Evaluation 1 - In what ways does your media products use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products

Image 1) Relationship of music to visuals - Within image one there is an instrumental so having a scrap book of pictures going from colour to black and white to sepia shows the audience watching it that it is a memory which helps the audience to realise what the music is about and what kind of story it is about to tell. They can pick up it will be a love/break up story as the images show this and the music reflects the images and creates an atmosphere for the audience as they are watching it. With this first part we have changed the colours of it and added effects over the top so it enhances the fact that it is a memory which links in with the music.

Image 2) Lighting - the lighting in this still frame is very bright as it is the beginning of the day adn as the video goes on it is going through the day and so at the end gets darker when she is burning her photos. This is effective because you can see the actors facial expressions which helps in a narrative music video so the audience can understand more clearly what is going on. Also the contrast of having the singer performing in the mirror which was created using green screen is effective because it isnt as light as the foreground clip, it is slightly faded which shows its not meant to be there or that she is thinking about the song lyrics.

Image 3) Mise-en-scene - within this image the setting is set to be romantic as they are being playful and joking around on a field which is a nice place to go on a date, the costume for this was very accurately picked out we wereing going for a casual everyday look but the main singer had a slogan on her top which related to the certain part of the song in this case her top said " 'To be or not to be' - William Shakespeare" which has relevance as she later leaves this boy for another. no props were used within this scene, just a cast that we picked because we thought they looked relaxed and happy together. Also they are both very happy in this scene and you can tell that by the smiles and laughter you see in the clip.

Image 4) Relationship of lyrics to narrative/visual - This clip within the video is key because it is performance, as the audience can see her singing and then behind her playing the guitar this can help the people watching to relate and see the relationship of the lyrics becuase you can see her singing them and also see the emotion when she sings them. So this shows how much the words mean to her, and it could also help the people watching to relate to what she is singing.

Image 5) Representation of artist/band with reference to record label's expectations - This is shows the artist playing the guitar showing she actually has a talent and the type of music she creates is pop/country so the record label would expect to have some aspects of instruments involved with the video, aswell as places with nature and a country feel to it so having pictures in the background would be expected as it connotes to the audience a country feel. Also the pictures of her and her old boyfriend shows that most pop/country music is about either love or break ups and so therefore having pictures in the background would be showing more conventions of then genre.

Image 6) Genre of music and how it is defined - This is an image of her new boyfriend who she is not happy with and a picture faded in over the top of her old boyfriend, this creates a feel that what she is really thinking about is her old boyfriend and she cares more about him than she does her new one who she is with in the scene. although it is a long shot because the girl is closer to the screen you can see her facial expressions and her emotions and how she would rather be with someone else than the person she is with. This is typical of the genre as it helps to tell a story and most music videos in this genre our narrative.

Image 7) Camerawork and editing (shot types, angles, movements: SFX and transitions) - This image has two clips faded together so it shows to the audience what the singer is thinking about this fade works well because it conveys more of the narrative with the editing techniques. Throughout the music video we used various shot types and camera angles, we used close up in the narrative so that the audience could see her face and see the emotion behind it linking to the song lyrics, we used long shots when performing to show the signer playing her guitar to show another talent that the artist has. We added pictures to help tell teh narrative and most of these pictures were mid shots.

Image 8) Intertextuality or influence of another music video - We were very much influenced by Tylor Swift as we felt her music was very much like the music we chose to use but we felt our target audience was slightly older, so we watched a lot of her music videos to get an idea of what kind of narrative aspects we could use, we were then influenced by her music video Picture to Burn, at the very end she has a burning picture to show she is over a relationship we thought this could work well with out video, but change the meaning behind burniong the picture, we changed to shes burning her memories as she realises she needs to move on.

Image 9) Setting/Location - This final image focuses on the setting that the singer wants to be back to in the narrative story, this setting is a romantic place for a date where they are having fun, we chose this location because it was accessible for everyone to get to and had great scenery for what we wanted in our music narrative. Most of our music video was shot in this location as our whole as our video is about love and break up. It also reflected the romantic scene of the video which is what most videos from the genre have.

Evaluation 2 - How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary

The main product - http://thedreamerteam.blogspot.com/2011/12/just-taste-music-video.html

Magazine advert.                                              

            Left side inside cover.                               

Right hand side inside cover and Cd     

Backcover                                          

Front Cover                                                        

We came about making this successful package by looking at different covers, some from our genre some not, and deciding what aspects of each catch our eye and we used some of them. Then we thought out what kind of music would be on the album and what images represent the genre.

So we came up with many ideas to do with love and secrets for the inside. We also looked at colours that may attract peoples attention and used those with a black and white background or made the whole picture that colour so it was eye catching.

