Friday 27 March 2015

Evaluaion Q4


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


Created by Aiden Scott on a group members account.

Thursday 26 March 2015

Evaluation Q3

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

In the beginning we collected audience feedback, but it wasn't very much help due to the fact that we had a lot of blank spaces. This meant that many of the feedback forms had things like, not enough footage and a lot of blank spaces. Because of this they were not very constructive towards the idea and construction of the music video. However, when we did start to make more of the music video, we found that the more feedback we got the better the video would become, this was because it made the possibilities more extensive and made a clearer image of what we had to do.

The most recent feedback gave us a external insight into our project, letting us know that what we had done was, in fact, good enough. Many small things which may not have shown up to us, other people saw and pointed out, giving us the option to change it, which we did. We have realised that it is important to receive other people’s perspective, making sure that everything is alright. As we progressed we received less negative feedback and realised we were doing something right, and with this, we were able to delegate our time and management time effectively enough, so we could complete the filming sand the editing in time.

At some point within the making of our music video we wanted to give up. This is due to many people dropping out on us when we needed them, and from the time that we had completed around 30 seconds, the rest of the class had nearly finished. We shortly received a moral boost when people began to say that it was improving on the feedback sheets.


To conclude i believe that the audience feedback sheets are very useful and we have learned a great deal from them. Having the access to people or an audience to judge our work, gave us the opportunity to make it better based on judgement. However, the only down side to the feedback sheets were that a few select people did not understand the plot to a full extent, but the majority did. This left us with two options, fix it to please everyone, but rush it, or keep it the way it is and make sure it is the best we could make it. We chose to leave it the way it was, since it was only about four people who did not understand it out of the entire class.

Evaluation Q2

  1. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?


Evaluation Q1

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


For the entire course of making the music video, I worked within the group of myself and Rosie to form Tear Down. We Have made the video according to the genre specifics of post-grunge. This happens to be because we very much enjoy that genre of music and therefore decided to make one of the songs we listen to the main focus of our music video. To find out what the codes and conventions of the specific genre of Post-Grunge were, we decided to investigate into bands such as Seether Stained and Hooberstank. With the elements of all of these bands and some deeper music such as Disturbed we came up with the idea of Tear down and the music video. We decided to go along the lines of a suicide awareness video, which can be perceived as "sketchy" or a bit too "dark" but it was with good intentions.

The typical connotations of Post-Grunge is depression and darkness. For inspiration we looked at the past stories for not only bands but for individuals, making the process of making the music video and ideas a lot easier. In many cases the bands members had suffered some sort of tragedy making the lyrics and music in general based not hat individual. This adds the representation and connotation of sadness and darkness win the video and song, this is because it is representing the love of a lost one. By doing this and making the song based on that individual, it makes it easier for the lyrics to develop meaning an to make the song have a more emotional impact on not only the listener but for the singer, where in many cases has broken down on stage. The lead singer of Seether, Sean Morgan has had the tragedy of his Brother committing suicide and devoted not only his new album but to songs directly aimed at him. This gives the strong connotation of death, tragedy and depression in Post- Grunge.
  However, when it came to making Tear Down, we tried to make the band as positive to the thoughts and feelings of depression. so when w thought of the concept of Tear Down we decided to make sure that their main goal was to make sure that they not only turned heads away from depression and suicide but to also help people who are suffering from it, By doing this the pain was to make sure that people know that suicide isn't always he answer and make sure that they know that the do have people to support them. This was represented in our video by showing the lead singers girlfriend committing suicide and then his friend coming to comfort him, so he doesn't take that way out as well.

The clothing  often represented within the genre is perceived as dark and has the convention of "Grungy". The style of grunge and the music was brought around before the introduction of Post-Grunge and Post-Grunge is a derivative of Grunge. Kurt Cobain who was the lead singer of Nirvana, brought in the new styling of Grunge. Grunge is often represented by the mannerisms of the person, i.e. being depressed and down, and are often perceived  as wearing checkered shirts, black jeans, piercings and often boots of some kind. This is what we decided to follow for our band but decided to mix it up due to the conventions of our band and the examples they set. We wanted to be conventional but unconventional at the same time, to do this we decided to follow some of the conventional outlooks, using some checkered shirts and boots but during the band performance we had the majority of black clothing. This means that we followed the guidelines of the genre but added a different twist, so we could become an individual stylistic.

I do believe that we have challenged all of the conventions of not only a general music videos and typically of the genre. I believed that the use of clothing  compared to the typical clothing is a clear difference in our bands difference, and the ending to our music video is also different to what will usually be expected.

Wednesday 25 March 2015

Problems we have encountered


Problems and resolution
Throughout the course of the year me and my group member Rosie found it vey hard to get started and started off very slowley with the production aspect of our video. We spent a lot of time on our digi-paks making sure that they werte to the best standard they could be. By doing so we fell a little behind with the filming and editing.

When we did start to film we encountered a problem where our lead singer decided he did not want to help us in our project, this meant that we had to find someone else. After considering who would be the best to we voted on making Terry (a felolow A2 student) to be our lead singer.We also decided for the original guitarist to remain the smae , but voted on our teacher becoming the new drummer instead of myself. This is because we viewed him as having a better rymthm and looking better when playing the drums to the song. Overall this made for a better finished product for the band. By making these changes we managed to get the work done in time and to a reasonable standard. When reading throught eh feedback sheet everybody seemed to agree that it was a vast improvement from before, and many of them said it looked very good as a finished peice.

