Note to Moderator

Dear Moderator,

Hello and welcome to our group A2 Production Blog. Thank you for taking time to look around! The best way to navigate around our blog is by clicking on the labels on the right hand side of the page. If you get to the bottom of the page, please note the "Older Posts" button!

In order for you to see exactly what each candidate contributed to this process, we have also included Individual Contribution labels named for each group member. All research and planning and construction posts contributed to by the named candidate will appear when you click that label e.g. Alice Contribution. 

Alternatively to look at exclusively Research and Planning or Construction, with everyone's contributions included, please click these labels. 

Each member of the group has also completed their own evaluation. Whilst we collaborated e content such as our YouTube videos, these evaluations were make individually.  You can access our responses to the evaluation questions under the individually named Evaluation labels, e.g. Alice Evaluation. 

Our finished Music Video is at the top of the blog, along with a picture of our album cover and link to our artist website.

Once again, thank you for your time - we hope you enjoy looking around the blog as much as we enjoyed creating it!

Alice Duke (Candidate Number 1135), Arianna Tipper (Candidate Number 1815), Ella Dawson (Candidate Number 1120) and Rakhi Biswas Evans (Candidate Number 1040).

Rakhi Question 1 - In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Forms and conventions underpin the creation of new media products. We have used theory and information from our research to create both our main ancillary products.


This prezi demonstrates our use of theory in the making of our music video, and the conventions we have fulfilled through this.

This is the album cover of 'The Strokes' - 'This Is It'. It was a very successful and controversial debut indie album so it was a big influence for us. Here I have analysed the conventions it uses and how we have been influenced by these. 

This GIF demonstrates how we added the conventional features of an album cover to our product. Starting from  images followed by band and album name on the front then side, track listing, institutional text, barcode and QR code

This is our website compared to that of 'the Veronicas' an all female rock band which makes them a good basis for comparison since rock is another male dominated genre.

The conventions found in 'the Veronicas' website which we have used are:

• A navigation bar at the top featuring similar pages like news, photos and store
• A prominent link to social media at the top
• Links to buy the new album
• Branding inspired by the new album
• A news feed on the home page
• A band logo at the top which remains on every page
• Their gallery also features a range of different costumes and locations
• They advertise tour dates on their front page, however we also use this on our events page
• They have free wallpaper downloads for interactivity, we decided to have a competition

Rakhi Question 2: How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

I would say the combination of our main and ancillary products is very effective because we have demonstrated synergy throughout the project, in small ways but also through the overall image of band identity we have presented to our audiences as detailed below:

These are some annotations on the synergy between all three products, also on our website, we hosted a competition to win free concert tickets by guessing all the references on the projection in our video - creating another link

Band identity example - Florence and the Machine

Band identity was important for us since, as a debuting artist it was the key way in which we could link all three products together. Florence and the Machine have a similar band image to the one we tried to connote - a female led indie band whose members are majorly overshadowed by its lead singer, like Debbie Harry and to an extent Karen O. Above is a still from the video for 'You've Got the Love', which, like most of their music videos actually featured only Florence. Next to the Florence still is a still of a shot typical of many of the performance clips in our video. We took inspiration from Florence and the Machine's branding and our video is centred around our singer with less than 10 non-instrument band shots without Arianna, although we decided to include the band in the video for backing vocals and since we are challenging the indie convention with an all girl group. Below are both our and Florence and the Machine's website, both are branded in the style of the current album and feature Florence and Arianna most prominently in the images. At the bottom are both our album covers. Both feature only the lead singer and, like Florence and the Machine we knew we wanted to use a powerful image of the lead singer alone. On Lungs, Florence has her eyes shut which gives her the same kind of confident identity we wanted to give our lead singer, since both leads represent the band as a whole and creating an eye-catching album cover with a medium/close up portrait without eye contact is both difficult and suggestive of self-confidence of the artist. This self-confident, independent of her backup lead singer is exactly the band identity we connoted through all three products, thus making them an effective combination.

To further test the effectiveness of the combination of our products, we used a screening of our video at school as a mini-marketing campaign with the school being a microcosm of our audience in the general public. To do this, as well as a facebook event, we put up posters around the school, one in the style of the album with a still from our video and one using photos taken from the website. Both had our logo and QR codes linking to the website.

A GIF of the posters and putting them up

As the screening was almost full, I would say this campaign was a success and an example of combining elements of all three of our products successfully.

