In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms
and conventions of real media products?
Our media product was for the song ‘Sing Sing’ by a Canadian pop/punk rock band called Marianas Trench. Typical of this genre are music videos with a fun or comic storyline or feel to them like for example; ‘Celebrity Status’ by Marianas Trench or ‘All the Small Things’ by Blink 182.
We tried to fit this typicality by creating a music video with a lot of energy and fun to it with a bit of a comic storyline of a stalker fan girl and her obsession that is a band member.
(A snapshot of the 'fan girl' holding up a banner to the band member.)
One of the main conventions of music videos are close ups because they predominate and establish intimacy between the viewers and the star (Pete Fraser). We quite a few close up in our music video but the close up shot didn’t dominate over other shots. We didn’t use close ups too much because we wanted to tell the story between the two characters, however we gave our ‘star’ or main character of the story (our actor Shaun) more screentime as he was the more important character and the story did revolve around him. Richard Dyer said “a star is an image constructed from a range of materials” so we felt close ups weren’t as essential; by making sure he is the first and last character we see so the audience would be introduced to him first and as they see more of him in the music video, we felt a relationship could be established in this way.
Another main convention of music videos is the use of fast-cutting. We did this for most of the music video and also used some longer shots where we felt was appropriate and when the tempo had slowed down a little like on the last verse of the song. Otherwise, the video is a upbeat and fairly fast tempo song so we tried to use plenty of different camera angles when filming one scene so we could still see the storyline and keep the fast cuts in.
One other common factors in music videos is that shots can be repeated throughout either to remind the audience of something earlier on, to be used as flashbacks or just used dynamically and used when appropriate. We went with this convention as in our storyline the band member ends up missing his fan girl who isn’t interested in him anymore. We developed this convention in conjunction with our storyline so the audience sees him remembering his time with her and it creates sympathy so the audience will feel for him whilst it also being quite ironic and comical.
We had a solid narrative throughout the music video using both the storyline and lip-syncing in conjunction with each other or switched between the two; “The video allows the audience access to the performer in a much greater range of ways than a stage performance could. Eye contact and facial gestures via the close up, role playing through the narrative and mise-en-scene will present the artist in a number of ways which would not be possible in a live concert.” (Pete Fraser, ‘Teaching Music Video’ - BFI, 2004) As we used our star in the narrative it depicts him away from the performance element and focuses more on the storyline and shows the artist as what would happen away from his concerts; therefore, we against the convention of the performance element within music videos.
How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
Our ancillary texts are tied to my main product, retaining imagery, themes and the colour scheme. We used our main character throughout our three products so that the consumer to establish ‘the star’ (Richard Dyer).
We wanted to maintain the familiarity with the band when creating our products so that’s why we chose to use the same themes throughout. When looking at other media products we found that if we wanted our website’s homepage to be based around promoting our track, music video and album the sites we looked at that did that had objects on the pages relating to those things like picture and videos of them and links to buy them. Also on their pages would be links to social networking sites which appeals to the target audience of teenagers - young adults as consumers of the kind of music this band makes. This is why we thought if we had put social networking sites like www.twitter.com, www.myspace.com, www.youtube.com and www.facebook.com the audience can ‘keep up with the band’ which is also why we wrote that on the website.
“Music videos, along with the introduction of compact discs, helped rescue a flagging industry in the early 1980s. In so doing, they established visual style – never of course totally out of style – as a pre-eminent aspect of performance” (Routledge, 1994). Using a similar visual style helps the audience identify the band with these products so that’s what we have tried to achieve by using the megaphone prop on the website, in the video and on the digipak; by using the same colour scheme of black, blue, red, and white throughout all three products and by also using our main character on the products too.
Overall our products are very well related to each other and all revolve around promoting ‘the star’ and mainly the track.
What have you learned from your audience feedback?
From the audience feedback received on our music video we found that our video fitted our chosen genre of music, it entertained our audience and that there were a few things that could be improved.
