Lukes media evaluation

For our project we had to create a music video, a CD album booklet and a CD album magazine advert for the independent signed ban we choose to work with, "Torrents". I worked alongside two of my class mates Becky Livesey and Amy Grogan. Together we all contributed to the project by shooting the footage of the video and taking photographs for the ancillary tasks. We uses Photoshop and In Design to create a CD album and used Final Cut Express to edit our footage. We also researched our chosen genre and updated our coursework progression which we all contributed on to our blog. I contributed mostly with capturing and editing the images we used for out CD album and updating this departments progressive on the blog. By using demographic profiling we targeted the audience of 16-25 year olds both male and female. This is due to the fact that "Torrents" being an indie band give connotations of being young, rebellious and care free. The band itself appeal widely to a British audience, especially young people, as the song talks about a night out and wanting to always be young. Also the bands logo consists of the Union Jack which shows the bands nationalism. As mentioned the bands social economic group is likely to be E meaning it appeals to students who can relate to the song as well as group D as it appeals to the working class.

For our music video we decided to follow the conventions of the popular, alternative genre, indie. The indie genre itself is becoming more and more popular despite the fact that indie does not follow the conventions of the mainstream genre. The genre promotes the need of all teenagers, to be able to go out, drinking, smoking etc. and enjoy themselves and their music. The general view of the indie stereotype is of one of fashion such as jeans, trainers and shirt and represent being young and rebellious. As seen below.

Music videos are generally aimed at a teenage audience, so the narrative of the videos tend to tell a story which usually involves controversy so to appeal to a wider audience, especially when it comes to indie genre videos. We decided to make out video similar to this and offered alternative taboo subject matters so to more widely appeal to our teenage audience.

The two most influential videos we watched were that of Black Eyed Peas “I Gotta Feeling” and The Prodigy “Smack My Bitch Up”. Both videos were about a night out offering alternative conventions and taboo subject matters and we decided to use the night out idea in our video. The point of view shot used in the video Smack My Bitch Up was very interesting offering alternative conventions to the typical music video genre. We decided to use this in our video.

Picture 1: This picture represents the alternative connotations achieved by Black Eyed Peas video “I Gotta Feeling” the use of different colours and the setting of a night out, shows how Black Eyed Peas used alternative, taboo subject matters to appeal to their audience. We also used this idea to achieve the same purpose.

Picture 2: This picture of the main character in the Arctic Monkeys video “When The Sun Goes Down” shows how props and location are used to stereotype a character as much as possible so the audience are informed clearly of the storyline. In this case a homeless girl who is treated badly by a successful man. We used the same idea in our video when trying to demonstrate the “bad girl, good girl”” stereotype with our usage of props and costume. We also choose a controversial setting, a night out, in order to portray the bands rebellious image.

Picture 3: Is an image of the point of view shot used in the Smack My Bitch Up music video which we used in our video. We decided to take the perspectives of the bad girl and the good girl when filming out night out storyline.

Picture 4: This screen shot of an image from the music video Smack My Bitch Up shows how the usage of dark/dull lighting helps add to the representation of the indie genre as being original and individual. Which we also incorporated into our music video.

 

Picture 5: This is also an image of a character taking drugs in the video Smack My Bitch Up which shows the alternative conventions used in the video, in this case taboo subject matters. We also used taboo props in our video such as smoking and drinking showing our videos alternative conventions. These kinds of scenes are used to attract the audience the video is aimed at.

Picture 1: Shows how we developed freeze frames of our clip to create the effect of the two girls taking pictures before their night out. Furthermore we used the greyscale, posterize and sepia effect in Imovie to make it look as the pictures were being taken on an actual camera. This could be seen as challenging the typical conventions of the music video as still images are rarely used in music videos.

Picture 2: Shows our use of split screen in our music video to show the perspectives of the good and bad girl. This could also be seen as challenging the conventions of a typical music video as two different stories happening at the same time is rarely used as it can be difficult to understand, however we made this as clear as possible and did not use this method throughout so not to confuse the audience.

Picture 3: Shows out first person point of view shot which we used throughout our video. This was mainly inspired from the video “Smack My Bitch Up” which challenges the conventions of typical music videos as they are usually concentrated on the band singing, whereas by using this method it showed out band to individual and different.

Picture 4: Highlights out use of taboo subject matters, in this case smoking, cohering with Andrew Goodwins ideology of “Voyeurism”, introducing controversial mise en scene.

Picture 5: Shows the stereotype of the “bad girl” dancing, causing a scene and trying to capture the attention of everyone in the club.

Picture 6: Shows the stereotype of young people getting drunk, having a good time but generally causing trouble and inconvenience to others.

Picture 7: Shows the perspective of the “good girl” when offered a cigarette coughs, also offering alternative conventions as teenagers are generally seen as rebels who are into drugs and smoking etc.

Picture 8: the “dazzle effect” at the end of our music video is used to show how the teenagers night had come to an end in a blur of drunkenness. Also helping to cohere with the stereotype of young teenagers getting so drunk they can’t remember their night out.