Rakhi Question 3: What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

Music Video

Audience feedback has been a big part of the project, especially for the music video. Below is a video with compiled audience feedback from members of our primary and secondary target audience (females of 15-45 years old and male teenagers) detailing how audience feedback has affected the changes we made to the music video with the final compared to an earlier version:



After the screening, we also asked our facebook friends, the majority of whom are in our primary and secondary target audiences, to complete a questionnaire on survey monkey. We used this to evaluate how effective the video was in appealing to our audiences using both quantitative and qualitative data, finding statistics and personal opinions. Katz and Blumler's Uses and Gratifications theory is a widespread and effective way of assessing audience interaction with media products and below I have analysed the results of the survey in conjunction with their key concepts:

Katz and Blumler's key uses and gratifications of media products 

1. be informed or educated
2. identify with characters of the situation in the media environment
3. simple entertainment
4. enhance social interaction
5. escape from the stresses of daily life

Number 1 is not really relevant to our music video and we have tried to subvert number 2, creating a confusing and mesmerising environment, ideally causing our audiences to question their environment, as the hospital was the most popular aspect of our video, out of dancer, performance and hospital on the survey. As explained below, I believe we effectively entertained the audience, several comments were made on the survey praising the editing, such as 'the editing was really good' and it was the most popular technical aspect of our video with 49% of people listing it as their favourite, out of editing, camerawork, lighting and set, with set as a second favourite. There was positive evidence, as explained below about social interaction from the survey but after the screening, there was buzz around the school about our videos and lots of people liked the video on facebook, as well as tweeting about it:

A tweet about our video

Not only are they tweeting but also talking about it in the common room - social interaction definitely enhanced!

As for an escape, I think the audience was definitely hooked, many of the people were so involved in the action that they visibly shuddered at the injection.

• The average rating for the video was 8.53/10 which suggested, while not perfect, a very positive overall response suggesting the audience were entertained by the video.
• This chart maps the results of the question: how much would you pay to see the band live? Over 75% of people would, after watching our video pay over £10 to see the band live with a over a quarter saying they would pay over £20. We think this is a positive number since popular alternative band 'Alt J' were quoted on the BBC (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-20066145) as considering £10-£15 a reasonable ticket price for a concert of theirs in London shortly after the release of their first album in 2012.

• 40/57 people surveyed said they found the music they listen to from their friends. Considering that concerts are generally social events and the data on ticket prices was very positive, I would conclude that the video gives an impression of a band who would fulfil the social interaction gratification.
• Below is a chart detailing the genre our audience thought our genre was (they were allowed more than one response). I think we have presented our genre well as many the majority of people put indie and pop, and as a genre that is difficult to define, choosing alternative is understandable and has a similar target audience to indie so I doubt we have judged our audience wrong.

• Whilst the feedback was mainly positive, we did receive some comments where the audience expressed a desire to see more of the band performance.
  
  "Perhaps if there could be more band members playing a role in the video"
  "More shots of band performance"
  "More band, less story"
  We perhaps could have improved here since as it is a debut video perhaps we should have established ourselves as a band more.
• We also received comments that the dancer was a little confusing but while some people found this to be a flaw, some enjoyed the mystery of questioning what/who he was

Album Cover

Our initial idea for the album cover was Arianna being held back by us with chains, in order to create synergy with the music video, however, some of the audience members felt that we did not feel connected as a band, as this clearly alienates Arianna from us. Whilst we wanted Arianna to be very much at the forefront of the campaign, we did not want to create too fractured a band identity, leading to the inside panel where everyone was edited the same, which audience members found effective and 'professional-looking'. However there was 'too much white space' on the inside of the album cover and so we added mirror images of us in the same pose wet, to continue our slightly kooky band image. We also removed the logo since the rest of the cover was very 'slick' and the round, rough, chunky logo detracted from this.

Our initial album cover with only one set of the band inside and original name and band logo

We also as shown above had a different name originally: "Shut Your Goddamn Mouth and Play Some Music" however, our feedback said that in the above edit, the name was not clear enough. As we did not want it to infringe any more on the image, we changed that album name to 'I' as in me, but also the Roman numeral for 1 - our first album. While people thought this was entertaining, they also said it was 'quite pretentious' so perhaps this change was not thought through enough since it perhaps alienates some of our target audience. To avoid alienating our target audience we had already changed our name from 'B*tch in the Band' since everyone we asked said this seemed like an extreme statement, and as a debut band this was perhaps not so appropriate.

