Samuel Ewen

The purpose of any music video is not just to promote the band but also to reveal an attitude that the band convey. As music is a auditory medium, a music video and other promotional material will be a media institutions main way of putting forward this attitude. For this reason my group and I made sure we put a lot of thought into what conventions we used, developed and challenged when making our media product. my research into conventions concerning the Ska Punk genre through survey monkey and through interviews returned a varied response, we used these responses to gauge a structure for our media products. This was the first stage of designing and planning what we were going to create.

Our music video uses conventional techniques in that most videos have an anchor clip that they flick back to in order to keep a sense of solidity and structure in the video. Our video also uses this technique. We have shots in which the whole band are present, which we continually return to throughout the video. Also, we have an aspect of narrative in our video, which is also frequently seen in real media products. These techniques ensure that our video does not just randomly and sporadically flick between shots that have no relation to each other and instead progresses through an intuitive theme that is not too abstract for one to guess.

Characteristic of many music videos, we have also included a performance factor into our production, the main character sings into the camera. In short, our video follows conventions of music videos in general, in accordance with Andrew Goodwins conventions of a music video.

By looking at existing examples of digipaks and of adverts, we found there to be conventions that we must adhere to make them look professional and to give the necessary information. We found that frequently there was consistency between the album and the advert designed to sell it. We made sure this was apparent in our texts. We used the conventional ideas of putting a record label and a song list on the back of the digipak. This was necessary information and also made sure there was song information, magazines ratings and a release date on the advertisement. It was also apparent that it is usually advisable to keep adverts and CD covers fairly simple.

Another important point with using conventions is the conventional idea of using the same fonts across both the advert and the digipak. Presumably to promote brand awareness.

Our video and corresponding Digipak and magazine attempts to largely conform to the Ska Punk Genre. As found by our interviews and surveys, the standard attitude tends to rebel against the monotonous day to day drudgery of the 9 to 5 job. We aimed to show that the character in the video makes this journey on a daily basis and is extremely bored of the whole thing, the beginning of the video establishes the middle England lifestyle from which we stray later in the video.

It initially tries to challenge conventions but it soon becomes obvious that the main character would rather do his own thing which ultimately conforms to punk conventions.

The particular aspects of mise-en-scene that we used to create the tedious lifestyle of our businessman was his costume (the suit and tie) his posture whilst dressing and walking to work and his general expression. His face here suggests that he is not particularly happy about having to wake up and go to work. The top image is a frame from our video showing the mundanity of his morning just through his expression. The bottom image is the costume we chose in order to more successfully contrast the brighter clothes the main character wears later in the video. His costume matches the convention of a bussiness man but not necessarily of a Ska- Punk music video. This is an example of where we strayed from and ultimately challenged conventions.

In the answers to the survey I posted on Facebook, we found that a perceived convention of punk rock music is the notion of red and black clothing, leather and ripped jeans. The main character is dressed in red and black as shown on the top image. This is the kind of contrast between the suited businessman and the casual punk style dress sense that we aimed for in order to follow ska/punk style conventions in our video.

The image on the left supports the idea of punk style leather clothing. This is a clear example of how we mainly used, but also slightly developed conventions in our media product.
Also, when those who did my survey were asked to suggest activities that a ska/punk rocker would engage in, we got a common response of drinking alcohol on the street. This was further backed up by the content of the video interview earlier in the blog. The pictures to the left and right demonstrate our use of this stereotype.

In the video, we tried to show a noticeable contrast between the morning when he is waking up and later when he decides to let loose and have a good time when the first chorus sets in. One of the ways in which we did this was by adding a desaturation filter. It is evident below that the desaturated picture on the left implies a slow and dull start to any day, contrasted with the brighter colours in the image on the right, which suggests a much happier and care-free individual. It can be pointed out here that this care-free attitude is closely entwined in the culture of our chosen genre. We also used this effect because along with red and black, interestingly, bright colours were said to be Ska/Punk, according to those who took the research survey.

We have mimicked the font that the actual band use on their promotional material. We used ratings from well known magazines, very common.
Used the same picture as on the album, almost always the case.

We aimed to keep the advert as simple as we could to fit with the themes of existing products. Naming tracks on the album, including the most popular track.

ALBUM OUT NOW very conventional language, simple, to the point.

Picture of garage door, contrasting with front cover as soon as the digipak is opened. Further supports the theme of contrast that we have been conveying throughout the whole promotional pack.

More contrast, outlining again the line between work and fun. Front cover almost synonymous with advert.
Simple tracklisting, record label and copyright information, keeping with the same style font, very conventional, the back of an album is commonly very simple.

