Evaluation

In What Way Does Your Media Product Use, Develop or Challenge Forms and Conventions of Real Media Products?
In a vast number of rock/metal music videos, the image that is portrayed is normally based around the band. In many videos that i have recently studied all have the same form of convention, which is to focus mainly on the band on the band, and as the song progresses, so does the storyline to it. Many of the characters that are in rock/metal music videos are shown as powerful, aggressive and loud. This is exactly what we wanted to do with our music video. Some of the examples of the characters being presented as powerful, aggressive and loud is through the number of different camera angles and shots that they use. Many of the camera shots they use are panning and tracking shots. These are used to focus on the main target or image. In my music video we used this convention in order to get numerous shots of the band as well as of the main character in the storyline. In many rock/metal music videos the backgrounds and the outfits are usually dark which gives the audience the metal feeling and/or vibe. This is what we wanted for our music video but, instead of using this convention, we challenged it by altering between a bright background, to a dark background, giving the mise en scene to the video a slight balance of bright and dark which can also be interpreted as good and evil. However, many videos don’t focus much on the physical appearance of the artist as a pop video would. Instead, the video focuses more on their instrumental abilities which gives the audience the vibe of hard, fast and loud aggressiveness when the camera is focused on a guitar solo or heavy drumming, which again is what we used in our music video by showing in many cases, shots where they were purely focussing on the guitar solo or the drumming. Another very important point that rock/metal music videos focus mainly on is the storyline and the actual meaning of the song. As many rock/metal songs have strong and powerful meanings, as well as powerful instrumentals, most of the time the video tells the audience the story of the song through the actual video. Sometimes this is shown more than the actual band /artist playing the song. However, this convention we used but developed a new convention that hadn’t been done very often. We developed the convention of cross media by including a separate part of the storyline which then leaded on to the main video. In our music video we started of with someone of the computer watching a music video, the character is unimpressed with what they are seeing and decides to comment on the video by leaving an insulting remark. He then falls asleep and at this point we take the audience into the characters dream of him being chased by the band. From the use of cross media, we are challenging the convention but, we are also developing a new one but also creating suspense and excitement for the audience as they get brought into a dream where we see the band playing. At the end of the video the character wakes up and finds that he has received a comment back which is from the band. This convention that we used showed two different universes, one which is reality, and one which is dream but, at the same time we see the use of media cross from the computer, onto the actual music video.
Many techniques that rock/metal videos use is the drop and crash of beats which when occur, we see a sudden burst or explosion in the video. An example of this would be in our music video when in the intro, after the drummer flicks his drum sticks and slams them on the cymbals, we see a sudden change in location, story and time which is often used to bring the audience into a new time span, a new location or even to bring them into the actual story. These drops and crashes in the beats suggest the band in the video as well as the song that they have “Broken out, exploded and irrupted”. Conventions like these can be easily related to amongst the audience as they can say whether they are anger or if they are upset. Another convention that can relate the audience to this is again through the dark backgrounds and the dark clothing. In our music video we used the common yet effective convention by wearing the dark clothes with the chains and ripped jeans and sleeveless shirts and by having the band play in a dark and dingy garage which again will give the audience the impression that the song might have a negative meaning or storyline.
A very important convention that is used in metal videos is the physical appearance of the band. Their outfits and clothes are aggressive looking and sometimes “Scary” due to the tattoos and metal chains they have, but most importantly, their hair and facial looks. When singing, some of the lyrics may be grunts or screams and a lot of emotions are put into this. We used this in our music video by including the lead singer put much emphases into the vocals. Another convention was the hair. We took the convention of having 80’s rocker hair and used them in our music video by buying the appropriate wigs. The lead vocalist also grew a beard in order to complete the convention. As the song was called “I Disappear” we took much time and effort in making the storyline obvious that the main character was trying to disappear and that he suffered while doing it.
Many of the camera shots and angles we used we took the conventions from were low angles to show the importance’s of the image, tracking and panning, long shots, medium close ups, zoom shots and high angle shots. In the majority of the music video we used many conventions form real media music videos however, one of our only shots and scenes that we truly challenged the convention was as i mentioned before, the cross media scene where the audience gets brought into a dream. This for us we thought was very unique as we hadn’t seen it very often in existing rock/metal music videos. We thought we would give the audience a bit of excitement by giving them a journey in the music video.

