Evaluation: Question 1

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

Below are 9 key shots which I have annotated to show the links between our music video and existing videos to show how we have used and developed the media conventions.

In case these embedded Scribds do not work the links are above each.
Question 1

I used Georgina's answer to question 1 to help me gain a greater understnading of what I had ot do and as we worked in the same group we researched the same videos and liked the same shots in our own video and so the shots commented upon are quite similar.


Question 1: Digipak and Website

Evaluation: Question 2

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

In case these embedded Scribds do not the links are above both.


Question 2


I used Georgina's answer to question 2 so that I could gain a greater understands of what I was expected to do.



Question 2 Improvements

Evaluation: Question 4

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

Question 4

View more presentations from hennieclough.

Evaluation: Question 3

When we first started this project we wanted all of the tasks to look professional and like something you would see in the music industry. To achieve this we needed to gain feedback from different sources so that we could meet this goal. At each point in our idea and construction stages we always asked our teachers opinion on what we were doing. This lead to us changing our idea to incorporate more exciting scenes and changing the editing so that the video was more fluid and dramatic.

Ones we had finished our second rough cut we decided to get some of the class to view it and give their opinions as we knew they had a media focused mind and an understanding of how music videos should look. The main piece of feedback which kept being mentioned was the fact that the editing of the clips in the first verse was quit slow and therefore quite boring especially after the fast paced instrumental section at the beginning of the song. We took this on board and changed the editing to make this first verse more exciting so that it would grab the audience’s attention when they began to watch it.

Once we had finished the editing we all added the video to our Facebook accounts so that we could reach a wide range of people include those inside and outside our target audience of 17 to 30 year old males who are either a “Scene Kid”, “Indie Kid” or “Indie Scenesters”. Facebook allowed us to reach people with a media focused mind and those without which gave us a wide range of technical and non-technical feedback.

Comments we recieved from media minded people

Bradley James: "The cinematography is fantastic"

Jack Osmen: "The editing is sublime, particularly in the introduction"

Tom Butch Martin: "its well edited l,ighting and composition of shots are good ,has good continuity throughout"

Elle Kitchener: "sososo much better than your rough cut. its more exciting now and gripping. very clever some of the camera work, shows skill."

Comments we recieved from people in our target audince

Tor Webster: "Vid reminds me a bit of Vlad the Impaler, think its cos of the dark story and the camera shots"

Conor Keappock: "I really like the idea and the stop start style shots when the clown make-up is going on. It fits really well with the song title and the style of the song, as it too is very sudden and stop starty."

Bradley James:"Loved all the effects and the story was very cleverly shown."

The overall feedback was mostly positive, people liked the editing and the camera work and thought that the storyline was easy to understand. They liked the different transitions and effects used on the video as it made it interesting the two main effects they liked were the Sin City effect on some of the clips, which allowed us to make some of the objects in the black and white clip red, and the fast forward effect used on the clips at the beginning with the strobe light. Many people said that they thought the video was professional and looked like a real music video as well as thinking the clown was highly scary. Some people liked how the storyline and editing reflected the title of the song and the tempo. People also liked the way the chair scene was filmed and edited as it fit the music perfectly.

We only had 2 comments which were a little less positive. The first is the fact that my reaction to Georgina putting on makeup was funny. I would want to change this so that it looked more professional and fit to the scary and dark storyline. The second was by one person who thought the scenes in London were irrelevant even though someone else commented saying “Really liked the bits filmed in on the bridge in London”.



I printed off copies of our digi pak and I handed them to members of the target audience to annotate. The feedback was mostly positive with people liking the pictures on the back and the simplistic text as well as how the picture on the inside cover is the back ground for the website and therefore creating a link. One person said they like how the flower is covering the girls mouth as it "implies she is being silenced".

The only criticisms were that the alignment of the flower was a little off and so should have been more in the center and that the copyright information was hard to read.

With the website I had members of the target audience view the site and write feedback on a piece of paper.

The feedback again was mostly positive with people liking the infomation about the band and the feature of the video as well as the useful links at the bottom of the page.

The only bad feedback we had was that the text on the poster was hard to see and the picture in the background was a little bit blury.

If i had time to change these faluts I would as I would have of liked to create a really stong brand which appealed to the whole of the target audience.

Final Video

This is the Final Cut of our video.