Picture of band together on inside of digipak, conventional style.

This question deals with how well all of our texts work together. On a superficial level our texts do have commonalities such as colour scheme and location but there are smaller and more subtle qualities that contribute to the promotional package being a combined and tailored effort rather than a set of unlinked final pieces.

From the beginning, our group decided it was important that there was consistency between our music video and our advert and Digipak. This consistency is referred to as Synergy.

Examples of synergy in our pieces are focused largely on the location, an aspect of mise-en-scene in the beginning of the video. The picture on the left is our final version of our album cover, which is strikingly similar to our magazine advert on the right hand side. This is a direct example of synergy. As is obvious, the font is the same on both texts. Also, a slightly different sized version of the picture was used in each. But seeing the two pieces together shows how effectively both pieces work together to combine with our main product.

The idea of choosing a consistent picture for both the CD cover and for the album advertisement is commonly used, its tends overtly toward a holistic promotional package, creating a strong brand awareness. If an individual sees the magazine advert and memorises the theme present then they will be better able to recognise the CD or Digipak when either browsing for it or if it catches their eye in a music outlet such as HMV. This was the general motive behind us choosing to do this in our products.

So both of our ancillary texts convey synergy between each other and also fit very nicely together with our main product, the video. This results in a well integrated promotional package. Here are some examples of how the two ancillary products support the general theme of the music video; contrast and wanting to leave the mundane behind.

The digipak, one of the ancillary texts, works directly at effectively combining with the main product (the music video). Above you can see that the digipak has on it two costumes, one casual (right) and one mundane and characteristic of the work environment (left). The fact that these two outfits have been chosen by our group to go behind the CD and DVD is a direct reference to the video. It definitely contributes to the theme of contrast as shown by the video itself. It is as if you open the digipack and are faced with the choice of either outfit, one on your left and one on your right. This is somewhat reminiscent of the choice the main character makes about 50 seconds into the video.

The methods we used to gather audience feedback were through survey monkey and through the use of video and written interviews. We were aware that we needed to design these interviews and surveys in such a way that they would give us useful information. the answers to these questions would give the group an insight into an audience profile, which ultimately helped us to design a promotional pack that will specifically appeal to a certain demographic.

Firstly, survey monkey was a very helpful tool to use. The members of the group and I each created a survey and posted them on our Facebook walls. What I learnt from my 5 question survey was varied but along a central theme. The questions I asked are in the image on the right.

The image on the left is a screen shot from surveymonkey.com that details what people believed to be the clothing worn by individuals who consider themselves part of the punk movement. The answers I got from this particular part of my audience research were: Leather jackets Torn up jeans (and denim in general) Jeans and torn t-shirt A loose tie We clearly learned from the audience research as our video and digipak have these elements in it. The main character is seen wearing most of these items. As can be seen on the next slide...

The left image shows the main character wearing red and black, accompanied by a loose tie. The image on the right has the characteristic spiky hair and leather jacket. We learnt that these choices would be a good combination through the use of audience research.

What the whole group learnt is that in order to have successful audience feedback you need to have the largest sample or the most applicable sample to what it is you want to find out. This is why all three members of our group each carried out our own survey in an attempt to attain as many answers to our questions as possible. In the video we used what we had learnt from audience feedback to create the best video. In the case of reaching the right sort of people, I made sure I interviewed a girl who I knew liked the genre of music we were interested in creating a video for. Therefore we would almost certainly get answers we could use.

To gauge what standard our texts were I had a colleague look at our texts and recorded what he said on video. He mentioned that the advert (shown on the left) did not have a professional look to it and could do with reworking, he mentioned that he liked the font and that we should keep that aspect of it. He also mentioned that the text on the right hand side underneath work hard play harder was too compact and wouldnt catch the eye of whoever read the advert. So as a response to what we learnt from our audience feed back, we changed the picture into a city, to make it look more professional and made it as minimal as possible whilst still keeping the original font. Audience feedback proved to be very helpful as the group agree that the new version shown on the right tackles the issues raised by the interview.

Firstly, in the research stages, upon planning what I wanted to find out, I used what I learnt last year in Media Studies and created a research survey on surveymonkey.com. This media technology was not only easy to use but also had a huge variety of different layouts and styles for questions, allowing me to get exactly the right style of question, in order to obtain the qualitative structure I needed to holistically appeal to a set demographic. This particular website was pivotal software in the research section of this project, which is evidently true because my group and I used much of what we gathered from this technology from Facebook, a social networking site, to decide how to create our video.