For our ancillary tasks we created a diggi pack for a CD album. We decided to concentrate on the brand image of our band as being young and rebellious.

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Picture 1: This picture illustrates how the Libertines incorporated their patriotic brand image into their CD album along with the help of typical indie clothing. We also decided to use our patriotic brand image within out album cover.

Picture 2: Oasis shows how they followed the typical conventions of a CD album by showing a picture of the band. We also decided to use an image of our band which also follows the conventions of our chosen genre.

Picture 3: Illustrated how Arctic Monkeys have incorporated taboo subject matters in their CD album in this case cigarettes. We also used a similar idea as these taboo subject matters appeal to our genres target audience.

Picture 4: Shows how Hadouken have used a unique and unusual font to represent the individuality of their band. This influenced in choosing the font for our album cover which would also be different and unique in order to represent our bands uniqueness.

Above are the final covers for our Album.

Picture 1: This is the Front cover of our album, as you can see we have incorporated our bands logo, the Union Jack, which helps our band be recognised by its audience. “repetition and recognition leads to expectation and anticipation” (G.Burton 2000), meaning that the band are able to relate with our band through the image that they portray. In order to highlight our patriotic image further we grey scaled the image and used the brush tool to fill in the reds of the Union Jack, bacon etc, In order to highlight these patriotic colours.

Picture 2: Shows how we used taboo subject matters to appeal to our target audience, which went against the typical conventions of CD album covers. The use of the cigarette shows the bands brand image of rebellion and controversy. We also grey scaled this image leaving only the patriotic colour of blue once again. By using the smoke brush tool we were able to amplify the smoke from the cigarette. By sticking to this brand image of being rebellious we were able to entice our audience further, as Naomi Klein said “no logo states, corporations may manufacture the products, but what consumers buy are brands”.

Picture 3: Is a picture of the lyrics of our song. By using the posterize effect along with the chrome effect we were able to create an image which looked like the lyrics had been jotted down in note form, which added to the unique, quirky look of our band.

Picture 4: On the back page of our album we used an image to incorporate our bands songs. We used the colours red and blue alternatively to illustrate our patriotic brand image along with the image of the beer bottle to demonstrate the typical stereotype of young teenagers being rebellious which we used throughout out product.

However our music video does follow some of the characteristics of typical music video, suggested by Andrew Goodwin in “Dancing To Distraction” (2003) There is a relationship between the lyrics and the visuals, with the lyrics, which are about being young and having fun and being illustrated in our video which is about a night out. The lyrics of the song talk about being 21 and still feeling like they are 16. Our music video portrays this feeling throughout as a group of teenagers are out on a night out, drinking and smoking. It was vital to use typical conventions in our video so that the audience are able to relate to the video, particularly young people, which our video was mainly aimed at.




What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Target Audience: By using demographic profiling we found our genre would appeal to both male and females between the age of 16 and 25 meaning it appeals to the scio-economic groups D and E meaning young people and the working class. The band is able to relate to this age group as the band members themselves are young and rebellious and are able to relate with the audience through their lyrics. Also by using psychographic profiling along with Young and Rubican’s characteristics, the band appeals to this young ”individual” socio-economic group as the “Torrents” brand image is different and individual.

I believe the target audience we choose is perfect as it is a large niche consuming audience which is growing in popularity and is the largest consumer of music. The indie genre is very popular with various types of sub genres such as electro indie. This audience, being the larger consumer of music, is most likely to relate to our video as the music appeals to them particularly. We maintained a brand image throughout in order to maintain out appeal to this audience particularly. They are the right audience for our music financially as independent labels run on small budgets so are able to gain maximum profit from their sales.

In order to gather audience feedback the whole class made questionnaires and we watched each groups final product, filling in their questionnaire. The class was then recorded as they answered the questions giving compliments on the videos and constructive criticism. On receiving our questionnaires from the class we were able to identify the positive and negatives of out video. To our success our alternative use of the “split screen” proved 100% popular with the audience, who all agreed the technique worked well and was a interesting narrative.

We did have some constructive criticism about our video, commenting and the dark use of lighting at the start of the sequence, which could have been improved on.

To attract our target audience we edited our footage, so that we used short fast paced clips in order to keep the attention of our audience, but made them long enough so that the audience could establish their understand of the sequence. We used the bar/gig setting well in order to relate to our audience and therefore create a relationship with their values and the video.

I believe that upon reading our audience feedback, that we gained a very positive response from them. I learnt that in order to relate to a target audience you have to follow the conventions of that genre, in our case indie, as much as possible if you want their attention. By choosing a relatable scenario, with a night out, we were able to appeal to a young person’s values and hobbies etc. However if the sequence was slow and for example, about a game of hockey, this target audience would not watch it as it would have no appeal to them.

Media Presentation

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4. Use of creative technologies.

