EVALUATIONKaris Hays

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

In the music video we tried to near enough follow the conventions of the indie/rock genre, we also challenged them on certain aspects. In a lot of indie/rock music videos there is always some aspect of a live performance whether it is with the band or with just the lead signer. In our video we imputed both types of live performance; we had the lead singer performing on the same location as the video was taking place, we then did the band section in a studio using green screen to add a splatter effect to the background.

For mise-en-scene we tried to use a varied amount of common features that were used in other indie/rock music videos. In the original video for ‘The Man Who Can’t Be Moved’ music video a lot of it is set outside we tried to use this in our video as well, we also wanted to originally have the live performance outside with the band but because of health and safety we were unable to do this. With costumes we wanted the band to have dark clothing just like The Script but instead the costumes that we used had a lot more colour involved than what we originally intended but still followed the theme of the indie/rock vibe.

When watching other indie rock music videos like One Republic and Lawson we noticed we noticed that they sometimes touched on serious topics that aren’t really brought up, for example in the original video for ‘The Man Who Can’t Be Moved’ the main character in the video is homeless, we tried to channel this in our own way in our video; in the video at the end you see the lead singer laying some flowers in to the river we tried to have in the story that his girlfriend died in a river accident which are coming a common risk. A lot of the lighting that we used was natural apart from the lights in the studio, a lot of due to the timing of this project the a mount of sunlight we have was limited so the natural light we used was very dark or the sun was very low creating a high difficulty in getting a nice shot without any lense flares. But it created a nice dark look to the video suiting the convention of indie/rock videos using dark lighting creating an overall nice effect.

Video

◦ Following Andrew Goodwin’s conventions of technical aspects we tried to keep our music video following the conventions of indie/rock but we also used some from pop genre. A lot of The Scripts previous music videos all follow some sort of storyline, we followed this by having a story of a young couple in love and the video explores parts of their relationship, throughout the video we used singular shots of the male lead using close ups and flowing behind as well as mixed in with shots of the couple together, it’s not until the end do you get to understand that the girl in the relationship has actually passed away. By using close ups which is one of Andrew Goodwin’s convention’s ‘Close up’s and focus on star appeal’ the audience get a proper feel of the emotion the characters are feeling as well as making a personal connection with the character. By having the lead actor in the band as well the audience see him as a normal person making them feel more connected and find things in common with the band.

We tried to gather some form of relationship between the music and the visuals but when watching the video back that recognition isn’t really made throughout. With the shots included in the video we tried to not just use shots using the actors. We used shots such as establishing shots of passing by traffic to then speed up in the editing process to connote the passing of time we did this a lot throughout the video to add more to the story and to try and make it more interesting for the audience. We also used green screen to add an extra piece of technology to the video as well as making the video look more interesting, this is used when the band are playing all together, we use one shot at the start where the green screen is just black this is when the lead singer is alone at the start, when the band comes into it a paint splatter effect comes on in the background which is similar colours to the album cover and the digipak.

◦ During my planning when researching digipak’s within our genre, we found that a lot of them use quite artistic images on them, we channelled that in our digipak using Photoshop we created a paintbrush effect to form our design that will be the cover of the digipak. The theme also followed with the name we chose for the album ‘Paint This Town’ the theme of paint followed throughout the digipak; for our CD and DVD disks and backs of the digipak was all a paint splatter effect which was created in Photoshop. The paint brush that was used on the front cover was also on the back of the digipak. The theme of orange was also used throughout the digipak, the name of the band we chose was ‘North Picaro’ which means ‘North Rogues’ in English ‘Picaro’ is the Spanish word for ‘Rogues’ as we wanted one of the band member to be Spanish which is where we got the idea of the orange theme from.

Digipa

kWe chose not to have the band on the front cover or on any of the slides of the digipak as we thought the theme of the paint splatter suited it more even though The Script used photos of the band in there’s we opted against it as we thought it didn’t suit our theme. We include a personal message from the band on one of the sides where you get a proper introduction to the band and what they are about, as well as having the chance to be featured in part of the bands arena tour when you take a selfie and tweet it, using different media platforms to grow their fan base. The Script don’t include anything like this in any of their digipaks.

