Friday, 12 February 2010
Friday, 5 February 2010
Planning for CD Album
Posted by smcmediablog at 04:49 0 comments
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 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!"
- "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"
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;
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.
Posted by smcmediablog at 04:37 0 comments
Tuesday, 2 February 2010
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Posted by smcmediablog at 05:18 0 comments
Split Screen
We have been editing the video to show two different girls views of an ideal night out. We believed that a split screen would be the perfect way to do so. We have figured that we have to overlay two clips, go to the motion tab on final cut, and change the scale of each to make them the same size in the middle of the screen. This works better than using the 'crop' tool as we can use the whole clip instead of just a certain bit of it.
Posted by smcmediablog at 05:13 0 comments