Final Cut Express

This software was new to us at the beginning of the year and in order to learn how to use it we did a small tutorial, i believe that without we would not have been able to create i final product. I believe it has allowed me to develop skills in which we could use in developing our video, with many different tools which we were able to use in our final product, giving us plenty of ideas when it came to making our video. Although on first appearance, this software appeared to be complex, but after a bit of playing and experimenting, it proved much more simple than first thought. It was straight forward when uploading our music and our footage on to this software, with all the tools clearly labelled. We did encounter some problems when using this software, for example when completing the draft of our video we were unable to re-arrange our shots to where we wanted them, but soon discovered that we had not used the ripple delete. Also when creating the split screen effect, after using the scale tool and saving our work, in our next lesson the size of our original images had altered so we had to delete these edited shots and re do them on to the timeline. Apart from these minor problems, the split screen worked well and was successful in achieving our original idea.

For our ancillary tasks we used Photoshop and InDesign and although i had used this software last year my skills with these two programmes were not great. Being able to use this software this year has allowed me to enhance my skills when it comes to editing photos and inserting text on to them. These two programmes allowed us to make our ancillary tasks as authentic as possible and offered a variety of different tools which contributed to our ancillary tasks. When editing out photos i used a mac laptop, which was a new piece of technology to me, however without it we would not have been able to develop our CD album and magazine advert. The laptop itself was fairly straight forward to use but at times frustrating as i found it difficult to get to grips with the mouse pad, which i eventually replaced with a standard mouse. When capturing our images we used samsung cameras which were available to use in the department as well as DV cameras which we used to capture our footage, which was also available to us in the media department. These two pieces of equipment were very straight forward to use and we encountered no problems with this equipment.

We also used the website, dafont.com when finding a font to use in our ancillary tasks, this website was great, clearly laid out and easy to use. The website offered a variety of different fonts instead of using the ones available on the computer, we eventually found the perfect font four our ancillary tasks on this website.

In order to keep track of our progress we uploaded posts on to our blog on blogger.com, this was a great way in updating the progress of our task. It allowed the members of our group to express their opinions and show our research towards our tasks. We uploaded pictures and videos to show our planning and research. The site itself was straightforward to use, however at times uploading images and videos to our blog could take a long time which was frustrating at times. However apart from that, blogger was easy and straightforward to use.

On completion of our final video, we uploaded it to the website, youtube, in order to gain feedback on our final product. This process was simple and all we had to do was save the video and upload it straight to the site. We did encounter a few problems in uploading the video, which failed on a number of occasions, but eventually it worked.

I believe that all the software we used played a key part in making our product unique and individual. I discovered that i had learned much more of how to use this software and i feel my skills have dramatically developed from last year.









CONCLUSION



Overall i think our final product proved a huge success, we stuck to our plans in creating an indie genre music video, which appealed to a young audience. We used the split screen well in creating the “bad girl” “good girl” storyline and by choosing a real club for our setting created the authentic indie look to our video. We used our brand image of being young and rebellious throughout our ancillary tasks and music video. Our audience feedback showed that the video itself was a success to our target audience. There are some things we could have improved on such as making the sequence even more fast paced and making the “good girl” “bad girl” stereotype more clear, however most of the audience understood what our video was about. I really enjoyed creating the music video and couldn’t have choose a better group of people to do it with, we all worked together and contributed ideas which were used in the video and most of all we worked as a team. I feel i contributed well to the product and have enhance my skills well from last year. Upon watching the video i am proud in knowing a lot of hard work and effort paid off well.

Final Music Video

Planning for CD Album

Above are the plans for our CD Album, we have come up with a number of different ideas which incorporate, not only images of the band but images that represent the "brand image"of the band. Th idea of the english breakfast and the cigarette we believed would best connote the "British" lifestyle as well as the indie image of being young and reckless. a main influence for the image of the band crossing the road came from Oasis's album "Definitely Maybe" Luke.

Evaluation- Amy

Introduction
For our project we created a music video, a CD album booklet and a CD album magazine advert for an independent band called the ‘Torrents’. I worked with two other pupils; Beckie Livesey and Luke Shufflebottom. As a group we all contributed to the coursework and helped to capture footage and photographs for our ancillary tasks, edit photos on Photoshop and In Design to create a CD album booklet and edit the film on Final Cut Express. We also contributed to posting blogs on Blogger.com to update our progression with our coursework. However, I particularly contributed to capturing and editing our music video and posting blogs on our website.



Using demographic profiling, we targeted the audience of 16-25 year olds both female and males. This was because the band the 'Torrents' are a young and rebellious indie band. They would mostly appeal to the British public as their songs contain lyrics about the current state of the country and also their band logo features the Union Jack appealing to the British public. The audiences socio-economic group is more likely to be group E as they appeal to younger people, who are usually students. However, they would also appeal to group D as this reflects the working class.
Using psychographic profiling and Young and Rubican's consumer characteristics, the band appeals mostly to the group; 'Individuals', as their brand image is quirky and unique. This means the bands audience also follow this image as young people are striving to be unique individuals. The 'Torrents' fulfill the 'Safety and belonging needs' when looking at Maslow's 'Hierarchy Of Needs', as their songs include issues such as employment, friendship, sexual intimacy and morality. The band also include all four major categories of the 'Uses and Gratifications theory' through their brand image, songs and advertising. For example, they offer escapism from everyday pressures by singing about current issues that the public are currently involved with. Our video appeals to the bands audience as it is quirky and different by challenging the conventions of both the Music video genre and the Indie genre creating its individuality.



