Evaluation Question 4

Evaluation Question 3

Q3.) What have you learned from your audience feedback? 

 During our planning stages, we focused on our target audience to make sure we knew where to aim and what direction to go in during the process of creating our music video. We started by creating a prezi to create an overall idea of what we wanted to aim for as an audience. Here we looked at the idea of what sort of age range our target audience would be, including the gender, sexuality and ethnicity our target audience may be with regards of looking at our artist and their genre of music. After obtaining this information, we were then able to branch off within our prezi to further evaluate what our target audience may include; this focused on the interests and likes of the target audience; i.e. typically liked brands, food brands, social media they would use frequently etc. 

We decided to focus on popular films that may be like within our supposed target audience due to the idea we had of including a film element in our video with the idea of our chosen song being called 'Poltergeist' - a key example film to include being the classic 80's film 'Poltergeist'. We decided to focus on also looking at hobbies and common places of interest within our target audience as this could prove useful with when looking at what location to use to film our music video. We also created a questionnaire to give to a small sample of people to discover key information to include within the idea of our target audience and what their interests was due to the fact this could provide key information for our ancillary texts when we would focus on creating our marketing for our artist; some of these questions included what their preferred music genre was and who their favourite artists were. 

We also took into account what type of elements of music video they preferred (i.e. performance, narrative & conceptual). Our results showed us how our audience preferred a narrative story line within music videos our a performance based music video. We took these into account with when beginning to plan out storyboards.We also discovered most of our sample preferred rock/alternative music which was a positive aspect for us due to our artist being an indie/rock singer. Our research helped influence our initial ideas due to the research we initially gathered, proving effective for our artists of the same genre. 

 Throughout our filming and editing we kept our target audience in consideration. We focused on creating an indie styled music video but we created an interested for our target audience by focusing our music video largely on a narrative aspect and we were able to show this through a conceptual way, something that wasn't particularity taken into interest within the results of our questionnaire but we believe we were able to incorporate a conceptual aspect successfully, so our target audience will enjoy it. One of the things we changed from our original idea was to set our video with our actress in front of a green screen rather than going to some of the locations we had discovered from our research.

 However, we believe that with the use of our narrative and conceptual element, and the use of editing in overlays, we were bale to create an interesting and intriguing music video that will still capture our chosen target audiences question. With completing our music video and ancillary texts, I believe some of our most successful elements have been the synergy created between our digipak and magazine advert; we were able to focus o creating these two pieces of marketing to be overall successful. The idea of linking in all elements from our music video to synergise all together will prove a high sense of professionalism across our target audience and the music industry. I believe the most effective piece of our music video would be how we have incorporated the use of editing an overlay within our music video to help create a conceptual element in our music video, which can be scene as slightly different compared to other indie music videos. The fact we were also able to use a brand new original song that has not been released yet has also been used to our favour to create an entire new image for this upcoming artist.

Evaluation Question 2

Evaluation Question 2 from Holly F

Evaluation Question 1

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

With using an original song, our artist has only had access to releasing music on Sound Cloud. While Sound Cloud is a popular music streaming site for other artists without a lot of recognition within the music industry, it still limits the availability they have with an audience due to the site not being as popular and famous such as others like Spotify or YouTube. So with uploading our music video onto YouTube, this allows us to broadcast our artist on a larger scale. With being on YouTube, our music video is available to millions of users that can come along and discover it within suggested videos or sue to adverts seen about the artist and searching on YouTube has proved to be the easiest way to find music videos. YouTube will be beneficial for our artist to become more popular within the music industry due to the fact of how a mainstream site such as this allow people to have the recognition they deserve for their work. The fact it is a free streaming site for music videos makes it that much more popular and intriguing for people to go online for.

Our advert can be seen to challenge real media products due to how we have taken genre stereotypes into account and used them to our advantage. For example, with using Photoshop, we were able to create an edit of smoke appearing to cover the artists face. We believe this is effective due to the fact that while we have decided to show our artist on the poster, something not typically focused on within indie artists magazine adverts, we have changed it into a way where we have left a sense of mystery; we were able to it in the theme of the album and the single ‘Poltergeist’ to the advert by creating a mysterious, supernatural effect. With also using a continuous style showing to have patterned across form our digipak to our advert, the advert can be broadcasted and advertised into other multiple ways and not just only a magazine. It can be advertised on social media sites or as a YouTube advert with clips form the music video shown to help engross a new audience.

With our music video, our genre is predominately indie/rock based and we have been able to adhere to the stereotype of the indie genre conventions with the idea of focusing on a narrative music video. Most indie artists follow through with this style of music video to tell a story; a clear example of this can be seen within Florence and The Machine, where they were able to create a whole conceptual, narrative music video series surrounding their entire album; each video being able to link in with the lyrics of each song. We focused on creating this within our music video as well by telling a story of a toxic relationship within an LGBT couple, but the main focus of telling a story within the video was to adhere to a stereotypical indie genre convention. 

Other ways we were able to adhere to the indie genre within our music video would be focusing on the costume; this being the key item of clothing that is memorable to our key audience being the denim jacket, due to many indie genre stars – such as The Smiths – would do something like this as a key factor of their style. With most mainstream music videos, they focus on including a large variety of different locations, a common factor noticeable within the music industry recently being these music videos being filmed in locations such as exotic beaches. 