Digipak

Layout With each side of the digipak we wanted the theme and colour scheme to be presented on each. We included a DVD which contains footage of the band behind the scenes as well as them on tour, it’s an added bonus to the digipak. With the songs included on the album we created the names ourselves we wanted to elaborate on the band that is The Script and create our own brand which originated from this band. Which is why we created the name ‘North Picaro’ and why we re-created a new album for the band we wanted to re-form the script in our own way with pop/indie and rock element intertwined into it all.

Coming up with a name for the band was the hardest part as well as naming the album especially when we wanted to change the name. in the name of the band we wanted something that had a foreign twist on it; we originally were going to call ‘Thorni’ which means thunder in Irish which is where the original version of The Script are from. We then realized that not a lot of people would understand that and it was hard to pronounce so we settles for the name ‘North Picaro’.

When we were originally naming the album we created a cover naming the album Bolt, but there was something that didn’t seem right for it so we re-created the whole album idea and digipak idea and using the theme of paint and naming the album ‘Paint This Town’.

Adver

tTo create the brand that we were wanting to create we wanted there to be consistency throughout the whole of this album, to do this we used the front cover of the digipak/album for the advert so people will remember it more and it will stick in peoples mind and they will think of the same band which is all linked. We used the same colour scheme of orange, white and black to brand the album, with the date in the same colour as the name as the band. I think the colours we have used are very gender neutral as well, making the band welcome to all genders, and trying tot break out of the stereotype of girls only being fans of boybands.

We also used the hashtag that was included on one of the sides of the digipak where the fans can get involved in the arena tour which is upcoming. This will get passing by people who see the advert to remember the advert as well as welcoming all forms of social medias welcoming different media platforms.

In addition to the advert for the album we also created an advert for something that the BBC do, where they introduce artists who they think are going to make it big in the up coming year. We created a poster for this that includes and image of the band with very dark lighting which is a common convention of indie/rock genres so we thought we would present this through this advert as well as in the video. The picture also creates mystery as you can’t really see the band members faces only a few shadows, this also represents the genre of indie and rock.

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

◦ In my group we chose for the main product to be the music video and for the auxiliary products to be the digipak and an advert. We wanted there to be a solid connection between all our products that we were creating. The main synergistic reference made between all of them is the colour scheme, we used the colours orange, black and white which we thought weren’t very gender specific colours and welcomed all genders especially with the stereotype of boybands being just for girls we wanted to break that stereotype and build a community of all types of people. In the digipak and the advert we use the same front cover that include these colours, whereas in the video we used the splatter paint effect that is on the CD and DVD as the background for the green screen in the music video. The fonts throughout the media texts all reflected the genre and style of the band and this was used on all our media apart from in the video. The font was very bold and, same as the colour scheme, was not aimed at any specific gender but at the same time suited the theme and genre that we were trying to create. When choosing the font that was going to be the bands name

we spent a lot of time trying to find one that sent the message that we were wanting to send, and we picked the one that we did because it was simple but at the same time effective. When we chose the hashtag ‘#paintyourtown’ we went for the effect of a paintbrush to symbolise the paint as well as creating a memorable effect on the audience.

In the digipak we make three references to the record label that our band have signed to, Island records. On the DVD and CD we have the logo of Island records at the bottom where the you are told what each disc is. We also have it on the back of the digipak where the song list is, we put the logo here as we believe d that these places got the most used by people who buy the album furthermore giving the record company extra recognition to more people out there.

Another theme that is shown throughout out all the media products is the theme of paint, this is presented firstly in the title of the album which is ‘Paint This Town’ as well the imagery of the album cover which is three paint stripes which have the paintbrush effect on them. The final piece of paint imagery is he splatter paint which is on the back of four of the digipak sides: both the CD and DVD sides as well as behind the message and behind the #paintyourtown, which is then used in the music video for the green screen.

Another theme is the hashtag that we created for the album, #paintyourtown, the whole aspect behind it is to form a platform using social media to get fans involved with the bands latest tour the fans have to tweet there selfies for a chance to be involved. The hashtag is on the poster and the back of digipak where it is explained on both.

How is it effective? Having a colour scheme throughout

all our media products, it creates consistency towards the audience. We picked the colour orange as it is a gender neutral colour and it breaks the stereotype of boybands being aimed at mainly girls, we were wanting to create a majority that was mixed of all genders. By also using a colour scheme you create something that makes people of the audience you create a feeling of recognition with the colour orange that people will then associate with the album ‘Paint This Town’.