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


The genre of our music video is of the Indie Genre which connotates rebellion and individuality. We were inspired by various artists and music videos that helped us to develop our own unique music video. Artists such as the Black Eyed Peas and The Prodigy influenced our Indie music video. As Andrew Goodwin suggested in "Dancing to Distraction (2003)" there are several conventions which make a Music Video typical. These are; Genre characteristics, Visuals/Lyrics, Visuals/Music, the need to sell the Artist, Intertexutality and Voyeruism. We tried to fit these conventions however we did infact reject some of the conventions intentionally within our video.

Picture 1: Demonstrates how the Black Eyed Peas have moved away from the normal conventions of Music Videos in song"Ive gotta Feeling" by making it controversial by introducing partying and the care free ideology of "Live life to the full". This inspired us to base our music video on a party setting where our actors and actresses go on a night out.

Picture 2: Presents the women in the Video as provocative going against the normal conventions of a music video. It stereotypes woman as suggestive and irrestible which influenced us to create the story of a 'good and bad girl' perspective within our own Indie Music Video.

Picture 3: Shows how props can be used to illustrate youth and rebellion. In the Black Eyed Peas video the UV paint is painted on their bodies at the party which resulted in us making our video as controversial as possible.

Picture 4: Illustrates the 'Point of View' perspective which we incorporated into our Music Video. The Prodigy's video 'Smack My Bitch Up' influenced us greatly and therefore we established the first person perspective from both the 'Bad Girl' and 'Good girl' of their night out.

Picture 5: Demonstrates the dark lighting used to create a grungy look to the Prodigy's music video to furthermore illustrate their rough and ready perspective of life which challenged us to incorporate the same ideology into our music video.

Picture 6: The party scene from "Smack My Bitch Up" exemplifies the rejection of the normal conventions of Music Video by showing girls in little and outrageous clothing and extreme partying which we tried to use in our Music Video too.

We intentionally made our Indie Music Video to go against the normal conventions of the typical Music Video however, we did challenge some of the conventions by not including a live preformance of the band who are usually male dominated which is typical of a Indie Music Video. Here are some screen shots of our final media project:
Picture 1: Demonstrates how we developed freeze frames of our film clips to create the effect of the two girls taking pictures of themselves before they went out. To highlight this further we used the greyscale, postersize and sepia effect in Imovie to make the free frames look more like pictures being captured. This could be seen as challenging the conventions of the Music Video Genre as the videos are usually moving and feature no still frames.


Picture 2: Shows the Point of View perspective which was used throughout. This was inspired by the Prodigy's music video "Smack my Bitch Up" which challenges the conventions of a Music Video as the camera usuall looks on the actual band who sings the song. This made our Music Video quirky and individual.


Picture 3: Emphasises the ideology of rebellion and controversy by incorporating alcohol into our Music Video. This rejects the typical conventions and promotes Andrew Goodwins ideology of 'Voyeurism' by introducing controversial mise en scene.


Picture 4: Once again promotes the idea of 'Voyeurism' and highlights how the 'Bad girl' is dressed provocatively and her make up has also been applied suggestively. This was done on purpose to establish the clear seperation between the 'Good and Bad girl' storylines.


Picture 5: Illustrates how we further pushed to go against the conventions of a typical Music Video by showing a scene of the 'Bad girl' being sick.


Picture 6: However is still in first person perspective but shows the chronological order of the night out within the Music Video which is typical of the conventions of a Music Video. The clip was quickened to show how the night was developing quickly.


Picture 7: Exemplifies the 'Bad girl' being provocative and inappropriate yet again higlighting the issue of Voyeurism.


Picture 8: This is the main feature of our Music Video which made it unique and individual. The use of split screen was to show the 'Good girl and Bad girl' perspective at the same time. This goes against the usual conventions of a music video as there is only usually one narrative.


Picture 9: Shows the characters out having a good time. The clip of the drunk youth was used here to illustrate the widely known stereotype that youths who drink are out to have a good time but usually cause trouble.


Picture 10: Again shows the use of the split screen at the beginning of the Music Video. The use of high tech technology is often used within Music Videos to advertise the latest gadgets. We used the mobile phones in this clip to establish the two young girls characters.


Picture 11: Illustrates the 'Good girls' perspective of the night out. When offered a cigarette she coughs demonstrating her angelic personality. This goes against the typical stereotype of youths today who are labelled to be drug users and binge drinkers.


Picture 12: The 'Dazzle Effect' was used here to clearly show the end of the Music Video by showing the night had become a blur and was at an end as the characters were walking down the street.
For our Ancillary Task we created a diggi pack for a CD. We adopted the ideas of rebellion, patrotism and youth to best illustrate our band the 'Torrents'.
Picture 1: Demonstrates the uniqueness of Hadouken's album cover. The font is unique to the band which influenced us to choose a font for our logo to put on our album cover which would be quirky and individual to the 'Torrents'.




