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

To summarise our project:

Song: "Unbreakable" (Originally by "Fireflight")
Artist: The Defiance
Genre: Rock
Target Audience: 15-22 year  olds

Throughout the project, research and planning of real media products influenced every decision we made as a group. We researched real artist brands, music videos, websites and album covers to note conventions of these products and draw inspiration for every aspect of our project. Below are outlined some of the artists and campaigns that influenced our decisions such as: Paramore, Within Temptation, We are the In Crowd, The Script, and Train.

Music Video

This director's commentary explains how we wanted to follow some general music video conventions, but also produce a rock video which stood out from others and gave a meaningful message.

Narrative influences:

As explained in the commentary, many of the rock music videos we watched were performance-driven or only followed the lead singer in a narrative e.g. just dragging the seek bar quickly through the music videos below, the narrative only follows Sharon Den Adel, the lead singer. The second video demonstrates the conventional performance-based rock music video.



This video is an obvious example of the lead singer being portrayed as the most important figure, which we wanted to avoid.



The Paramore video is completely performance-based, which is also what we did not want for our own video, as we thought our song was more meaningful (addressed further below).

We wanted to break this convention, and decided to create a narrative-driven music video. Although our storyline was inspired by "Hall of Fame" by The Script, the idea for the whole band narrative stemmed from "Rumour Mill" by We are the In Crowd. 

These are the final shot of the characters in "Hall of Fame" - They have successfully achieved their dreams.

As shown in the gif of "Rumour Mill", each band member had their own storyline, which we wanted to re-create. The story itself in uncommon in rock songs, where performance is the priority (as mentioned in the director's commentary). Our message of never giving up or becoming "unbreakable" was not common in the rock music we listened to, or the videos we watched in the rock genre.

"Rumour Mill" band member character storylines

Our recreation of this

Todorov's narrative theory:

As we wanted to tell a story, almost like a film, we decided it best to stick to this theory.When we had access to our edit suite, the first thing we did was start working on the narrative sequences for each character. This was because we had not had many performance shoots, thus we did not have much footage. The narrative footage was also easier to edit together as it did not require as quick editing as performance would.

Each character had 3 sequences, which we tried to fit to Todorov's Narrative Theory as best we could.

Created on gliffy.com

After trawling through hours of footage, we picked the best shots, and created 3 short action sequences which we could integrate together for the song verses in the music video.

My / The lead singer's narrative sequence

Aidan's / The Guitarist's narrative sequence

Camera/ technical influences:

The music video to "Drops of Jupiter" by Train heavily influenced the camera movement in our video. We wanted to create similar constant camera movement. Although this particular song is not a rock song, many rock music videos (such as the ones above) do contain a lot of camera movement. Without narrative, or with less narrative, it is crucial that the performance maintains audience interest for the duration of the song.

Drops of Jupiter camera movement example

How we tried to recreate constant  different camera movements

Styling

The artists already mentioned: Within Temptation and Paramore, also influenced our styling. The band members are dressed in casual but stylish t-shirts/ shirts and jeans. Each member has an individual look but complements the others.

Screenshot form "Ignorance" - Dark shirt, sleeves rolled up - This corresponds to the colour of the drum-kit, therefore completing his look as a drummer. His costume is different to what the other members are wearing, therefore he stands out even though the outfit itself is quite simple. He also has a beard, which none of the other band members do.

Screenshot form "Ignorance" - The guitarist appears the light, quirky one of the group as he is wearing a light blue shirt, and even his guitar is a brighter colours  He has his own character and personality within the group, which is an important convention of music videos when portraying band performance.

Screenshot form "Ignorance" - As mentioned, each member of the band has an individual style, but also work together well to complete the whole band look. We wanted a similar effect for The Defiance.

As you can see, we chose a more Paramore - inspired look for the male members of The Defiance, while the leader is dressed in a more Gothic style dress. This was so that she was immediately different and unique in the band.

In this screenshot from "Stand my Ground", the band are all dressed in similar black Gothic clothing, whereas we wanted to emphasise the lead singer in the group shots, therefore we broke this convention.

Representation:

Goodwin's theory points out that the music industry often has "voyeuristic treatment of the female body", hence we wanted to steer away from the sexualisation of women as outlined in our gender representation research post. Thus, the lead singer of The Defiance, while we tried dressing her stylishly and so she would appeal to both the male and female audience, is not exposed or inappropriately dressed.

Website

In a research post, we investigated the features of music artist websites and female fronted rock band websites:

Please click to view post

We stuck to these music artist website features, but also had to personalise ours to suit our rock genre. Dark colours, such as on the Evanescence website, were typical of rock websites, so we wanted to portray our genre clearly, therefore followed it. There was also a banner, which most artist websites had, that stayed constant in all the pages of the website to promote one overall brand, which we also drew upon.

Evanescence website banner

Album cover

The Album cover features were some that are present on all album covers such as a bar code, album title, artist etc. The cover similarly portrays the genre of the music, and must efficiently give an idea at first glance of what the audience can expect from the songs. 

