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

We chose as a group to use the rock genre for our media product and we did frequent amounts of research in order to find out the typical style and form of rock music videos, some videos we looked at included 'Hall of Fame' and 'Drops of Jupiter' . There are many ways in which our media product conforms to the conventions of music videos, but also many ways in which we developed and in some cases challenged the forms and conventions of real media products of the rock genre.

Director's Commentary

Here is a brief commentary about some of the forms and conventions we used both in the narrative parts of our video and the performance parts. We also talk about things we did in the music video that challenged or developed typical forms and conventions.

Influences of our Band

Below is some images of how we portrayed our band

These are some bands we were influenced by:

Paramore



We believe this is a rock band that was very similar to our desired representation due to them also having a lead female vocalist and a band image that we wanted to resemble, cool and fun while also being passionate about rock music. They have a wide audience primarily 15-25 year olds of both genders, and a wide range of successful rock songs such as 'Misery Business' and 'Monster'. Our desired primary audience was similar being both genders 15-22 years.

Fireflight



This band is the band that had the successful song 'Unbreakable' that we used for our music video. We learnt a lot from the way they presented themselves and took aspects from their image into creating the rock persona of our band. Such as wearing dark styled clothes which we liked and so developed to wear some dark clothes while also adding a bit of colour to our band image.

Hey Monday



This band was a cool rock band which we like the style of. We found them a little too colourful for our desired image and so chose to wear darker clothes as well as some bright clothes of the style Hey Monday wore. We also used a darker lighting set-up and backdrop when we created are music video.

Music Video

 

Narrative

Our narrative consists of three characters resembling each band member, who have individual problems with there lives. The guitarist is a passionate player who wants to be successful in music, but is stuck busking. The singer has a stressful job and wants to to do something she enjoys as such as singing. While the Drummer wants to find and opportunity to play the drums as a career out of the way of his frustrated parents. They come across an band audition poster providing them with the opportunity they have been looking for. The narrative ends with them meeting and entering an audition room.



Hall of Fame was a video that strongly influenced the story of our narrative. When we listened to the lyrics of the song 'Unbreakable' we like the idea that it was about having problems and finding a way or solution to return stronger and over come these problems. Hall of Fame has a strong narrative in which two characters from different backgrounds had difficulties and big aspirations. The girl had a hearing problem and wanted to dance and the boy wanted to be better at defending himself.

  The Script- Hall of Fame ft. Will.i.am

We also really liked the way the narrative followed multiple story lines and this helped as create ours as we wanted to focus are narrative on each individual band member. The audition scene helped give us the idea of how each of our band members could achieve their dreams of becoming successful musicians by coming together and trying out for a band audition.

Todorov's Narrative Theory

To help us form a convincing narrative we made sure we followed Todorov's Narrative Theory. Below shows how are narrative follows the theory.

Performance

We looked at a wide variety of music videos so we could learn to make our performance convincing and conform to the forms and conventions rock music videos.

Camera Movement:          
     

                                                                     

Were learnt from this video on how much camera movement was used in Music videos. It allowed us to help the music video flow and follow and trace the band through a using shots  pans and zooms. We also learnt to include a wide variety of shot types from long shots to close ups. As well as to show peoples emotions, we chose to use close ups to also create convincing lip syncs when focused on the singers face.

Miming Instruments Convincingly:

This was the video we watched after realising we didn't mime convincingly on our test shoot both singing and playing instruments. This video included lots of performance from about 1:30 onwards and were learnt to exaggerated movements and large gestures while playing helped improve the overall performance and made it look more realistic.

Gifs of Conventions we used from rock music videos 

Camera Movement

Exaggerated playing of Instruments

Head banging and large gestures to the music

Website

I have compared the forms and conventions we have used to create our Website with the bands we researched in order to help us make ours. 

Album Cover

I have compared the forms and conventions we have used to create our album cover with the similar band Paramore, for their album cover for 'RIOT'

So in the end we made sure our media products used good conventions of the the rock genre, so our products could be appealing to our target audience, but also have unique things such as our unconventional narrative to make our music video stand out.