How Effective Is The Combination of Your Main Product and Ancillary Texts?
In order to promote our music video, we produced a CD promo pack which consisted of a front cover, back cover and insert cover and two magazine adverts in order to promote and launch the music video. For the promo pack we decided to keep a similar theme but, we went with a more dark and fearful theme for the promo pack. One of the reasons why we did this was so the audience could identify the two aspects of the band I general, but also the music video itself. We chose to go with a complex front and back cover so we could show how the band and video in whole reflects onto the audience. As we used various affects in the music video, we thought adding artwork onto the front cover would give the video more of an understanding of its complexity. On the CD covers and adverts, we created the text to be “Aggressive” and “Loud” by making it either “worn out” or “in your face”. We did this also because we thought the text would go well with the album title, the band name and the picture and artwork that we used.
The adverts that we made varied. We made one that was simple but mysterious and the other one obvious and to the point. We chose this method of doing two adverts because we wanted one of them to give the audience the impression that the album was “Fearful” as it was in coherence with the album title. We kept this one simple but at the same time, gave the audience a sense of confusion and stability at the same time about the album. The second advert we created was related to the actual music video itself. We did this because we wanted this advert to be obvious to the audience, and also to remind them about the music video. However, what we did differently in bother adverts was in the obvious advert, we added a magazine rating that showed the quality of the song and album but, we also mentioned that the album included the “Hit single” which was the music video so again we are reminding the audience about the song and music video. In the second advert we kept the theme simple but the text that we included was a release date and I small annotation which related back to the album name and music video. In bother adverts we included a small picture of the front cover showing that the front cover is the album which again we are reminding the audience who the band is and what the album title is.

What Have You Learned From Your Audience Feedback?
After showing our audience our music video and CD promo Pack, we gathered a lot of information from them and how they felt towards our media product. After showing them our music video, we learned that many of the camera angles that we used were very professional but at the same time difficult. The reasons for this were due to its uniqueness and timing between scenes. We also leant that people enjoyed our music video because it looked good due to the mise en scene that we had created for example the clothing, the appearance, the song and the locations. The audience liked the fact that we used the actual music video as a dream sequence and thought it was very creative. For this reason this set off a good vibe for our video and again the audience thought that due to the way we edited the video and added affects, it looked professional and ideal for the theme of the actual video. We also got many comments and remarks about the meaning of the actual song and how well we made the storyline fit in with the song meaning. Overall we received many positive comments about our music video and how we constructed it all together. We received many positive comments about the accuracy and timing of the scenes of the band playing. However, the main comment that we received was some of the camera tricks that we did and some of the tricks that we did in the scenes for example the drum stick trick in the intro of the music video, at the guitar solo etc. Many of our audience enjoyed watching our music video and wanted to use some of the conventions that we used for their own music video. Our choices of characters were most suitable for our music video as the audience had said that the characters were suitable for the video sue to our passion and enjoyment of rock/metal. We were told that in the music video, the characters emphases and enthusiasm in playing the instruments were very realistic and very convincing and looked as if we were actually playing the instruments. However, one comment that we did receive about the music video was about the storyline. We were told that even though the story was easy to follow, some of the scenes on the storyline seemed a bit random and could have had a bit more sense to what it was, why it was there and why it was there. However, overall, the audience had given us positive feedback and we were happy to take. The last thing we learned from this was that in the music video was that the audience wanted a slight bit more understanding in some of the scenes. We know this for the future.