Our video was effective to the audience, as it followed a specific story which linked to the music; the original video used the story of the lead singer being homeless and waiting for a girl to come home. So in our video we used the story of he girlfriend being dead but you don’t find that out until the end, we presented this by having a series of shots of the couple together with a cross fade of the male lead by himself. This is effective as it creates emotion within the audience giving them a personal connection with the video.

Our album and brand that we have overall created follows with the hashtag ‘#paintyourtown’ which is a play on the title of the album ‘Paint This Town’ it gets the fans on North Picaro involved in the distribution of the album. If there fans are tweeting about this hashtag on all platforms of social media it is gping to catch attention from people who have maybe never heard of North Picaro

before giving them more coverage as a band to a wider audience who are not familiar with the album therefore helping their fan base to grow through all types of social media. It also gives the fans a feeling of involvement as the idea behind the hashtag is for the fans to tweet a picture of themselves and it might be included in the bands latest arena tour which is soon to be happening, they are a apart of building their ‘idols’ fan base.

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

For our audience feedback we created a survey through survey monkey as we thought we would get better audience feedback through that as we can see what people are looking for. We sent this to people through group chats like Facebook messenger as we thought it would be a better place to get feedback from our initial target audience. We got quiet a few responses about the video and only some about the whole project all together. We only got one comment on the actual YouTube video but it was a very helpful response.

A lot of the responses from the survey said that the story was presented well throughout the video and that you could really understand what was happening, which is a good point as that is one of the main conventions for indie/rock music videos, some people even understood the deeper meaning which is also a good point. A lot of people interpreted the story in a different as well but the understanding of the feeling of loss was understood.

One of the responses through the survey on the music video said that the singing from the main singer was not in time. We filmed these sets of sequences a few times but could never get the timing right as in the chorus there is series of different tempos, the first of the shits where the lead the singer is singing the chorus went alright and all the tempos matched but for the second we tried a lot of different durations but none of them matched perfectly and we didn’t have any time to film anther series of shots. They also didn’t understand why the background for the green screen was chosen which I think we didn’t present to the audience well enough.

From our audience feedback I have learnt that we portrayed the story the way that we wanted and a lot of people understood what the foundation of the story was about, a lot of people understood that we were presenting the feeling of loss in the video some people interpreted it as just a break up and did not understand the deeper meaning behind the video. I think we could of presented this better with clearer shots and edited it better for people to understand that the girlfriend was meant to of be dead and the shots where they are together we could of edited better to make it more noticeable that it was a flashback. I also learnt that the live performance of the lead singer in the street didn’t work with the lip-syncing we did film this multiple times, the actors also felt uncomfortable while lip-synching in the centre of a city, we did try to make them more comfortable by changing the location to a less busier side of the city but they still weren’t 100% comfortable doing it. The presentation of the video and the camera shots and angels that we used were liked by a lot of the views saying that they weren’t all the same that we used variation. The emotions that we wanted to create were felt from the audience as well ‘had an emotional feel to it’ which is one of the main things we wanted to do with the video.

On the survey there was only one question that asked about the whole of the media product not just the music video we only got four responses on that question cause not everyone saw or made the connection between the digipak and he advert. From the four comments that we got everyone said that they liked the simplicity of the digipak and the magazine. They also like the colour scheme that we went along with which is one of the things that we were really passionate about because we wanted to use a gender neutral colour to break the stereotype around boy bands being just for girls. The audience also liked the font that we used which was also important to us as we tried so many fonts when designing the advert and album cover as none of them went with the look that we were trying to create. They also said that they aren’t complicated to understand which is also a good point because we didn’t want them to have too much going on.

From our audience feedback I can gather what people think of our overall media product that we created. For our video everyone understood the story that we were trying to create even if the only understood the foundation of the story but the majority understood that the video represented loss, this has shown me that we could of maybe presented this clearer to people and then maybe they would have been able to understand it easier. We also understand that the lip-sync part of the video didn’t work as well as we wanted it to and maybe we could of gone around it differently.For our digipak and advert people liked the simplicity of it and the colour scheme that we had created for the brand of the album ‘Paint This Town’ which is one of the things that took a lot of trial of error where we had a lot of different ideas which would not of worked the way we wanted them too.

