Unit G324 Evaluation

Unit G324 Evaluation

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

How effective is the combination of your main product with ancillary texts?

In my group’s music video, we wanted to stick to the generic blueprint of a love song for an alternative rock band, but with a twist that challenges the usual stereotype. Our video uses the theme of loss, as our character wanders around his local area, remembering the times he spent with the woman he loved.

"Helena" By My Chemical Romance

We decided to make our audience feel sympathetic towards our character, Ben. We did this by using a lot of close up shots of his face, which lets the audience see he’s heartbroken. The band My Chemical Romance often uses the theme of loss or death in their videos, and will use extreme close ups of facial expressions to exemplify their emotions. However, this band would be classed as punk rock, and thus use this theme in a much darker and more direct way, by showing such imagery as corpses dancing around their coffins. As our chosen band is much more mainstream, and almost romantic, we wanted ours to be subtle and sweet, showing how our character misses his partner, and placing beautiful flowers on her grave.

We know that a lot of our audience, (both genders, aged 15-25, ) will have experienced death in their lives, and we wanted to use our video to create a relationship and bond between our character and our audience; this means that they will relate to the video and see the beauty and romance involved, referencing Lacan’s Theory of identity. We also used costume from popular brands across Britain, such as Top Shop, which will show the audience that our character is similar to them, so that they can relate to him further.

My Digipak cover

We wanted to avoid making our female character look amazingly beautiful. We did not want the audience to feel voyeuristic, therefore subverting the Male Gaze theory. We did this because the average person isn’t as perfect as many music videos portray, and our audience know this. We wanted the audience to believe it and relate to it more. We also thought that if we were to include voyeuristic shots, it wouldn’t suit the theme and feel of the video.

Our character is 18 years old, but has been forced to deal with a very serious scenario. We wanted to show that the youth of today can cope with adult issues, and deal with them in their own way, representing them as mature and strong.

My digipak challenges the stereotype for an alternative rock band. I have used some quite strong, almost shocking images, which could seem too imposing, and maybe more suited to a heavier rock, or punk rock band.

Each panel of my CD includes the theme of mouths. I used this theme as it links to the song title, “The Kind Of Thing You’d Say”. I have used very similar images of a shouting face throughout the digipak, to link it to my theme, and to make it interesting and powerful enough to be the album of a rock artist. Teeth can be perfect for framing words and letters, and the mouth itself has so many interesting features, such as a tongue, which can be used as a base for text or images, so to me it seemed that this theme would work perfectly for an album.

I wanted my digipak to stand out from other CDs, such as “Playboys” by The Rasmus, and, “A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out”, by Panic! At The Disco: two albums with quite boring images or dull colours, both of which don’t stand out. I wanted mine to use interesting images, such as Fall Out Boy’s “Infinity On High” or “Captain Morgan’s Revenge” by Alestorm. It uses the silhouettes of the band members in the centre of the front image, as many debut albums do, to promote the actual band members and increase their own individual popularity. The silhouettes I’ve used reference Green Day’s “International Superhits!” with the use of fading the band into the rest of the image, as seen in All American Rejects’ “Move Along”.

This will appeal to my target audience, males aged 16-25, because it is striking and interesting, with reviews from media products such as HMV and Kerrang! which are popular to the demographic.

Franz Ferdinand and WW2 Adverts

My promotional poster

The advert uses a similar image to my digipak, drawing attention once again to the mouth but showing more of the face around it, shouting advertising text. This references an album by Franz Ferdinand, which is based on an old WW2 propaganda poster. These have an attractive woman calling out. I wanted this to be even more imposing and striking than the CD, as I wanted it to look like it was almost forcing you to buy the album. By turning the head to face the front it looks like you’re being shouted at, and the words stand out more in bold format.

Ghost Silhouettes idea

Sunset Grave idea

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

My audience feedback taught me that I don’t have to stick too firmly to the stereotypical thoughts of what an alternative rock bands album should look like. Using social networking sites such as Facebook and Bebo, I asked 10 males and 10 females, aged between 16 and 20, a variety of questions about my ideas, such as, “If you saw this for sale, would it attract you enough to want to buy it?”.