How Did You Use Media technologies In the Construction and Research, Planning and Evaluation Stage?
Throughout this whole project, there was a wide range of technology that was used in order to construct, research, plan and evaluate my project. The first use of technology to construct my media project was a filming camera that allowed us to film all the footage and take our pictures for the CD promo pack. We used for the vast majority of the researching was the use of the internet. We used the internet in order to present our project on our blogs. This was to keep record of all our work and to show our work. However, the internet was also used to research different CD albums, Different music videos, different songs and different methods of filming and constructing. Many websites that I used in this stage was Google and Youtube. Youtube was a huge help to me as it allowed me to view the different types of music videos and gave me an insight on what type of music video I should do in order to go with the storyline. The research through this was done in order to get a rough idea on what to do for the music video that we made. Google images were used largely in order to find all the different types of CD albums to base ours on. Other technology that we used In order to construct and plan was Sony Vegas 10 on computer. This was the key element for us to edit our music video. This is where we spent the majority of our time editing and constructing. If it weren’t for the program, we would have had to use premier plus on the Macs which we would have struggled to construct the video as we were all unfamiliar with the controls and settings of the program. Another very important use of technology that we used was Photoshop. This was the key element in constructing the promo pack which included the front cover, the back cover, the insert cover, the CD spine and the two magazine posters that we created. This programme helped us created these pieces and also helped us with the research as well. We experimented with some of the settings in order for us to find out which setting would fit best, which affect would go better and which setting would be most suitable. However, throughout the whole project we used existing media such as real music videos, real songs and real CD’s in order for us to create our own. We used many conventions from these existing pieces of media and challenged them in many cases in order to get the best possible version of our own idea. However, In order to upload all of our products onto our blogs I first had to convert the pictures into JPEGS in order for me to upload it. The video was more difficult to upload. I first had to create a youtube account and upload the video to youtube. I then had to take the HTML code and embed the code onto my blog. After this was done my blog was complete.

Music Video "I Disappear"

Magazine Adverts

Compared to the CD promo pack, we used completely different pictures. On the CD cover we focused more on the band. On the magazine Adverts we focused on different areas. We focused more on the actually meaning of the Album title rather than the band. On the first advert (Top) we mentioned and stated the band name, the album name and the "Hit single". We did this because as our music video and song was "I Disappear" we decided to use a picture that helps relates back to the actual song and video rather than back to the artists. To do this, we made the main character fading to help emphasize and remind the audience the music video and song. We thought this idea of the advert was good as it contained for once a bright background and it gave off a friendly vibe as to say that the song and music video was good and that the band isn't all the time "dark, depressing and aggressive" like most rock/metal songs and music videos are. We mentioned a release date for the album along with a 5 star rating quoted from a real metal magazine called "Metal Hammer". the background we chose was a location that we used in the music video which again is to bring us back to the video.
The second advert (Bottom) we used was a very dark, aggressive and typical metal theme. We took a picture of a my back as i have a tattoo which we thought would look good as a type of "Emblem" for the band. The colours we used in this advert was black and grey to give off the metal vibe. We also decided that on this advert we kept it simple and to the point but at the same time, keep it a sort of mystery due to the simpleness of it. We included the text: "The end is near" as again it related to the album title "Lightning Fear". We wanted to emphasise the album in different ways and so we came up with the two ideas that are our magazine adverts. In both adverts we displayed in the bottom right corner the album front cover to again promote the album. The main reason why we came up with two ideas for adverts was because we created the first one (Top) for normal music magazines as it was calm and friendly, and we created the second one (Bottom) for specific metal magazines such as Metal Hammer and Kerang because of its dark colours and aggressive and morbid vibe. We didnt want to use pictures of the band as we thought we had used them to many times on the CD and decided to have a variation.

CD Promo Pack

This is our finished CD Promo pack. we included front and back cover along side with an insert cover inside the CD. As you can see we also included the spine of the CD that we decided to add some artwork on. When looking at other CD albums from the rock/metal genre, we noticed that alot of them had artwork, pictures of the band but most importantly, some were quite complex and so we decided to have this for our own CD promo pack.



