Finished video

Question 1 - In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Our brief was to produce a promotion package for the release of an album, to include a music video, digipak and magazine advert. To begin, I had to research other music video's from our chosen genre and explore their conventions. Conventions of indie music videos included the use of both narrative and performance, casual smart clothing, instruments (predominantly the acoustic guitar), other characters, ironic humour and performing straight to the camera ('direct address'). When it came to producing our own video, we had to decide what conventions we were going to use, which we would develop and which we might challenge.
We decided the main convention that we would use in our video would be the ironic humour. We found this in a few acoustic videos like Joshua Radin's song "Brand New Day", or  Ed Sheeran's song " Lego House".

Ed Sheeran - Lego House

Joshua Radin - Band New Day 

Joshua Radin is an american folk singer/ song writer who was born in Shaker Heights, Ohio witch explains the folk origins. His songs have been in many of Scrubs, Grey's Anatomy, Brothers and Sisters, American Idol and One Tree Hill. His songs have also appeared on over 75 films and television placements. Brand New Day is from the album Simple Times witch is his second studio album, it was released on the 9th September 2008 on iTunes. 

The main convention we decided to use from this video was the ironic humour that is portrayed through out Joshua Radin's video. The song title is Brand New Day which suggests that he's life is looking up, he's having a fresh start and that feel is spread throughout the lyrics but in the video he gets thrown around told to get lost by a police women, hit by a car and beaten up by a gang. This all sounds a little nasty and harsh but in the context of the video it is very funny. We wanted to bring the convention to our video and make people laugh at a video with a song that wasn't particularly funny, in terms of it's lyrics. We also liked the casual / smart look he has in the video so we tried to use and develop that convention in our own video.

We did lots of researched on videos that we think were in our genre, Artist's like Joshua Radin, (Some) FooFighters and Newton Faulkner.

We challenged the continuity convention of videos in our genre mainly in the costume area of our video. This was mainly because our actors didn't wear the same things every day we filmed but we decided to keep the costume changes running through the video because it gives the feel that the video is not just on one day it is throughout his life.

Question 2 - How Effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary text?

Question 2

Overall I feel that the combination of our three products was effective. I think this because they all share similar imagery and they would be easily identifiable by audiences. Our ancillary task is almost exactly how we wanted it to look. We planned the front of the digipak to have an image of the main performer with the strange Bird obsessed man kissing and holding the bird that is in the first chorus with the performer sitting in the back ground looking scared or disturbed, so I think we created the image we wanted for the front of our digipak. I tried to keep a strong feel of brand identity running through the ancillary tasks and our video which I think I did especially since all the subjects in the images used on the poster and digipak are featured in the video like the front background which is an image from the video of the first chorus. We were just trying to make the rest of the digipak relevant to the video so we had an image of the of the background wall that we used in the chorus of the video for the back and then used the lines of the bricks as lines for the song titles to run along. We decided to turn the back and front black and white because it is a convention of our genre to have a black and white digipak. The inside of the digipak is two images of objects that are featured in our video showing more brand identity to the video. I think that our audience would clearly see the brand identity between our 2 media products and in the effective connection to the video because of the identifiable actors that are in the video and on the digipak and advert.

(Shot from the video)

If I were to start a fresh with my digipak I wouldn’t change a lot, I might do more research into attractive colours for products and then get the right balance between general attractive colours and what looks good on my ancillary task.
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I think audiences would clearly relate our ancillary task to our music video because there are clear aspects of you our video in the poster and digipak that clearly relate to our video, and so therefore they are effective as a combination.

Question 3 What have you learned from your audience feed back

The first feed back we received was from the questionnaire that we produced. We made these questionnaires to see what our target audience expected from a music video in the indie genre and all the conventions that come along with that. Our target audience members thought that our music video should include varied shots, narrative and choreography. We used this information to gather our ideas and see what would look good and please our audience, we have tried including varied shot and a variation of a narrative but when it came to choreography we decided the song we had chosen would exactly fit a dance routine, as most video's in our genre don't involve any choreography we decided we wouldn't upset our audience if it wasn't included.
When we were in the production stage every few weeks we would get our media class to watch what we had done so far and used there criticism to help develop our video. Because there was lots of people watching it at the same time they could pick up on things that we may have missed and add to our video in some ways, giving us suggestions and ideas that could help make our video look better. We received positive criticism from our peer's things like little bits of video being out of sync and possible transitions that would look good for our video.

We uploaded our video to You Tube and linked it to Facebook then asked people to give us some feedback and see what our target audience really thought of our video, most of our friends in our target audience really enjoyed our video and liked what we had done with the song. The parts they enjoyed the most were the funny parts with ash acting, what they thought didn't quite go was the clash between the slightly boring serious acting in the performance clips with the funny acting of ash.Facebook was a great way of distributing and receiving feed back for our video as our friends will all be in our target audience and in the age range of 13-21 Years old, because this audience were the demographic i was aiming my video towards I could get the most constructive criticism.

Here is our finished music video of the song The Day I Died by Just Jack.

Question 4 – How Did You Use Media Technologies in the Construction, Research, Planning and Evaluation Stage?

Research and planning

Feedback for Digipak and Poster

I showed both of my ancilary tasks to the class asking for feedback in how to improve and their reasons why. It was important for me to understand their views in not only how the CD and poster looked, but whether the connection between them two and the music video was clear. The one question that was repeated a few times was about the over-laying colour on both the CD and poster as they were different! I felt that because the image is the same, the colouring can be different as the puplic would more likely distinguish who the star was in the image and not the colouring. However, I took this into account and both colours are dark (one being black and white and the other sepia). 

Some questions were raised as to why we chose the "pigeon" and "TNT-bomb vest" for the inside of the digipak. Both things are featured in the music video and from mainly choosing them from random as this relates to our music video. The bomb vest is also one of the last things the audience will see in the music video before it dips to black, this allows them to connect it, arguably, making the CD more personal to them.

Updated Poster

This is our finished digipak magazine advert. we binned the first draft because of of some of the unclear information like the artist title and "OUT NOW" feature. On the first draft i had "OUT NOW" and the release date which with the feed back we got from the first draft we found it wasn't a very advertising look so we decided to lose the release date and just keep the "OUT NOW" because it is very attention grabbing. We also added places where the album is available like HMV, ITunes and Spotify. I did edit there logos a little bit so that they would fit in with the poster but I kept the main aspects of the logos so they could still be identified as big music retailers. I also added the record label but again edited it so that it fit in with the rest of the image. I would imagine this poster would be featured in a magazine such as "Q magazine" as our genre would fit in with some of there previously featured artist's and they do a lot of full A4 page for big artists. we have gone for a full page because Mercury records are a very big recording company so it would be in Just Jack's capability to make a full page happen.