We finally decided on using mainly colours that other artists from our genre and with the same target audience would use which was purples and blues and reds for the CD package, for the Magazine advert we chose to use more conventions of the country genre with the brown colours and setting with trees but we kept the font a dark purple so it matched with our CD package.

Overall, i think this made the main product and the ancillary package a success because it had many conventions of the music genre type and it had things that our target audience would like to see, we know this from giving our target audience a questionnaire to find out what draws them to a particular type of music, and by doing research into the genre itself.

After re-evaluating our above ancillary products and with our audience feedback we decided to re do our digi pack.

The front cover we felt needed to embrace the genre more so that people would see it and realise what sort of music it is. Also the message of the album is about going on the journey that is life, so we thought having a road leading somewhere or nowhere - which ever way the reader interprets it, would be a good way to show the message of the album. Having the road amongst trees and leaves would show to the audience that it is country music. The images of the artist transitioning from normal everyday clothes to glamours clothes also shows her going through a journey of her own, it also shows with the artist in the glamours clothes that it is a cross over genre as its country and pop music. The first image of the artist sitting on the ground playing her guitar shows to the audience that she is a musician and is very concerned with the music and portraying her emotions through her songs, as an audience we can see this by the clothing she is wearing as it is everyday, modern teenage clothing, havign this also helps the target audience relate to her more as they can see she is like them and going through similar situations. The second image is of the artist slowly rising up, this is a symbol to the audience that she is growing up and becoming more mature in her music and her ways but her clothing still shows her youth and also her transitioning on her journey. The third image of the artist shows her more matured and experienced most of her journey as she is standing uo with with her guitar to show although she has been on a journey she still hold onto her original ways of music, the dress shows her style and self moving on with her life and ambitions. The final picture of her in a formal red dress shows she has become sophisticated and got through her journey and came out better for going through this process, which can help her target audience realise that things can get better and if they are going through similar situations that getting through it just takes time and everything will be alright in the end. The colours of the images of the artist go from light whites with some dark colours to blues to bright bold reds to show that she has gone through a change and has ended up bolder and more confident. The bright orange/yellow colour of the leaves and road background show that the album may be mellow music whereas the expression on the artist faces show an emotional side, so from this album cover we can see that the album may have a wide variation of songs on to resemble the journey as some times may become tough and some make you smile. The font on the front cover was chosen as we wanted something that catches the audiences eye and having bold black was a well thought out decision as it contrasts with the brighter colours on the front to catch your eye and when doing research in HMV i discovered that many titles are in colour so it would stand out against other albums when in a store.

The first inside cover we wanted to show the artist for who she really is but also keep it about what her music is like and what it represents. We thought the best way to do this would be a collage of various pictures of her and various background the resemble the album and the message it carries of being on a journey. The use of framing each picture to look like it is a Polaroid picture was to resemble to the audience the stages she has been through during her journey and a token to her of that moment in time. The four pictures at the top at the back are various roads resembling a journey and in the pictures going across it starts with minimal cloud and gets dull and grey towards the end, this is a hint to the audience of what her music is like as some songs are mellow and some are about strong heartache and pain for example 'Just A Taste' This image has less colour than on the front where is has yellow/orange this is to show a simplistic, more about the music side as in many pictures she is holding the guitar. We decided to have no text on the inside of our album to show the more simplistic side to the artists music and to show what teh artist is like as a person and how and what kind of music she creates, and we felt added text would clutter the image and take away from how we want the artist to be portrayed. Having bright backgrounds for the images show a simple and plain clam vibe which is a contrast slightly to what her music is all about.

The inside cover right- CD- is linking to the front cover as it has the orange/yellow leaves as it shows to the audience more of a country feel which links to our genre and helps the audience to see teh style of music it is within a store, but also shows a main theme of the album and music which is love as the heart created by hands shows and many of the songs on the album are about love. This is very simialr to our previous inside CD part minus the artist. We decided to take the artist out of this picture because we wanted to create a more simplistic, artistic image and we also felt that this shows to the target audience the main focus of the songs which is love and then it links in with the other previous images as they can then make the connection that love is a journey.

The back cover of the album we kept similar also to our first original copy, the changes we made were to the design in the corner larger and added flowers to link in with the leaves on the inside and on the front cover. The leaf bullet point instead of numbers ties in with the whole out doors country theme which resembles the genre well to the audience. The text of the album name 'The Odyssey' is larger than the other text as we wanted it to stand out more and it is continuously the same throughout the digi pack to create a brand identity for the artist and the music. The other text is in the font Gabriola, we choose this font type because it is similar to the album title and also the band title but more simple as it is not intended to stand out and catch peoples eye like the other two are meant to do. We also felt it would be a good choice to use because it seems like a font type teenage girls would generally use and them being out target audience we thought it would be perfect. Having the whole image in black and white apart from the dress contrasts with the front as it was all in colour, having the dress in black and white shows she has been on her journey and changed to more glamours ways but still wants to hold on to the way she was before with the converses, this is like her music as she moves on but can't get him out of her head. Having the swirl pattern in the corner adds a more feminine effect to the album which we hoped would entice our target audience in, we had the swirl pattern with flowers to link to the country genre and also link in with the front and inside cover as the are leaves and such like.

