Our Final Products

Our Final Products

     Music video

     Digipak design

     Advert design

Evaluation - Media Technologies

Evaluation - Media Technologies

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

     Construction

How lighting was constructed at certain points:

The editing process was finally completed on 16th March 2017, over 3 months after the start of filming. The editing was a long, occasionally frustrating, but ultimately rewarding experience. The timeline below looks relatively simple and light, which reflects the simplicity of the video: unlike a short film, there was no audio to worry about, besides the music, which made editing much easier.

The narrative is also straight forward, and there are no complex scenes which required easy access to a lot of footage during the edit - that would have made the timeline look busier with a lot more layers. Because all the scenes are really brief, the video has a very quick pace. This also made the video easier to edit.

Sam took the most control during the editing because he was the most confident with Final Cut Pro X and had the most editing experience. He disliked using Final Cut Pro X, as he found the interface difficult to do precise edits in, and was still not used to the magnetic timeline feature. However, it was also a very collaborative experience because every week we would watch the whole video through as a group and make comments about things we wanted to change. These changes were generally minor, such as reordering some of the shots earlier in the film to clarify the order of events.

Another change we made was speeding up the footage of the silhouetted hand turning the pocket watch. We did this because the pacing was too slow, and it detracted from the flow of the video. Thankfully, it is not very noticeable. The more substantial changes were to do with visual effects. Sam used Triune Digital's Fire Assets inside Final Cut Pro X to enhance the live action fire. Below is a VFX breakdown on some of the shots he added CG fire elements to (although only 3 shots are in the video below, he added some form of CG fire to 90% of the fire shots, mostly digital embers).

For the digipak, I hand-drew the drawing of the heart and the veins coming from it. Sam then scanned it to his computer at home with a scanner, imported it into Corel Paint Shop Pro X2 (which he is more confident on than Photoshop) and digitally coloured the scanner heart using a Wacom graphic tablet. Digital colouring gave us much more flexibility than colouring it on paper, as he could finely adjust the tint, saturation and opacity of the colours. Our original re-touched design was too saturated, so Sam desaturated the colours and dropped their opacity from 100% to around 60%. This gave it a more watercolour look which we liked.

Sam was also able to resize the heart elements on the computer. We thought the core of the heart was too large in relation to the small parts, so Sam made the core smaller so it would be better proportioned. This would have been very difficult to do on paper, as it would have required re-drawing the whole thing again, or using scissors and glue.

We uploaded the final video on 22nd March, and promoted it on our own social media pages, such as Facebook and Instagram.

     Research

We used google to research other indie bands to widen our knowledge and broaden our horizons. YouTube was instrumental in helping us discover our tone and direction as it helped us understand more about the conventions of indie music. Blogger was utilized so we could keep a record of our processes and consolidate our progress.

Sam used a camera (Canon 600D) and editing software (Sony Vegas) to create lens tests where he tested a combination of lenses and filters so we could really nail the visual style of the video. See the video below:

     Planning

To ensure that we kept lines of communication open, we created a Facebook messenger chat, an Instagram chat, a WhatsApp chat, and exchanged phone numbers so we were all able to contact each other in many different ways. We would upload draft versions of edits or digipak designs to group chats, and we were able to instantly feedback and discuss. This made it much easier to keep on top of tasks and make sure we all knew what we were doing and could contact each other if we ever needed help.

     Evaluation

In our evaluation, we used a wide range of media technologies. We used two videos, one was a group commentary on the final video, and one was the evaluation of all the equipment used in filming (at the top if this post). We also put everything on blogger, using pictures from the internet and screenshots from YouTube to back up our points.

I also learnt how to make Prezi's, a presentation system I had never used before. At first I found the layout hard to understand, but as I grew more used to it my confidence increased. As well as this I also had to screenshot videos and save images to illustrate my points, and crop and resize pictures and text to make them more suitable for presenting.

Evaluation - Audience Feedback

Evaluation - Audience Feedback

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

The audience hold great power over media and therefore producers (in this case, us) have to consider the audience's response to ensure their product is received well and they gain higher profit. We therefore made sure to consider the audience when creating - for example, some initial feedback on our digipak designs suggested that the colours were too saturated. We were able to resolve this to fit better with the audience's expectations by reducing the saturation so that they're not too bright and will appeal more to our audience. By doing this, we considered the way the audience would react to our products to ensure that they would want to buy it.

When creating our product, we had to ensure that it was suitable for our target audience, who may be critical of our product. Therefore we took in to consideration of what people would want to watch and how they could engage with what we create (as seen in our earlier posts here, here and here). 

As our music video has been uploaded to Youtube, we can gather some feedback by seeing the number of people who view our video and who likes and dislikes it. Having posted our music video on YouTube we we able to see how many views it got. Additionally, we got 7 'likes' (thumbs up) which is good for us, as the producers, to see because we know that our music video was enjoyed and liked. Some of the comments we have received can be seen below.

We also used questionnaires to gather further feedback. Through these questionnaires, we were able to get diverse and well rounded feedback from different kinds of people. For example, we initially started of by giving the questionnaire to our family members. Anica comes from a Bangladeshi Ethnic background and we found it interesting to see how her parents reacted versus her siblings. Her parents felt a bit confused by seeing girls holding hands in our music video, likely due to the fact that when they were our age, being gay was stigmatised and perceived negatively. Additionally, religion could play a factor in them not enjoying the music video as they don't believe in gay couples. However, when Anica showed her younger siblings, they were more accepting of it as in contemporary society it isn't as stigmatised.