Evaluation Question 2: How effective is the combination of your main products and ancillary texts?

To make the combination of our Music Video, Website and Album Cover effective we created synergy across our three platforms. To do this we included multiple connections between each media product such as branding, colour schemes and themes.

Branding and Design    

Paramore's website, pictures and album is a good example of the strong use of branding synergy across all 3 platforms.

It uses a similar font and branding style across the three platforms. The website toolbar font and font in one of the pictures shown on the right is exactly the same The colour scheme across the platforms is shown to be bright solid colours.

• You can see above how we created synergy across our media products by including in bold large capital text the words 'The Defiance'. 
• The specific logo on the website home page and on the drum kit is exactly the same, which meant the audience would have a greater chance of remembering our band, through repeatedly seeing the logo.
• To create even more synergy we used a blue-black and dark colour scheme. However we could have included a bit more colour in our website as it was mostly just black, to further increase the synergy.
• We also wore the same clothes in the website and album cover, and similar styled clothes in the music video. 

Themes and Meanings

We also created synergy through the combination of our media products with meanings and themes through the use of colours, text and performance. 

Each band member has a different coloured backlight on them, which connotes a different representation of the band members characteristics. 

• The red colour was to represent danger and warning, to resemble the guitarists crazy and thrill seeking nature. 
• The blue colour is a cool calm colour and so symbolises the cool relaxed nature of the drummer. 
• The purple colour is quite an exciting colour and was chosen to represent the quirky and fun nature of the singer.

We continued to connote the representations that we showed by the lighting in the music video in our website. The meet the band section allowed us to write about the way we wanted to present each band member. Each profile described our similar hobbies like our passion for music, but also our individual representations. Daniel was presented as being a cool relaxed guy, Shobnam as a quirky and exciting person, and Aidan as a thrill seeker who liked to travel.

Below you can click each band profile to enlarge the image. Please click the 'X' button at the top right to return to Blog post.

We tried to use synergy through the use of imagery logs and information across all three of our media texts, to connote the message, themes, style and genre of our rock band. By doing this I believe we were very successful in combining our media products, in question 3 we obtain audience feedback on how clear are genre and style was.

Evaluation Question 3: What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

Audience Feedback

After creating our video,  we organised a date for a large screening of our music video where we invited many people through Facebook to the event. This allowed us to get more people to watch our video and as a result able to provide us with useful feedback.

As we wanted to get feedback for our website and Album Cover as well as the Music video. We created three short online surveys (Monkey Survey) with key questions that we wanted to know about that were sent to people to fill in their answers. Each survey is shown below via the link.

Audience Surveys

Below shows the three survey templates created to ask and obtain feedback from our audience about our music video, album cover and website.

We managed to get feedback from 18 people for each survey.

Music Video Audience Feedback

 Below is the results of the survey of the 18 people who took part in the Music Video survey. I have split the data up into separate sections.

Q1 On a scale of 1-10 what would you rate our video?

Q2 On a scale of 1-10 how clear was our narrative 10 being very clear and 1 being not clear at all?


Q3 On a scale of 1-10 how convincing and appealing was the performance 10 being good and 1 being not good?

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Q1,Q2 and Q3 | Create infographics

The darker shades of blue show a higher rating on a scale of 1 to 10.

For the first question there people gave a very high ratings out of ten, which shows that in general people thought our video was very good.

On question 2 about how clear our narrative was. Most people gave good ratings of around 7 and 8, but unfortunately some people gave lower ratings of 5 and 6. This tells me that the narrative of the music video was not as clear as it could be.

Question 3 was a very positive result as all 18 people gave high scores the lowest being only 7. It shows that people thought we looked like a real band, and performed realistically and connoted to the style of a rock band.


Q4 Would you recommend the video to a friend?

Q5 Would you say that the video is a Rock genre music video?

Q6 Will you find and watch the video again?

Data for Q4, Q5 and Q6 | Create infographics

The feedback from question 4 shows that the majority of people claim they would recommend the video to a friend. This shows that are video must be interesting as people want to share it with their friends.