Final Cut from WGSB on Vimeo.

Final Website

Kelsey developed the website even further by adding the actual video and the poster to the website. Kelsey stuck with her idea of having more than one column and I think it works and does not look to cramped. The name of the single and the album are present in this table so that the user can easily see what the single the video is for and what the album is called so that they can buy it.

Kelsey has also added a login feature do that the user can become a member of the website and can therefore access more of the website than someone who is not a member.

She also added links to the bands other websites so that the user could add them on Facebook and Myspace and view their own official website.

I really liked this final website as it looks very professional and like a website a band would actually have. I like the background and the way the buttons and the title stand out from the background. I also like how the buttons change colour and their are links to the bands other official web pages.

Click here for a working link to the website.

Digi Pack Finished Template

I thought it would be a good idea to show how the digi pak would look like as a template so that people can visually see the positions of each section of the digi pak and what they all look like together.

I used Photoshop to create this I flipped the inside images vertically and horizontally so that all of the images where in the correct position and makes sense when the digi pak was folded.

Final Digi Pack 3D

I used Photoshop and a template from the internet to help me create a 3D version of our digi pak, this allowed us to see what the product would look like if we actually made it.

I used the transform tools to make the images fit the case and I also used the Inner Shadow effect on the CD so that it looked like it was actually sitting in the tray.

Final Digi Pack

This is the final digi pak laid out in its template form. I thought it would be a good idea to show the digi pack like this so that all sides of the digi pak could be seen.

I used Georgina's mock up digi paks and then expanded the idea by putting the name of the album on the front cover and also creating the inside. I though Georgina's mock up digi pak related to the target audience and also it would form a link between the video, the website and the digi pak. Georgina took selection of pictures of herself and so this made it easy for me to create the digi pak as I had all of the elements ready for me to start using.

I used Photoshop to create this digi pak and I used a selection of tools and effects including Drop Shadows, Inner Shadows, the crop and selection tools and the text tool. I also made the CD tray more transparent so that you could see the image behind it by adjusting the opacity of the image.

Music Videos in the News

The most recent controversy over music videos is the explicitness of Lady GaGa and Beyonces single Telephone. There is a high amount of sexual content throughout the video including nudity and skin showing with Lady GaGa being wearing nothing but yellow tape in one scene. Lady GaGa also kisses a women which adds to the references to a women’s prison. The video also makes references to poison and the murder of several strangers in a diner in the middle of a desert which I believe is a link to the film “Natural Born Killers”.

This is a link to an article I found on the Daily Mail website all about the explicit video.

Digi Pak Analysis

I have decided to quickly analyse this digi pak front cover as one of the shots we used in the music video was the main girl withe a hand over her mouth silencing her and this front cover has a similar image.

- Simplistic text.
-Artists font so that fans can easily identify with the product.
-Simple but powerful picture as the girl as piercing blue eyes which capture the audience's attention right away.
- The background is simple.
- She has no clothes and so therefore does not detract our attention because her body is then one colour.
- The artsit also does not have much make up on which again makes the audience focus more on her eyes and arm rather than what she is or isn't wearing.
- I like how the title of the album is written on her arm this is very quirky and different.

Developing the Website

Kelsey spend along time developing the website sot that it looked more professional. She changed the background to a panel of pictures of the woods so that the background looked more dynamic. She still kept the background of the title and the buttons grey though so that they stood out from the dark background. She created a table to enter the information and the video into.

She added content to the table and a link to the video, we all liked this idea but we didn't like the extra column in the table as we thought it would be hard to find content to go in it and it would make the website look quite cramped.

Magazine Advert

Georgina decided to make a magazine advert to add to our website as she had the skills to do it and it was quick and easy to make. She used the pictures she took for the digi pack and used the paneled montage effect as the background of the poster. She used black banners across the background to create a plain platform for the text to be written on.

She did a lot of research into the conventions of magazine adverts and what adverts from the Alteronica genre look like. Georginas Research.

Responsabilities

This table shows each member of the group and what our responsibilities in the project were.