Furthermore, by having audience feedback we were able to understanding people's thoughts and feelings to specific elements of our digipak and advert designs. Below are some of the questions we asked and some of the answers we were given.

From this, we have found that our products, in general, were well appreciated by our audience. The likes and comments we received on our music video suggests that, in general, people enjoyed the video. However, from Anica's conversations with her parents we can also see that some people find it strange and unusual, showing that our video might be challenging to some people. Our ancillary products were also enjoyed by the audience, with those we asked saying that the colours, font, images and style work well, although they were not fully to everyone's tastes.

This is our initial magazine advert, and it is quite plain. We were very influenced by Arctic Monkeys magazine advert. Having researched into real indie media texts the magazine adverts weren't very 'decorative'. It usually consists of a few colours and 'plain' font. Having researched into this we realised that indie magazine adverts are very minimal, therefore we conformed to this. Our magazine advert consists of a black plain background, with 'rearrange' and 'Biffy Clyro' in white plain font. Additionally, we put the album cover on the advert so that our audience know what it looks like.

Having received audience feedback, we found that the audience felt like the background is very plain. Therefore, we decided to incorporate light grey 'veins' running across the background to add depth and visual interest, which also relates to the veins on the digipak. Also we added a QR code and website on the bottom of the magazine advert to allow our audience to explore our social media platform. Additionally, many magazine adverts contains some sort of social media to allow their audience to explore into them, therefore, we decided to do this. We also added copyright information Arc Diath Records. This is a way for the audience to know a bit about us.

Evaluation - Products

Evaluation - Products

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

Evaluation - Forms and Conventions

Evaluation - Forms and Conventions

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

Link to our Prezi

Intertextuality Between Our Products

Intertextuality Between Our Products

Our products - the music video, digipak and magazine advert - are all reasonably different to each other, although they have certain features that keeps them linked together. This intertextuality as our texts reference each other keeps our products linked and shows they are part of one package.

Our digipak and advert are very clearly linked. This is because our advert is directly selling our digipak, and for this reason we wanted them to be linked so the audience can see what they would be buying. This can be seen as the front image of the digipak is literally on our advert, meaning that our audience can immediately recognise our digipak if they see it in stores and wish to buy it. Our CD design also links to our advert as they use the same black coloured background and the same white font, linking them that way as well.

Links between the digipak & advert with the music video are less direct. This is because we wanted to follow the conventions of the music industry, where digipaks & adverts rarely visually reflect their music videos as the digipak holds several songs whilst the music video is for just one song. However, there are still intertextual links there. We included the lyrics to 'rearrange' inside the digipak behind the CD to link the digipak and music video. This links them because the buyer will recognise the lyrics in the video, connecting our products for the viewer.

Our advert links to the music video through our links at the bottom of the advert. Here, we have inserted a working QR code that takes the viewer to our music video. As well as allowing a potential buyer to listen to the song and watch the video to see if they like it, this also links our advert and music video as there are no direct visual links on our advert.

There are some design links that connect all three of our products. First is the colouring of our digipak and advert, which link to the music video. While our video is not as multicoloured as the digipak cover design, our video does feature a similar tone of pale, pastel colours like the ones seen on our digipak. The colours on the advert also link as the black colours relate to the black and white projector room scenes in the music video, which have a similar dark colour to them. 

Another link between our products is font - the font used on our digipak (excluding the 'Biffy Clyro' font) is the same as that on our advert and is similar to that used at the start of the music video. We ideally wanted them all to be the same, but since the advert and digipak were creating using different software to the one used to edit the video, getting exactly the same font was impossible.

One way we could have increased the synergy between our music video and digipak would have been to directly show it at the end of our video. Often, artists will show pictures of their albums at the end of their music videos, with 'buy now' annotations to allow the viewer to quickly buy the album. Had we done this, our video and digipak would have had a much stronger link, not only as the video would link directly to buying the album, but also because it would let the viewer see the digipak and therefore recognise it if they saw it in store or in the magazine advert.

The Ancillary Tasks

The Ancillary Tasks

Here are our finalised digipak and advert designs:

     Digipak

     Advert

Making The Digipak & Advert

Making The Digipak & Advert

Once we had finalized our digipak and advert design, we started to make them. Since we liked the idea of using illustrations we decided to draw them, starting with the digipak since the advert was based on that. We found computers hard to draw on so decided to draw it on paper and the digitalize and edit it.

I started by drawing the design from the sketches in pencil, so that if it went wrong it would be easy to correct. I then went over the sketches in biro as it is a good medium to create different textures and shapes with, plus creates the illustration effect well.

After this, Sam scanned the pictures and added colour to the original drawings. At first our drawings were much brighter, but our audience said that this didn't work so we made them less saturated. Below are the finished designs.

For the advert, we decided we wanted to have it strongly resemble our digipak, as that is the thing we are selling and would allow the consumer to immediately recognise the digipak if they saw it in the shop. Therefore, we decided to base our advert around the digipak. At first we did this by putting a picture of the digipak on the side and having the rest of the advert black with important information (e.g. dates, title) in white font. However, we decided that this looked quite basic and unprofessional, so we decided to make it look more interesting by adding the veins from the image in grey in the background of the advert. We also changed the layout, placing the digipak in the center and the writing above and below. As well as this, we also added some interactivity by putting a website, QR code (which actually works) and a copyright label at the bottom, making the product look more real and professional.

Music Video Commentary

Music Video Commentary

We decided to make a commentary for our video, discussing our thoughts and process behind certain points in our piece.