We got our feedback on our music video by having a screening with our class. The kind of audience the pop/punk rock genre is aimed at is teenagers so this was a great chance to get some realistic, useful feedback from that age group. The comments we received for this is that the storyline and feel of the video was fun, likeable, energetic and comical; the video had good pace; it fits the genre and the lyrics; they likes the way we had repeated some of the shots towards the end of the video; they thought the lighting was better than from our first draft and the running scene that we had sped up or the ‘manipulation of time’ in that scene was good. Some improvements they thought we could have was that some of the lip-syncing could be a little clearer and they suggested also that a small performance element in there of our actor singing into a microphone from different angles on a blank background could be inserted randomly throughout the video. We appreciated this feedback and I think that given a little more time we could have re-filmed some parts of the video where the lip-syncing is a bit unclear and also we might have managed to have that small performance element as in other, real pop/punk rock music videos like ‘Good Charlotte – Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous’ or ‘Sum 41 – In too Deep’ if we didn’t focus on the storyline so much. Overall, the feedback was mainly good and I agree that there are definitely some improvements that could be made.
For our digipak, we asked people of our age, ones that would be the consumers of this product and they liked the abstractness of the front cover, they liked the images, what we did with the last back panel that fold in with some lyrics from each song on it and the colour scheme. They suggested that we could have different images on the inside which were also mine and Patricia’s thoughts.
The feedback for the website was mainly good. We asked our peers again as they are of the target age group. They really liked all the rollover images or the ‘visual aids’ on the page. They liked the images we had created like the megaphone and the Polaroid, the scroll-box and the layout of the page. They thought we could improve it by adding a few more objects onto the page like images and social network update boxes. Again, I and Patricia agree that this is something we could have done, if given more time we would choose to improve this as when looking at the websites I analysed like that of www.linkinpark.com they had objects all over the page like fan comment spaces, social networking updates, and blogs from the band members too; all things we would have liked to put onto our website.
How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
When researching my products I began by looking at real media texts by using the internet to search for music videos to analyse; for websites and also for digipaks. I used Youtube.com for the music videos; this has the largest video streaming database on the internet so this provided me with enough real music videos to look at and analyse. I then looked at band’s websites like ‘Linkin Park’ and ‘Muse’ and analysed them. Both of their homepages based around their latest albums and promoting that more than anything else and the rest of the website would promote their past albums and other things to do with themselves. We wanted the homepage to revolve mainly around promoting the ‘new album’ we were creating for our task and the ‘new track’ that we had made the music video for so these websites were a great inspiration for ours. When looking at existing covers for CD’s and digipaks, I looked at ones that were quite abstract and simple when doing research as this is what we wanted. I looked at ones by the band ‘Alter Bridge’ and one by ‘The Killers’; both had specific colour schemes, both stood out and both were fairly simplistic. When researching the track we looked at multiple unsigned bands on websites like Myspace and contacted them. We got permission from a few different bands but when we were listening to their music we were unsure what we could do with their tracks at first. As me and Patricia both listened to the band that we ended up choosing I went onto their record label, 604 record's, site and contacted them through there and within a few days I got a reply from their manager also the co-owner of the record label saying that we have permission to use the track we wanted.
For both the digipak and the website we started by using green-screen technology to take the images we wanted for our cover. We used bright lighting from the right-hand side in some of the images and for others our actor was fully lit. As we were taking the pictures we got some from many angles and even from above so we needed to get direct light from above so there was no shadow underneath and the green screen underneath our actor. After this we put these images onto Adobe Photoshop CS4 where we cut around the images getting rid of the green screen behind, using the 'magic wand' tool and the free-hand select tool, so we were left with just an image of our actor with a megaphone and no background behind him, this allowed us to put anything in the background.
(original picture before editing to be used for Polaroid on website which was taken against green screen)
When making the website we chose to use both Macromedia and Adobe Dreamweaver (depending what computer we were on). We started by choosing a colour scheme: we chose red, blue, black and white. So we started by making a black background for our website. We then went onto Fireworks and Adobe Photoshop to make buttons, the navigation bar and logo. We used the internet to find a font we wanted for our logo and navigation bar and other things on the page. White font was mainly used against the black background as it is a contrast from that colour and would stand out more and borders were either blue or red and some texts were in blue. To position everything on the page we used layers that are in Macromedia Dreamweaver but not in Adobe Dreamweaver; the layers on the Macromedia programme allowed us to position objects on the pages a bit more freely. Because this programme uses HTML coding it allowed us to put our music video in there by using the embed code provided by Youtube.com which is where we uploaded our video and also make a scroll box on the page.
(Split view with design & HTML coding on Dreamweaver)
When linking the pages up we had to create new pages for each one. We then decided to use rollover images so it makes the website more visually appealing. We did this by editing the images we already had. For example the ‘Home’ button on the navigation bar. We decided to invert the colours every time the mouse rolled over the image and so did the same for the rest of the navigation bar by splitting the images up so they could all link to different pages.
