Thursday 17 February 2011

Evaluation-Question Four

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

Research:
New media technology helped me considerably on gaining information contributed greatly to how I was able to gain information. One way was thought the Internet, as i researched music videos i able to use YouTube and other video sights to watch a verity of videos to help plan for my own. As YouTube has a wide range of videos it was easy to find the codes and conventions especially 'indie' style videos. I was also able to use google to research, music video directors, companies and was able to find a lot of helpful and reliable websites. This is much quicker and easier than, say, using the library as technology is used a great deal in music and creating such amazing videos so to gain knowledge on such thins one would have to use the Internet rather than search thousand of books, which is time consuming. Also i have an I-Phone 4 which allows me to research as i can connect to the Internet or down load helpful apps, and blog while on the go rather than waiting till i get home or school.

Planning: Video editing software, I-Movie helped to turn the storyboard i made into an animatic so that we could all see our music video coming together, in animac form. This helped make decisions about whether the clips worked well or needed to be improved. I found this more useful and helpful than a normal storyboard as seeing the clips move from one to the other gave me a greater understanding of how the clips would play out. Again good old Internet also helped as we would regularly go on facebook  to keep all of the team members in close contact for planning shoots and when and where for meet-ups as well as mobile phones. Music technology contributed to the planning stage as I was able to listen to the song, envision the video with how i wanted to see it without watching the actual video via. a site such as YouTube and being influenced as this needed to be an original idea thought up by us as a team. Other Social networking site Twitter was used to set up an account for the band, as i said before to make the band assessable to there fans and i guess it makes them more real.

Construction:In the construction stage of the project, again i used the Internet in order to obtain photographs of settings/locations as this was important. Google was amazing source as it provides a wide range of photographs with ins seconds, we were able to find photographs which looked exactly right for our Mood board. I mentioned it before but Photo editing software, Photoshop. I used this when making my digi packs and poster, editing and cropping, changing colours, adding fonts, all hard at first but very easy to get into and very useful to use.
Again Music technology was used as during filming we needed to make sure the lip syncing was spot on and to ensure this we used an I-pod and dock so the lead singer and band new where they were with the song. We used another Video editing software, Final Cut Pro, which i said before. This was used to edit the clips for our music video and place them where we thought was suitable, Final Cut Pro is much more complicated than other editor software's, therefore making it a little more difficult at first but making the video look more professional also.

Wednesday 16 February 2011

Evaluation-Question Three

What have you learned from our audience feedback?

As Feedback is vital! we posted our video on some social networking sights, to ensure some comments about our music video. It was nice reading what other people thought and everyone seemed to enjoy our video and didn't find it dull or boring half way through, which was our main gaol. But ofcorse with every positive comments you will always get some negatives thrown in there, but as long as its constructive criticism, i am pleased. Firstly we got told to re shoot the entire performance shots we filmed in the Pub, as our teacher thought this was dull and you will loose interest in the audience, this was upsetting to hear but also a good thing as we were still in the editing stage and we knew it wouldn't take long. this is when I then thought of the idea to incorporate Guitar Hero into the performance shots, as i said before its a young peoples game and the audience will be able to relate. 
Another thing that came about from the audience feedback was the lighting in our performance shots, someone said they looked a bit bland and making the setting dull, so the band were shinning out, unfortunately this problem could not be altered on the editing software we were using, final cut pro, as it was a fault when we were filming and we should of noticed this at that time. 
We the did a showing of our video to a small group of people and asked them to write down there thoughts, Majority commented on the quick cut shots at the start of the guitar solo, which i was pleased about and a few said it gave the video some pace and also kept the audience on there feet. This was really good news as that's what we were aiming to do and by the look of things we achieved it. 
Another thing we got from audience feedback was the performance shots needed to be embedded a bit more with full band and it was this that made us re-work the guitar solo portion of the video and we worked in more individual band member shots, this wasn't a problem and easy to to do. 
The feedback was all round good and everyone seemed entertained, and if i was to to do it again i would be careful about lighting the band and the setting as that was our major fault.

Evaluation-Question Two

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

As part of the course you are required to make a digipack and poster, i knew straight away i wanted it to contain the same amount of fun that the video has, although the Pub was disappointment, we took some amazing pictures that really capture the band being them self and having a laugh, and will work very well in creating a sense of fun within the CD cover and poster. I decided to use the same picture for the poster and Cd cover and also the same font through out both as it makes them relate better with each other. I decided to make the font look young and a liike childish but still cool, so i chose light eye catching colours  for both CD and Poster, so if they were to be sold in a shop or on a bill bored somewhere you would notice it, and a font that looks like a teenagers boy hand writing, as there boys who are laid back and from a school, i feel this worked well with the band image. The poster is a lot larger then the CD but i still wanted to use the same image as the front cover so i did, i also made it black and white and edited the back ground so its just white on photo shop. Using photo shop was difficult at first but once i got the hang of it, i really enjoyed using it.  

On the back of the CD cover i thought it would be a good idea to have the Twitter and Facebook logos at the bottom to show that the audience can follow and be friends with the band making there more interactive and that much closer to there fans and finally I displayed our record label, Rough Trade and the bar code because this is what real CD covers consist of.

so by having advertisement and giving the band Twitter and Facebook accounts it will be easier to promote the band, and as the video is like a home movie i believe the audience will be able to engage in the band with great ease.