Re-Shooting

Today we are going to be re-shooting some of the bath room scenes, this will consist of:
- Extreme closeups of Georgina applying regular makeup.
- Extreme closeups of Georgina applying clown makeup
- Closeup of Georgina’s face with and without clown makeup
- A medium and a long shot of Georgina turning to look at me with clown makeup on
- A point of view shot of Georgina from my position.
- An establishing shot of me and Georgina in the bathroom together

Hopefully once we have completed the bathroom scene we will have time to go to the woods location and shoot:
- A point of view shot from the bushes of Georgina walking past
- A shot of the clown in the bushes
- A long shot of Georgian walking through the woods and turning to see the clown (but the clown will be out of shot)

Second Website Idea

From looking at the first website we realised the the colours and the layout did not look professional and did not link to our video at all. Kelsey changed the background colour to grey and made all of the information more central. She also added a picture from our video so that the user could see that the website and the video where linked, she has told us that this picture may change because she wants it to be more powerful.

We all thought that it would be a good idea if the to links change colour when the user cursor was on top of it indicating that there was a link. Kelsey did this creating rollover images which when the cursor was on top of the image the text would be white and the rest of the time the text would be black.


Her is the second attempt at the website through further research Kelsey has realised that that this site needs more development so that it looks like something which would be present in the music industry. She suggested that she may change the background to a picture instead of a bold colour this will also make the buttons more pronounced.

Font Choices

From doing research into Indie/ Pop/ Electronic websites and digi packs I have found that the fonts used are highly simplistic and quite feminine. We want to break this mould a little bit by having a masculine font and a feminine font working together. Below are some fonts the whole group thought would be suitable.
These are the two font that stood out to us the most and we have decided to make the top font for the larger text on both the website and the digi pak and the font at the bottom for the smaller text as it is easier to read large amounts of text in.

Mood Boards

These are 2 mood boards which we mad to try an capture what emotion we wanted the video to portray. We wanted to make a link between fantasy and reality with an element of confusion. we wanted to make our video have a twist at the end.

These mood boards show the locations we want to film at and inspiration we have got from other music videos and films to help us to develop our story line further. There is a reoccurring theme of clowns throughout both mood boards as this is how we want one of the main characters to be dressed as a clown is a major part in out final idea.

Georgina's Digi Pak Mock Ups

These are Georgina's mock ups of the digi pak, as she took the pictures she decided to create a few digi packs at the same time. All of the digi paks for indie bands are incredibly simplistic and so Georgina tried to re-create this by using simplistic images and text and making the layout also very plain.

Georgina added the copyright information, the bar code and the track list to the back of the digi pak so that the digi pak looks professional and contains all of the normal conventions of digi paks.

Georgian's Front Cover Mock Up

Georgina's Back Cover Mock Up

DIgi Pak Images

These are the images Georgina took of herself to add the to front cover of the digi pak. She took a selection of images from black and white to colour and some with heavy make up and some with natural make up. Georgina also took a few photos where she had a flower in her mouth, the light flower creates a good platform to add dark text to. Georgina's dark hair also creates a good platform for adding text but in a light colour.

Response to Rough Cut

This is the rough cut of our video we showed this to Mrs McLuckie and she gave us feed back on how we could improve it.
There is a section of the video which we have not yet filled and so we cut some of the music out and this is why there is a jump in the soundtrack.

Rough Cut from georgina campbell on Vimeo.

The overall response to our rough cut from Mrs McLuckie was that it had potential but the loose ends needed to be tided up to gain the best marks. The first thing she commented on was the first verse, she thought it was quite slow and boring as it was just Georgina walking forward. She also said the editing was too slow on this section which also made the beginning boring when it is supposed to capture the audience’s attention because it is the fist thing they see. As the tempo of the music and the editing became faster she said the video started to capture her attention although the bathroom scene shots had to be redone as some of them were out of focus. At the end of the video there is a shot where the clown mask rises up from the floor but Mrs McLuckie did not like this as she thought it would take the impact away from the final shot where the mask is dropped. The last comment she made was on the scene at the end of the video were Georgina was struggling with the mask and the clips were fast forwarded to give more of an impact. She liked this but thought the scene went on for to long and so should be broken up slightly.

We showed the roughcut to a few class mates to gain feedback from the target audience and people with a technical mind. The main feedback from the group was that the video had a good storyline and their were some good ideas in the video but they could be executed a little better by changing some of the editing and shots. A few people thought that the photographs and clown faces at the beginning was a bit boring and irrelevant. Another criticism was of the bathroom scene some people felt that this did not make sense but could be good if a few of the shots were changed to include a few more wide shots and point of view shots.