We also did this for lots of other images on the page that don’t even link up to anything like the megaphone that tilts up with an outburst of colour:
(original megaphone image and the rollover image)
And this image:
This image is one we had edited from the green screen and we edited it to look like a Polaroid photograph and rotated it at an angle. By using a Gaussian and Movement blur tool on Adobe Photoshop CS4 it allowed me to distort the image so we placed that as the rollover image when putting it onto the webpage. We also placed the text onto it in this programme and as we wanted to promote the new album we thought this would be a good idea to put ‘Sing Sing. Out Now!’ on it.
When creating the background for the digipak we used Adobe Photoshop CS4. We wanted something abstract and that would stand out so we used the chosen colour scheme of black, white, red and blue and scrawled onto the white background in red and blue around our image using a paintbrush tool with a thicker brush for the red and a slightly softer and thinner one for the blue. When creating the text the text tool was used and the logo was taken from the one we created on the website but inverted in colour also so it was in black and not white. We chose our images from the ones we cut out from the green-screen. We used the text tool for the rest of the text.
When editing images for both the digipak and the website we used Macromedia Fireworks, Paint Shop Pro X and Adobe Photoshop CS4.
We used Adobe’s Premiere Pro CS4 to edit our music video. This involved capturing all the footage we had filmed and then naming the ones we wanted to keep in order to keep organised and know what’s what and getting rid of the clips that weren’t so good and not needed. We then placed them on the timeline and trimmed the footage down in order to fit in with the track which was also placed on the timeline in place of the original audio on the footage captured as that wasn’t needed. We also used this programme to create fades as a transition with some shots as we felt some cuts were too harsh and to edit the brightness, contrast and lighting of our video by using the video effects provided on the programme.
For my evaluation I originally wrote it onto Microsoft word and when I had finished I copied it onto a new post in my blog on the blog hosting site www.blogspot.com. I pasted the text into the ‘edit html’ tab as otherwise it would copy the encoding from the programme too and not change to the chosen font on my blog.
and conventions of real media products?
Our media product was for the song ‘Sing Sing’ by a Canadian pop/punk rock band called Marianas Trench. Typical of this genre are music videos with a fun or comic storyline or feel to them like for example; ‘Celebrity Status’ by Marianas Trench or ‘All the Small Things’ by Blink 182.
(A snapshot of a comic part of the Marianas Trench video 'Celebrity Status')
We tried to fit this typicality by creating a music video with a lot of energy and fun to it with a bit of a comic storyline of a stalker fan girl and her obsession that is a band member.
(A snapshot of the 'fan girl' holding up a banner to the band member.)
One of the main conventions of music videos are close ups because they predominate and establish intimacy between the viewers and the star (Pete Fraser). We quite a few close up in our music video but the close up shot didn’t dominate over other shots. We didn’t use close ups too much because we wanted to tell the story between the two characters, however we gave our ‘star’ or main character of the story (our actor Shaun) more screentime as he was the more important character and the story did revolve around him. Richard Dyer said “a star is an image constructed from a range of materials” so we felt close ups weren’t as essential; by making sure he is the first and last character we see so the audience would be introduced to him first and as they see more of him in the music video, we felt a relationship could be established in this way.
Another main convention of music videos is the use of fast-cutting. We did this for most of the music video and also used some longer shots where we felt was appropriate and when the tempo had slowed down a little like on the last verse of the song. Otherwise, the video is a upbeat and fairly fast tempo song so we tried to use plenty of different camera angles when filming one scene so we could still see the storyline and keep the fast cuts in.
One other common factors in music videos is that shots can be repeated throughout either to remind the audience of something earlier on, to be used as flashbacks or just used dynamically and used when appropriate. We went with this convention as in our storyline the band member ends up missing his fan girl who isn’t interested in him anymore. We developed this convention in conjunction with our storyline so the audience sees him remembering his time with her and it creates sympathy so the audience will feel for him whilst it also being quite ironic and comical.
We had a solid narrative throughout the music video using both the storyline and lip-syncing in conjunction with each other or switched between the two; “The video allows the audience access to the performer in a much greater range of ways than a stage performance could. Eye contact and facial gestures via the close up, role playing through the narrative and mise-en-scene will present the artist in a number of ways which would not be possible in a live concert.” (Pete Fraser, ‘Teaching Music Video’ - BFI, 2004) As we used our star in the narrative it depicts him away from the performance element and focuses more on the storyline and shows the artist as what would happen away from his concerts; therefore, we against the convention of the performance element within music videos.