The following research made clear that we should include an image of The Defiance band members on the front to immediately promote our brand, and our album and artist names should be clear and bold.

Please click here to view post

Altogether, we wanted a product that was somewhat conventional to the rock genre, but we did not want to simply copy or follow blindly. Therefore by having an unconventional narrative, we tried to make our debut single and music video stand out.

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

The main aim of our entire campaign and 3 products was to promote a brand, therefore consistent branding of The Defiance was very important. Our overall media product had to have synergy between all 3 texts in order to do so. We had to consider what connections and links to make between the 3 products in order to keep a consistent but not repetitive brand.

Venn Diagram demonstrating synergy between the different parts of our media product. Created on gliffy.com

"The Defiance" logo

After researching various fonts, we noticed that rock bands tended to have mostly black logos, but with an immediately recognisable font, that was consistent across all their products.

Colour schemes/ Band characters

A shown in the diagram, each member of the band had their own colour in the music video to connote their "character" or personality in the band. We tried to keep their  individual personalities similar across all 3 products in a range of ways, not only using the colours, but other techniques as well.

Please refer to this image when mentioned below

Blue is typically used to connote a cool calmness, therefore the drummer was dressed quite simply, with a laid back hairstyle. He is different to the other members and this shows through his biography on the website as well, and the promo shots (shown in Daniel's bio below), both on the website and on the album inside panel, where he has relaxed and natural poses.

We played on the obvious of purple being a combination of red and blue, to demonstrate that the lead singer was the "glue" of the band. The idea of her was that as the only female member, and lead, she pulled together and completed all the members and the music. Furthermore, the purple was the best choice between red and blue back lights for aesthetic value as well. The promo shots (shown in Shobnam's bio below) display her as a quirky and fun character, and an integral part of The Defiance.

Red usually connotes passion and danger. The guitarist was intended to have an eccentric and energetic type of personality. Through the music video, we see enthusiastic strumming, and head-banging at points. Moreover, in the promo shots (shown in Aidan's bio below), Aidan has typical rock-star poses such as the "rock on" hand gesture, and the jumping pose. He is the "crazy" one, as we liked to call him.

Themes and messages

Through the title of our album "Ascension", the song titles, our debut music video storyline, and website biographies, we had one main message: Don't give up. 

Our original post of the album song titles.

These are the biography images on the website. Each character has their own personalities as seen in the rest of the pictures, but the pictures are edited similarly, thus connecting them together.

However not all of our campaign worked together in synergy.

Inconsistency

We started with the intention not to be repetitive, and to keep our identity fresh, however realised that this causes discord within our media product and confusion as to our band logo and identity. It almost looks like a completely separate brand, and therefore contradicts what synergistic marketing or promotion of a brand is used for. The next post underlines why this is an issue regarding the audience.

Overall, the message is fairly clear to the audience (As outlined in Question 3), therefore we were somewhat successful in our presentation of the 3 products. However, in order to fully understand whether our campaign was successful, we required some audience feedback, which is discussed in the next question.

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

After our media product was finished, we decided our target audience would be 15-22 year olds of both genders. This was because the rock genre is more popular with young adults e.g. Paramore, Green Day, Fallout Boy etc. We wanted to know whether we had chosen the correct audience group, and whether the age range was appropriate in order to know whether our album would sell, and whether our music and brand would disseminate and appeal as widely as we hoped. Using SurveyMonkey, we created surveys to gather feedback on our music video, album cover, and website.

Audience profiles for "The Defiance" from Shobnam

Music Video

This was the easiest way to converge quantitative data such as percentages of people who liked/disliked the video, statistics such as the audience age groups, and also qualitative written responses.


This is the survey we sent out to our audiences

Most of the participants were of our target 15-22 year age range

Age was an important factor to ask about, as we felt it would be useful to be able to differentiate between responses from different age groups. We could them oversee how the target audience age range responded to our music video.

We received an equal spread of data from both genders, This was also important as we did not want to exclude either gender, but wanted to investigate whether the music video appealed to both or was more catered to one.

Below are 2 comparison charts (made on gliffy.com) of responses from our target audience of 15-22 year olds. Female responses are red, and male responses in blue (Stereotypical gender colour roles yes, but most common). 

The girls had a range of likes for our video, including style and narrative, while the boys were more critical of the technical aspects e.g. camera movement.

On the other, the boys enjoyed the performance parts of the music video, and the members of the band, but disliked the
narrative storyline.

Looking at these responses demonstrates that though we had intentionally wanted to appeal to both genders in our age range, the video had somewhat appealed to both, but also somewhat fallen short. Most of the female participants commented on similar aspects that they liked or disliked, as did the males. Therefore, in trying to broaden our audience, we had actually caused our music video to appeal less to either gender. It is worth noting that perhaps we should have focused more on one gender group, and thus catered our music video more specifically to that gender.