Evaluation-Question one

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


Before we started researching or was giving a brief, we as a group knew what type of music video we wanted to do. this was a typical "indie" style music video, full of fun immature laughs with a young group of friends, and when we were given our briefs, the obvious choice would be the band 'Tonic' and the song that jumped out at us the most was Alright by Supergrass. 


So straight away i started researching the conventions of an "indie" music video, well i actually started looking at dance music videos made by young artists, Kesha was the first to spring to mind, as she uses comical and familiar settings, and a lot of young people having fun. Then i begun to look at typical indie bands to help finalise what had to be in our video and what we wanted. i noticed while researching that the video is mainly focused on the band and that they are always having fun, goofing around being young and reckless.


our band were originally called "Tonic", but ofcorse this just wasn't right and as a group we  decided on a new name. For ideas we checked out the brief as this tells us what the band enjoy and what there dislikes and likes are, In the brief I noticed it said the band had met in school, as i said that to the others, Gemma thought of a catchy name "Two Mile Radius". I loved it and so did molly, it works because normally to attend a school you need to live withing a Two Mile Radius and i thought this would suit the band very well.  As we began planning the video we decided we wanted to document the band having fun, as i said previously that's what most 'Indie' music videos consist of, and as they are teenagers, who love alcohol and having fun, we felt this would be the kind of video they would release.
We wanted to film a house party, as they are lots of fun and has been successfully in other, but also a cafe scene where there eating and discussing the party, so its like the morning after. But like most plans this wasn't working so we decided to rethink. 

so after some re thinking we thought we could film in a pub, showing they're a home grown British band, and pubs are still fun and atmospheric. So me and Gemma went looking for a pub to film in, and we found one with nice owners and were very kind about us using it for free. After we looked at the pub scenes on the computer it soon became apparent that the video would look dull with just these shots. so we all went back and did some more research to see what we could do to improve our video, it become clearer that we needed some fun band shots, just of the band having a laugh and being them self's, similar to the Mcfly video for their single Star Girl, its shot like a home movie. 

Unfortunately i was busy the day gemma wanted to film, but to make things easier she offered to film on her own, with out me or molly. i trusted gemma to get good shots and wasn't surprised to come back find some excellent footage. We made it clear we wanted these shots to look as natural as possible, even though the angles where set up for the shots, Gemma asked the band what we wanted them to do, and i feel they really listened and gave us more then we asked for, and really made a good impact on the video and i was very happy with it and i was getting really excited to edit the video. As the home footage shots were so good we decided to re shoot the performance shots but this time in one of our houses and to keep it young and fun we decided we wanted the to perform with Guitar Hero instruments a popular game with you audience. As these shots were filmed we worked with a variety of shots again to give it a more authentic feel. So when we got round to editing we as a group made sure it was fun, fast pace video, to ensure the audience will appreciate it and it makes it more exciting to watch. We also included a photo montage, which is different photos played one after each other. we did this during part of the guitar solo and i really think it works well, and to keep the audience interested we sped up parts of the band playing the guitar, again making sure the audience were not getting bored.

Sunday 30 January 2011

Poster Finished!!




This is my poster, complete! 
I chose to make it black and white as it looks more professional and i like the contrast of the red writing with the black and white poster. 
these are also the most used advertising colors.

Digi-Pack Done


I finally finished my digi pack! it took a while to use the photoshop on the macs but after a few tries i managed to edit it and then change it into a Jpeg and upload it.
I chose these pictures because i thought they captured the band in there element and really shows the happy free spirited band they are. 
the guitar hero image was chosen because we used it in the video, also its a young, cool game and would help promote them as a cool young band.
i have also added a Facebook and Twitter icon, telling the audience how to get in contact with the band and makes the band more real.

Wednesday 19 January 2011

Audience Feed Back

The Band:

Micah: "It all looks good and flows really well. The only two bits that I think lack a bit are the verse with the "hit a wall" line there's too much of just Sean's mouth, and at the beginning of the solo feel the shots from full band to full band make it seem abit jumpy whereas adding a singular member shots in between would make it follow better because at the moment you do that halfway through the solo however both of these points are minor because the whole video itself is brilliant."

ABR: " I think it looks amazing, like its really good the one thing I think would be good is to maybe have some shots of the guitar hero screens just so we can see that we were meant to be playing guitar hero. However this is only something minuscule because it doesn't ruin the music video by it not being there. I think it flows really nicely and I can see the message your trying to convey about the band. Nice use of close ups too :) so glad I could be apart of it.


Jonny: Awesome. I think the guitar hero rather than real instruments video was a good choice. I love micah doing his weird spasm at the 1:00 mark. I watched it like 4 times. I think that it needed a few more individual people shots as well because it occasionally lingers a bit long on the full band shots and so you can see flaws. I also love the pics of us at the end. Can you facebook them? they are good pic


Others:

Charlotte:  REALLY love close ups of sean's mouth, they look really good, and the slight to one-sidedness of the shot. the film is really well synced except for one point and the general theme i.e. the band messing about is well presented. at some points however the film seems a bit unprofessional i.e. more like home video than music video. the photos seem a bit abrupt and the solo section could've used more shots of just one person i.e. accentuating the solo. 
OTHERWISE, love it.


Miss Beere: The song goes very well with with the image and the story of the video. It was excellent. The photo montage was impressive, I really enjoyed watching it.

Mrs Moore: Mise-en scene/ natural verisimilitude/ organic feel of the performance. A few cuts need to be tightened-up shame about the lighting of of the band a bit flat but you may be able to improve that on Final Cut.