How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
Our ancillary texts are tied to my main product, retaining imagery, themes and the colour scheme. We used our main character throughout our three products so that the consumer to establish ‘the star’ (Richard Dyer).
We wanted to maintain the familiarity with the band when creating our products so that’s why we chose to use the same themes throughout. When looking at other media products we found that if we wanted our website’s homepage to be based around promoting our track, music video and album the sites we looked at that did that had objects on the pages relating to those things like picture and videos of them and links to buy them. Also on their pages would be links to social networking sites which appeals to the target audience of teenagers - young adults as consumers of the kind of music this band makes. This is why we thought if we had put social networking sites like www.twitter.com, www.myspace.com, www.youtube.com and www.facebook.com the audience can ‘keep up with the band’ which is also why we wrote that on the website.
“Music videos, along with the introduction of compact discs, helped rescue a flagging industry in the early 1980s. In so doing, they established visual style – never of course totally out of style – as a pre-eminent aspect of performance” (Routledge, 1994). Using a similar visual style helps the audience identify the band with these products so that’s what we have tried to achieve by using the megaphone prop on the website, in the video and on the digipak; by using the same colour scheme of black, blue, red, and white throughout all three products and by also using our main character on the products too.
Overall our products are very well related to each other and all revolve around promoting ‘the star’ and mainly the track.
What have you learned from your audience feedback?
From the audience feedback received on our music video we found that our video fitted our chosen genre of music, it entertained our audience and that there were a few things that could be improved.
We got our feedback on our music video by having a screening with our class. The kind of audience the pop/punk rock genre is aimed at is teenagers so this was a great chance to get some realistic, useful feedback from that age group. The comments we received for this is that the storyline and feel of the video was fun, likeable, energetic and comical; the video had good pace; it fits the genre and the lyrics; they likes the way we had repeated some of the shots towards the end of the video; they thought the lighting was better than from our first draft and the running scene that we had sped up or the ‘manipulation of time’ in that scene was good. Some improvements they thought we could have was that some of the lip-syncing could be a little clearer and they suggested also that a small performance element in there of our actor singing into a microphone from different angles on a blank background could be inserted randomly throughout the video. We appreciated this feedback and I think that given a little more time we could have re-filmed some parts of the video where the lip-syncing is a bit unclear and also we might have managed to have that small performance element as in other, real pop/punk rock music videos like ‘Good Charlotte – Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous’ or ‘Sum 41 – In too Deep’ if we didn’t focus on the storyline so much. Overall, the feedback was mainly good and I agree that there are definitely some improvements that could be made.
(Snapshots of a comic part & a performance element of Good Charlotte - 'Lifestyles of the Rich and the Famous' & Sum 41 - 'In Too Deep'.)
For our digipak, we asked people of our age, ones that would be the consumers of this product and they liked the abstractness of the front cover, they liked the images, what we did with the last back panel that fold in with some lyrics from each song on it and the colour scheme. They suggested that we could have different images on the inside which were also mine and Patricia’s thoughts.
The feedback for the website was mainly good. We asked our peers again as they are of the target age group. They really liked all the rollover images or the ‘visual aids’ on the page. They liked the images we had created like the megaphone and the Polaroid, the scroll-box and the layout of the page. They thought we could improve it by adding a few more objects onto the page like images and social network update boxes. Again, I and Patricia agree that this is something we could have done, if given more time we would choose to improve this as when looking at the websites I analysed like that of www.linkinpark.com they had objects all over the page like fan comment spaces, social networking updates, and blogs from the band members too; all things we would have liked to put onto our website.
How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
When researching my products I began by looking at real media texts by using the internet to search for music videos to analyse; for websites and also for digipaks. I used Youtube.com for the music videos; this has the largest video streaming database on the internet so this provided me with enough real music videos to look at and analyse. I then looked at band’s websites like ‘Linkin Park’ and ‘Muse’ and analysed them. Both of their homepages based around their latest albums and promoting that more than anything else and the rest of the website would promote their past albums and other things to do with themselves. We wanted the homepage to revolve mainly around promoting the ‘new album’ we were creating for our task and the ‘new track’ that we had made the music video for so these websites were a great inspiration for ours. When looking at existing covers for CD’s and digipaks, I looked at ones that were quite abstract and simple when doing research as this is what we wanted. I looked at ones by the band ‘Alter Bridge’ and one by ‘The Killers’; both had specific colour schemes, both stood out and both were fairly simplistic. When researching the track we looked at multiple unsigned bands on websites like Myspace and contacted them. We got permission from a few different bands but when we were listening to their music we were unsure what we could do with their tracks at first. As me and Patricia both listened to the band that we ended up choosing I went onto their record label, 604 record's, site and contacted them through there and within a few days I got a reply from their manager also the co-owner of the record label saying that we have permission to use the track we wanted.