For our video, we focus on our location not being shown as the focus of the entire video is on our actress who is only standing in front of a green screen. Other music videos filmed like this or in a similar can be seen to be done by Coldplay with ‘The Scientist’ where the music video is focused predominantly on the leader singer but uses a real life situation and location for the background, rather than a green screen which we chose in our case.

In ways we have challenged the conventions of the indie genre can be seen with how we have used a female artist; while there are commonly known to be quite a few female indie singers, it is still the case that the genre is mostly male dominated, as such with other music genres. With using a female artist, this allows us to be able to go against the mainstream music video idea of sexualising a women’s body within a music video, which is commonly seen in pop music videos. With using a simple close up of our artist singing into the camera in a continuous way with editing in other footage, can be seen to challenge the stereotype of music videos with displaying our actress as a normal ‘heartbroken’ girl, rather than a sexualised object which can mostly be the case within the media. The idea of showing the representation of a gay couple within a music video can also be shown to challenge the concept of music videos as there are not many famous music videos which focus on the storyline of a LGBT couple; Macklemore and Troye Sivan can be named as one of the few famous mainstream artists that have been known to show this representation within their music videos. Even with the representation of homosexual characters in music videos, it is also known that not many of these couples with music videos show female and female relationship storylines. One famous indie singer known to have done this, and can be said to be famous for her music videos because of this, is Hayley Kiyoko who has involved multiple lesbian relationships or feelings within her videos, often portraying herself within her narratives.

With looking at our Digipak’s, in many ways we have conformed to the typically accepted ‘norms’ that this packing is predominately distributed as. One of these factors being how most artists will carry out a common theme throughout the whole of the digipak. For example, using a photo-shoot to cover the front, back and inside cover of the digipak. An example of this can be seen with Katy Perry’s ‘Teenage Dream’ where she has used multiple images from the same photo-shoot to carry out a theme for her digipak. The idea of using specific and similar images helps create a sense of repletion and familiarity for the audience, allowing the digipak and artist to become more memorable in a way that will be easier for the audience to access the artist; for example, if the same packing style was used for the artists advertisements, they would be easier to recognise.  

Overall, I believe our ancillary texts have been successful with the idea of conforming to the indie music genre. With the inspiration of other artists of the same category, we have been able to create an overall product conforms to this aesthetically pleasing idea that has been created surrounding the indie genre while creating our own unique twist with regards to linking our ancillary texts to the theme of our artists song being about ghosts and the supernatural element in some ways. To push our digipak further, I would prefer to edit it and see how we can improve it and allow it to become more unique and unlike most, creating a new and interesting element that we have already begun working on originally. 

Final Video

Ancillary Texts

Ancillary Texts from Holly F

Production Schedule

Original Proposal

The plan is to film a music video which successfully represents the narrative side of the song which the artist has conveyed through the use of lyrics. Alongside this, myself and Chloe have planned to incorporate several conceptual segments in order to convey the themes and motifs around the song, and this will be carried out predominantly using props and costume.

Schedule

• Initial dates for filming: 

• Prep: Tuesday 15th November 2016

• Final deadline for filming:

Tuesday 15th November 2016: Prep Day

Time: 13.50pm-4pm 

Location: My garden

Actor(s): Kate Sweatman 

Props/Costume: White background, black paint, glitter, bikini top and makeup. 

Equipment needed: Camera, tripod, white lights.

This is the very first day of the filming process and the aim is to begin filming for the conceptual parts of the music video. Within the conceptual section, our actor Kate will be standing in front of a white background, appearing nude lip syncing whilst having paint artistically thrown at her. 

We first started off by getting our actor ready for the shoot by doing her makeup and her hair to ensure that she looks the part. We focused on a dark eye makeup look but added some glitter to her eyes to make her look more relaxing. 

After finishing her makeup, she then got dressed in a bikini top so she would appear nude from the shot we would be filming. Once outside where we had set up, we had our actor sit down and focus the camera to make sure we would film the right shot, we did a practise run through of the song to make sure the first actual take could go to plan as well as possible.


Wednesday 7th December 2016: Location and Practise Shots

Time: 2-5pm

Location: St Mary's Island 

Actor(s): Holly Fagg

Props/Costume: camera, tri-pod

With travelling to our new location of St Mary's Island, we were able to walk past the docks and achieve a good view of the river and with the time of day it was, a good view of the sky being close to sunset.

Wednesday 16ty December 2016: Final Filming Day for Music Video

Time: 3-4pm

Location: Media Studio

Actor(s): Holly Fagg

Props/Costume: green screen, tri-pod, camera

The plan for this filming day is to complete the filming of the lip syncing for the performance element of our music video. As shown by our storyboards, we will film our actor Holly lip syncing the lyrics to the song Poltergeist into the camera therefore enabling us to cut and change which part of the lyrics we incorporate into the music video if need be. As shooting each try only takes around 3 minutes we aim to keep filming the lip syncing part until we get it to the standard we are happy with.