert, this is especially true with the Pop and Rock genres. Camera movement is used to keep pace with the artists movements during the music video and to give the audience an impression that as if they are dancing with them to the flow of the songs beat.

 

 In addition, they also incorporate very provocative performances to emphasize the sexual and love undertones that they have, such as Lady Gaga’s Judas music video which shows her bathing with two men in a provocative manner. This is how performance narrative is used in order to portray human nature and other emotions in music videos, an example for our music video is Pete’s impending insanity as well as references to personality disorders, apart from that our music video is fairly light-hearted. In addition, there is no real set narrative for this genre due to it being so diverse, but the all in some way hold conventions of wealth, glamour and beauty in some way shape or form.

 

They are edited by what the music video represents, such as low-key dark

 Lighting for a Ziggy Stardust music video due to its freighting themes and light enhancement effects for a Gorrilaz music video due to them frequently having comical natures. These are all Mise-En-Scene examples and most music videos have high key lighting to capture the full scene of what’s happening but some do subvert this stereotype, like Ziggy Stardust or Akon’s “Smack That” music video as they are both set in dark, mysterious places and a lot of the events depicted in the music video are obscured to the audience, adding a sense of enigma and mystic. Actors aside from the actual artist usually are comprised as background extras, for key sequences, i.e dance scenes or another chare the that the singer falls in love with in the music video, like the Transsexual man in Keizai’s “Giant In My Heart” music video. There are so many elements in pop videos but they are always, glamorous, rich locations that emphasize upon the glamorous lifestyles that celebrities’ enjoy. Costumes and props also play a vital role in music videos, often representing emotions and desires within a music video.  An example of this is the strange device in Katy Perry’s “E.T” music video that represents lust and love. These factors overall define the typical features of the pop genre and what their target audience expects from it. In addition, there are other editing conventions such as camera styles like cutting to the beat and fast cuts. These are to keep the videos pace up with the potentially fast lyrics and to make the audience more intrigued and captivated by the music video. These also present good opportunities to cut between performance and narrative sequences in music videos to keep the pace equal with the song in order to not dampen the pace of the music video and compromise the audiences interest and we follow suit in this practise with our Benchwarmers music video with Pete being stalked by this mysterious mask-wielding figure to him lip-synching with the same mask on to emphasize upon the alter-ego concept within our music video.

 

Since these factors are all required for an effective music video, we utilised this to suit our own genre, which is Indie Rock for our “Benchwarmers” music video. The typical conventions for the Indie genre is strange and cheap looking mise-en-scene and artists that dress in punk-rock styles costumes with the actual music being rock with a slight electro undertone incorporated into it. To get an initial idea and form a basis for our music video, we researched the typical conventions of the genre of Finn Riggins, which is Indie Rock.  Indie Rock videos are usually composed of strange and surreal elements like Coldplay’s “The Scientist” music video with a protagonist has to get away from it whilst having some humorous moment’s in-between in order to captivate the audience. They also are usually set in semi-urban environment with some signs of decay, such as the sequence in our music video where Pete is in the run-down bus stop at the beginning and the end. They also have the artists performance frequently featured but with different conventions, such as Pete and Conor featured in a unique way, i.e wearing the animal masks during the singing sequences. This reflects our dedication to the narrative/performance aspect of the music video, which in essence is the most vital part of any music video.

 

We also incorporated more innovative and ambitious camera angles and techniques to our music video in order to make it more captivating and interesting for our target audience. We also used more extensive editing techniques and spent more quality time editing in order to give the video that fine finishing touch, such as the more refined special effects that were applied to our title sequence in order to show that we have moved on and adapted from our production in year 12. Also, they overall incorporate rock with some pop and alternative elements, such as strange and unique costumes which have a focus on indie conventions. These strange and unique conventions of a rock/pop hybrid like the former are mainly followed and adhered to but they can be subverted, such as in our music video we filmed some shots in completely rural areas such as the woods.  These conventions have been broken before by other indie rock groups like Finn Riggins itself amongst other groups such as Bastille and Billy Brag. Overall, these three elements are applied in our music video “Benchwarmers” by Finn Riggins due to the narrative of Pete’s insanity applied alongside

 

In Particular, there are some specific promos that have influenced our music video, such as Keizai’s “Hideaway” and Martin Garrax’s “Animals” music video.