A photo we originally wanted to use for the back panel, however our audience feedback informed us that it was very sexual which was not an image we wanted to portray

Website

With the website, as it was a new medium for us to be working with, we received feedback about both technical and visual/usability issues. From feedback we made the following changes: 

An early version of the website

• Back button on gallery needed - this was a simple technical issue which we addressed
• A contact page needed - as we were a new band on a small independent record label, contactability had to be made very clear
• Make sure institutional information is prominent - this is a convention of music websites
• Ensure there is a variety of images and costumes - as a real band would have lots of different pictures in different locations and costumes
• Clear opportunities for purchases and interactivity needed - to address this and alert our audiences to our tour dates, we added a competition to win two free tickets to our concert by spotting all the references in the 'You'll Find a Way' video projection
• Enable Facebook comments on everything - the 'contact cannot be displayed' box was originally a facebook feed however this made the site look too cluttered and was unconventional for music websites so we enabled facebook comments on everything instead and also a 'like' feature on many items
• Change the newsletter box - our feedback told us the subscription box was too chunky and made our site look unprofessional so we removed the white background so it blended in more
• Pre-order/Buy Now on merchandise - another convention of bands who have a new album out 
• Dates need to be highlighted - to make our website more slick, we made the buttons highlight when hovering over our tour dates
• The background is boring - whilst the background and theme should reflect the album cover, simply having the front panel image was too boring and also used to promote buying the album throughout the website so we created a tessellation of the letter 'I' instead

Rakhi Question 4: How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Technology has been large part of the whole process, from social media, to new digital technology, it has been crucial in construction, research and planning and the evaluation

Construction

WIX

We used a lot of social media on wix - we had links to tumblr, facebook, twitter, instagram and pinterest as well as a live twitter feed, facebook comments and a 'tweet/like/pin' feature on several items

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We used a service called mailchimp to enable users of our website to actually sign up for a newsletter, the above gif demonstrates how signing up works

For the lighting, we wanted to create a grungey but still colourful and interesting set up, one interesting influence was 'Arcade Fire's' video for 'Here Comes the Night Time' which featured very similar lighting - we liked the blue and red colours and the fairy lights in the background and took influence from this, however we set up the lights so as not to hit us since we only wanted to colour our backgrounds

In wix while most functions for creating buttons and pages were simple and obvious however we had to learn how to use widgets, for example going through twitter to create a personalised user widget.

CAMERA

We used the Canon 5D Mark II for the focus pull shot at the beginning of our video as it had a much closer zoom than the V1E which allowed us to create a shallow focus effect

We used the Sony HVR V1E for most of our video. To create an infinite white effect in the hospital, we used a low aperture - about f2.5 so the depth of field was low and the white background blended together.

We planned to use a GoPro for some of the dancer scenes. Although we did not use this footage in the end, we downloaded the GoPro app on our phones, allowing us to see what we were filming on our phones.



 This is a video using shots from each set up to show how we graded to get the desired effect from the original shot. While mostly this was not new, just using ProcAmp and 3-Way Colour Corrector, for Kai we had to use an 'Echo' which changed in different sections of the song and we had to adjust the intensity and delay of the echo to achieve the effects above.

This video contains annotations on how I used 'After Effects' to make the dancer disappear in some shots

Research and Planning

We had a facebook message going throughout the project so that we could plan and communicate as a group at all times, at home or out on our mobiles

Technical presentation from aliced1996

This is the technical presentation, created as a plan for the technology used on the shoots for the music video

For the album cover, we used Adobe Photoshop. While we did not use any very complicated effects, we did use the 'Skin Smoother Action' to make ourselves look polished and a bit unreal. It is basically an airbrush for which you select how much you want to change from the original and then simply brush over skin. One problem with this was that it lost the intensity of some shadows, which we had to use the burn tool to put back in.

Evaluation

For the evaluation, I used several technologies which were new to me. Prezi for one was very useful as it allows viewer to navigate around more freely than slideshare - so they can just click on parts they want to read. I also used imgflip.com to create gifs, which are smaller and simpler than videos but more informative than photos. Survey monkey was also incredibly useful since we posted it after the screening.

Arianna Question 1: In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Overall, we tried to balance our uses, developments and challenges to the forms and conventions of real media products. After looking back, I found that we mostly used and developed conventions, and only challenged a few. Goodwin’s Theory demonstrates the conventions of all music videos.

Some of which are:

-        A relationship between the lyrics and the visuals, with the visuals illustrating, amplifying or contradicting the lyrics.

-        A relationship between the music and the visuals, with the visuals illustrating, amplifying or contradicting the music, editing to the beat

-        Genre-related style and iconography present.

-        Multiple close-ups of the main artist or vocalist, develop motifs

-        Voyeurism often plays a major part, especially in relation to females. This often means a voyeuristic view of, and an objectification, of women. The emphasis on looking also includes the artist looking directly into the camera helping the audience connect with the artist.

