Sunday 10 April 2011

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

In year 13 I have been creating a music video and ancillary texts to go with it. It’s been challenging, exciting, hard work but overall rewarding. I have been analysing existing texts and getting ideas and seeing what existing artists have used in order to identify the conventions of their genre. Our music video is of an acoustic/ pop/ folk style. Our music video is very much like Florence and the Machines ‘Dog Days are Over’ video. It has a very outside colourful surreal theme to it, which I think we caught in our production also; with our artist singing in the snow in a skirt and jumping around on a snowy trampoline. In Florence’s video it is mostly outside in the woods amongst nature. I think our artist is fairly similar to Florence and the Machine as her music is of a similar genre and also has a similar target audience. So we know that our music video is within the same bracket. In our music video there is a part where our artist is performing, which is a conventional element of music video - as our song has been voted to be acoustic – folk, so therefore watching our artist singing with enthusiasm whilst playing an acoustic guitar helps to enhance and conform to the genre. The main feature in our music video is our stop motion animation it is simple but looks brilliant and effective with this song. The genre of this music and the song feels very creative and Florence and the machines music videos help this image by using creative images within her music videos, with bright colours and bunting. These concepts of creativity I think appeal to the target audience and follow the genre of the music, as it is a very personal and intimate style of music, with the artist showing who they are and what they are feeling through imagery and their creative ideas. My album cover shows its genre also through the creativity of the images. The front cover for example has an image of the artist on it that looks as if it is a cardboard cut out. This immediately shows the audience that she is an acoustic folk artist or something similar because of the creative way that she is represented with the arts and crafts used within the music video and the digipak production this flows well with the folk - acoustic genre because of the upbeat naturistic and personal feel you get from listening and watching this percific genre. A similar artist that uses this concept is Lenka as you can see from her album it is very creative and also continues the theme from our music video with the nature and the wild creatures. This is a very admirable album cover as a collage surrounds her. A collage is almost the definition of creativity as it is just a jumble of colours and images that you represent yourself put in to an image that makes some degree of sense. The album sleeve that Lenka has created represents her just as much as my album cover represents my artist’s song and personality. Lenka’s album is very similar to my artist‘s as it has a creative feel and to add to that creativity it opens out to reveal a bigger image. This shows that she has big ideas and a very large creative mind. Very like my artist. These two artists sing similar genres of music also; enhancing the imagery is good for our genre of music. ‘Lenka is a BIG inspiration.’ Continuing from Lenka’s brilliant design I created my creative magazine advert with her creative mind album pull out with the artist being surrounded by her creative thoughts. This in itself goes very well with my music video as my artist is sunk in to her animation (creative thoughts). Basically as you can see the advert that I have created shows my artist being surrounded by her thoughts that appear in the music video such as the cotton wool sheep and the felt tree. My artist’s image is also made too look as if she is thinking and enhancing that the imagery surrounding her are her thoughts. My animation was created over a few months with lots of organising, storyboarding, creating and filming! The long process was challanging and took many attempts to get it right, we even had a practice shoot to see if we could learn anything from it, we learnt that the smaller the movements the better the effect and the faster you would be able to play it and still look brilliant! we also got ideas from 'the kings of animation' Aardman with their amazing animation called dot, which features a similar design to our music video with a character running from left to right running past interesting scenery and avoiding obsticles. I believe our animation was very well created and has an oustandingly good feel to it, considering it was our first real test of creating a full length animation with a storyline to it. The deadline short coming we finished our animation and started to put it with the music. Shortly afterwards we realised that the animation would not stretch effectivly enough to keep the audience interested in the production. We resorted on drawing up storyboards and mood boards of ideas and came up with the idea of the same story just in real life also, with some performance with hopefully the magic of edditing to make it look as if our real life character was part of the animation. This was a challenging ordeal, but i believe that it was certainly worth it in the end, as we now have an incredible first music video and animation combination. Andrew Goodwin speaks about how a narrative and lyrics of a song link to a music video through imagery and the narrative. This relates to my music video as it has a story to the music video that is easy to follow and the story relates to the lyrics. For example the lyrics ‘I don’t know which way to go, I don’t know which way is home’ combined by a panning of the camera as if the character is lost. Another example of this narrative structure with the lyrics is when the animation is walking through the autumn scene with the leaves being thrown around by the wind, this combined with the lyrics ‘I’m so lost in the wind’ we decided to make the music video relate to the lyrics because it makes it easier for the target audience to follow the narrative during the music video. Goodwin says that, the music video using lyrics may tell a story but will regularly remain unresolved. My music video Challanges this statement as our music video starts with the main character being depressed and so therefore singing and the animation is a metaphor of her trying to get over the fact that she needs ‘you’ but by the end of the music video they appear to be back together. Overall I have strengthened the audience appeal by using similar ages characters, themes that teenagers will have started to experience and finally using the animation they can relate to the creativity as they are at the point in life where they need to sculpt their life.