For Keizai’s, some of its locations of decay, i.e the urban storage facility is typical of alternative style music videos.                                                                                   

 

Also, Martin Garrax’s animal masks highly influenced our video because there are similarities between ours and Garrax’s music video due to us adopting the same conceptual idea of having a main character utilising an animal mask.

 Links to the videos

Keizia=

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESXgJ9-H-2U

Martin Garrax=

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCYcHz2k5x0

Examples form our promo are shown here:

 

 This first shot shows how we’ve used the conventions from Martin Garrax’s music video by using similar animal masks which gives our music video a unique undertone. This is vital because if a music video doesn’t stand out from the crowd it will not gain much attention and subsequently fail at captivating the target audience. This is the overall purpose of a promo. However, at the same time we have challenged typical media conventions. This is due to the fact that most artists do not have their faces obscured by a mask or other items and this creates a sense of enigma for our audience. However, Pete did not as we wanted the character to be portrayed as a type of victim instead of a character that’s in control of their current situation. We have also made the intro for our song more innovative and interesting by starting the music the second Pete presses play for the actual song on his phone in the video. This shows some commonality between the song and the video by incorporating a small and discreet product placement sequence in the video. This has also developed a factor sometimes incorporated in some music videos, such as Cher Lloyds “Swagger Jagger” music video.

 

This is not very conventional as music videos have only just started to use product placement heavily. Aside from our and Cher Lloyd’s music video, some modern examples of product placement include Coldplay’s “Adventure Of A Lifetime” and Bon Jovi’s “It’s My Life” music video.  

 

We had used several locations for our music video, amongst these are:

1.     Bourne Woods

Bourne Woods was the locations for our shots comprising of Pete running through the woods and when he sees the mysterious masked man watching him from afar on a bench. We chose this area not only for its natural beauty but to create of sense of despair and to make the audience feel as though Pete’s character is being followed before they actually see Connor’s mask wielding character.  A similar location is used in the indie video “War” by Poets Of The Fall featuring a similar protagonist that is stalked like Pete’s character by a supernatural force.

Video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0f_hewSrAH4

2.     Elsea Park

 

Elsea Park Estate in Bourne was used in order to contrast the environments in Bourne Woods. The shots filmed here were the lip-synch shots and the scene where Pete encounters a vision of Conor once again. The reason why we chose an urban area was to emphasize that even though there are far more people about to help a person like Pete if he was in trouble, he still can’t get away from these haunting encounters that he has.  These are typical for music videos due to the fact that some kind of household interior is featured in some way shape or form.  An example of this could be the mansion at the start of Lady GaGa’s “Paparazzi” music video. Household interiors are used to in a sense to represent either a sophisticated rich lifestyle or a mediocre average life like what is depicted by our main character in “Benchwarmers”.    

3.     Haconby

 

We used Haconby Village in Lincolnshire in order to film our innovative opening and ending scenes where Pete is at the bus stop whilst rethinking about all his recent encounters that are presented as flashbacks throughout the music video. We used this locations bus stop due to the fact that it is in a state of disrepair and disuse and combined with the fact it is a remote location this emphasizes upon our chosen songs indie themes where you can make great things from as little resources available to you. A comparison can be made with a music video by Nicky Romeo “Toulouse” where the main character is at the bus stop rethinking past events in a flashback like Pete’s character is.

Video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrVC5dm5fFc

For costumes, we did not incorporate a terrific amount of them but the few we had were an effective illustration of the Indie Rock/Alternative genres. We did however select our costumes carefully and it is typical for characters or artist performances to wear casual clothing in Indie music videos.

Firstly, Conor and Pete both wore an animal mask that created a sense of dread with a slight taste of dark humour throughout an otherwise light-hearted music video. This also made our concept behind the promo unique and gives something for the audience to remember. We combined this aspect with a suit to give a “Men in Black” impression to the audience and to create a sense of enigma and mystery behind the characters in order to convince the audience to keep watching the music video.

 

 Peter’s costume was just casual clothing but it however reflected the casual appearance of the Indie Rock genre and how the characters in the music video are ordinary people in strange and somewhat weird situations. A similarity between our music video can be seen with Duke Dumont’s “Need U 100%” music video due to the fact that it consists of an ordinary guy who has a strange occurrence happening to him, i.e a radio in his stomach.  Also, both characters are just casual people caught up in odd situations instead of rich, glamorous stereotypes frequently portrayed in Pop music videos.