We will use the constructive criticism to develop our music video further.

Two Door Cinema Club Website

I thought it would be a good idea to analyse the bands own offical website to see what kind of features we could add to our website.

The website is very simplistic with the same cat picture being used as the background on each page and on 2 of the links on the side of the homepage. The same simplistic text is used for all of the page links and the title at the top of the page and a similar font is used on the rest of the text as the main text would be hard to read a lot of text in.

I will show my findings to the group and try to use some of these conventions and features on our own Two Door Cinema Club website.

Two Door Cinema Club's website

First Attemps of the back of the Digi Pak

This is my first attempt at the back cover of the digi pak. I added the bands record labels logo at the bottom of the page, as from doing research I found that this is one of the conventions of digi paks. I also added the bands website addresses as again this is a convention of digi paks and it allows the owner of the digi pak to find out more information about the band easily. Another thing I added was a bar code as this is a normal convention of any CD so that it can be sold in a shop. I only added the one track to this version as I thought we were just making a digi pak for the single, I added the length of the track to the back of the digi pak as from looking at singles I had at home they all indicate the length of the track.


With this second attempt at the digi pak I added all of the bands singles the same ones as they have on their own albumn. I chose to lay the tracks out in a paragraph rather than a list as it took up less room and from teh research I have doen many Indie bands show their tracks in this way. I made every other single red so that you could easily see the differnet tracks.

With this last cover I changed the arrangement of the websites and the creators to see what it looked like.

I will take some pictures in the next week to add to the digi pack and depending on the colour of the pictures will determine the colour I make the background on the back cover of the digi pak.

Two Door Cinema Club Website

Two Door Cinema Club now have their own official website http://twodoorcinemaclub.com/ we can take some ideas from this to help us layout our own website and see what features we should use to make it look like a professional music bands website.

First Website Idea

As Kelsey had made a website before we all decided that she would be the best person to be in charge of making the website. We all agreed that the website should be quite dark so that it related to the music video. Kelsey decided to use black, white and grey as the 3 main colours of the website. Kelsey made the template below and we all agreed that the layout was quite plain and looking back at our video the colours are more grey than black.

Kelsey is going to change the layout and colours so that it relates to our video a bit more and the bands genre of music.

Editing

We used Final Cut to create our video as this is the programme many professionals use to make music videos.

Georgina took on the role as editor as she picked up the skills really quickly and had a good ear for the counts in the music. Also we agreed that it would become very confusing if we kept switching tasks.

Below are screen shots of Georgina editing.

Here she is editing the first verse - the scene in the woods.


Here she is desaturating the clip to give a more clip that grey scale look that we wanted our video to be in.


Here is a link to Georgina's blog so you can see more clearly exactly what she did.

Understanding of Censorship

from looking at the censorship through history and in the news today I have developed an understanding about what is appropriate in music videos and what is not. I will take what i have learnt and inform the rest of my group about the do's and don'ts of music videos.

Censorship

"As the concept and medium of a music video is a form of artistic expression, artists have been on many occasions censored if their content is deemed offensive. What may be considered offensive will differ in countries due to censorship laws and local customs and ethics. In most cases, the record label will provide and distribute videos edited or provide both censored and uncensored videos for an artist. In some cases, it has been known for music videos to be banned in their entirety as they have been deemed far too offensive to be broadcast."

-Wikipedia

1980s

The first ever video to be banned by MTV was Queen’s !982 hit “Body Language” due to the homoerotic undertones, lack of clothing and the amount of sweat. This was belived to be unsitable for the television audience at the time.
Duran Duran’s hit “Girls on Film” was banned by the BBC as it was to sexual as there were several sexual fetishes shown in the video including .topless women wrestling in mud.

1990s

In 1991 the dance sequence of Michael Jacksons “Black or White” video was cut as it showed Jackson touching himself inappropriately. Michael Jacksons most controversial video was “They Don’t Care About Us” as it was banned from MTV, Vh1 and BBC because of the alleged anti-semitic message in the song.

Also in 1991 the country music artist Garth Brooks had his video “The Thunder Roll” was banned from The Nashville Network and Country Music Television for his portrayal of an abusive husband.