Wednesday 18 March 2015

Poster Analysis:Stone Sour

Stone Sours Posters:


Both of these poster advertise the release of their new album which I have annotated the digi-pak for. The album is simple yet gets the genre across very easily, you may not be able to pin point the exact genre but you can clearly tell it is not pop, but something much darker. This is due to the dark contrast and the images of a man on fire running and another of a man drowning. These are very dark and meaningful images and have been placed there to show suffering and darkness. Which is also shown with the flames appearing out the back of the Digi-Pak image
showing that it is dark and possibly having that evil connotation since flames are often a connotation of hell or evil.

The different band names allow everyone who look at the poster know bands similar to the ones bing advertised.The names of the other bands give a clear representation of the type of music which is being advertised, names such as Pop Evil and Stolen Babies does not show the typical connotation of pop, bu instead shoes something of a darker genre.




Monday 16 March 2015

Final Draft




This is the final draft of my music video. For ther final cut we have made a few changes and moved and decoloured more images to fit in with the style of our genre. We also had to make sure that all of the peices were in time and all synced together, without any mistakes. By doing this it allowed us to get a much better draft than the original.

Final feedback












Tuesday 3 March 2015

Member Change

Changing the band members:


We have had to change the members of the band due to the lead singer not being able to make all of the deadlines for the shooting arrangements. This means that we had to change the band and add someone else into the band to cover for the lead singer. This also meant that we have had to change our already shot pieces of work, and we have to reshoot.

We have a couple of options, one of the options is to have our friend Terry be the guitarist of the band and delete all of our already shot guitar pieces with our original guitarist,Max, or we have the option to replace the lead singer with me or Terry, making the guitar shots completely acceptable to keep.We have decided to use Terry as the lead singer 




Guitar:Max



Lead Singer:Terry

Drums:Shaun


Tuesday 10 February 2015

Cross Media Case Study

Cross Media Case Study:

For the cross media case study I am going to look at Korn. This is because all of his videos and artwork is meaningful and unique. Korn have a very independent look to their albums and website, looking very sinister and edgy.


WEBSITE



this is their official website. Instantly the band are the large key image. this is because it feeds the listeners needs. They go on the official website to find original pictures and information on the band, such as tour dates, news etc, and they see it immediately and can access it easily, creating a better bond between the band and audience. the colour scheme of the website creates an edgy sinister look. this is important that this happens so people know exactly what they are abuot and the music they make.


 POSTERS
 This is another form of media in which Korn advertise themselves, which is posters.  posters ar e a god way of advertising because you can make them as big as you want to have the best result. I think the way that Korn has created their poster is different in comparison to their website, which has a slightly more professional look to it because its smoother and, yes its still cartoony, but it had an older feel to it. I think that the colours, even though bright, still present the band for the genre which they are. The band themselves are not on the poster meaning they are selling their music rather than their image which pop artists tend not to do. I think that the posters links to the albums more than the albums




ALBUMS




These are some of Korns albums. The colours show a clear indication of the genre but dont really link with any of the forms of advertisment Korn have. The albums dont have anything in common with eachother apart from the bands name. This in comparison to the website is a very traditional way of using media of advertising and presenting a band.





                                                                     SOCIAL MEDIA




Facebook, twitter and youtube are very good media  platforms to advertise Korn as a band because they are well known and used everyday by people all over the world. The webpages being do known means that they can be accessed easily and quickly whenever they want meaning that it feeds the audiences demand. I think these are the best ways to show korn because it means that they will never loose views because the websites are so known. i think its good that all the web pages link in with eachother because it looks professional and is easier for the audience to relate an individual image to the band and build a profile off what they learn from all the various web pages and link them together.  

Overall Korn uses a multi-media platform which gives them the ability to reach all the demands of their audiences, for example, simple posters with tour dates for the older generation who are not familiar with teh internet, and for the younger generation, webpages what they can look at on mobile devices and find information about the band whenever they want. 





Thursday 5 February 2015

Steady Cam Testing

Steady cam shooting

We have tested out the steady cam after a few unsuccessful shots. This resulted in a very shaking video and meant we may have to go back and reshoot some. We were instructed to try the steady cam and here are the successful videos from the test.






More Locations


More locations

These are some new locations where we are going to shoot our video. Having multiple location will make the video look more interesting and more dynamic. We have chosen the room because it is dark controlled lighting and a very large open space where we could set up the entire drum kit and other things.

This is a room in the drama studio which we are going to use to film our music video. The room will not have the chair in it when we dilm, but it will have all of the necessary pieces of equipment we need to dil, including all of the band members and all of the instruments. The drums will be placed at the very back in the centre and the guitar will be placed either to the right or to the left whilst the lead dinger moves around on stage.
The second is simply a bench which will be used to show the lead singer sitting on it. We will have him looking very angry, depressed and unaware of anything happening around him. The bench will be situated on its own so we can show the isolation which is connoted through his actions.

Wednesday 4 February 2015

First Draft


The Gift First Draft





This is the first draft of my music video. There needs to be many changes to the video, including desaturation the video, changing colours of clips, syncing and reshooting. We will need to do this before we can submit it as a final piece. We have shown it to the class and they have given us feedback on what we have to do.

Wednesday 28 January 2015

Filming of Max

Filming of Max


Today we decided to do a couple pf shots of Max oplaying his guitar.With all of the hassle of our lead singer not showing up, we have decided to go ahead and record Max's shots anyway. 





These are the shots from today.

Wednesday 7 January 2015

Plan for Shooting

Plan for Shooting

We have completed the first couple of shots however the only problem which we encountered was the majority of the class said that the shots were amateurish and needed to be re-taken. This means we need to continue shooting for our music video as well as re-thinking our first couple of shots and producing the rest of the music video. 

We will need to do the beginning shots again out of principle and this is because we need the first shots to be taken seriously and not look cheap or amateurish, these are the most important shots and are the main ones, which need to be corrected.