 

Compared to a lot of other music videos out there, we used relatively few editing techniques apart from jump-cuts and speed ups for example our time lapse sequence. These are all fairly conventional but they are mostly applied to indie rock videos like ours as opposed to the entire indie genre as a whole.  We kept the complex editing minimal in order to make the music video a more exciting experience whilst at the same time keeping it grounded in reality for the audience. It also helps to reflect real life situations, i.e people who suffer from personality disorders who indeed do see people who aren’t actually there. We overall used fast cuts in order to emphasize the fast-pace of the music video and in order to adhere to typical cutting to the beat conventions without making our music video seem to far-fetched. We cut-to-the-beat very well and organised the narrative and performance equally by having the same amount of both so the audience isn’t experiencing more of one than the other. Finally we concentrated heavily on the editing for the first two-three weeks following the music video to get the majority of it done whilst still allowing time to go back and erect any issues if needbe.

We have used both Narrative and Performance in order to create an effective music video storyline. The narrative is overall a troubled media student who keeps seeing visions of a masked man who it is later revealed that he studied as part of a media project, (A picture of Conor is present in Pete’s folder at the end to emphasize upon this). As well as being strong in this aspect, we backed up our ideas with good, believable performance that enticed the audience to yet again keep watching our music video. This is overall very conventional of music videos to incorporate both a narrative and performance of some type like Bon Jovi’s “It’s My Life” music video where the teen has to get to the concert where Bon Jovi is playing at. Only very few music videos go against this stereotype, such as Radiohead where the whole video is just him singing whilst the helmet slowly fills full of water.

 

We have overall mixed both narrative and performance equally so the audience is experience an equal amount of both instead of seeing more of one than the other. This is overall conventional to have an equally spaced music video in terms of narrative and performance.

 These narrative and performance aspects overall heavily influenced our ancillary tasks shown above. Examples of these are the typical conventions of a CD/DVD Digipak which are good shots combined with innovative taglines and features such as colour editing with our fonts throughout the music video to make it more appealing to the target audience. One good example that influenced us was Maroons 5’s “V” album Digipak shown below:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As you can see this is a simple but effective Digipak that shows good conventions such as the band members being clearly visible, a clear logo and all the other sponsors and information clearly labelled at the bottom. These are all simple but effective methods that we incorporated into our poster whilst not crowding the Digipak with too much information, the former being renowned for putting target audiences off.  We were overall best off by concentrating primarily on the innovative visual effects that we applied to our poster and not crowding it with too much information. This is overall comparable to many other poster designs from other groups and artists, such as Green Day and The Gorillaz.

 

As you can see, these posters are comparable to ours as they are really effective at conveying a positive image about the artists and it makes it look fun and entertaining as well as to some extent looking childish. This overall attracts our target audience as they see albums and songs like this as an escape from their day-to-day reality.

 

The most noticeable design concept that is shared by our poster and the examples is that there is a close-up of a characters face, in our case Conor and for the Gorillaz its TJ the Monkey. This is to intrigue our target audience to what’s behind the music video for the artist without giving away too much if not any aspects of the music videos narrative and performance. This is a very effective way of promoting an artist’s new song whilst keeping the plot of the music video a closely guarded secret. Subsequently, this eggs the audience on to watch the music video or just but the song. The effects as mentioned before are cel-shaded to give it a comic-cook style appearance and emphasize upon the Indie genre being renowned for producing satirical and light-hearted music videos similar to its alternative genre counterpart.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2.                        How Effective Is The Combination Of Your Main Product and Ancillary Texts?

 

The products we created, our music video, poster and Digipak work together to create an overall effective brand image about our fictional project for Finn Riggins. They represent the band as an icon of the Indie Rock genre and this is shown through the innovation of our media usage, such as the strange and unique camera shots, like the 360 degree camera shot with an unmasked Pete to represent his mind spinning out of sanity and control. In addition, there are new editing techniques utilised in our music video to make the audience feel on edge and feel relatable to the disturbed main character, like sections of Pete in the 360 degree shot with Conor Green screen in a flashback like manner.  In addition, the way the Digipak is presented overall reflects our dedication to this project as it is presented exceptionally well with standing-out features such as the unique background combined with our original photography truly brings the project to life. With the music video and the ancillary tasks placed together they overall coincide with one another. They also correct each other’s faults, i.e the poster alone would not be enough to entice our target audience into becoming followers of Finn Riggins without having interesting music videos like “Benchwarmers”. This creates a brand image which subsequently all goes together well once combined to show true commonality between the three different media institutions, a poster, Digipak and a music video.

Prezi below refers to question 3.