Picture 2: Illustrates the Libertines patriotic imagery to Britain which the Torrents also express through their songs which was then incorporated into our design for the Cd Album.
Picture 3: Exemplifies how a picture of the band usually feature somewhere within the Album Digi Pack which is a convention of the genre of Cd Albums. Therefore we followed this and used a picture of the band within our booklet.
Picture 4: Illustrates Pendulums individuality and creativity that they used to create their Album cover which represents the genre of Indie Music as they focus on their raw talent. In addition, we developed a Cd Album Pack which was creative and individual.
Here is a collage of our CD Album Booklet we created:



Picture 1: Shows the Front Cover in which we incorporated the patriotic ideology by using our band logo and a Union jack placemat. In order to highlight this further we added a grey scale layer over the top of our existing colour layer and used the brush tool to make the red colour of the tomato sauce and tomatos etc. stand out representing the patriotic colours.


Picture 2: We used this picture inside the album cover to go against the normal conventions of Cd Album covers. The use of the cigarette shows rebellion which is the image the 'Torrents' like to illustrate. We used a Smoke Brush Effect in Photoshop to create smoke from the cigarette. Once again we created a greyacale layer over our existing image to highlight the blue colour of the ash tray.

Picture 3: Features the lyrics of our song which we used in our Music Video. The use of the chrome effect makes this picture quirky and like a scrp piece of paper. We designed this picture in order to demonstrate the bands image by being playful and individual.

Picture 4: Is the last page of our Album Digi Pack which incorporates a song list in the Union jack colour scheme. The use of the Beer bottle within the picture demonstrates the typical stereotype of youth today and rebellion which we used relligiously throughout our products in our coursework.

When our peers were asked to fill a Questionnaire out about our product the feedback was generally positive. Here are some questions and answers:

Has there been any effects used that are different to other music videos?

• "The split screen can't be seen in many Music Videos, and also the POV perspective"
• "I liked the first person POV shots which made you feel as if you were there"
• "I really liked the end effects when the camera shot blurred to a redish colour"
• "Photos at the beginning worked really well!"
  

Do you think the narrative of the music video fits the Indie Genre well?

• "Yes - Indie Music - Low Budget"
• "Yes, idea of being young, going out to parties and having a good time, idea of being "Still 21" - old enough to drink but too young to have experienced life to the full"
• "Yes its in first person, Indie music is individual which works well!"
• "Yes, I think it worked well. The youth aspect went well with the Music track"

How effective is the combination of your main products and ancillary texts?

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What have you learned from your Audience Feedback?
To produce our products we used demographic profiling to determine who our target audience would be. We decided our audience would be a mix of males and females around the ages of 16-25 years old as the Torrents are a young and rebellious indie band; appealing to this age group however, with extremely meaningful lyrics about politics and patriotism rather than just controversial lyrics about sex and drugs. They would mostly appeal to the British youths as their songs are grungy and unique sometimes containing lyrics about the state of the country being unstable and this therefore influenced us to design the Union Jack logo for the Torrents again appealing to the British public. The audiences 'socio-economic group' was that of group E as they are generally younger people, who are mostly students. However, the Torrents also appealed to group D; those of the working class similar to the band members who are also contained in this 'socio-economic group', their lyrics and image would appeal to their interests and ideologies of escapism and rebellion.

By researching into the psychographic profiling and Young and Rubican's consumer characteristics, the band appealed mostly to the 'Individuals', as their brand image is quirky and individual. The bands target audience also follow this image and by aiming to be different and unique.

The 'Torrents' fulfill the 'Safety and Belonging needs' when we looked at Maslow's 'Hierarchy Of Needs'. Their songs included issues such as employment, friendship, sexual intimacy and morality. The band also offered all the four major categories of the 'Uses and Gratifications' theory through their brand image, songs and advertising. For example, they offered escapism from everyday pressures by singing about subjects that the public are currently involved with, they involve personal relationships and personal identity as all of their songs are about real life, and also surveillance as they sing about current situations to help clarify what the British public agree with.
This was a good audience to target even though they are not as finacially stable as Middle Class people. The audience is a large group who would be loyal to our products and products like it by downloading it and sharing it with their friends through Facebook and MySpace for example where most of these 'individuals' spend their free time on the internet listening to music. We used various websites to research the Indie Music Video Genre such as Youtube, Indie Record Lables such as Rough Trade, Facebook, Google and UK Tribes. This was the summary of the Indie Kid which we used alongside other opinions of the Indie Genre to create our products:





Therefore, we did not have a Secondary Audience as our current audience proves loyal to the Indie Genre. During our project's creation we have used various audience feedback questionnaires to create the perfect product for our target audience. Before we began the project we created a questionnaire asking peers what was their favourite genre of music, when they listened to it, how they listened to it either on the TV or the internet and if a music video had ever influenced them to go and download the song. From this we saw that the Indie Genre a niche audience of youths who genrally watched music videos via the internet. We also created audience feedback questionnaires when we had finished our products to see whether our efforts were succesfull and what needed to be improved next time.
In order to please our audience we used all the following above to create the perfect Indie Music Video and other products. By using young and rebellious characters within our video and religiously following the patriotic and individuality ideologies we were able to fulfill these conventions and we were pleased with the outcomes.