-        Intertextual references to other media texts may be present.

I created a Youtube video with annotations with another group member, Alice, to highlight the points in the music video where these uses of conventions occur:

Conventions were often difficult to establish for our indie-pop genre as we could not find many bands similar to ours. However, we found that the main forms and conventions used to make this genre clear to the audience involved the concept of the video, styling, mise-en-scene, and the attitudes in performance. For example, in the projection set up the band wore dresses to demonstrate the pop side of the genre, but also chains and chunky boots to add a grungey feel. The lead singer was very dramatic with her performances and instrument-playing band members are also conventional for indie-pop. Due to it being a hybrid genre, we were able to look at other genres, for example pop, and use some of their conventions.

Another big influence to our music video idea, was the music video for Rihanna's song, We found love. The theme of this song is about a relationship based heavily on the reckless lives of a young couple, and their association with drugs. One of our initial idea was going to be based around the downfall of a girl due to drugs, so this video had a heavy influence on the development of our idea, and affected our decision to incorporate a boy and girl in our video and how it can be a relationship that causes a person to go mad. 

We decided to produce a music video which was performance and concept, with the concept sections even having a slight narrative. After researching other music videos, for example Hey Monday's I Don't Want to Dance, we found that this was conventional for a band’s debut. It allows the audience to get to know and identify with the band in performance shots, but it is kept interesting and gives a stylistic feel to how they may continue in the future.

As labelled in the annotated video, there are several occasions where we have links between the lyrics and the visual. There are many occasions where we illustrated and amplified the meaning of the song through the visuals. However, there’s a disjuncture in many other places where the meaning of the song or lyrics has been completely ignored to allow the audience to interpret things in their own way.

 

 Intertextual references were particularly useful for our music video as it provides the audience with clues and a means of creating links and theories to understand the concept and why the lead singer might be in the hospital. It was also effective in that we could attract our target audience with other current forms of media, for example television and film. Here is a video of the whole projection sequence, although a lot of it is not seen in the final music video:

One of our biggest challenges was the idea of straying from the typically pop girl-band. We found that being an all-female, instrument playing indie-pop was pretty uncommon. Goodwin’s Theory mentions the idea of a notion of looking and a voyeuristic view of women. The notion of looking was heavily featured in our music video but this treatment of the female body is definitely something we wanted to challenge. Our first shot includes direct eye contact between the girl in the hospital and the audience. This eye contact is maintained throughout all of the set ups, but is used in the hospital scenes to create a particular effect. It allows the audience to empathise with her character even further as everything she says becomes very direct to the viewer. We tried to avoid a voyeuristic view of females throughout our video. Laura Mulvey coined the phrase 'male gaze' in 1975 as she believed the audience have to view characters from the perspective of a heterosexual male. She believed music videos in particular objectified the female body and did things like linger on female curves. We did not over-sexualise the band members' bodies, resulting in the representation being strong and aspirational. We used lots of close-ups and beauty shots, but all of these were of the face and no other parts of the body.

We took inspiration from various other music videos throughout the project. For the hospital scenes we took inspiration predominantly from 'This is Gospel' by Panic at the Disco. The video for this song is also based around the idea of someone in the band going crazy and needing to be strapped to a hospital bed, whilst he is singing, and resisting control. We really liked the effect which was created so continued with a recurring motif of restraint and ordered similar clothing for the nurses (including face masks and gloves).

  

The clinical white idea for the hospital came from watching Lady Gaga's, Bad Romance music video as we wanted to create a contrast between her in her scenes of madness and the flashbacks of her as she watches the busker in areas around Brick Lane.

When planning our album cover, we researched a lot of real media products to gain some inspiration. We found that the conventions of a typical album include:

•         Strong images on the front and back cover
•         Band name and Album name on front cover
•         Band name and Album name on the spine
•         Track list on the back cover
•         Institutional information on the back cover
•         Barcode on the back cover
•         Synergy across all four panels
•         Sense of band’s brand created

We looked at album covers of both bands of our genre, and strong individual female artists and sought out inspiration. We found that it was conventional of solo artists to have a striking close up of themselves on the front. Although we were a band, we thought that this would be quite effective and challenged the convention of the albums for groups. We established that we wanted our cover to be individual and arty, so we began looking through images of models and their photo-shoots to gain further inspiration, and this is how we came up with the idea of the lead singer being underwater in a bath. One of the album’s biggest selling points is the enigma created around it, so we decided to further this with the title of our album, I.