For the three tasks, the most obvious thing that they have in common is the mise-en-scenes of our music video. This for example is the woods background that is in the poster and the Digipak as well as being prominently featured in the music video during key sequences well Pete first meets his alter-ego in the videos plot.

In addition, all three have shared typography throughout. This is so that the audience would have the same familiar feeling about the video when they first see it after first seeing it themselves via the poster advert.  The same also applies for colour, which is yet again cel-shaded and blurred to give it a surreal sense of dread as well as dark humour which is present in the music video.

 

 

 

 

 

These three example show synergy in work as all the three pieces of media incorporate the same typography to show consistency as well as synergy throughout the project.

There is also imagery that is consistent throughout the three pieces of media, the most obvious of which is the mask that is a key prop throughout all three pieces of media and is the flagship promotion for Finn Riggins in our project about them.

We did this in order to represent the music video for what it was, because if the audience misinterpreted what they expected the music video to be somehow due to the ancillary tasks, they could be let down or disappointed so we didn’t risk making the ancillary tasks too unique without compromising the music video. These features combined with the detailed promotional poster represent the band Finn riggings as being at the top of their game and an inspiration to other bands within the same genre. These three pieces of media overall come together to achieve a good level of media usage and innovation by all four of us in our group and our collective efforts we put into this project. The overall concept and design ideology behind our three texts was that they need to be very similar to each other but at the same time be very different in order to not compromise the message that we are trying to send to our target audience about us being different from the rest.

Also, these three texts work synergetically. An example of this being that the advert promotes fictional tour dates and the actual song of our music video “Benchwarmers”. Also, the Digipak overall promotes the album for Finn Riggins due to its innovative, in your face appearance and conveys the message that the audience need to hear the star of the show, namely “Benchwarmers”.  In addition, our project will show exhibition in different ways and forms. Firstly the music video will obviously be shown on mainstream devices such as YouTube and iTunes so most if not everybody can listen to and download the song. This will be the main way the song will be distributed and promoted due to the millions of people that go onto the internet every day, let alone YouTube who will see it advertise and subsequently gain us more viewers.  “New” media as such is more effective way to show our music video and ancillary tasks due to the fact that most people are connected to the internet in some way, shape or form and can subsequently view our media products faster and more regularly if they please to do so in this digital age.  It overall makes our media project more readily available for our target audience to access and is a good example of technical convergence between pieces of media.

 

 

However, we will endeavour to promote our video through more niche methods as well, such as having it broadcast on TV via the world famous music channel MTV.  This is due to the fact that it is the most watched music channel in the world and last year over 80% of American households alone received MTV.

This will help us reach a broader audience, such as older people who aren’t as into technology as younger people are can they also see our music video. The “Traditional” media methods like MTV have disadvantages such as that they have nowhere near the audience that is received by newer methods of media such as what the internet has. Statistics shows that out of a nearly 70 million population in the UK, fewer than 100,000 watches MTV daily. This severely limits the amount of viewers we want daily from the video and this is why we are mainly distributing it via online methods. The advantages for “New” media is that the internet is very easy to access and anyone can possess the ability to go online and watch music videos like ours if they have the right equipment, i.e. a decent modern computer and an online connection of some sort as well as a mobile device such as a tablet or smartphone. We can also for traditional media use a magazine publisher in order to promote our band advert. The advantages of this are that they are clearly visible and attractive when you look at them. The disadvantage is that they are incredibly expensive; up to £8000 per month for one magazine brand and that the idea of going out and buying a magazine is numbered due to online resources such as Podcasts and PDF magazines taking over actual physical material. If we had to, I would choose Karrang! Magazine due to its good reputation for honest music reviews and the fact it is renown throughout the world. It also has a good even distribution of all genres throughout it as opposed to being dedicated to one genre and target audience. This would convince us to use Karrang! Magazine to help promote our music video due to the fact that they are not biased to one genre or target audience, allowing our Finn Riggins music video to have a fair chance at being promoted through it.

 

In addition, the advert is effective individually from an eye-catching perspective as it would captivate people who had no idea about Finn Riggins into looking at it and possibly gaining interest in them by the usage of our innovative camera shots that are blended in with our unique special effects that captivate the audience’s attention to our advert. There is overall an unusual link between these.

Later on in the production, we also added a couple of shots of Pete singing with his mask on his head whilst still in a way wearing it. This was in order to make a revelation to the audience who the mask wearing figure in the music videos narrative is, and that it could represent modern psychological issues like Paranoid Schizophrenia or Bipolar Disorder to bring a shed of authenticity to our music video instead of it being completely far-fetched like Kanye Wests “Power” music video.

