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

When planning our final product we thought about the image that we would put across.

This was important to us as we are aware of how a bands image can influence fans.

For our Band/Artist image we wanted to seem extraordinary and stand out from the crowd as being quite quirky and adding different styles to our music videos to appeal to lots of different audiences. We wanted the band to have different personalities within the band so we seem appealing to many different groups of society. We deliberately made our band to have a cheeky exterior to give ourselves more depth and seem interesting to the audience. We thought if our band was to have many diferent personalities then we could add another dimension to our music video making it repeatable.

To give ourselves more freedom to make a good, solid music video we decided that the lyrics would contradict the video. We preferred this idea because it looks more soph

isticated and professional. In my opinion i feel when the lyrics amplify the visuals and ruins the

video as it cannot flow as well, and also there are certain boundaries we would have to stick by. It also takes away the freedom from making a fun video that the audience can be entertained by on all levels. For instance some of the best scenes in our video are nothing to do with the lyrics, for instance the pool scene at the end and the chasing scenes in the woods, therefore the viewer can see that we have used our imagination to make the video. This swimming pool shot came from researching various songs on the internet, to be specific we had the idea from a video called 'Friendly Fires - Jump in the Pool'.

The genre of our piece is Indie/rock. This genre of music i feel bode well for us as it is very versatile as many people can like it as it is not a niche product. The beat of the music helped us a lot to create the high energy music video.
As the song has a quick beat, we had to adapt this to the narrative. We brainstormed a few ideas and looked at a few existing music videos to get a general idea of what we could do. One video that helped us with the chasing idea was the 'Sandstorm - Darude' video.

One of the themes that we liked was the running aspect of the fast paced music videos. This gave us the idea of a chase scene. Having a chase scene pushed us towards making quick cuts therefore making it repeatable to the audience. As there are four people in a our band we thought it would be good to have four different stories going on at the same time emphasising our different personalities, both through movements, props and costumes.

The musical structure of the song is very traditional; Introduction/verse/chorus/verse/chorus. As it was a clear song this meant that we could easily base the video around the different parts of the song, for example when the chorus kicks in we have the lead singer in the shot. The guitar solo in the song was al

so very good for us as it gave us a great marking spot to have a story building shot where everything almost come together. I feel we did a good job on filming parts of the video to certain parts of the song, for instance when filming the tractor scene we knew that was going to be for the guitar solo, therefore we weren't wasting time thinking of what to do or thinking how long to do it.

Nowadays i feel that the Indie/Rock genre can market to all ages, but overall as a group we have set the target audience to 18-35 year olds. We feel this gives us a lot of leeway as we have no limits to our video in terms of humour and storyline. As our target audience is older than the characters in the video, i feel this add to the entertainment and fun nature of the video as the viewers will not take it too seriously but can still be appreciative. The target audience in terms of genders can be for both as the song and the video are very versatile. The video is not based on the theme of voyeurism therefore it is light hearted and appealing to both.
When making the CD pictures for the front cover and the poster, we thought a lot about making the link between the pictures and the music video. In my opinion, if a band has pictures that relate to a certain video on their album then the video will seem more exclusive and sought after. Each member of the band has taken part in the pictures and we hav

e not been biased towards one individual which makes the relationships within the band stronger.

I feel this challenges the forms and conventions of other band pictures as they tend to have the lead singer in the spotlight, with the other band members in the background. As our genre is Indie, I feel that our band style is the retro kind of style. Therefore we had to make our pictures look retro by editing it in a very stylish and retro way, which makes us look intellectual and in touch with our artistic side. I feel the large writing on the poster shows our bold personalities and shows the audience that we want to be noticed. The image and the writing looks very authentic, this again shows our retro side as you can see from our front cover at the top of the page.

As our band just has a few pictures with a simple poster it makes our band seem very low key and professional and appealing to the audience as we don't seem like a manufactured band that is run on money and no talent. As you can see from some of our images in the digi-pack below;

How affective is the combination of your main product and ancillery texts?

The purpose of our product was to entertain the audience watching. While entertaining the viewers, our goal was to also to put the emphasis on the different personalities that are portrayed in the band. This, i feel, was a major factor in our video as it gave our band a comedy factor and lets us make a video that is slightly bizarre, therefore could appeal to wider audience as it's not particularly a video set around a certain genre. As our song is from an indie band, the genre is Indie/Rock. I dont think the genre of the music really had an effort on our video, however, i feel that the fashion of our band was based around the indie style, especially the look and the actions of our lead singer.
We also made a digi pack. This is combination of a CD cover, In Lay booklet and a

poster. The purpose of our CD cover was to highlight our new single and highlight the genre of our band. As the front cover of our CD is stylish it shows that we are artistically literate with substantial intellect therefore we will be taken seriously and not looked down upon as being a manufactured band being fed money. I feel it also shows that we are out to make our own image and not run by the media, as many bands these days are. The target audience for our band is anyone who enjoys indie music but also anybody who just wants to be entertained. I showed the video to people of all different ages ranging from 14-58 and they liked the video and all gave positive feedback, therefore i think we have achieved making an entertaining video for a wide ranging audience. I feel the publication for a band will come from such advertising as posters and being inside music magazines, for example NME.