Wednesday 6 April 2011

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

Sunday 3 April 2011

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







I believe my advert should appear in NME magazine, firstly because this magazine helps up and coming bands, sothey would be happy to help my artist start selling her album. Also the genre of the song fits in neatly with the genre of music magazine. The NME is full of acoustic/rock/folk/indie bands.



What have you Learned from your audience feedback?



This is a questionnaire sheet that I had given out to 11 people from my target audience (ages 14-20) these 11 people viewed the video and saw the 'digipak' also, in one viewing. These sheets in particular are the best answered ones and genuinely the overall views taken from the questionnaire.







This is a Video interview of people who took part in the screening and summarising on what they said on their questionnaire. And telling me more that they couldn't say on their questionnaire.



I have learnt from my audience feed back that, people of the target audience really enjoyed it so i know that i hit the spot of the target audience just right, but there were a few downsides. I have learnt that if i was to create another music video, i would need to feature more vibrant colours and more excitement with some sort of action as you can loose interest in the music video fairly quickly. i have also realised that the females enjoyed and appreciated the stop motion allot more than the males. This wasn't too much of a downside as i knew that the the females would enjoy the music video more as the song and the music video feature a female, which makes it much easier for the females to relate to the lead role.

Thursday 31 March 2011

Tour of my album cover that i have printed out to explain

this is a video tour of my finished album showing how the folded sleeve works with all the separate panels.

Digipak: Magazine Advert

Digipak: Front of Poster (front of sleeve)

Digipak: Poster (back of sleeve)

Digipak: Thank you message (2 Pannels)

Digipak: Picture Panel (2)

Digipak: Picture Panel (1)

Digipak: Lyrics Page

Digipak: Back & Sides

Digipak: Front Cover

Wednesday 30 March 2011

Magazine Advert Process

Here i have added another layer, this layer was white and i have made it very transparent and placed it behind the layer of the texts and the actress. I also then placed a JPEG image of my Album front cover so when people are drawn to the add they can see what the album looks like when they go off to purchase it. ........ i then started placing the text on the add. I used lots of different fonts as this goes with the many colours that the images bring to the add. ........ here i have taken more pictures of the animation creatures used during filming and also a picture of the actress within our film and put these objects on a different colour back ground so i could get rid of the background easier (Green Screen Effect)i then placed these images around the actress in the middle as she then seems like she is thinking of these characters, in her own little dream world ......... this is the second stage of my process. I took a picture of some cotton wool that I used during my animation for the clouds and created a cloud effect around the outside borders of the advert. .......... I started off by deleting the original blank white layer and creating a box colouring it in a shade of red then made white circles and put them in order and regular leaving the same distance between each one creating a professional looking poker dot layer

'Green Screen Photo's'

These are the photos i have taken to be used within my CD digipak. i took them on different coloured backgrounds so i could remove the background easily. Using a 'green screen' technique
i used this font because it is a vintage acoustic style of wrighting which i think goes well with the theme of the album and the genre of the music. i used this font because it looks personal as if the artist has put her heart and soul in to this album. It is also very extravagant i used this font for the 'i forget that i need you' behind the image on the front cover, because it is simple and easy to read when the text is in masses and repeats it's self. I used this font because it is bold and modern and this is used for the name on the album front cover as this shows the audience that she is a bold modern artist, and also to be practical and stands out from the background.

