Thursday, 14 April 2011

Evaluation question 3

Our audience feeback really helped give us a clear idea of where to go with our video. When we had our initial idea we talked to members from our class and asked what they liked about music videos, and they highlighted the catchy beat and the dancing, and this was very much the basis for our video. But then we thought to make it a bit bigger and set up an app on facebook asking people what they liked:

http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=154333361271508#!/apps/application.php?id=154333361271508&sk=wall

And one of those comments really got my attention. Somebody said they really liked the story, and that although the dancing was nice, it was the story line that made the video. So with this feedback we knew we needed dancing but that it would be even better if the rest of the video had a story line.

When we had completed a rough cut of our video we showed our teacher, and he pointed out a few really easily made mistakes, so we corrected these. When we next showed him our video he'd got another teacher from a differenct school to come in to give us some feedback, and he said that we needed an ending, the begginging didn't quite fit with the speed of the track, we needed to re shoot a certain scene, but that it otherwise met all of it's targets. So we took this feedback and proceeded to make an ending and correct the other little things.

Wednesday, 13 April 2011

Evaluation question 2

With our main task and our ancillary tasks we wanted to create a feel of being modern and appealing to todays youth, while still clearly being of the dance genre. When we thought about tackling this we decided that the main character in the video should dress like todays youth, jeans and a t shirt etc. So we incorporated this idea onto our digipack, but altered it, so instead of jeans and a t shirt we had jeans and a hoodie. This showed clearly our target audience and gave our character a certain persona that we liked. We followed this through onto our website, with a rolling photo gallery that has lots of pictures like the ones on the digipack.



Our main task was all about dance and music, and we needed to show that in our ancillary task, and one of the easiest was to do this we thought was to have a sound wave on both the digipack and the website. So we played our track on windows media player and print screened a sound wave, then placed this all over our ancillary tasks. It is the centre piece of our digipack where the CD is held, it is the header of the website. I would say that other than the image of DJ Ransome, this sound wave would be our distiguishing feature.

When we knew our target audience was young people, and after we'd created the persona for our main character in the video, and on the digipack, we felt we still needed to do a little bit more to capture our target audience. We search on the internet for a site that allowed us to create graffiti art text, and we then featured this on our digipack. It doesn't however feature any where else in our product, as it would look out of place in the music video, and we wanted the website to be appealing to adults, so that they could use the site to buy tracks/ apparel/ concert tickets, for their children.

As a whole package i think that our project would be easily regonisable to it's target audience, and easily distinguished from other products on the market. It's new, it sticks to conventions, but stands out, and our research into our target audience makes it exactly what they're looking for.

Tuesday, 12 April 2011

Evaluation question 1

For our main task my group chose to make a music video. We tried to stick to convetions where we could. We found that most music videos, if they weren't depicting a scene at a club, weren't really depicting anything related to the song.



As you can see from the first image, my group created a chart ranking and a visible way of show that in the video, much like music videos today. In shot you can see the main character about to wake up. Now we looked at B.O.B's song Magic we doing our introduction, and found that in that song B.O.B was wearing just his normal clothes. We also saw that the shot was from a higher angle so to stick to conventions we did the same. In our second picture, we've tried to stick to the conventional image of a DJ, by showing him controlling and audio desk. We found that in any video where you did get to see audio desk stuff happen the shot tended to be really close to the hand of the person controlling it, so we stuck to this convention. In the third image we have stuck to the convention of choreographed dance. We did this by asking some of our friends to help us. In a music video by another artist his backing dancers dance in silhouette, and we found this conventional through a lot of other videos too, so we felt it necessary to stick to this convention, and to do that we got our dancers to stand in front of some frosted glass windows on a sunny day, which meant that the camera picked them up in silhouette. During the dance sequence the dancers stick to the beat of the music, and the high and low points in the section, finishing of their first section by doing a movement to mirror that of the music, the music slows down, and the dancers strike a pose and then slowly lower their arm in an ark. The fourth picture is an example of how my group went into flash backs, by turning it black and white, flash backs aren't always seen in music videos, so we chose instead to stick to movie flash back conventions, by making the action black and white. The flash backs forward the narrative of the video, by showing how the mess that he is tiding up got there, or showing what happened with a certain object from the night before. Our product has a very strong feel of a music video, with the song, the strong, but irrelevant to the song, narrative. The dance sequence, the outro being after the music, the chart ranking on the video.


For this task we also had to create some ancillary products, a album digipack, and a website (which didn't have to be live). Both our album digipack and our website link well together, both have the image of a sound wave prominent on them. The album has graffiti art on it, to give the urban feel that we wanted for the persona of DJ Ransome, it also has a panel of pictures, as you might find in an album cover for a band, as well as a page with the song listings, a back cover that has a bar code, a couple of promotional panels which show pictures from the music video, a message from the artist panel,and a front cover which has the album name on it and an image of DJ Ransome. The website is modeled on Usher's website. Our website has the sound wave at the top, where all the link to the other pages are held. There is a short artist bio, as found on Usher's website. Then there is a photo gallery that changes picture every few seconds, and towards the bottom of the page there are details about some up coming events (which aren't real). The background is black and the text is white to stand out. We feel that the website gives a professional feel, but also lacks information.

Monday, 11 April 2011

Digipack construction


This is our front cover. We wanted our artist to have a bit of an edge to him, and be an image our Target audience can relate to and we thought we could achieve this by using graffiti art, as it is commonly linked to the youth, and this is our target audience.

















This panel is original art work or the artist, this is common in digipacks, and we wanted to stick to conventions.








This is the track list for the album, which is necessary in a digipack.





















This is the panel where the disk will be held.
















This is a bio about the artist, we felt it would be a good thing to include as the artist is new and people will want to know a little bit about him














This is our back cover. We found a bar code on the Internet and added it to this panel for authenticity.












Through all the panels there is a running theme, which is the sound wave. We included this as the recognisable feature of this artist, something our target audience will see and link to the artist.

Sunday, 10 April 2011

Final piece story board




This is our story board for our final piece. We stuck almost exactly to this story board, and where we left blank spaces we filmed the dance sequence and our clips. The dance also appears early in the final, where it is not included in the story board, this was a decision we made after filming, while editing.








Tuesday, 22 March 2011

Any post between the 2nd of November 2010 and the 11th of January 2011 are not included in our final project, but I am deciding to keep them as proof of planning, research and construction.