Evaluation Question #3

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

We all sat down and planned our ancillary tasks together so that we maintained a consistent look through all 3 of adverts and covers.

We used photoshop to edit our photos and create our adverts. We turned down the saturation so that the image only had a tiny bit of colour. We then used the magic wand tool to select items of clothing for each character and turned the hue and saturation up on the items of clothing so they had a neon look to make the covers stand out. We also changed the brightness and contrast pf the whole images and applied a black vignette on top so that it gave the whole thing a dirty look to it.

I think the advert and cover match match our music video really well. I think the fact that we turned the saturation down made it consistent with the video as we did this with the music video itself. The covers also match the socially realistic, grimey feel of the video. I think the way we planned our ancillary tasked worked really well to our advantage as I feel they do all look like one whole promotional package.

If we were to advertise our package in a magazine i think it would be NME. This is because NME readers are the audience we're targetting our product at. They are liley to be fans of the idie/alternative genre otherwise its unlikely they would be reading NME. This means our artist would gain fans and its highly probable the readers will like the video.

A weakness in advertising this way is that other people who don't read NME might like this but might not get a chance to know about it it. A larger marketing campaign would eradicate this problem.

Our product would be very effective in getting at the target audience however there is the problem that it might not hit a new audience which could result in higher sales figures for the artist.

We discussed the pricing of the product and decided we would price it at £2.99 available as a CD and download, we would sell it as a single and video. We think by making it available for download we would generate more sales as downloads has taken over the purchasing of CD's and it is easier for people to buy as they don't even have to leave their home. We decided we would make our advert a quarter page or A6 size advert. We looked at other adverts of the same size to see if we thought this would be too small but discovered it was still very noticable if the advert itself stood out, which we think ours does.

This advert for Disturbia clothing really stood out to us. It is the same size as ours and we think this is proof that our advert will be effective although this is for a clothing company

this has bold colours which makes it stand out much like ours

We made the decision that our music video would be premiered on MTV2 which is an indie/ alternative music channel at 9pm on a Thursday night. This is because its a week night so people are likely to be home and it is after all soaps and dramas have finished on terrestrial television channels so it wont clash with any programmes with high ratings.

We measured our advert when creating it to ensure it was exactly the right size and met the marketing standard. We think consumers would want to buy this because it is a single and video for £2.99 which is a good price for the material you get.

Evaluation Question #2

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

"Told their story clearly, but possibly could have benefited from some more creative images."

"There is a good natural feel to the characters, they're very true to 'music video' characters. The ending is particularly good. A real music video feel, could have been the real thing."

" Story was simple but effective. Some of the camera/editing effects were a little distracting, sometimes less is more. The opening and closing titles were 'top class'. The colour accent didn't quite work probably due to the over cast lighting and it didn't work in the videos favour. The cars in the background distracted, a better location could have been selected. Cant they find a park bench like normal alcoholics??!!"

When discussing our promotional package we decided we were aiming our product at 13 years and up indie/alternative fans, both male and female. The reason we have such a wide age range is because this genre of music is popular with all ages at the moment.

We decided to get our feedback by posting our video on "YouTube" and "Facebook". From this we received some good feedback and some constructive criticism. Alot of the points made we had already realised and pointed out ourselves.

We learnt alot from our audience feedback. Our location could have been a bit better, we could have moved further from the road, although upon filming we didn't feel the road was as much of a distraction as someone pointed out hence why we filmed there and not in the busy residential area we originally planned too. Our feedback also pointed out that some of our shots were unsteady and we should have taken more care to avoid this from happening. If we were to do this project again then we would take great care in making sure we had steady shots. Framing was another issue we had, some shots we cut off the top of our narrators head and we would be more careful of this next time.

Evaluation Question #1

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

We first decided to make a music video to "Here in Your Arms" by Hello Goodbye, when we started filming even though we had done a lot of planning, it was difficult to film, and we cam across alot of difficulties when trying to film so we went back to the drawing board to have a re think and decided to then make a music video to Jamie T – Shelia

Jamie T produces music what I would call Indie/alternative. We chose the song because we liked it but also we also chose it as we could base a story around the song, and it seemed easy to create video for this genre.