The magazine advert- we kept with the theme of going on a journey of self discovery so used a wide open road, again it bright colours. The use of a long shot image of the background is a symbol that the road ahead is a long one and the album takes you on a long journey. Having the artist on the side of the road with the guitar shows that she is playing through her journey although in contrast her being in glamours clothing shows to the audience another side to the artist which connotes that she has been on her journey and that is her transformation after everything she has been through and gives to the audience an idea of how the music may develop in the album. The text in this magazine advert is the same as in the album to give the artist more of a sense of brand identity. In comparasion to our first attempt at the advert we have not used dark colours and have shown the audience the face of the artist rather tha having her face the back and made the font more something a teenage girl would like and maybe use to fit in with our target audience rather than having it look very computerised. Also we have made the band name stand out more and make in eye catching for people to stop and read it.

Overall, i think redoing our ancillary products has created more of a success as we now have more of a brand to the artist and what her and her music are like and also incorperated many conventions from the genre and makes it clearer to the audience what music they can expect from this album. In comparasion the digi pack shows more experience in the technologies we used and a better sense of brand identity. We wanted to make our ancillary products have a brand identity because from our peer assessment feedback many said they did not feel that our products had this, we then asked them to gives us feeback on our new products and many have said it has a good brand to it and more attracted to our target audience. We also changed the colours making them brigher but made the text colour darker to still show some songs are emotional and about one of the themes of the album which is love which is also represented but the CD being a love heart, and it links with the music video we created because it has a close up of the love necklace. Showing the guitar in almost every picture shows the artist as an artist with real musical talents and links with the country genre as most country songs are mainly played on the guitar.

 

Evaluation 3 - What have you learned from your audience feedback?

As we evaluated the audience feed back together

Here is a video of our whole group discussing what we have learnt from our audience feedback, and also talking about what we need to improve on.

Evaluation 4 - How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research , planning and evaluation stages?

Throughout this task we used a various range of different media technologies they are:

The first type of technology is Powerpoint. As we created a powerpoint to present to the class what our song was and our initial ideas that we had about the singer and song we chose. Also it showed the class and teacher about the genre of the music we have chosen to do.

The second technology we worked with is the Apple Mac as we discovered and got to grips with using Final Cut Express, we got practising by using dancing animals and putting it to music so that we got to see al the effects and transitions that final cut had to offer.

I used photoshop to create the ancillary products for editing the pictures and adding text to them to make a CD cover and Magazine advert. I had never used this programme before so everything was new to me and it did take me a while to figure everything out, but in the end it was easy to use and had many brilliant effects and ways to get our digipack exactly how we wanted it for example layering a picture onto a different background.

I used prezie to create a presentation on a singer or band from our genre and then present it to people, teaching them more about artists and the music they make and the music industry. This was also new to me and it had a very simple and easy to follow tutorial to show you how it works. This helped me massively in creating an informative and attractive presentation. This is a site i will definitely consider using in other subject areas as a fun way of presenting.

We used a camera and a tripod to film the music video. I was very familiar with this equipment as we also used it in AS and I had the same problems as in AS with the battery running out and sometimes getting the tripod with the unstable leg, but it was alright in the end.

We used Blogger to blog about our progress and the planning and research we had to do for the music video. This site we found very useful in keep the group organised as it is a place everyone can access and see our all of our schedules and progress. We also used this site in AS so were familiar with the set up and how it worked, but this year i felt more confident using this site and trying new things such as uploading videos and Prezi presentations on the blog to show.

I used a Sony CyberShot t90 to photograph the pictures for our ancillary products and also to capture the groups working process of said production. The quality of the pictures are very good as the camera has a good amount of pixels.

We also used iTunes to import the song onto the Apple Mac's and then to import it onto final cut express. Itunes also helped to research for an unsigned artist/band, but I then decided to go with 'Just A Taste' by Rachel Hawker and the Remedies.

I researched online websites in which to create a font for our product and initially used DaFont.com for the font type for our magazine advert and for the CD but after re-evaluating our ancillary products i searched again and fount a better easier to use site called 1001 free fonts.

