Friday 9 December 2011

32) Analysis of old student Digipak/s

When creating our Digipak we thought it would be in our best interest to research previous students efforts in an attempt to recognise any potential things to avoid or develop to create a better end product.


Above is the first DigiPak we looked at; although it contains all of the typical conventions of a digipak they have opted for a minimalist black and white colour scheme which although challenges typical covers with regards to colour and composition we felt it may not be in their best interest to choose something with such little appeal, for instance when a shopper is looking in a store for an album they may not have typically listened to before, a colorful cover is much more likely to catch their eye and encourage impulse buys.


This is the second DigiPak which chose to look at, its look although colorful and eye catching is very basic and messy, the images of the band members are edited well, as part of a composition they seem like  they've been placed anywhere, in addition to this the use of text was not executed with very much detail, on the 5th track for instance it overlaps onto the black background.


In conclusion by looking at both of these Digipak's we learnt in order to have a successful digipak design it would need to Colorful to catch the consumers eye, it would need to contain all the typical iconography such as "Parental advisory", Barcode, Format logo and finally we learnt that we need to take time to ensure that all aspects work together properly and set aside time where we can go over the whole thing fixing small mistakes and generally cleaning it up ready for consumption by the public.

Monday 5 December 2011

Script For Commentary

Overview;  
We wish to present our direcotrs commentary in a way we feel will not only look proffesional but will also be thouroughly engaging to the audience, the way we feel this can be achieved is through the use of a green screen with myself and the rest of our group in front of it whilst our music video is played behind, this gives us the ability to stop it , and easily convey our feelings through clearly shown examples.

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


Dom: In order to answer this question successfully we first need to establish the genre of music of which we feel our song falls ino which after much reseach we believe to be 'pop rock' reasons for why can be seen in depth on our blog, a  band of which that plays similar music to our 'band'  is a band called 'McFly'.

Ben: This song, '5 colours in her hair' shows all the conventions that should be used in a music video of 'pop rock' genre. These are: Performance Footage, Bright Colours, extensive editing and Story-line, In some ways our video does use the convention of performance footage in our video as we have a lot of lip syncing. However, we also challenge this convention as we have no use of instruments in our video.

James: In a lot of McFly's videos there is extensive use of bright colours, coming in many different forms, the clothing is all very bright, so is the general style of editing. We feel our video challenges this conventions as we adopt a dark style of editing and as you can see behind me such as  the saturation effect and de-saturation effect. But there is also editing techniques that change the size of the video and make it appear in different areas of the screen. This is used in both our video and McFly's video. As seen behind us, this therefore is a further way in which we follow the conventions of th 'punk-rock' genre.

Joe: Storyline/ narrative is a further convention of this genre shown In both McFly' video and our video, there is a storyline and performance footage, therefore showing that we are using this convention, a convention that I believed we used successfully.













How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
Ben: This is our final album cover ( shown on the screen ) which we feel is very effective as the contrasting colours of the pink and grey merge well together and seeing as the band is called 'The Pink Spiders', the pink obviously goes in relation to the name of the band. it also follows many of the other conventions of the music poster genre

James:However our music video doesn't have pink in it because we wanted to have contrapuntal feel to the video where the music is a lot more up beat and lively than the performance seen on screen which we wanted to be similar the Architects - 'Heartburn'

Dom: We as a band wanted the mood on screen to be quite like the video behind ,with the slow walking down a street and walking through fields and woods.conveying the somber and contreversial subject, ie. underage drinking.


What have you learnt from audience feedback?
-+

Joe: When we created our final product it was given to a test audience, all of whom produced feedback on what they thought about it and possible changes to make which they felt it required to be successful.

James: They felt we followed the conventions of our genre effectively they also we're impressed by the editing and did not make any bad comments, however some felt the lip syncing was not 100% accurate in places which overall we agree with.

Dom: Our peers also felt the jump cuts and words we're timed well with the beat of the song and matched the on screen actions, we were told it was slightly abstract and harder to read at times, however this was intentional to keep the audience interested and on their toes.


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

James: Throughout the production of our Music product we have used various  types of new media technology, such as the obvious; blogger of which has helped us publish our project in a professional manner shown through the incorporation of both images and videos which have the ability for us to easily convey our desired effect and explain/ analyse easily, professionally and efficiently. Also the ease of use such as the ability to edit, add and access from any browser in the world.  

Dom: Finalcut has been a superb tool in both planning and research as well as the completion of our final video, and the directors cut version also, firstly final cut was taken advantage of in the initial research for the blog post on fillers, as well as lip-syncing with both the words to the music as well as the actual lip movement, this maximised our confidence for the editing for our final cut which we feel is also successful, as it enabled us to successfully convey the desired effect, shown through the use of fillers, fades and emphasis on certain sections portrayed through the on screen lyrics.  

Ben: Google Streetview was in fact also a help shown in the blog post for our location recce, the way in which this helped was it enabled us to show our ideas and scout for ideal locations a lot quicker and efficiently opposed to manually doing, especially when the weather was against us.  

Joe: Photoshop was a further form of digital technology that we took advantage of shown with our digipack and magazine advert which allowed us to take seemingly plain and simple images and manipulate them in such a way which successfully conveyed the desired and professional image.

