My Band Flyer

How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluate stages? (Music Video)

Throughout the stages of my music video, I used various media technologies. To film the video we used a digital image camera, without this we would not have been able to record any footage. The cameras have many useful features such as zoom, which is important if your want a close up and can be attached to a tripod for level shots that look more professional than a rough shaky camera.

The main hardware that I have used has been the Apple Mac; I occasionally used PCs to edit my blogs, but Macs were the tool I used to create my music video. The main software that was used was Final Cut Express as this has many advantages over iMovie that we have previously used; you can manipulate video clips in many different ways such as cutting, changing the speed, and adding effects. We could use multiple tracks within the programme so that you can have more than one clip playing at once; it also has the ability to layer clips making it easier to have one long clip playing and short clips on top to cut away easily. Similarly with Photoshop, I was not familiar with different effects that could be used, making the editing process very time-consuming for me. However, I found cutting and syncing the different clips fairly easy and didn’t have many problems, as long as I made sure the arrow pointed downwards to place the clip, and not sideways which causes everything after that to be out of sync.

How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluate stages? (Ancillary Task)

When planning my ancillary task, I used media technologies to search for real media products that I can gather ideas from. I used the internet to search for other digipaks and concert posters that famous music artists have produced, or that other media students from previous years had made. This is important as you can see what elements work well, and which don’t and then add them to your work, or choose to leave them out - this way you give the audience what they want and they will be more likely to buy our product. We also took various location shots of what we could use in our video.

Throughout the construction stages of my ancillary task, I used various media technologies. The main hardware that I have used has been the Apple Mac; I occasionally used PCs to edit my blogs, but Macs were the tool I used to create my ancillary task. I used Photoshop to create my ancillary task because of its number of useful tools and ability to layer different images. With this program we can edit images in many different ways and add effects that will make your piece of work unique to the last detail. I used this throughout all my tasks.

If I redid this task, I feel that I would try to be more confident in trying different tools and seeing what I produce instead of using the few tools that I am comfortable with. I used a digital camera to take pictures of band members, which were then uploaded onto the Macs for me to crop and copy into my ancillary task.

A final way we used media technologies in our ancillary tasks is in our evaluation. In order to get some audience feedback we posted our work on the popular social networking site Facebook. We got multiple people giving us feedback on our work including what went well, and what we could do to improve it.

What have you learned from you audience feedback? (Music Video)

What have you learned from you audience feedback? (Ancillary task)

In order to gain audience feedback about my work, I decided to post it on the popular social networking site 'Facebook'. This is a very effective way to gain feedback as many of my friends could comment and give me feedback. I posted my flier and got several replies about how to improve it; different people could comment, from people in my media class, to people from other schools doing media and anyone else.

My audience feedback had enabled me to acknowledge that “the colours in your poster is very bland, which does not fit into your genre.” I agree with the comment that my flier lacks in vibrant colours that suits our neon image. To improve my task, I feel that I could have incorporated images from my music video to help my audience link the images and identify the band image.

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

For our digipak we used screen grabs from our music video on some panels. This was to ensure that the audience can fully relate our packaging to our music video to our band image. We’ve taken a colour scheme of mainly dark colours which emphasise the overlying neon colours or text on top. For my task of the flier, we all dressed in dark clothes to relate to the dark clothes we wore in our video. But gave it a more urban setting with the wall as the background to break conventions of our genre and to place a link to where we would be performing that event, in London.

Our music video works very well in combination to my two digipak panels. The dark colours combined with the neon glows of the background and words follow a lot of our music video, such as the lip syncing we did with the lava lamps as the background and our faces. Some effects that were used in the music video; such as when we are on the stepping stones at Boxhill; match my panels well as they also have bright colours standing out amongst everything else.

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

In my ancillary task I used standard conventions that you would expect to see on a flier. I included the email address and Facebook page of our band; the date; the venue and the name of our band. I challenged our genre by using a brick wall as my background; in doing this I represented the area that our band would be performing, in Koko which is situated in an urban area. All three of us are following the convention of dark clothing in my flier; the darker, dull colours help to emphasise the font and our band name. I chose the venue Koko as our band is not renowned enough to perform at larger venues; in doing this I also made sure my one-day flier coincided with James’ poster.

For my sections of the digipak I used and developed the conventions of our genre. For the background I had it mainly black and then drew neon lines over it in green blue and red. For my panel that the CD will go on, I had just this background to keep it simple as a lot of the time it will be covered by the CD or out of view. The background can look like neon chains, which resemble how people would be in a club, all linked together and dancing; or it could also show the links that the notes in the music make together. I also did the back panel which included the songs that featured in the album. Instead of a traditional layout of numbers and songs in a list; I decided to place some vertical, some horizontal and all in different neon colours to make them stand out.

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

For our music video we decided to break the convention of locations that you would expect to see in a Big Beat; we chose to base a large majority of our video in a forest. Traditionally, a lot of Big Beat events take place on the beach. Our clothing uses the forms and conventions of our genre, however I feel that we have developed this by the use of our 3D glasses in the close ups of us lip syncing. The idea of incorporating lava lamps into our music video has developed on the existing media products of our genre.

We followed conventions of a standard music video; lip syncing, cut on beat, location change etc; because they are effective when used in a music video, we have learned this by analysing popular music videos and looking at their conventions. These videos are successful for a reason and they engage the audience in the way a music video should. The conventions vary between genres, but are still very similar with regards to the actual video conventions.

Lip syncing is one of the most important conventions when it came to making our video, it is an extremely good way to make your video look professional; when watching music videos without lip syncing; they can look unprofessional and that not a lot of time has been put into them, when you see a performer lip sync it assures you that it is them singing is and it is also more interesting to watch. We lip sync through most of the parts of the video where vocals are involved, however, for some shots it would be unnoticeable since we are too far from the camera to notice.

Cutting to the beat is where you cut your video to a new shot, in time with the beat of the music. We used this method often in our video as we believe it makes the video look a lot better, it gives it more of a natural flow and leaves room for some interesting editing effects. It shows that the video has been edited to match our genre and that it is not just a video which has no relation to the song. We decided to make eye contact with the viewer; however in some shots we chose to keep the mystery of our identities by covering our eyes with the glasses.