Here we recorded Audience Feedback which we gained from some of our peers;

How did you use Media Technologies in the...

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In conclusion our product was a success!

We stuck to our plans of creating a Indie Music Video with the target audience of young adults. We wanted something unique and individual and created this through our split screen of the two girls perspective. We filmed in a young club which also added to the authenticity of the Music Video and gave it a professional yet gritty edge. Our Brand image was maintained through all our products with the repitition of our ideologies of rebellion, patriotism, controversy and youth by using the logo of the Union Jack and young rebellious actors. The Ancillary Tasks also proved authentic and parallelld the personality of the band by being creative and constantly pushing our ideology of youth, rebellion and patriotism. Our audience feedback showed that our products were also a success by recieving very positive feedback from our peers which can be seen in the Audience Feedback video. Some things that they suggested we could do to improve would to try and make the Music Video even more fast paced and include more storylines for the 'Good girl' in the Music Video.
Overall i have enjoyed working on this project with the members of our group. We all had similar ideas and worked well together to produce a professional Music Video. I have enhanced my skills on Final Cut Express, Photoshop and Blogger and now appreciate the hard work that has to be put into just one Music Video. However, i enjoyed acting within the Video and being able to be so creative.

Amy Grogan.

Beckie's evaluation

For my coursework, In a group of three we created a music video, a CD album booklet and a CD album magazine advert for an independent band called the ‘Torrents’. The main product (music video) is based on two different points of view on a night out through the use of a split screen effect. We all contributed to the ideas of the products, the filming and also the editing. Using the software 'FinalCut Express' I mostly helped to edit and put together the footage we had captured, whilst we all contributed to using the 'InDesign' software in order to edit our pictures. We also posted all of our progress, in turn, onto blogger to keep everything updated.

1. In what ways does your media product, use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Our target audience for our products is the teen tribe 'Indie'. This tibe all fits into the ‘rough and ready’ stereotype. Mainly influenced by music and fashions such as skinny jeans and vintage jumpers, it is important for young people who belong in this group to dress in certain ways and listen to certain bands. The main image of the genre is being rebellious and young. Festivals and small intimate concerts are usually a regular occurance for our target audience.

MUSIC VIDEO

Typically, music videos are aimed at a younger audience as they consume the most music, therefore the videos usually use narratives which will interest them. We have been majorly influenced by the black eyed peas video ‘I’ve got a feeling’ (above) as it includes getting ready to go out for the night and having lots of fun with friends. For our coursework, we wanted to create a quirky and 'addictive' video which our target audience would like to watch over and over again, which is what we did. As we used young characters for our video and included two girls getting ready to go on a night out it means we followed some typical conventions of an indie music video.

We also used lots of low high key lighting, especially in the club as it portrays how a person feels when they have been drinking alcohol and makes the music video look much more exciting. Also, the use of our fast paced editing and shots helped to keep this lively feel up too.

Andrew Goodwin suggested in "Dancing to Distraction" (2003) 'There is a relationship between the lyrics and the visuals'. This quote is proved true in our music video, as it is about being young, even though they are 21, and wanting to be able to be a youth forever! INDIE MUSIC VIDEO

Most indie bands are signed up to independent labels, such as Rough Trade Records. This institution is home to many similar bands, such as The Libertines and The Strokes. Most British labels have the same traits, these being low budgets and advertising by British web, for example networking sites such as Myspace and Facebook, twitter and youtube. Rough Trade Records also do this!

Rough Trade records have a low budget for their music videos, which means recording the footage in typical locations such as streets and cities, rather than a full theatrical video that takes place in a studio or extravagant locations. An example of this would be the Kanye West video 'Touch The Sky' which involves expensive equipment and well known stars. On the other hand, a video for The Prodigy is filmed on the streets of Britain and also worn down houses and a night club. This video was the biggest inspiration for our piece.

Indie music videos in Britain usually use locations such as warehouses or streets as this fulfills the typical stereotype of being rebellious and carefree. Also, many indie videos contain props such as alcohol, cigarettes and drugs as these are taboo subject matters and the target audience usually enjoy this. For our video, we have included taboo subject matters such as drinking, smoking and going out which fulfills these typical conventions.
As the band are also all male, it portrays the image of male dominance which is popular throughout the indie genre. The music is guitar based and doesn't follow typical melodies, again slotting in with the conventions of indie.

This was the video that influenced our ideas for the 'point of view' shots as we believe it challenges typical indie video conventions and makes the product more individual. However, in our video we used a split-screen effect also to fit in with the narrative, being two different ideal nights out. We believe this works well as it is individual and also offers an interesting contrast between the two different views. It is important to create a product which is individual, as it allows to express artistic freedom. As music video's don't have many typical conventions, it helped us to come up with our own ideas that we believed worked well with the music. ANCILLARY TASKS For our ancillary tasks, we chose to create an album cover and also a promotional advertisement for the bands new single. As our image and the music itself is indie, it is mostly aimed at a teenage audience who are 'rough and ready', therefore we tried to portray this image through our ancillary tasks too. All the images we created for the album cover have been edited in a way to fit the generic conventions of indie, for example we de-saturated the colours and made them more grotty looking by the use of graining and chroming. We have used pictures of a full english breakfast as the band are extremely patriotic (which is also shown by the use of the union jack for the logo), a picture of lyrics written on a screwed up piece of paper, and a picture of a cigarette in a 'fosters' ash tray.