 

It also uses a kind of innovative cell-shading effect to make it more comic-like and this gives it a unique blend compared to most music album posters. Other examples of this rather rare convention are in Telltale Games The Wolf Among Us and Ghost In The Shell.

 

                          

Finally, our CD/DVD Digipak is not a form of media that can succeed on its own but combined with both the poster and music video it can definitely succeed

 Overall, all of these aspects work well together and each are one piece of a project, without one, the rest won’t be as effective on their own, they need to be combined together they make a quite frankly excellent media combination. It will be exhibited physical as fans of Finn Riggins would go out and buy it as well and having a free PDF file that will be viewable online for those unfortunate enough not to procure it in time as it is intended for as a limited run promotional product. It overall links to our song by having “Benchwarmers” as its main attraction and having the same front page and background as the poster did. Also, we have made the sections look more innovative by for example, splitting the mask into two for two side of the Digipak between the CD that is made to look like a piece of rotting bark ,all of which emphasize upon mystery and enigma. These will be exhibited mainly online through the means of “New” media such as online sites like YouTube or Soundcloud as well as some forms of “Old” media like billboard adverts or rolling boards. The reason why I would personally choose to exhibit the music video mainly online is due to its sheer usage by people these days, and the fact that it is bound to be noticed when advertised on a piece of mainstream media like YouTube, as it gets over 400 Million page views a day, this will undoubtedly attract publicity for our music video.

Overall, all three of the pieces of media are intended to create synergy for the audience which will hopefully then enable them to instantly recognise our unique and ambitious music video.

3.                        What Have You Learned From Your Audience Feedback?

 

We have learned many important aspects about audience feedback that will played a vital role in the production of our music video. We conducted this before the filming of the music video so we could get a good idea of what we needed to film. First of all, our Poll Everywhere, which we conducted in class with our peers displayed vital information that we then utilised and used to improve upon our initial music video. The Poll Everywhere is a very simple yet effective way to gain audience feedback as they can just text comments through via their smartphones instead of having to go through the hassle of filling out a questionnaire as it takes a considerable amount of time. Examples of this were that some people claimed the typography at the music videos introduction was too little and obscured to be seen clearly by the action sequences in the music video so we subsequently acted upon this by making the text larger and applying a slightly darker periphery to it in order to make it more easily readable to the audience. This is one of many factors that we improved due to audience feedback and this endeavour shows the importance of listening to audience feedback in order to help develop your ideas and concepts through feedback of others that can inspire you to delve into aspects that you didn’t think about before.

 

Perhaps the most critical information that we had at our disposal was our Vox Pops, as you can see below, there was a good variety of opinions and factors that needed to be taken into consideration. A vast majority of the people we interviewed agreed that we need an eye-catching and exciting music video that will gain the undivided attention of our target audience. Vox Pops stands for the Latin phrase “Vox Populi” which translates in English to “Voice of the People”. Vox Pops mare basically interviews with members of the public about a certain topic. They are effective due to the fact that the public, compared to larger groups have fair and diverse opinions about a topic and subsequently offer different perspectives to take into consideration. They are also effective for gathering feedback as most people if they had the time would want to do a quick interview for a Vox Pops. We also learned about what people typically from a music video, which gave us the impression that they all wanted us to incorporate something unique and innovative in our music video to make it stand out from the crowd. A Vox Pops is very useful for gathering audience feedback because the few speak for the many as a lot of people will agree with their opinions. We also briefly conducted audience research via online surveys to do with similar topics to give us an idea of what our Vox Pops interviewees would say.

 

I also created a Prezi to narrow down this section into an effective summary.

https://prezi.com/qooegiutr-ys/edit/#1_24309637

 

 

 

4.                        How Did You Use Media Technologies In The Construction and Research, Planning and Evaluation Stages?

List of Technologies used by us as a media group:

1.     Blogger

2.     Microsoft PowerPoint

3.     Prezi

4.     Scribd

5.     Adobe Photoshop

6.     Apple iMovie

7.     Padlet

8.     Adobe Premier Elements Pro

For our initial preliminary tasks, we used a Nikon DSLR Camera for filming purposes as it is a reliable high-end camera with excellent quality filming capabilities perfect for our project and then used Apple iMovie in order to edit it appropriately due to the programs editing sophistication.  For our research, which was one of the biggest tasks there was, we extensively used YouTube, UnSigned.com and other websites like sound cloud and Facebook in our search for a decent independent song, eventually finding Finn Riggins “Benchwarmers” as an excellent choice. Also, they are public websites that can easily be accessed by anybody so in terms of time researching for music videos, our time just searching for them was effectively reduced to just a couple of school periods. In addition, if our target audience was to view our music video as most people do for all bands and artists, it is easily accessible without having to jump through hoops in order to watch the video.