For question 5 everyone said Yes, meaning either we did a good job in making sure we stuck with some of the typical rock genre conventions. Or this question was a little flawed should have been more detailed in order to make the person more indecisive when answering the question.

Question 6 gave more positive feedback as it gave evidence that a lot of people found are video enjoyable and would choose to take the time to look it up and watch it again.


Q7 What was the your favourite and least favourite parts of the music video?



Here is some of the results of Question 7

The positive opinions of our music video seemed to vary some saying they liked technical things while some liked parts of the performance. However frequent comments occurred about how the narrative wasn't as clear as it could have been. This tells me that we may have rushed the narrative a bit or made it a little too complex for the audience to understand. We could have included a few more scenes to slow the pace of the narrative down a bit and make it easier to follow.

What I learnt from feedback for our Website and Album 

Below is a Prezi that shows the results of the surveys for the Album and website and what the results meant in relation to our media products and our audience.




Overall the feedback is quite positive and shows we were successful in creating our band image and each of our media products for our band. If we had more time we could use the feedback to further improve our media products and make them more entertaining for our audience.

Evaluation Question 4: How did you use new media technologies in the construction, research and planning and evaluation stages?

We used lots of new media technologies during all of the stages when making our media product. These technologies allowed us to obviously help in filming and making our music video, but also in stages of planning, research and in the creation of our website and album cover.

New Media Technologies during Research and Planning

During the research and planning stages of our project we used social media websites and applications such as Facebook and Skype. This helped us discuss and share ideas outside school to contribute more to the project.

 The Facebook screenshot on the left shows
how we were able to share information such as the location and date for the narrative shoot.

Below shows a Skype log between myself and Daniel calling each other about early ideas for the concept of the music video. We took breaks between calls to get on with research and called back when we had ideas that we wished to discuss.

Cameras and Lighting used during production

The Sony V1E

We used this camera to film the majority of our music video. The main reason we used this camera is because through research we found out that this would allow us to obtain our 'infinite black' look. It was very sophisticated camera, but was fairly easy to use and we had no problems through the process of filming of our video.

The Canon 5D Mark II

We used this camera mainly to take behind the scenes pictures that we would be able to include on our website. The other important use of this camera was when we took our promo shots of the band and album cover photos. The Various settings were useful in getting good high quality images.




We used a variety of Roof lights in our school Seward Studio

As well as general lighting of the band members. This setup allowed us to create loads of different effects during our filming process, such as back lights and spotlights.



Arri 650K red heads

The Arri 650K floor lights were very useful for allowing us to get any additional lighting that we needed. It was particularly useful on our outside school shoots in the narrative scenes where without the a Arri 650K red heads we would only have natural lighting.

Software and Web 2.0 that we used

This is a website that allows you to make your own websites, which we used to create the website for our band 'The Defiance'. It was a extremely helpful program that was easy use and allowed us to produce a realistic and professional site. You had to make a free account using your email, but then we were able to easily create the website with the technology it provided.

Adobe Photoshop is a very good software that we were all very experienced at using. It allowed us to edit pictures to include on various parts of our project such as the website and album cover. We also used Photoshop to create our album cover Digipack.

We used Adobe Premier to edit any videos that we created such as the Music video and the Behind the Scenes video. Again we were all advanced users of this software so found it easy to use.

Using New Media Technologies to assist in Establishing Band Image

We created a band twitter page for our band 'The Defiance' to make our band more interactive. It allows us to keep our audience updated with what is going on with our band. And also allows the audience to have a stronger connection with the band through interactivity of comments and tweets.

Below is a screenshot of our twitter page we created

We also made a Facebook Page for our band. As Facebook is the most used Social Network in the world it was good to use this as lots of people would be able to follow the page, therefore widening our audience reach. We exploited the popularity of Facebook by providing information on tour dates on our page and important notices and info about out band.

Below is a screenshot of the Facebook page we created.

Throughout the project and each stage we used a variety of different new media technologies that helped us make our successful media products. Without them as well as the quality of footage from less technologically advanced cameras, it would also have been a lot harder to organise tasks which we did through use of new social media like Facebook and Skype.