I began with the idea of having either the shadow of a grave surrounded by flowers, in front of a romantic sunset, or the silhouette of a man holding the hand of a woman, who’s fading out into the background. The feedback collectively gave similar results, all basically saying that these wouldn’t be interesting enough to grab attention and they don’t promote the band enough. This I completely agree with, but didn’t notice at the time, so these reactions really helped to push me towards my final product.

After posting my final ideas and panels I got a variety of responses, but they all seemed positive. The males I asked said things like, “I love it!” and “I’d buy that, it looks professional!” whereas some of the females replied that it was scary, but effective. This shows that the males I asked generally found the image more effective, and it appealed to them more than the women, who thought it worked technically, but didn’t necessarily like it enough to buy it. I didn’t think that it would appeal as much to a female audience, as the image is quite strong and masculine; I would expect females to prefer a more illustrative, rather than graphic, image.

In the audience feedback for our Music Video, we used Facebook to send out another Questionnaire. This included questions such as, “How would you say a male is generally represented in a music video?” They replied with “Manly”, “Strong”, “A leader”, and “The best in a group.” However, we decided to keep our male character as an average person, who lives in similar situations to our audience, so that they can relate to him. The results that came back generally backed up our main points, and meant that we didn’t have to change much.

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

The use of my media blog was incredibly useful to the construction of my work. Having my tutors give me constructive feedback at every stage of my work and development meant that I could see where I was going wrong, and how I could improve it. The “Edit” part of the blog meant that I could easily go over the areas that weren’t as strong, and build on them to achieve a higher grade. This blog allowed us to put any work, development or related article onto a space where anyone could access it, and add to it, from wherever they were, be it at home, at school or anywhere with a computer. This meant that I could access my feedback at any time. The blogs allowed us to not only write in the standard area, but also to embed videos from Youtube or Google Videos, post ‘Google Documents’ for formats such as Microsoft Powerpoint files (which can’t run straight from the blog), or hyperlink other URLs.

In our music video, we decided to use Adobe Premiere, an advanced editing programme; this enables us to neatly edit clips together, use a video transition between shots and easily view the editing as it develops. We used some of these transition effects for shots such as when our character sees his lost partner, and she vanishes before our eyes. This was a ‘Ghosting’ effect added to a change in opacity. This meant that the shot showed the image of the last few frames, as it progressed, giving it a ghost-like quality. We used a Sony Handicam Digital Camcorder to shoot our music video. This was lightweight, easy to use and can connect to our computers instantly.

In my digipak, I decided to use Adobe Photoshop, a programme I’ve grown up with and thus know very well. This allowed me to create, import and manipulate any images stored on a computer, a USB stick or the internet; to add, change and tweak any aspect necessary. It also incorporates a variety of different filter effects, to make an image look more interesting and stylised. I often used a filter effect called ‘Cut-out’ with ‘Lens Flare’ to make the image look two dimensional, and almost cartoon like, and to give it an interesting lighting effect, which looks like the lighting used on a stage. To take my images I used my Fujifilm FinePix 4800z Digital Camera, which I know well, is light enough to easily carry, has a good focus and resolution and can get the images onto my computer just by putting in a camera card.

In my research to find an unsigned band, I used Myspace, a social networking site which also has a section for promoting British bands. It lets you see a page showing all the information about a band, how many fans they have on the site (and what they think of the band), some publicity pictures and some of their inspirations and views. Once I found a band I was interested in, I used Youtube, (a video hosting site, where you can search for any of millions of videos across the world), to look at the band and find out more about them. These sites allowed me to quickly access information and listen to the music of the band.

A lot of my inspiration for making our music video came from watching the Kerrang! Channel on my Skybox TV. This channel broadcasts a variety of new, classic, top rated videos and the Top 40 of the month, from all areas within the rock genre. This allowed me to see a variety of different bands and videos, to see which ones related to our ideas, analyse them and use some of the ideas or techniques in our own work.

Jack Edwards