Our task was to produce promotion package for the release of an album which had to include a music video, together with a magazine advertisement and a cover for its release as part of a digipak (CD/DVD package). We had the choice of either working alone or working in a group of no more then 4; I chose to work with just one other friend. Although we were working together we had to produce our own blogs (www.zakcolbya2media.blogspot.com) with all of our own planning and our own ancillary texts.
Before we did anything we had to decide which song we wanted to make a music video for, we chose The Wolves by Ben Howard. Once we knew which song we wanted to use we then researched that genres conventions and watched other music so were able to see what common conventions were used in music videos and especially within the same genre. We also did background research on our chosen artist, Ben Howard, so we knew a bit more about him and his music.
The genre of our chosen song would be acoustic, folk/folk rock. Folk music was culturally particular and often related to national culture. For example in the United States, Polish-Americans, Irish-Americans and Asian-Americans would learn songs about the countries where their grandparents were from. Folk music songs also commemorate historical and personal events such as; Christmas, birthdays, Easter, weddings and funerals and each of these events are noted with folk songs. Religious festivals also often have a folk music component. Folk music is often played on acoustic guitars or similar instruments and is just one singer, however, in this day and age, there are whole bands that perform folk music as it has become quite popular, Mumford and sons are a good example.
I made sure that my video and my ancillary texts were conventional of the genre so I used conventional micro elements, location, costume and props, all of which were similar to the ones I had found in Folk videos when I had researched them. I applied all of these conventions in to my own work in order to make my video, digipak and poster look a lot more authentic and appealing to my niche target audience
My video is conventional of not only folk videos but music videos in general. In my video I have used elements of performance, narrative and abstract, all of which are conventional elements of music video. Although I have used elements of all three is largely narrative and abstracted based as it is an abstract narrative and there is only a little performance, a few clips of our artist strumming his guitar. However, it is an acoustic guitar which would be conventional of not only music videos but conventional of the folk genre as a lot of folk artists tend to play acoustic guitar opposed to electric guitar. In the video our artist is also dressed in a traditional folk style outfit, he is wearing a checked shirt and black jeans. It is a very casual outfit and really represents him as an artist and his music and the genre. The location of the video is also conventional of folk music videos as it is set in a woodland area and large empty fields which is the type of location we saw in folk videos that we had analysed. At the start of the video we also use four establishing shots of different areas we had filmed, I believe that these set the scene and represent the music and the genre as they are calm and peaceful shots. However some of our video isn’t conventional as we have chosen to make quite an abstract video and have an abstract narrative and this wouldn’t be conventional as normal folk/acoustic videos would not be abstract. We chose to go with the abstract feel after watching videos by Bat for Lashes and Boys and Bear.
I used all of the conventions of folk to make my digipak and I believe each panel of my digipak is conventional and represents the folk genre. My front cover is a shot of the artist sat on his bike in the woodlands. I chose to use this image as the woodlands would be conventional of the genre and it featured the artist which is conventional of album covers. He is also wearing conventional clothing, a casual checker shirt and jeans and is sat on his bike looking away from the camera looking relaxed representing him and his music. The image I used is black and white so I used a bold white font for the artist and album name in order for it to stand out. I chose to use a simple font as again that represents the genre and the artist.
For my back cover I have used a conventional shot of the folk genre, it is a big open field with a few sheep in and some trees down to one side, I believe each of these represent the genre. I chose this image as I would be able to put the song title down the middle which is also conventional of album covers, I also added a barcode in the bottom corner which is conventional of albums. Again I have used a bold white font against a black and white image.
Both of the inside panels feature the artist, who is in colour, against a black and white image of the woodland. Like the front cover we can see that the artist is wearing clothing which is conventional to the genre and the woodland are he is stood in is also conventional. Another conventional feature is that in one image he is holding an acoustic guitar which represents him as an artist and the genre. The fact the artist is the only thing in colour really makes him stand out. Each panel also features an initial of the artist in a big bold white writing which really stands out against the black and white image.
Both of the disc feature just one simple image of trees and lakes yet these are effective as they are conventional of the genre. The spines also feature conventional images of fields in black and white with the album name in a warm orange colour which represents the genre.
For my poster instead of using a conventional image of the artist in a woodland area I chose to go for the plain and simple look. I used a medium shot of the image so we are able to see his conventional clothing from the waist up and I featured the artist name, album title and all other essential information. I even featured a star rating and quote from the mainstream music magazine NME, which is conventional of album posters.
I believe all of our final products produced; music video, digipak and poster all work together as they are all promoting the same thing (our artist) and they are all of the same genre and use the same conventions to show this.
During the construction, research, planning and evaluation of our music video we used a lot of new media technologies including adobe premier pro, photoshop, blogger and of course both video and still cameras. The most important of which would probably be the video camera as we had to use this in order to film our music video. We used a Sony tape camera but unfortunately on one occasion we had to use a Panasonic SD card camera as we wasn’t able to book out the Sony we had previously used and we needed to film so had to make do with a different camera. Both the cameras were really easy to use, especially for both me and Karim as we have both used Sony tape cameras before and the Panasonic was actually Karims so we had no problems using them. The only difficulty came when uploading the footage from the SD card on to the edit suite from the Panasonic as we couldn’t do it the same we would have with the Sony but we managed to work around it and upload it without too much of a problem.