I feel if our band is shoved in peoples faces through the TV and the internet then we again will feel manufactured and will not be known just for our musical talent.
The narrative of both the product and the ancillery text is to (as we are a new band) show our various personalities so the public know what we are about, same goes with the posters and the album cover, it subtly shows our personalities and our sense of humour. I feel these tie in with the purpose of the representation that we want to put across to the audience. Our video for instance shows a group of boy having fun and in the outdoors, this gives off a very trusting image and shows that we aren't trying to be intimidating towards anybody. The product connects to the purpose as we are trying to show a new up and coming band w

hile also showing the various personalities that are depicted in our band, i feel this makes our band very likeable as we aren't hiding behind our instruments and just letting the music do the talking.
I would hope to see our video on the TV, for example MTV or being more specific 'MTV 2.'

I think this would be good as if we show the video with our song then people will get an idea of the look and feel of our band instead of just being a song, it also makes the song memorable and recognisable to the audience. This will then be the start of our band breaking through.

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

To get feedback from the audience we put our video on 'Facebook' and also showed it to fellow classmates and friends. Everyone we showed the video to gave us good feedbac

k. By gathering comments from the audience, it made us realise what we achieved with the project. As the audience was not entirely sure why the characters were running therefore agreed with us in saying that we had created an enigma, thus making the video repeatable.

The audience also agreed that we have made a comedic video. This is important to us because if the audience did not understand the comedy that we were portraying the video it would be very confused as to what we were doing.

For me, the one objective i wanted to achieve was to make the video repeatable to the audience. This was made possible by having 4 different characters in the video, all taking different routes in the story line. I feel another dimension to the video which made it repeatable was the 'random quirkiness'.

Overall i am very happy with the feedback that we got especially as the age of the audience that viewed the video ranged from 13-58, and each person appreciated the video.

As we are students we all know that the most popular social networking site is Facebook. We used this new technology as we knew we could get a wide range of people to have a look at our final product and easily give us some feedback, using both the comment area and the questionnaire provided. Here is a snapshot of what our profile looks like. Our Facebook Group

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

During the planning of our media project, the new technologies that became available to us became very important. When planning our music video, our first instinct was to look at various music videos on 'YouTube'. This helped us look at videos from bands of a similar genre and gave us inspiration for what we might want to do for our final piece.

I think the real new media that helped us in the project was the 'Blog'. This meant that any ideas that we came up with, weather it be at home or it the classroom, we could all upload ideas and discuss them as a group.

When deciding what track to use for the video we used a social networking site called 'MySpace', this helped us find unsigned bands that we could use for our song. This is how we found our band, 'YellowGarage'. Although we knew the band members, we could still choose the song we wanted to use in the video by listening to the songs on the website. After listening to the track 'Money' we had to find a way to contact the band members to ask permission, we did this by contacting them via another social networking site called 'Facebook'. It was a ver

y quick transaction and shortly after we asked they gave us an answer, therefore we could get on our way to planning the storyboard.

In the construction part of our coursework we used media that was very new to us therefore we had to learn how to use to get the best results out of our video. We first of used the High Definition camera to film, for this we had to learn what the best lighting was to film and how to get the best results. For the first scene i was the camera man so I had to make the audience believe it was morning while still getting adequate lighting.

As the cameras can pick up the slightest movement from below, this made the filming of the vehicles very hard. For the tractor scene we had to make sure the shot was perfect and the driving was smooth as we were running out of light, therefore before driving i had to make sure that the camera was stable. We put the tripod in the back of the car and surrounded the legs with clothes. It turned out to be one of our best scenes. As you can see from this action shot, the picture is very clear and the right lighting has been used.

After completing the video we took turns and worked as a group to edit the video using 'Final Cut Express'. This new technology helped us gain confidence with using editing software, i feel it also helped in the filming stages as we knew the limits of the software and what we could do with each shot. As our video consisted of many fast shots, the Final Cut Express software became vital when trying to get the perfect timing for the cuts to go with the music. One of the shots which i helped to produce to go with the music is shown below. This took a while as we had to get 4 cuts in a very short amount of time while sticking with the cymbal beat from the drums. Another example of timing that we had to get right was the end scene where we jump into the pool, this was important as it is our trademark shot.

In our evaluation stages we used a mix of new technologies, ranging from the Internet Blog to Final Cut Express. In this last stage we needed to mix the two to get the best outcome for our evaluations, we wrote our views about the video and how everything went on the video while showing short video clips from the video and photos. On Final Cut Express we had to learn a new skill of exporting video clips into a separate file and move it onto the internet blog.

In conclusion to the project, i feel it went perfectly and everything that i imagined to be in our music video worked very well. I feel this was down to having a good up beat song to go with our up beat video and also the technology that was available to us to use.