I also used Youtube to upload some of our research and planning videos for the ancillary products and for the music video. Youtube helped me to research and find ideas for our music video by allowing me to watch other videos in the same genre and also past A2 music videos. This helped me to see what was good and what was awful and sparked off some brilliant ideas for our video, as we found that after watching many Taylor Swift videos she was ideal inspiration for us. I also uploaded the animatic of the story board and the final product onto youtube to embed onto my blog

I also used Safari when on the Mac throughout our research stage, to search for unsigned bands online, record companies and also social network sites such as facebook when collecting audience research on our chosen genre, I posted a link to SurveyMonkey onto facebook in order for people to complete a survey on what kind of music they liked and what the expected in music videos o that genre.

SurveyMonkey helped us a great deal in finding out what our audience expected and what we should include into our music video. The site was very easy to use as it was clearly displayed and easy to navigate around.

Timeglider was another piece of technology I used to create a time line of 'The history of the music video' At first i could not get to grips with using this particular site but after a while it was relatively easy and it is an appealing and interesting was for people to view a timeline

Paint - I used this in order to piece together the whole image of 9 small still frames for the 9 still frame analysis. This is something i have used before and therefore had no difficulties with.

Microsoft word- This is something i use on a daily basis and so was not new to me but we used it to find an appropriate font style and size for the print on the digipack to list the tracks and the writing that is on the magazine advert. I chose to use this particualr form of technology to find the perfect text because it is simple and easy to use.

The Music Industry

Within the music industry there are many record labels that artist's get signed to some of them are:
Polydor
Island
Sony
Def Jam
Syco
Universal
Warner Brothers
and there are many, many more.

The larger organisations offer there artist's and bands lots of experties because it has the recources to do so, it also gives them lots of opportunites to be promoted because it is a large company and it takes up a lot of the market. But some artist's are restricted by demands of the company, so they cant truely express themselves as they would like to, they have certain rules that they must follow.

The singles chart is more dominated by pop rather that punk reggae / rock genres.

Manufactured band, bands that are out together by a company for a label tend to be the same, because they think they can make them into something that will sell them lots of records.

Independent companies do not have a memebership of the RIAA - Recording Indusrty Association of America. But they do dominate 25% of the UK market, with about 800 record labels.

Different music videos in our genre

Taylor swift - White Horse

We have drawn inspiration from this music video because we feel Rachel Hawker is like Taylor Swift with the subjects of her songs, and because of this we feel that like Taylor Swift a narrative music video with some performance would be best. I have researched some of her music videos and all of the songs about love have a young teenage puppy love feel to them. Taylor Swift also writes songs about break ups, which is what Rachel Hawkers song 'Just A Taste' is about and so I watched Taylor's video of White Horse which is about a similar topic to the song we have chosen. It is like our music video because we are going to use flash backs like she does in this video to show when they were happy together.

Kelly Clarkson - Mr know it all

This song is like the one we have chosen because it has a slight pop edge to it. I watched the video and we thought it was was interesting and we wanted to use some of the ideas to try and convey a different meaning, so it relates to our song more. For example we like the idea of her watching a screen of something she has just done in the past and lip syncing over it. We also like the idea of having the band silhouetted behind the green screen, we have expanded on that by having the two female leads silhouetted in different positions behind the green screen.

Colbie Caillat - I Never Told You

This music video is similar to ours because it is a narrative video and the style of music is the same as ours to. In this video it has a picture then fades into the picture to show a scene this was one of our original ideas and watching this video we saw ways in which we could do this. This video also gave us the idea to have a romantic beach scene between the boy and the girl but we knew we would have to make it appeal more to a teeanager audience.

Genre Research

The genre of our song is Country/ Soft Rock/ Pop and as i researched into this genre i found a singer songwriter who is similar to ours and her songs are like the song we have chosen 'Just a Taste' this singer songwriter is Taylor Swift.

Although our target audience is slightly older than that of Taylor Swift's we feel that she is still a creditable inluence to use when creating our music video as the way she creates a narrative in her videos is effective in getting across the meaing of the song.

Most of Taylor Swifts music videos are narrative with bits of performance in them. Most of Taylor Swifts songs she writes herself so she draws inspiration from her own experiences so being a teenager a lot of her songs are about love and break ups, which is similar to Rachel Hawker. For example Taylor Swifts song love story is about how she loves a boy but she thinks he doesn't notice her and through the video as it tells its narrative we discover he does. This video uses intertexuality as it makes references toShakespeare's Romeo and Juliet with the costume and some of the lyrics. There is a Various range of shots in this music video because it is a narrative so it shows all the aspects of the story that is being told.
Taylow Swift has a target audience of tweens and teenagers i would say form about 10 - 17 years old mainly girls because they can relate to her songs and understand what she is going through.