Once we had filmed all of the footage for our music video using the video cameras we had to upload all of it on to an edit suite, once we had done this the most important piece of new media technology for us became Adobe Premier Pro. Adobe Premier Pro is an editing programme which allowed us to edit all of our footage. On this piece of software we were able to do almost anything we wanted to do with our footage from cutting clips, making them shorter, making them faster or slowing them down, adding effects such as Sepia tone, which is one we used throughout the video, to using split screen to make it look like there is more than one of the same person. The first screenshot is of how we used the split screen to make more than one of the same wolf appear. In the box on the left hand side you can see the clip has been cropped so just the one wolf is in shot, you then do that with different clips and then layer those on top of each other and you can see the final shot in the box on the right hand side. The second image is a screenshot of another effect we used called In and out of focus, found in the Matrox video effects folder. This effect made whichever clip it was dragged on to fade in and out of focus so the shot went blury for a slight second then came back in to focus. We used this shot on a POV shot of the actor watching a movie on his laptop, we used it so it looked like he was falling to sleep and his eyes kept slightly closing and opening. Adobe Premier Pro was very helpful as it allowed us to get our music video to exactly how we wanted it without any difficulty as it is a fairly easy programme to use. The only problems we faced with it was that eventually, and due to the computer being slow, Adobe Premier Pro started running really slowly and tended to crash quite a lot so we always had to save it after everything we did in case it did crash.
Another really important piece of new media technology we used a lot was Blogger. Blogger is a blogging website which we had to use to record all of our research and planning. On Blogger you can post text, images and videos on to your own personal blog. This was important to us and the teachers as this is where all of our work other than our video would be posted, only our final video would be posted after all the editing was. It is a very interactional blog as all of the teachers and your friends are able to view your blog and see all of the work you have done. It is really easy to use, really straight forward and is a great way of recording all of your research and planning. Although there are lots of other blogs on the internet such as Tumblr, we use Blogger as it is a lot more formal and work based whereas Tumblr is more informal and a lot more picture based, people tend to use Tumblr just to post images they like but people use Blogger in order to record work like we have done so.
As well as using video cameras we had to use digital cameras. We didn’t use them that often but without them we wouldn’t have been able to make our ancillary texts. The digital camera we used was an Olympus and we used it to take photos of our artist for our digipak and our album advertisement. Even though we only needed 6 images for our digipak and one for our advert we took a lot more, this allowed us to edit different ones and see what worked best then pick out the final ones. The camera wasn’t a really big fancy SLR and was only simple digital camera but it was easy to use and the images it took were good quality. However, for the photos for my advert I used my friends Cannon 550D SLR to take them, the quality of these images is fantastic and is a lot better compared to the digital Olympus.
When it came to making our ancillary texts Photoshop was definitely the most important piece of new media technology. Photoshop is a photo editing programme similar to Adobe Premier Pro only instead of editing video, you edit photographs. It is a fantastic programme to use and allows you to do anything you want with your photos. It came in really handy for our digipak as it allows you to crop the images in to squares so they are the right shape for the digipak and you can also crop out circles to use for the discs. Photoshop also allows you to add text on top of your images which is fantastic as we needed to add album titles and song titles on to our digipak. We were also able to play around with the colours on the images, either making them warmer or cooler, which are what I did on my advert, or bleaching the colours out and even making them black and white which is what I did for my digipak.
In conclusion all of the new media technologies we used in order to plan and create our music video and ancillary texts were all very helpful and easy to use and without them making our video and ancillary texts would have been very difficult.
Audience feedback was very important to us throughout the production and after the production as my audience would be the people consuming our products so I needed to find out what they would like because if my target audience did not like the products, it would not sell. I knew our target audience was a niche audience of folk fans so I was able to ask appropriate questions which related to them in order to find out what they wanted.
Before production I set up an online poll on my blog, on this I asked a series of questions to find out what they wanted. The questions ranged from names they liked for us to pick for our artist, which type of music video they preferred (narrative, performance, abstract), what social group they fell under and what subjects they studied. These questions were really helpful as they gave us a really good idea as to what our audience were like and we would know pretty much exactly what they wanted. From the poll we found out that the majority of the people who answered were young males aged between 16 – 19 in social group E who study creative arts based subjects, the majority of them also preferred abstract based music videos. So once we knew all of this information it was really helpful when it came to creating our music video as we could make it exactly how our audience would like it and this way our video would largely appeal to audience which is what we wanted to do.
After we had made our video we wrote a questionnaire aimed at our audience so we could see what they thought of our final product and to see if it was what they were expecting. We printed ten of our questionnaires out and handed them out so people could fill them in for us, we tried to keep an even split between males and females. On the questionnaire we asked whether they were male or female and their age, whether they liked it and understood it or not and what genre they thought it was. We didn’t ask loads of questions but we thought we asked an adequate amount in order to find out if our target audience thought it was successful or not. All of the people we asked said they enjoyed our music video, some said they liked it because of the sepia tones and the colours we used, and some liked the wolf motif and some like the location. The majority of the people we asked understood the video but unfortunately a few of them said they struggled a little to understand it and only had a vague idea of what was going on. All of the people we asked knew what the genre of it was so this tells us that we was successful in using the genres conventions in our own video and we was successful in understanding the genres conventions and portraying them in our work.
Overall I believe the pre production, production and post production of our music video and our ancillary texts went really well and I am really happy with the final outcome. We didn’t have any problems with filming or anything other than not being able to get a camera but that was easily worked around as we could either wait a week and book one out then or use Karim’s camera. We got all of our planning done early on which was really helpful as we was then able to start filming early on and this left us with a lot more time to edit, which took a long time, and re shoot or shoot new footage which would also take a moderately long time, so because we got all of our planning and research out the way first it made the production of our music video and ancillary texts a whole lot easier.