Another use of audience research is that we could investigate how our audience interpreted the message of our music video. Their interpretations of out main themes are as follows:

These are various snippets or themes that all of our respondents picked out - Made on wordle.com

These are a few of my personal favourite responses:

Meet Torin the Cynic:

Made on pickaface.net

"A young tramp, busking for 10p coins, a drummer that jumps over bannisters when it's seriously unnecessary and a girl that does homework dressed like a secretary and should probably get anger management lessons (and a new phone), meet through strange posters that have been plastered an exorbitant amount on walls (including one in shobnam's room?!) and through letterboxes. They then go to audition having never practised together, and yet somehow (because they must simply be musical geniuses) they win (woo!!)"

And Leo the deep-thinker:

"It was a coming-of-age story of someone who, against all odds, turns to the power of music to express themselves. Having heard the horrible message of hatred and murder, the public turn on this person, trying to silence them. BUT THE ARTIST FIGHTS BACK, and establishes a new order where misery is life; all to please one person, The Artist. Long may The Artist reign. \m/"

Secondary Audience

Not only could we  review out target audience, but among these surveys, some were taken by our secondary audience of 22-30 year olds, and even some over 30s. This told us if we had been right to exclude anyone over 22 from our target audience group.

Here is a response from a 26 year old female working in a bank: (Made on voki.com)

This goes to show that the feedback we received from our target audience carried through our secondary audience as well. The response was the same as the 15-22 year old female group, therefore perhaps our target audience age range was slightly limited.

Using this feedback, we were able to deduce what our target audience wanted from our music video and in summary realised that our shots may be too fast at points, and also sometimes too dark. Furthermore, many people said that there were not enough CUs of the lead singer. Though we wanted to allocate equal screen time to the 3 members, this did not appeal to the audience.

As a positive though, most of the female audience appreciated the message behind the video, while the males coined it as "cheese" and "naff". Moreover, Most of the audience appreciated the styling of the band, and commented on the physical appearance as well as the quality of performing and acting.

Album cover and Website

We also carried out surveys to see if our album cover and website appealed to our target audience. We again included questions to receive quantitative figures to give us a general consensus, but also qualitative answers for more detailed and specific feedback. The following are data graphs and charts created using infogram.




In summary, the background of the album cover seemed to appeal, however the harsh blue colouring and fonts did not. This could be because of the mismatch to our band logo. The responses also suggest difficulty in understanding immediately what genre The Defiance is. This could be because there were no images of the band with instruments or because of the inside panel images. They images on the inside suggest a more fun side to the members of the band, therefore perhaps not connoting the rock genre efficiently, rather a pop/indie/ alternative type genre.





Again with the album the font and colours/general style seemed to be the least appealing factor to the audience. Like with the different font on the album cover, some of the website fonts were not synergistic with the other products. Furthermore, we tried to keep the design simple, so as not to portray a too flashy or bright image of the band or mistake our genre, however the audience expected a more "interesting" design. This could be fixed maybe by adding more interactive features such as moving images (gifs), opportunities to listen to more songs (although impossible in our media project), and the galleries could be fixed so that the images didn't cut off.

All in all, the campaign on the whole successfully promoted a rock band, but could have been more clear in terms of the look of the album cover. Synergy between the 3 products made for a consistent "The Defiance" brand overall. The chosen target audience appeared too broad gender-wise, but correct perhaps even a little niche age-wise. From the feedback, if we catered more specifically, the target audience could be either males or females from 15- 25 (or older depending if individuals were rock fans to begin with).

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

Our main new media hardware were cameras, both for video and photo shoots, and lighting equipment (including studio lights and portable lights). The software used in post production were mostly Adobe products (outlined in the Prezi), and Web 2.0 was crucial in our marketing campaigns; especially as we needed a fully integrated multi-platform marketing campaign; and evaluation stages.

The following summarises how each stage of this project made use of new media technologies.






The studio

We were lucky enough to have access to a fully equipped studio and received training on the lighting deck. All the performance shots are lit with studio lights that we decided on and set up ourselves.

Here, I am setting up the lighting for my solo shots

Here we could choose which lights we wanted to use, the intensity and also the colour. The lights could only be moved manually however, so it required at least 2 people collaborating at the same time to set up quickly and efficiently. The most effective preparation for shoots were when one of us controlled the lighting deck, and the other 3 Group 5 members moved the lights manually. It was also useful to actually use the camera to check if lighting looked good.

Without opportunities to use new media technologies or the relevant skills to use the equipment, the actual footage may not have been as we wanted it e.g. we may not have been able to get performance shots if we couldn't use the studio lighting. A fully narrative rock music video would not only be boring, but would also not fit the rock genre. Hence audience appeal would be reduced. In addition, if we did not use Web 2.0 for a fully integrated marketing campaign, such as the Facebook and Twitter pages, we would not have been able to raise awareness of our brand and artist prior to the music video release. New media technologies also enabled us to share the video and collect online audience feedback. Therefore it is crucial in every stage of our project.