Here is the front cover. Much like the back cover, we went with the dark background but, whilst studying different album covers, we noticed alot of rock/metal album covers were either artwork, or pictures of the band. For this reason, we decided to challenge the convention and use both for our front cover. We went with black stormy sky with lightning as it was in coherence with the album name which was "Lightning Fear". We liked the idea and chose it. The picture we chose was of only two band members. We chose this picture because the guitarist was looking back as to say he was looking behind him at the stormy, lightning filled sky and the drummer appears to be stunned and "Confused" with what is going on which again relates back to the album name. We thought as well that the picture itself was "Confusion" and gave the CD cover more of a "Metal" feel to it. In the bottom left corner we put a little sign that says "Parental advisory" as to say that the CD contained explicit lyrics which is very common with rock/metal CD's.



This is the back cover of the CD. We went again with the idea of having the band in mid-shot of them playing the instruments as this again emphasized the professional and realists manner of the CD. We went with the dark background to give off the "Metal" look and vibe. We put on the back of the CD a bar code as well as statutory rights and a record labeling company to make the CD look professional and realistic. We wanted the back cover to look complex with the picture and the song titles however, we kept the cover nice and neat so the writing could be read, and the picture could be see.



This is the insert cover of my groups CD promo pack. We decided to go with a basic "Metal" background as we didnt want to use any imagas as we have already done that for the front and back cover and we wanted a variation of themes. We chose the idea of having the band members present with their names and job roles in the band to show who they were and what they contributed to the band and overal, to the CD. We kept to the dark background due to the "Metal" look and after researching CD albums, we found that our idea of having the band members present was done before but, most commonly on rock/metal CD albums. So we took the convention and went with this. We chose pictures of the band members playing to give it more of a realistic and proffesional manner.

Re-Shoot/Re-Edit

During the duration of our filming, we filmed all the scenes and pieces of the music video to fit the sections of the song. After we had filmed everything on our first day of filming, we went over it all and looked back at it and started the editing process. We noticed we needed more footage of the garage scene and therefore we had to go back and film more footage of the garage scenes. We started filming on 16th October and had to return to the garage and film more garage footage on the 19th.
After we had all the garage scenes and enough footage, we then went on to filming the storyline scenes in the woods on the 27th October. We then started filming on the 29th October the junk yard scenes of the band playing. Fortunate for use, we filmed a lot of footage there and we didn’t have to go back and film more footage there.
At this point we were editing our video and we were putting it all in place and all together. We thought we had enough footage of everything but then realised we needed to fit in some big gaps of the storyline scenes in the woods. We looked back at all the scenes we had and realised that we didn’t have any footage of Joseph in the storyline scenes and decided that in order for us to complete our music video; we had had to go back and re shoot some footage of us in the storyline scenes. We then returned to the woods on the 6th November to re-shoot the remaining scenes that we needed for the storyline scenes. These scenes included the group chasing Craig and extra scenes of Joseph. After we had the extra scenes we went back to editing the video and we had finally had all the required scenes and we had filled in al the time gaps in the video. We then had to edit all the scenes in but, as we had new storyline scenes, we had to take some of the old scenes out, and replace them with new scenes as they were more suitable and more efficient.

After we had finished editing the video we came up with some ideas and decided to make some alterations. We first decided that we wanted an extended start and finish to the music video and came up with the idea of having Craig on the computer falling asleep and then entering a dream sequence. We then had to film the scenes of Craig on the computer and so we did this on the 19th November at our school. After we had done these scenes we then edited them in to the video and we were satisfied with the result of the music video. We then finally went over and did some last minute editing by adding in affects such as the blur tool and cross fade in between scenes.

After we had finished we then noticed one scene where it was just before the ending of the video of Craig. We noticed that it didn’t go well with the video and we had to change it. So we had to go back to the woods to re-shoot that last scene on the 26th November. We filmed the last shot and went back to edit it into the video. After finishing editing in the last shot we looked over the video one last time to make sure that everything was in place and we then noticed that three scenes were slightly out of time and so our final bit of editing was to rectify the timing problem. Once we finished that we were finally finished with the music video and everything was in place.