Almost all of my work was presented on blog with the exception of the audience profiles and prop lists which were done as Prezi files and then converted so they can be viewed on Blogger by fellow group member Conor Durrant. We used these formats due to the fact that it is simple and user-friendly for both the blogger and the blog viewer to look at and edit blog posts. The software that Blogger is based-on is also easily able to incorporate files from other software and make it viewable on it, such as Prezi files and compressed YouTube clips as well as tables created on other software, i.e Microsoft Word.

 

 

 

 

 

In terms of production, we extensively used Adobe Photoshop in order to incorporate our ideas onto our media poster and edit it. This was the software that we used the most during our final production stages alongside other software such as Adobe Premier Elements Pro for editing and incorporating effects into the actual music video. We also utilised camera studios for our Pitch to get excellent lighting effect for extreme close-up shots. This greatly aided us in Photoshop due to the fact that we didn’t have to sort out lighting effects through the software as it was already completed; this subsequently saved us crucial editing time. We used a vast variety of shots in our music video, most commonly mid-shots in order to capture the characters costumes as well as their faces to establish the characters clearly.

We also used both high and low-angle shots to establish the characters authority in certain situations. An example of power is Pete’s alter ego who is terrorising the protagonist throughout the music video. In addition, we used low-angle shots in the sequences like the above shown of Pete to represent his hopelessness and impending insanity throughout the music video to be represented as a constant spiral of madness.

 Aside from these examples, we used large amounts of long-shots for the mise-en-scene of the music video to show the vas, open environments that we filmed in, such as the sequence in Bourne Woods when Pete is running by.

 Aside from Adobe Software like After Effects for the final tuning for the music video like doing Chroma key for the green screen sequence in our music video, we used Apple iMovie extensively for most of the editing process. This included actually putting the video in order and cropping scenes to the length we wanted. This was then converted into and editing compatible files then the effects were applied in After Effects and Sony Premier Pro.  

We overall used our preliminary task as a basis for our music video and we have moved on tremendously well from AS to A2. We have overall took the best parts of our production, which was teamwork and editing from Year 12 AS Media and incorporated this into our Year 13 A2 work to make the best possible media production we could have possibly made. We also built upon our technical skills from last year by taking more time to adapt to the updated software, i.e Adobe Photoshop CS6 to CS8. This allowed us to find out and learn to use new features such as the colour corrections for our ancillary posters background and HD Lighting effects in order to show that we can use more complex editing skills like as mentioned before editing background and foregrounds in accordance to the lighting needed as well as the HDI Lighting effects for typography and Images present on the poster and Digipak.

We used ww.unsigned.com to find our song “Benchwarmers” by Finn Riggins to counter copyright issues and the fact that the song had to be from an independent artist in the first place in order to show that we are dedicated enough to find a decent song instead of just choosing any old song from any category on the website. 

We also used social media like Facebook and Twitter in an attempt to contact the band, however, they did not respond like Joint Honours did in order for us to gain their permission to make a music video based on one of their songs, so we just went ahead with it anyway regardless. We also research briefly on websites to exhibit our completed music video and inevitably choose YouTube due to its superior connectivity and the fact it is more well-known than other alternatives like UnSigned.com and Vevo.

 

In addition, for a research phase we predominantly used YouTube to explore examples of music videos and to get inspiration for our music video.

We have overall learned to utilise more innovative camera shots more often and vary the variety of shots throughout the music video to make it more erratic and fun for our target audience to watch. We also, as I mentioned before learned to adapt and use editing software like Adobe Premier Elements Pro and Photoshop more effectively and use it to add a fine finishing touch to our music video.

Our audience research technologies were the Poll everywhere and the Vox Pops. We use these methods mainly due to their ease of use compared to other contemporary methods such as a questionnaire that is time consuming and boring for our target audience to fill out. We also used these due to the fact that they are easy to upload and incorporate into technologies such as Blogger instead of having to take pictures of a physical resource such as a questionnaire then manually upload it to Blogger.