Tour of my album cover 'Proto Type'



This 'proto type' I created to help me with planning my finished album cover sleeve. The scale is 1:1 as then I could measure straight off this proto type on to photo shop for certain sizes and to be able to tell where certain panels will be corresponding to the other panels. it was an old way not using much technological know how, but gave me a big help in the process of my album production that I am very proud of.

Wednesday 23 March 2011

Album Cover Analysis: 3 'Florence + The Machine'


Florence is a very unique band artist and almost has her own genre of music, soul-inspired Indie. She has a very ‘hippy/ vintage’ style to her dress and her designs to her accessories. The front cover has Florence standing very elegantly up against the vintage style curtain, with lungs hanging around her neck like a necklace. This is a very serial image and sums up her image, the name of the alum and the way she is to the rest of the world. The album is called lungs these are not cute or relate to her audience. Her target audience has tried to reach as wide as possible. She is a young girl who is shown to not have a care in the world because of her chilled relaxed look on the album. But the serial-ness shows that she thinks very differently about the world than other people do for example, the lungs round her neck are so powerful and euphoric, it seems like a living breathing Creature to me, like a fellow person, and Strangers and Charm seems like it came from Lungs, but at the same time feels like it's not part of lungs. The lungs being her first album is also showing that her lungs that she uses for singing have got her this far and have crafted this album for her.
On the back of her album she continues the lung theme with a chalk board type of effect on to the black background. This image looks very detailed and has numbers pointing to certain parts of the lungs. I think that these numbers relate to the song titles located beneath the image, showing which part of her lungs hypothetically created that single. This is a very deep image that makes you think how much Florence is proud of her album and her ‘lungs’

Album Cover Analysis: 2 'Eliza Doolittle'


Eliza Doolittle is an artist who I like to think is very similar to our artist in our music video, and she has used similar concepts to our music video using lots of random colourful objects, it looks like she is trying to send a message to her audience that she is taking over as lot of the objects are famous landmarks. These famous landmarks have been ‘infected’ by the Eliza Doolittle fever as everything has a twist to it such as an ice cream splattered on the famous London gherkin and many other childish objects are used to indicate the Eliza takeover. The text on the front cover is very bold and just shows the dominance that she likes to show, the text is also on a banner been dragged across the sky by a toy aeroplane. I think she uses the childish theme because her music is very upbeat, happy and give you a good feeling. The theme also appeals to her target audience, which I think is young teens, vintage. But the images used in the album cover show that the target audience could be even younger. Genuinely the target audience is much wider than expected, as I believe that the album artwork is saying buy me and escape to Eliza Doolittle’s utopian island.
The back of the cover is still in the sky with the artist surrounded by the names of the tracks all in different fonts showing her creative wacky vintage style, this continues from the clothes that she is wearing also, very stylish and vintage. I think this style is pointed towards the fashionable young trend, but can also be seen as an idol to look like and be like so the old who want to be like Eliza can be young and fashionable if they buy this album.

Album Cover Analysis: 1 'Lenka'


Lenka is a very upbeat cute pop artist. Who seems to be very creative with all her videos and songs, this creative collage affect continues through out and on to her album cover panels. The album cover is full of bright colours and playful shapes, connoting the fun playful music she creates. Her name is revealed as part of a branch of a tree surrounded by homemade scenery of clouds and rain and the sun, this album artwork reminds me of my music video with our animation, which I think enhances the correct decision of linking our genre of animation with the genre of our artist and song.
The front cover is created very well, as it folds out to become this poster that continues the design across it. With a tree growing all the way to the top with lots of creative imaginative childish imagery, such as small animals, love hearts and colourful shapes. This continues the childlike theme to the design of the album. Another connotation to this appears on the back panel of the album cover, where the artist herself is eating a strawberry lace which is a very childish innocent image. The love hearts clouds and plants continue on to this panel as well, with the artist looking up in to the top right hand corner in to the clouds showing that she is possibly day dreaming and that the album is her dream come true. This corresponds to her music video ‘The Show’ she is experiencing many things that she wants very quickly saying that she should just enjoy what ever comes her way, and at the end she has gone to sleep in her bed whilst singing.