The magazine advertisement picture is of the band stood on a main road looking carefree, this was heavily inspired by the famous 'Abbey Road' album cover. <--- The Beatles. We believed this would be a clever idea because it is recognized by many people therefore it will catch our target audiences eye. We edited the picture to fit with our genre by making it black and white, and also changing the exposure of the picture to make the physical features of the band stand out. We added text to the picture which included the bands name and the name of the single in order to sell the product, which was the aim inititally. Typical conventions of a magazine advert for an album include the band themselves and props, costumes and editing to portray the typical image which is relevent to them. For example, bands such as the arctic monkeys use many black and white images to portray their 'gritty' image, as we have, to fit in with the indie genre.
 

2 - How effective is the combination of your main products and ancillary tasks?Our brand image is mostly based on the idea of rebellious young adults who are looking to have lots of fun and aim to spread the idea of patriotism.

The libertines are very much linked to our branding image as the band are all young, dress in the way that indie inspired people do and their music also fits the brand image. They also inspired us as they have an existing single cover for 'up the bracket' which contains an edited version of the union jack, which is what we decided to use for our logo.




In order to make our logo different from this, we custom made our own union jack through the use of photoshop, and edited the colours in order to make it less happy looking and more gritty. We also used the brush tool along the sides of the union jack lines to make it look more messy rather than neat and tidy, as again this fulfills our brand image. As 'Torrents' is written across our logo, we browsed the recommended website 'Dafont.com' and found a suitable font. It looks bold, as the music is, and rough, which is the image we are constantly trying to portray in order to appeal to our target audience. 'Music is not primarily a commodity form but a promotional one' (A. Goodwin 1992)



I believe we maintained this brand image well through all of our products as, for example, our music video involved young characters on a night out and also involved taboo subject matters such as alcohol, cigarettes and relationships which again portrays the image of being young and rebellious. As we edited our advert using the 'monochrome' tool, it gave the band image a sense of girttyness, and 'toughness', which is typical within the indie genre. However, our album covers included lots of patriotism such as the union jack in order to express the bands feeling towards England, and show them to be a patriotic band.
We used close ups also for the album covers, such as the ash tray, as this shows their strong rebellious side and boyish nature, which is again what we were aiming to do.



http://www.roughtraderecords.com/ If our band were to belong to a record label, I would choose rough trade records as it is an independent British record label, and is home to many bands which are similar to 'Torrents' and aim to portray a similar brand image. For example 'The Strokes' and 'The Libertines'. I believe this label would be likely to fund our band because they are individual in the lyrics they sing and what their songs messages contain, but they also offer quirkeyness which is vital for the music industry in modern times. The band don't just sing about love and relationships, but they speak directly to the working class about how Britain is becoming a tough society and how things need to change!



3 - What have you learned from your audience feedback?
TARGET AUDIENCE = USING YOUNG AND RUBICAMS PSYCOGRAPHIC PROFILING, WE AIMED TO TARGET THE NEWEST CONSUMER GROUP, BEING 'INDIVIDUALS' WHICH WAS CREATED IN 1988. WE CHOSE THIS GROUP AS OUR AIM WAS TO MARKET OUR BAND AS QUIRKY AND INDIVIDUAL.



Using demographic profiling and the socio-economic scale, we would be targetting group E with our products as our target audience is mainly teenagers, therefore students. Our products also appeal to the working class as the music is about having fun and being carefree.



I believe that this target audience is perfect as it is proven that they are the ones who consume the most music even though they are more of a loyal niche audience. Indie music is becoming more and more popular throughout Britain and in order to make our products appeal to them we have to maintain a brand image in which they would be interested in. They are right for our product financially as independent labels such as rough trade only have small budgets and the products do not need to be shot in top of the range studios, but can be filmed in real locations and still be appealing.



In order to gain feedback, the class created questionnaires and we all viewed each others final proucts. The class were then recorded giving verbal feedback to each group, being both good and also constructive criticism. After collecting the questionnaires back in, we were able to see common features which were popular, and other effects which were not so popular. 100% of the class believed the split screen worked extremely well, and 100% also believed that the narrative was appealing.











ATTRACTING OUR AUDIENCE... When we were editing our footage, we tried to make our shots as short as possible in order to keep a fast pace throughout the video. We cut them all down to at least 3 seconds each in order to keep our audience interested in the product, however kept them long enough to keep the narrative clear. The use of young characters addresses our audience well as they are more able to relate to the situation and become involved in the diegesis of the product. When the class gave us feedback, a few people said 'I felt like I was on a night out with them' proves that we addressed and attracted our audience well.