Madonna is the artist most associated with music censorship for her highly sexual videos such as “Lucky Star” and “Like a Virgin” as well as homosexuality and references to cross dressing and group sex in “Justify My Love”. The debate over the banning of her “Justify My Love” video resulted in the Canadian music video network MuchMusic launching a program called “Too Much 4 Much”. This program would show banned music videos late at night with a discussion show after where the members would talk about why they though the video was banned.

The Prodigy had their hit “Smack My Bitch Up” banned in several countries due to the depiction of drugs, sexual content and nudity. They also had their single “Firestarter” banned by the BBC because of its obvious references to arson.

2000s

In 2000 Robbie Williams’s video for his hit “Rock DJ” caused controversy as it showed Williams naked and peeling off his own skin revealing flesh. This was banned in the Dominican Republic and censored in the UK.

In 2002 Russian duo t.A.T.u caused controversy with their single “All The Things She Said” as it showed the 2 girls embracing and eventually kissing. Richard and Judy the television presenters began a campaign to have the video banned as they thought it would be highly appealing to pedophiles with the use of school uniforms and young girls kissing. The kiss was also choreographed into the girls live performance and when t.A.T.u appeared on Top of the Pops the kiss was replaced by audience footage so that it was not shown on television.

Breaking the Colour Barrier

In the first few years MTV was on the air there were very few black artists shown on the channel and the first non- white act to play on MTV were “The Specials” a white and black integrated band of musicians and vocalists. Apart from the specials many other black artist’s videos were rejected by MTV as they did not fit the strict Rock format of the channel at that time.

Before 1983 Michael Jackson also struggled to get shown on the channel. To break this colour barrier the president of CBS Records, at the time Walter Yetnikoff, spoke out against MTV and threatened to take away MTV’s rights to play any record from the CBS label. After this Michael Jacksons “Billie Jean” began to play regularly on the channel amongst other black artists.

MTV Channels

Since then more and more music channels have appeared which allows us to watch music videos 24 hours of the day. MTV has a lot of different channels under its name including some which are not music channels. The different music channels are used to appeal to different demographics.

The 5 Main MTV channels have their own individual characters which relate to the genre of music played on the channel.

MTV Hits shows chart hits and very few MTV shows. The channels character is a girl who looks very mainstream and up with times remembering the current and up to date music hits.

MTV Base focuses mostly on R'n'B, Hip-Hop, Reggae, Soul and Urban music and this is why the character is black, with a piercing and baggy clothing as this is the stereo type of R'n'B, Hip-Hop, Reggae, Soul and Urban artists.

MTV is a general music and entertainment channel and as this was the first of the channels the character used to symbolise this is wearing a crown so that it shows that this was the first channel and is the “king”.

MTV Dance is a 24 hour dance music channel and this is why the channels cartoon character is wearing head phones and is in dance clothing.

MTV Rocks (formaley known as MTV Two) is focused on alternative and rock music and this is why the channel character looks like a stereotypical “Rocker” with long hair and black clothing.

VH1 tries to target a more mature sophisticated audience of people between 25 and 44 year olds.

VH1 Classics (now rebranded as MTV Classics) shows music videos and concert footage from the 60’s up to the 90’s and sometimes feature footage from eras as early as the 40’s.

(a rebrand of TMF) when TMF was first launched it was described as being “ designed to replicate the rhythms of the whole family, playing the best pop videos with the biggest pop stars to become the sound track to the British family life." VIVA still uses this concept but films and programs for the sister channels are also shown.

MTV R is purely an entertainment channel showing reality television programs all day.

Mtv Also own the following channels:

• MTV +1
• MTV HD
• Comedy Central
• Comedy Central +1
• Comedy Central Extra
• Comedy Central Extra +1
• Nickelodeon
• Nick Replay
• Nick Jr.
• Nick Jr. 2
• Nicktoons
• Nicktoons Replay

The Launch of MTV

On August 1st 1981at 12:01am MTV was launched and the first ever music video to appear on the channel was "Video Killed the Radio Star" by The Buggles.

In the beginning the channel was solely used to play music on 24/7 but now a days you can see live award shows and view reality television programs such as “My Super Sweet Sixteen” and “The Hills”. New reality shows like these have created a new brand of celebrities whereby they are famous for doing nothing apart from being on this show. The format of these kinds of shows are supposed to show the raw reality of the characters lives, the cameras follow the characters around all day for a couple of months so that they can get a good amount of footage to put in the series.