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

PlanningTechnology was used a lot when it cam to the planning of our idea, we had already done our own ideas on PowerPoint where we came up with a set of ideas; we then pitched them to each other choosing our group idea, as a group we didn’t pick any of the individual ideas we developed our own idea as a group. We did rough drawings and rough drafts on software like word just to create an idea of what we wanted we later developed from what these ideas. We gained inspiration for our ideas from what The Script had already created.

We used word to create our shooting schedule we did this by creating a table on word document to make a clear table on what we will be doing on a day to day basis from every hour. We used social media to contact the actors to gather there mobile numbers to place on the farms so we could contact them easily if anything were to change if one of the crew was to be ill for example.

For our story board we did rough drawings of what we wanted, overall we have done about three drafts of the video eventually getting to the story that we have in the video. Even with the final storyboard we used we still changed a lot when we started filming as we discovered that a lot of our shots were very hard to create.

When coming up with the idea of the digipak and advert, we originally were going to have it as a wolf we then later discovered that all images had to be taken ourselves and we would struggle with getting an image of a wolf. We then played around on Photoshop creating a new idea ‘Bolt’ which did not work with the theme we were wanting to create.

Resea

rchFor our audience research we did two sets of ways to collecting our audience research, our first way was creating a survey on the website ‘survey monkey’ we chose are varied amount of questions finding out if people know much about the band The Script, we sent out the surveys to people on different social media platforms such as Facebook messenger to send out to multiple group chats to receive responses. This helped us understand what people who don’t know much about The Script and what there music is about. It helped us gather information as to what to include in our video and what people already interpreted from the name of the song ‘The Man Who Can’t Be Moved’

Our other way of gathering audience research was through doing video interviews. We did through using canon 600D camera and tripod with a white background. We did 5 interviews and split them between us. We edited two sets of the interviews on Premier Pro and the final set on Movie Maker. Editing on Premier Pro helped us gain confidence on how to use Premier Pro, it helped us use the transitions, the title sequences and the filters over footage. The interview that was edited in Movie Maker would not export onto YouTube despite following instructions, so in the end we did not use the Movie Maker interview.

Final

product

For our final project we used Photoshop and Premier Pro to create: the music video, digipak and both the posters. We used Photoshop to design and create the adverts, when we originally designed the advert we used features like outer glow on the circle that was around the name of the album which was going to be ‘Bolt’. We then decided that these features made the image and the title seem to in your face not drawing attention to what the album is really about. So when we re-designed the front of the digipak and the advert, we made it more simple by just using a paint brush and enlarging the size of it to create the image we now have, following the colour scheme that we have created elsewhere.

When using Premier Pro for our video we had previously had time to practice on it when doing our interviews, so we had some experience in using the software. We used our storyboard to put the shots into the order that we were wanting to have them in. We put the videos into the order that we were wanting them to be in and then started the editing process, we used a series of transitions between each shot to make sure the video flowed instead of just having jump cuts from each shots; we used transitions such as additive fades and dissolves to create the look that we were wanting, we also played around with the opacity on some of the fades to see what they came to look like. We also had experience with green screen in our video for the live performance, we filmed the band playing instruments on the green background and then imputed the footage into the video, once these were imputed we then dropped the ultra key effect onto the clip, then used the eyedropper to select the green colour from the background and the finally we placed the image that we used for the background on the digipak as the background of the green screen we put the footage up onto video three and put the image in line with the rest of the video.

Evalu

ation

We exported our video via YouTube, we originally were going to export it through Vimeo but we cam to the conclusion that a lot more people have and use YouTube so were more likely to see it through YouTube rather than Vimeo. After that was exported we shared the link to the video through Facebook Messenger and through imessage group chats, we asked people to the share the video with any of their other friends who would be willing to watch for us. We did this as the majority of our friendship groups were around similar age as to what our video/band would be aimed at and we felt that we would get a more accurate response to what we were really looking for from a target audience point of view. With the link to the video we also sent a link to a survey made through survey monkey which was created to gather feedback from the audience; it included a series of questions asking about the video and there overall responses from the video. Furthermore this helped us to gather even more information into our audience feedback.

For each of the six question I used an open comment box giving the respondent enough space to write as much or as little as they want.