Also involved in research was the video interview, used to find out the views of an individual who is an actual fan of the punk genre. A prerequisite of this video was a camera, which I provided through use of my mobile phone. I also needed to convert the file from a 3GPP file into an MP4 in order to upload it to my blog. This was another stage of technology I used in the planning stages of my media texts.

Brothersoft.com was the website I used to convert the video .

Also, a large part of our research included browsing and analysing existing products. For videos, this was very easy as the group just spent time on Youtube.com. YouTube was extremely helpful for this and is arguably the most efficient technology for finding videos for existing material analysis.

I then typed up my analysis on Microsoft word to ensure there were no spelling mistakes and then copied and pasted this passage into my blog. It was also a use of technology to capture a screen shot of the video in order to back up my evaluation.

Existing music videos were not the only media that we needed to research and analyse, we also needed to see existing digipaks and adverts to get a feel for the conventions were looking for. For this we used Google search. Whilst doing this we found it quite hard to find images of these texts, especially relevant examples. To evaluate this use of technology, there perhaps may have been an easier and more effective way to find adverts and digipaks such as searching magazines. But despite the difficulty of finding these images, Google did prove very helpful overall. This may be an appropriate time to say that a computer was necessary for these kinds of tasks, through research, planning, construction and evaluation of our promotional pack.

At the planning stage, we didnt actually much technology beyond our pens, pencils and imagination when actually creating the ideas for the music video itself.

This was the case until we needed to put the storyboard on blogger.com. For us to do this we had to use a scanner and scan the images into vuescan scanning software, before uploading them onto slideshare.com, in order to embed the storyboard into our blogs.

Later in the planning stage, we needed to plan the locations where we would be filming our video. To do this we used Google maps, searched for relevant areas and captured a screen shot and uploaded these screen shots to Blogger.

The planning stage did not require as much technology as the other stages as it was mainly a discussion. However, the technology we did use, I believe we used to a high level and realised how helpful it is to have technologies such as a computer and software like Google maps in the research stage of the promotional package.

In the construction stage, we used a variety of technologies. Firstly the main component of filming is obviously, the camera. We used a very advanced Cannon 600D that made filming very easy, the manual focus on the camera was especially helpful as we could pick out the exact area of focus we wanted and it also allowed us to do a focus pull that features late in the video. The camera proved easy to use and the technology was necessary in the completing of our coursework. This clear cut highly defined level of photography was what the group was looking for in order to give our texts a conventionally professional look.

If it can be considered technology in its own right, we used a tripod in order to keep the framing of the video consistent, for example, in the morning sequence we had two shots that required the same framing.

For storage of data, the camera had an SD card which extended the internal memory of the camera and also made transferring the files to the macbook very easy as it has an integrated memory card slot. The macbook is a very advanced and capable laptop that made the whole process of producing the texts very easy. Of course, I was not very fluent on it to begin with on the Mac as I had never before used one for any great length of time, but after an hour or two, the group and I were able to use the technology quite effectively.

After transferring the data, we imported the files into an editing programme called Final cut pro. Final cut pro was an excellent piece of software that we used to actually order, cut in/out and compose the separate clips we took with the camera. Other groups used adobe premier but this software was practically the same.

We used the left screen to choose the clip we wanted to use and the right screen to see what the fully composed video looks like. The timeline along the bottom allows you to place the clip where you would like it relative to the other clips you have. On the far left is where we imported the clips that we captured with the camera. Also on the time line is the music, allowing us to match the words of the song with the miming of the main character.
The software became easy to use and we would have found it very hard to achieve the same effect if we had to edit on the camera. Final cut pro is one of the most important pieces of technology we used in the construction stage.

Upon finishing the video we uploaded to YouTube in the hope of getting feedback, however, what comments we did get were quite unhelpful. Perhaps a different method would be more appropriate.

As well as the video, we created the digipak and advert by taking images with the same camera and imported them into Photoshop, which is advanced photo editing software.
We used Photoshop to put the images together in a digipak form and to overlay the text on them. The software was easy enough to use as we learnt to use it last year whilst making our music magazine. We used the software because it allows you to work in layers. This is helpful as you can move and re-move the text around until you are happy with it, then flatten the image.

The evaluation stage is extremely brief as it is self evident that I used Microsoft PowerPoint to create this Presentation, which implies that I used a computer on which to make it. Other than that, I only used Google search and print screen to select the images for this evaluation. I thought it would make sense to keep it simple, because the text content of the evaluation is in my opinion, most important.