Tuesday 29 November 2011

Individual Evaluation - James

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

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


What have you learnt from audience feedback?
-+

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

Throughout the production of our Music product we have used various  types of new media technology, such as the obvious; blogger of which has helped us publish our project in a professional manner shown through the incorporation of both images and videos which have the ability for us to easily convey our desired effect and explain/ analyse easily, professionally and efficiently. Also the ease of use such as the ability to edit, add and access from any browser in the world. Finalcut has been a superb tool in both planning and research as well as the completion of our final video, and the directors cut version also, firstly final cut was taken advantage of in the initial research for the blog post on fillers, as well as lip-syncing with both the words to the music as well as the actual lip movement, this maximised our confidence for the editing for our final cut which we feel is also successful, as it enabled us to successfully convey the desired effect, shown through the use of fillers, fades and emphasis on certain sections portrayed through the on screen lyrics. Google Streetview was in fact also a help shown in the blog post for our location recce, the way in which this helped was it enabled us to show our ideas and scout for ideal locations a lot quicker and efficiently opposed to manually doing, especially when the weather was against us. Photoshop was a further form of digital technology that we took advantage of shown with our digipack and magazine advert which allowed us to take seemingly plain and simple images and manipulate them in such a way which successfully conveyed the desired and professional image.

Joe Scott - Evaluation Questions

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

When creating our media product, we aimed to conform to the typical conventions of real media products, this is because we waned something that is instantly recognizable by audiences of our genre, rather than risking unpopularity by unsuccessfully challenging these forms and conventions, to achieve a seamless integration with this genre we studied other music videos to find common themes and noted them down for use in the design stages of production.
    To test these new themes we created a draft product and as a first attempt at replicated common genre characteristics we feel this was achieved, Finally using what we learnt from our draft we we're able to produce in our opinion a high quality, instantly recognizable and memorable music video.

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





What have you learnt from audience feedback?


When we created our final product it was given to a test audience, all of whom produced feedback on what they thought about it and possible changes to make which they felt it required to be successful.

They felt we followed the conventions of our genre effectively they also we're impressed by the editing and did not make any bad comments, however some felt the lip syncing was not 100% accurate in places which overall we agree with.

Our peers also felt the jump cuts and words we're timed well with the beat of the song and matched the on screen actions, we were told it was slightly abstract and harder to read at times, however this was intentional to keep the audience interested and on their toes.


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


We have used new media technologies right from concept, through to planning and to production,
there is a wide range of technologies used including in the use of PC's and the Internet to carry our research on other bands and typical conventions of our genre, to produce our drafts and final product we used the Apple software 'Final Cut Express' and finally to evaluate each others work and receive a final mark we used 'Youtube' to upload our video so it can be watched anywhere.

Individual Evaluation - Dom

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

To answer this question, I first needed to identify what genre of music our song choice would be classed as. This will help me in order to choose a similar song of the same genre and pinpoint the individual conventions used in that video and the conventions used in our video.
The genre I believe our song could be categorised into is the 'pop rock' genre. I feel our song is too soft to be classed as a full on rock song however it uses many instruments and is therefore not entirely poppy. A band that plays a similar sort of music to ours I would say is a band called 'McFly'. After extensive research through many of McFly's music videos I was able to identify some conventions and a video that portrays all of these conventions. (Shown Below)


This song, '5 colours in her hair' shows all the conventions that should be used in a music video of 'pop rock' genre. These are: Performance Footage, Bright Colours, extensive editing and Story-line. 

Performance Footage
In this video, there is a lot of performance footage showing the band members, this includes instruments and lip syncing. In some ways our video does use this convention as we have a lot of lip syncing. However, we also challenge this convention as we have no use of instruments in our video. This is not done intentionally. Originally we set out to use many instruments such as a piano for the music intro at the start of the video but a lack of planning meant we couldn't find anyone that could play the piano. Below are screen grabs of the use of performance in McFly's video and ours as well. 






Bright Colours
In a lot of McFly's videos there is extensive use of bright colours, coming in many different forms. The clothing is all very bright, so is the general style of editing. Our video challenges this conventions as we adopt a dark style of editing and as you can see in the pictures above, there is a huge difference in clothing we are wearing. I believe we adopted this style as our song, in contrast to many of McFly's, has quite a dark meaning and story behind it whereas McFly's lyrics and stories are quite upbeat and happy. 

Extensive Editing
Editing is a very broad subject there are two aspects of editing that I need to focus on in order to analyse editing. There are filters and effects applied to our video that make it look dark such as the saturation effect and de-saturation effect. But there is also editing techniques that change the size of the video and make it appear in different areas of the screen. This is used in both our video and McFly's video. Examples are shown below. 




Storyline
In both McFly' video and our video, there is a storyline and performance footage, therefore showing that we are using this convention, a convention that I believed we used quite well.

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

After researching many videos and ancillary products (eg DigiPaks) I approached the ultimate conclusion that the most successful DigiPaks were ones that included reminders that can be seen in the particular video. So we decided this would be a convention that we would try and incorporate in our digipak. Obviously, the pink in the DigiPak reminds the audience of 'The Pink Spiders'

 
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