We went sat and watched various music videos on YouTube of the same genre and and of different genres to compare during our research stages.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N64QMKEbJQg - “Florescent Adolescent” by

Arctic Monkeys

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wA15L6cHPvQ - “When the Sun Goes Down” by

Arctic Monkeys

Both of these videos are also of the indie/alternative music genre. They both have similarities to the "Sheila" video in the sense that they convey a sense of social realism and use real locations such as streets, rather than studios and sound stages.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wws7mnMewPw - "Psychosocial" by Slipknot

Slipknot are a heavy metal band, neither the song or the video have a story and the genre of music didn’t interest us, so we would have found it very difficult to get ideas and make a video to go with a song that we didn't really have a passion for.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M11SvDtPBhA - “Party in the USA” by Miley Cyrus

This song is of the Pop/R'n'B genre and so the video is very glamorous with extravagant sets and designer clothes. With the time ad budget and equipment we had to make our video we knew this would be very difficult to portray. They are also very cheesy type videos, often featuring choreography breakdowns and so this would of been very difficult to produce.

This is the original music video for “Sheila” by Jamie T:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-L7Cadb-c0

And this is another song by the same artist Jamie T called “If you’ve Got the Money”:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DLo54YDNek

Our video was different from the original because we had/used:

Different Location

Jamie. T' s original video for "Sheila" was set in London alongside the river Thames, ours is mainly set on a cycle track.

Different story

Jamie. T's video follows the story of Sheila only.

Different Characters

As mentioned before Jamie. T's video follows the story of Sheila only, where as we decided to feature all 3 characters mentioned in the song and follow each of their stories through the video.

Our video was similar to the original because we had/used:

A narrator

Both ours and Jamie. T's original video have narrators. However our narrator holds no relation to any of the characters, whereas in Jamie. T's the narrator turns out to be Sheila's Father.

Real locations/Social realism

Both the videos have real, urban locations, giving a sense of social realism, rather than studios and soundstages, I feel this is more effective as it relates to audiences more.

Minimal props

Both videos use minimal props. Jamie. T's videos main prop is a bunch of flowers. Ours were a bottle of pills and a bottle of drink.

I feel our video uses alot of convention of real media texts. In the planning process of the video we researched many other videos of this music genre and found the majority used social realism and a story for their video. It was decided that the main focus of the video would be the characters stories in the song portrayed on screen. This therefore is developing and using real media texts. My feelings to following the convention rather than challenging it were positive. This is because to challenge the convention wouldn't of been right for the song or the video, and the audience it is aimed at would of found it odd, and so feedback would most likely have been negative. Also the song conjures up images of this kind of socialist realism type of video and so to go against that wouldn't of been right.

Ancillary Task - Advert & CD/DVD cover

This is my final and completed ancillary task:

(CD/DVD cover)

(advert)

Editing

Finally! We've finished filming and are preparing to edit! We have transferred all of our footage onto the Mac and began to edit.

Once we uploaded our footage we realise we had a newer version of i-Movie that we hadn't used before, but once we got used to it we realised it was actually easier than the older version! it gave us more options for effects and transitions and made cuts easier and more precise.

As we only have one laptop its difficult for us all to use the software and edit the film. We decided as long as we were all present during editing, throwing in ideas then it didn't matter who was actually on the laptop.

We have used a variety of transitions such as fade in and out, to black and white aswell, we used cross blur, cross dissolve, cube, swap and doorway! We used a sound effect at the beggining of our film when the front door bangs shut. We also editied the films hue, satuartion and brightness and on some of then added an effect so that they looked as though they were filmed on cctv cameras. On a few of the clips we cropped the images as they had obstructive objects in the mes-en-scene. We also added in a title sequences at the end.

plan for cd/dvd

This is our Plan for our advert:

Its going to be very similar to the CD cover except the advert will have a background image with all 3 characters and then the CD cover we designed and the artist and song name and also the price.

We decided our promotional package would be advertised in NME magazine. This is because the magazine is an indie music magazine and this is our target audience. We found out alot of information about how much it would cost to advertise in this magazine and audience information on this site:

http://microsites.nme.com/php/mediapack/pdf/nme_media_information_full.pdf

Lights, Camera, ACTION! - Take #2

Filming went very well today, we got alot done and worked until it was dark. We got alot of the narrator shots done today, we told our actor to really exaggerate when miming so it makes it easy for us when it comes to editing.

We also got the drug deal scene filmed which went very well.