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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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