However, we stuck to the conventions we found for the back. We used a striking image with the lead singer’s bare back and piercing eye contact, without sexualising her body. We ensured to include all the band members on the inside panels as a debut album needs to introduce the full band. After seeing this Steps album cover, we realised that this technique would be a perfect way of displaying the divide between the 'perfect' image of the band members to the wet image with imperfections. We created the synergy across all the panels by theming them all around water.

We went through a similar process with the website, I looked at both the Florence and the Machine website and the Veronicas website to establish the conventions of music video websites.
Some of our conventional findings were:

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•      Top of every page: Menu Bar and band logo
•        Pages: News, Events/Tour, Merchandise, Gallery/Videos, Music
•        Links to social media littered throughout
•        Consistent band branding (signature font and colour scheme)
•        Lots of opportunities for purchasing
•       Heavy focus on advertising latest album/single
•        Institutional information and contact details

The website is extremely important as it acts as the central hub for the band, so we tried to keep it as conventional as possible. We decided on doing an opening page after being inspired by Lorde’s website. We thought hers was very effective so used the idea of an image within a letter to create our ‘I’ for the page. After looking at Lady Gaga’s website we decided, like hers, we wanted our website to be heavily orientated around the album, hence the background of tessellated Is and pre-order links on many of the pages.



Arianna Question 2: How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

I think that we used both our main product and ancillary texts effectively together to create a brand for our band. As it was the band’s debut, we needed to establish an artist identity by ensuring that our products were synergistic across our 360-degree campaign. We also needed to ensure that our indie-pop genre was made explicit.

When trying to establish our artist identity, we took a lot of inspiration from Lady Gaga. Although she is a solo artist, we has decided to focus our marketing towards the crazy and outgoing lead singer, so Lady Gaga was perfect. Above is a gif from Lady Gaga's 'Bad Romance' music video, which inspired our hospital set-up greatly. When looking at some of Lady Gaga's album covers, it is noticeable that they all include an extremely striking close up on the front cover to entice the audience. This also portrays an image of confidence which we wanted to replicate for our album. Lady Gaga's website has extremely evident links between her website and album, as the website is completely revolved around its imagery. There is an intial pop-up for the purchase of the album, along with constant links throughout the website, a washed-out background of the album cover and a maintained font and colour scheme.

We wanted to market our band with the lead singer as the focus. We created a memorable identity for her as crazy, powerful and dominant. Along with general attitude when performing in the music video and having more screen-time, we used colours as a means of portraying this crazy character. With our band colours being black and red, the lead singer wore a bright red dress while the others wore black in the projection set-up, instantly causing her to stand out. This styling was then carried through to the promo shoot creating a synergistic link between the video and the website where the photos were placed.  This marketing was also continued on the album, as both the front and back cover were strong individual photos of the lead singer, unconventional of debut bands which would usually like to introduce all their members.

We created a sense of enigma with our album cover. The image of the lead singer underwater and the theme of water does not give any clues to the music of the band, it was conceptual, similar to the music video. This enigma would encourage the audience to go to our website through the QR code on the back cover, which acting as the central hub for our band would provide all the answers to the questions raised. We needed to make sure the audience found their way to the website as it contained purchasing opportunities, essential for any marketing campaign. For example, tour tickets, the single, the album and branded merchandise.

As the central hub, the website contained lots of synergistic links with the music video and particularly the album cover. The website was orientated around the album cover, something we found out was a convention during our research. Both the opening page and background contain images of the letter I, the title of our album. In the gallery, there are behind the scenes photos from the music video shoot, encouraging people to watch the video, a promotional material, and then buy the single and album. This also makes the audience member feel special, as tho
ugh they are a VIP with extra information about the band. This gratifies their needs in entertainment and surveillance.

Our band logo was definitely a means of ensuring a sense of branding across all platforms. The graffiti-style font provides a clue to our genre and our band colours, red and black, are featured. The logo is featured on the drum-kit in the video and also in the top corner of every page on the website. We have also extended it to social media with our Twitter image also being the logo. Our reco
rd label, Revolutionary Records also provides as a means of creating synergy between the ancillary texts as it is features on both the album cover and at the bottom of every page on the website. We decided it would be an independent British Record Label and decided on the name during a meeting.

We wanted to truly test how effective a marketing campaign we could create, so we used a screening of the music video in school as a means of doing so. We created an event on Facebook and put up posters around school, one with band performance images and one with a still of our music video’s first shot. The posters also contained our QR code so people could have a direct link to our website. I also created a trailer with two other members of my group, it provided as a teaser for all the music videos being shown at this screening.

Improvements:

The avatar below describes an improvement which could have been made on the combination of our main product and ancillary tasks: