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

The combination of our products is overall quite effective as we tried to create synergy across all three platforms so the website and the album cover is complementary to the music video. Nowadays it is extremely important for an artist to have an integrated, cross-platform marketing campaign so as to keep up a consistent branding that audiences can recognise. Their message must be repeated many times throughout their marketing for it to truly be delivered.  However, we believe there are steps we could have taken to make our product more synergetic.

As an example of a very synergetic rock music brand, we looked at the band Firelight.

What we picked up on:

• They had their band logo across all three platforms: in the top corner of their website banner, in the background of their album cover and it is shown in their "Stay Close" music video
• They generally stuck to a black and white colour scheme which is present in the website banner, the album cover and the narrative of their "Stay Close" music video. In their performance of the same music video the colours and very washed out, plain and almost sepia tone like and though it is not exactly black and white, it keeps close to the colour scheme
• The same image is used for the album cover and the website banner

Having seen that, we then looked into other bands and the similarity between their website banner and their album covers. Here are two examples:

 For example, the You Me At Six website banner and the Paramore website banner use the same font for their title as the album cover (as illustrated in the image above). The colour schemes for the albums and the website banners are also similar. You Me At Six stick to grey tones and Paramore have subdued grey tones with splashes of bright colours. 

So through researching bands' websites and album covers, I saw that it was conventional for their to be a similarity between the two products as it helps the audience familiarise themselves with the band.

In our initial planning stage we wanted to create something similar to the brands we researched but, when it came to production, we thought we ended up trying more variation. 

Unlike the previously mentioned websites, we did not keep the font of the band's name the same on the website banner and the album cover. Our intention was to create variation but, this may create disharmony between the two ancillary texts.

But, to keep to a similar theme, the band members are all stanced similarly- in a tight triangular formation and all of them purposefully looking in one direction. Furthermore, for the image of the band there are prominent colour hues. The website banner is notably pink/purple and the album cover is heavily blue toned.

We created a "Meet The Band" section on our website where there were links to each band member and a description about them. We realised that audiences may find a personal relationship with The Defiance's music which would invest them further into the band. To maintain such a personal relationship, we did our part to bring a bit of the band's personality to them. This way the audience can be assured that the money they are putting into the band by buying their music, merchandise, concert tickets etc. is with good reason. 

Shobnam's Profile (Lead Singer)

Aidan's Profile (Guitarist)

Daniel's Profile (Drummer)

Through each of their bios, we intended for the Album message of "not giving up" to come through.

Quotes from Shobnam's description: "... it started off with karaoke in my bedroom, until I found my true calling of Rock" & "To everyone who's made it possible for us t o be where we are today, thank you for listening and liking our music."

Quotes from Aidan's description: "...we all like rock music and have a passion for music." & "Playing the guitar is something I have been doing since a child..."

Quotes from Daniel's description: "I have always wanted to create the beat since I was young. I used to use cutlery, the table and pans as my drum kit." & "I couldn't afford lessons so I just had to teach myself. The first few years were the hardest as I annoyed everyone I played around." & "Don't let anyone stop your dreams!"

Below there is an analysis of the track list and how it corresponds to the details on the website and then it goes on further to analyse how we came to a decision on the inner panels:

Click to enlarge

The use of prominent use of one colour (the blue hue on the album cover and the purple/pink hue on the website banner) is also present in the music video as in the performance, each of the band members have a different coloured backlight:



Something that was common amongst all bands was to have the band logo on the drum kit in music videos as this enforces the band's identity and it is a practical place to put the logo.

Our band's drum kit.

Here are examples of other bands who have the band logo/name on their drum kit:

In conclusion, the combination between our main product and our ancillary texts are quite effective and we managed to maintain some syngergy throughout however, I feel there were steps we could have taken to make it all even more effective. We could have used the band logo on the album and not have used a different font. In addition, we could have stuck to one colour scheme in our website and album cover to have more of a lasting impact on the audience.

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

Our target audience was 15-22 years olds of both genders and our secondary audience were people above that audience. Our tertiary audience was dedicated fans of the rock genre.

Audience Feedback on Music Video

We realised that it was important to gather feedback from all stages of constructing our music video as we had focused audience groups, from our targeted audience, throughout the course of the construction of our music video. Especially at the rock genre generally has a fragmented and vast audience so we needed to do our utmost to meet their desires.

Pre-Production

Whilst in the pre-production stage, we gathered small audiences of around maximum 5 people to watch our music video in its progress and gained feedback.


Many of our audience members told us that the narrative for the busker was confusing which hindered them from fully understanding the message of the music video. This was our original narrative for the busker:

The scenario was that he was busking and a bystander was offering to buy his guitar but the busker kept saying no due to the love of his music. However, our audiences said that they would not have guessed that was what was happening unless they were told it. Some of our audience members told us that it was unrealistic.Taking all this into consideration, we altered the narrative.

Post-production

We held an audience screening for members of our school to come and watch all the music videos created for the A2 course. After that we sent out surveys to people who attended to fill out what they thought of the music video. We created surveys on Survey Monkey and sent them to people via the internet.

Here are the questions and responses to the survey about the music video:

Question 1: Rate the music video. 1 being poor to 10 being excellent. 

This was the response:





Our rating averaged at 8.29 which we considered to be generally positive.


Questions 2 and 3: What did you like about the music video? What did you dislike about the music video?

Click on the image to go to the page with these notes. Yellow notes were the POSITIVE feedback and the pink notes were the CRITICISMS.

POSITIVES:

From this I picked out that many of the audience members enjoyed the story line and our aim was to make the story line immersive and relatable to our target audience so, we were successful in this.

The style/editing/camera use in the music video was praised too which gives us confidence the way way we decided to film the music video. Our editing was very simple and conventional and this response shows that audiences like to keep to things that are familiar to them.

The 7th note contains a comment which says they liked how the plot was focused on the entire band which was something we wanted to heavily emphasise and we managed to achieve that. One of the core messages of the band is shown through their friendship: that they can do anything together and if the audience could understand that through out narrative then we had done our job correctly.

CRITICISMS:

A few of the comments mention that the quality of the shots were not up to standard. This tells me that we needed to improve on some of the technical aspects of our video in relation to the camera.

Another comment mentions how outfit changes were confusing when the shots cut right next to each other. This tells me that in our editing, may not have been clear to distinguish between the two performance set ups that had different costumes.

Our narrative was criticised for not giving all the guitarist's and drummer's characters enough screen time in comparison to the lead singer. Considering our aim was to show them all equally, this made us really think about what the audience wanted. We could have possibly added a more dramatic story for the busker and had more shots of the drummer included?

Question 4: Explain in your own words what you think the narrative of the music video was.

From looking at the answers received, almost everyone understood the narrative so I believe it was overall very successful in conveying the message. 

One answer however, said "It was just forming a band" which leads me to think that audience member did not understand the narrative. Another reason could be that that particular person did not feel a personal connection with the narrative and was not invested in it. This feedback has helped me to learn how audiences will interpret something completely opposite to how you intended it to be received.

Another comment says the narrative exactly how we intended it to be received but they have written "two people". Going on the assumption that it was not a typing error, this would mean that two of the band members got more screen time than the other which means we have not conveyed the message of unity properly in our music video.

Question 5: What kind of genre do you think this music video is?

100% of the audience guessed that the genre was rock which was correct. 28.57% also chose pop as the genre. We never aimed to have a sub genre of pop but, as the percentage was low we decided that overall we were successful in conveying our genre.

Question 6: Would you watch more music videos/listen to more songs from the band?

None of the respondents chose "No" as an option which shows that everyone who watched it had some sort of an interest in the band and as a record label in the music industry it is key to be able to get people interested enough to want more of the band to make more money.

Question 7: What do you think the message of this music video is?

Every response showed that the audience understood the message we were trying to show through our narrative (even the second slightly satirical comment).

Question 8: Who are some of your favourite artists/bands?

We asked this to see whether any of the audience's tastes were into bands similar to ours or not. Here is a collage the bands/artists that were mentioned:

The modal type were bands which is to be expected as most of them said they liked the music video so you would presume they liked bands too. It was interesting to see artists such as Marina & The Diamonds and Laura Marling mentioned as they are solo artists of a completely different genre but, the rest of the respondents answers were favourable towards our band. We did not limit ourselves to giving the survey to strictly fans of the rock genre as we wanted to see whether our band would have a wider appeal to fans of other genres too.

Audience Feedback on Album Cover

By creating a survey, I was able to gather some qualitative and quantitative data on how our group's album cover was received. I have created a Prezi explaining the results gathered from the survey.




Audience Feedback on Website:

The general response to the website was good, I decided the best way to gather people's opinions was through qualitative data as it would give me more detail to analyse. To do this I used Padlet which created a blank online wall and when I shared that wall with people they could post their opinions on this wall.

Created with Padlet

In Summary:

After showing a sample of our audience all three products, we asked them to guess overall what the genre they thought the band belonged to.

The top most guessed genres. | Infographics

Rock was the most guessed genre and it was comforting to see that even though the second most guessed genre was metal, there was a large gap between the amount of the two genres.

Overall, we have been lucky to receive great feedback from our audiences. From audience feedback I learnt that interpretations can vary according to person and that it is down to lifestyle factors such as childhood/friendships/family that may affect their viewing. I also learnt that the music industry cannot be assuming of its audience as they may not receive the product you are giving them in the way that you predicted. I personally learnt that the audience's view is very important as without them anything you work for in the music industry is rendered useless since everything is for the pleasure of the audience. I also learnt that we targeted the correct audience group of 15-22 year olds as they were the majority of our viewers (only one person who took the survey was below that age range). However, our secondary target audience were people older than 22 years old and I now realise that was a mistake as we did not get as many viewers of that age group.

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

New media technologies helped us not only to film the music video but also helped us to formulate our idea of our band and to then follow that up with research. It also helped us create the album cover and website that is linked to our band and the technologies helped ensure that synergy was created across all three platforms.

In our early research and planning stages, one of our tasks was to create a technical presentation explaining how we wanted to approach our music video from a technical point of view. This was ours:




Cameras:

The Sony V1E:

Me using the Sony V1E.

Our music video was shot on this camera. It was easy to handle and had manageable settings that we could manipulate to achieve the look we wanted. For our performance we wanted the "infinite black" look and the quality of the camera helped us to gain that look.













The Canon 5D Mark II:

We used this camera to take the promotional photos of the band for the website and album cover. This was professional camera with different settings we could experiment with to get the right look.








Web 2.0:

In our research and planning stage, we explored YouTube in search for the song that we wanted to use for our music video. It was also used to eventually upload our finished music video.

A piece of qualitative data I found said that in 2012 64% of surveyed teenagers said they preferred to use YouTube to listen to music

To create the band's website, we used a flash based website called Wix. It was easy to use and navigate through and had all the basic components of a website given to us. A challenge we faced was wanting to incorporate more functions into the website but the site did not have them.

To do that we had to use HTML. For example, to put up the band's Twitter feed and to create a mailing list section. This helped us to think of creative solutions around a problem.


Programs:

We used Adobe Photoshop to create our album digipak. We also used it to create the band posters that are shown in the music video narrative.

Adobe Premiere was used to create our music video. The audio track was layed out on a timeline and once the things we filmed were exported, we could drag and drop them into the timeline and place them where we wanted. The program was simple to use and had opportunities to add effects to our clips however, we didn't. This is something I might have changed in hindsight.








Social Media:

In the Research & Planning stage:

In order to plan and research outside school hours but stay connected at the same time we used Facebook to message each other and contribute ideas. We created a group and its purpose was to discuss anything related to our project. As Facebook is easily accessible, we were able to communicate well through and used it as much as possible.

As part of creating the band's image:

On the website & album cover:

To keep our campaign fully integrated interactively, we made sure our website and album had features to emphasise social links. There are links throughout the website to social networking websites such as Twitter and Facebook. There is an opportunity for fans to sign up for the official mailing list for The Defiance which will keep them updated on tour dates, competitions, meet and greets, special offers etc. The album has a QR code for fans to explore even further into the band via it.

How new media technologies were used in the evaluation stages:

Our evaluation stage required feedback from audiences and to go about doing that we created surveys on Survey Monkey.

It was simple to design the survey, then a link was provided for us to be able to share the survey out and collect results and finally Survey Monkey provided charts and graphs of the data collected for us to analyse.

For the sharing stage of the surveys, I distributed the link via forms of social media I had in order to get as many respondents as we could.

I sent this message on Facebook to several people who had attended the screening of the music videos that we had had previously.

A post I made on Tumblr.

I also tweeted the link to my Twitter followers.

New media technologies has also helped me to present my evaluation in an interactive manner. 

Click to enlarge

Overall, I believe I exploited new media technologies to a great extent. In the production stage of our music video, I think we possibly could have made use of the technologies even more. For example, we could have added effects to our music video when editing on Adobe Premiere. In the evaluation stage, I used the new media technologies to help display my analysis and research in an interesting manner. Some that I had not even considered and I will definitely be making more us of in the future such as PadLet.

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.

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.