Overall we gained a very positive reaction from our target audience. I have learned that in order to appeal to a target audience, you must use conventions which attract them and persuade them to follow your product. For example, if our video's narrative was based on old men going to the pub, it would not appeal to them. However, as some people believed the video could have been more fast paced, I have learned that we could have shot more footage in the time we had in order to include many more shots and make them much shorter to keep the pace interesting.

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4 - Use of creative technologies

FINAL CUT EXPRESS:

This software was new to us at the beginning of the college year, as we used Imovie last year, so we took some time training on it before creating our final product. I believe this software has helped me to gain many new skills as it allows a lot of artistic freedom and there are hundreds of different tools to help create a successful final product. For example, we created the split screen by overlapping two shots, using the 'scale' button on the tab above the 'viewer' pannel and scaling them down in order for them to fit in the mihe screen. We were not able to do this in Imovie. We also edited the exposure of certain shots and enhanced the colours by using the easily accessible menus at the top of the screen in order to enhance our video and make it look much more professional.

Before editing the pictures for our ancillary tasks I had used photoshop and InDesign, however not to the extent I used them this year. I have enhanced skills I had before and learned many new ways to edit pictures and make them look effective in order to gain a good grade. To edit the pictures on this software, I used the mac laptops which I have never used before. We used these software programs as they are great in the way that they have so many tools and effects to allow you to create a very unique product. In order to capture our footage we used samsung stills cameras from the media department and DV cameras from the media department to film our video footage. We then uploaded them onto InDesign and enhanced the colours, make some black and white by using the 'monochrome' tool. We also scaled down the images to the exact size of album covers.



As said earlier, the website 'Dafont.com' was very useful as it offered us a wide range of fonts for our ancillary tasks instead of using standard fonts on the macs which we used. We experienced no problem with this website. For the soundtrack of our music video, the band sent me the song '21 but not for long' which I then transferred onto my memory pen and onto the mac our group was using in college. Even though FinalCut express is a very professional software package, I thought it is simple in the way that things are clearly labelled and organized very well, therefore I had no problems uploading the soundtrack onto the software.



Blogger is a great way to keep track of progress and upload images of working on the product. I believe that it allows every person in the group to express their creativity and views on the product in many different ways, for example uploading videos off youtube and uploading images of camera phones. It is also extremely useful for research as anything we found could simply be written and uploaded onto here for the whole group to see. On the other hand, some posts took a long time to upload onto blogger and there was a few errors we encountered, however in the end we managed to sort out these problems.



We uploaded our final video onto 'Youtube.com' in order to recieve audience feedback and note any ways in which we can improve in the future. The process of uploading a video onto youtube is not difficult, as all we had to do was save the product and upload it straight to the website. The only problem we encountered was that it failed a couple of times or took a long time to upload, but apart from those things everything ran as planned.



On the other hand, the software sometimes limited our creativity as it would not allow us to go ahead with certain actions. For example, after completing the rough draft of our video product and putting all the shots into the correct order, it would not allow us to then re-arrange the shots if we desired. In the end though, we realised it was because we did not use the ripple delete. Another problem we encountered was when we first put in our split screen effect by using the 'scale' tool, the image sizes changed when we next came to edit the product, so we had to delete the shots we had edited and drag them back into the timeline again.
However, the split screen did prove successful after that one error. We also use the colour grading tool on the shots of me as we wanted the 'bad girl' narrative to be shown as more happy and wild. We used the colour corrector video tools menu in order to do this.



I believe that the software and technology we have used have allowed us to fufill our potential and create a unique and individual piece as we desired in the planning stages. Looking back at my portfolio last year, I believe I have gained many new skills such as how to use complex software in a more subtle way and also how to hold a camera more steady!

CONCLUSION...Overall I believe that the piece fulfills everything we planned in the first stages. We wanted a split screen to show two different views on a night out, which we did successfully. We were also able to film our footage at 'Key Street' in Clitheroe, which we had planned in the first place. As a group we collected lots of research in order to learn which types of elements and conventions we needed to use for our products to attract our target audience, such as young characters and locations suitable to the genre.

The video itself proved a success when looking at our audience feedback, as 100% of the audience believed the music and the video together worked well and they all believed the narrative of the video was suitable. However, one thing we could of improved on is the pace of the product if it was a little bit faster.

The album pictures all fulfilled the brand image of 'rough and ready' as the editing tools used on those, such as edited exposure and de-saturation portrayed the image of rebellion. The content of the pictures themselves also did this. The magazine advertisement, which was highly influenced by the beatles, targets our main audience as it involves young, indie characters who look like they are having a great time! I believe the audience are able to understand the bands genre by simply looking at our ancillarys tasks and watching our music video as we follow typical conventions, and also break typical conventions which is popular within the genre.

This year I believe this coursework piece has enabled me to gain many skills I did not have before, such as managing time in a more efficient way and also basic skills on software such as FinalCut and InDesign. Personally, I have tried my very best on this product and fulfilling all the needs to gain a good grade and the group I have worked with have been brilliant. We have all put in 100% and worked very well as a team.

Beckie.