For both the digipak and the website we started by using green-screen technology to take the images we wanted for our cover. We used bright lighting from the right-hand side in some of the images and for others our actor was fully lit. As we were taking the pictures we got some from many angles and even from above so we needed to get direct light from above so there was no shadow underneath and the green screen underneath our actor. After this we put these images onto Adobe Photoshop CS4 where we cut around the images getting rid of the green screen behind, using the 'magic wand' tool and the free-hand select tool, so we were left with just an image of our actor with a megaphone and no background behind him, this allowed us to put anything in the background.
(original picture before editing to be used for Polaroid on website which was taken against green screen)
When making the website we chose to use both Macromedia and Adobe Dreamweaver (depending what computer we were on). We started by choosing a colour scheme: we chose red, blue, black and white. So we started by making a black background for our website. We then went onto Fireworks and Adobe Photoshop to make buttons, the navigation bar and logo. We used the internet to find a font we wanted for our logo and navigation bar and other things on the page. White font was mainly used against the black background as it is a contrast from that colour and would stand out more and borders were either blue or red and some texts were in blue. To position everything on the page we used layers that are in Macromedia Dreamweaver but not in Adobe Dreamweaver; the layers on the Macromedia programme allowed us to position objects on the pages a bit more freely. Because this programme uses HTML coding it allowed us to put our music video in there by using the embed code provided by Youtube.com which is where we uploaded our video and also make a scroll box on the page.
(Split view with design & HTML coding on Dreamweaver)
When linking the pages up we had to create new pages for each one. We then decided to use rollover images so it makes the website more visually appealing. We did this by editing the images we already had. For example the ‘Home’ button on the navigation bar. We decided to invert the colours every time the mouse rolled over the image and so did the same for the rest of the navigation bar by splitting the images up so they could all link to different pages.
We also did this for lots of other images on the page that don’t even link up to anything like the megaphone that tilts up with an outburst of colour:
(original megaphone image and the rollover image)
And this image:
(original polaroid image and the rollover image)
This image is one we had edited from the green screen and we edited it to look like a Polaroid photograph and rotated it at an angle. By using a Gaussian and Movement blur tool on Adobe Photoshop CS4 it allowed me to distort the image so we placed that as the rollover image when putting it onto the webpage. We also placed the text onto it in this programme and as we wanted to promote the new album we thought this would be a good idea to put ‘Sing Sing. Out Now!’ on it.
When creating the background for the digipak we used Adobe Photoshop CS4. We wanted something abstract and that would stand out so we used the chosen colour scheme of black, white, red and blue and scrawled onto the white background in red and blue around our image using a paintbrush tool with a thicker brush for the red and a slightly softer and thinner one for the blue. When creating the text the text tool was used and the logo was taken from the one we created on the website but inverted in colour also so it was in black and not white. We chose our images from the ones we cut out from the green-screen. We used the text tool for the rest of the text.
When editing images for both the digipak and the website we used Macromedia Fireworks, Paint Shop Pro X and Adobe Photoshop CS4.
(Screen shot of the text tool being used in the Macromedia Fireworks programme)
We used Adobe’s Premiere Pro CS4 to edit our music video. This involved capturing all the footage we had filmed and then naming the ones we wanted to keep in order to keep organised and know what’s what and getting rid of the clips that weren’t so good and not needed. We then placed them on the timeline and trimmed the footage down in order to fit in with the track which was also placed on the timeline in place of the original audio on the footage captured as that wasn’t needed. We also used this programme to create fades as a transition with some shots as we felt some cuts were too harsh and to edit the brightness, contrast and lighting of our video by using the video effects provided on the programme.
For my evaluation I originally wrote it onto Microsoft word and when I had finished I copied it onto a new post in my blog on the blog hosting site www.blogspot.com. I pasted the text into the ‘edit html’ tab as otherwise it would copy the encoding from the programme too and not change to the chosen font on my blog.
