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:

Arianna Question 3: What have you learned from your audience feedback?

We tried to get as much audience feedback throughout the project as possible. We decided that our target audience would be British females aged 15-45, with our secondary audience extending to males of the same category and tertiary being foreign non-English language speakers. However, in the midst of our project we realised that targeting the tertiary audience would be unrealistic with a small independent record label. We decided to focus on the primary and secondary after this thought.

We needed to take into account Katz and Blumler's theory of the key uses and gratifications of media products when trying to target our audience. Our video was definitely entertaining, but I feel that it would have been difficult for the audience to identify with the characters in it. However, this provided an alternative interesting effect as it could have been considered confusing and intriguing. It definitely enhanced social interaction, with people talking about the music videos for days in school. Some went as far as saying they “want to create [their] own music video now”.  Finally, I think the video definitely provided an escape from daily life. From watching reactions in the screening we held, everyone seemed hooked on the narrative.

As a group, we created an online questionnaire with SurveyMonkey, an online web tool, as it was an easy way of getting feedback from friends in the form of quantative data and collating it all in one place. We all shared the link via Facebook and we received over 50 responses. Social media platforms were extremely useful when targeting our young, modern and technological audience. Here is a video I created going through the results:

Alice and I also held a focus group with friends who would be in both the primary and secondary target audience. This is a video of their responses to the questions we asked:

After learning about Stuart Hall's theory of 'preferred and negociated meaning' I understood that all of our texts are polysemic. There is no one way of looking at things which is why every audience member interpreted the music video differently. Our hospital set up was inspired by old depictions of a psychiatric hospital, for example that in the film One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest. We had to be wary that with negotiated meaning, this could be interpreted as offensive. However, from our audience feedback we established that this was not the case.

It was necessary to get audience feedback on our ancillary tasks. Again, social media was a perfect was of doing this. I sent an image of the album cover and a link to the website to a few friends and this is an example of the feedback I received:

Overall we received a lot of positive feedback on our video, but there were also some improvements to be made.

Positives:

-        The hospital was interesting and the narrative was effective

-        Faced paced editing

-        Editing and effects of the dancer

-        Band performance

-        The projection of popular culture references worked well

-        Narrative and lyrics worked well together

Improvements:

-        Narrative not always fully understood

-        Projection not always visible in background

-        More shots of other members of the band

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

Research and Planning:

New media technologies were essential throughout every stage of the project. In the research and planning stage we kept in contact using social media. We had a ‘Music Video’ group message on Facebook, on which we could discuss ideas and plan meetings and shoots. We also had conversations over Skype when planning things at length. Skype was perfect for when we needed to show eachother flat plans and album art sketches.

Youtube was particularly vital in this stage as it was our means of finding a song. We listened to some other songs by Santigold and would not have found ‘You’ll Find a Way’ without Youtube’s recommended videos. We also used Youtube when looking for inspirations for our video. This is how we found the Panic! At The Disco video which was our main inspiration for the hospital. Although they weren’t successful, we also used Spotify and Itunes to try and find a song to use.

Web.20 allowed us to go to website such as Amazon an eBay to purchase items needed for our shoots, for example the straightjacket, needles and nurse outfits.

Construction:

Within the construction process we came across lots of technologies and techniques that were very new to us. We were given cameras that we had not worked with before so they took some getting used to. We used the Canon 5D Mark II for our first shot as we realised it would be the best for an intended focus pull.  We shot everything else on the HVR-V1E, another unfamiliar camera to us. We were also new to using the lighting desk to control the Arri Flex studio lights. We were able to reposition them, adjust the strength and use coloured filters to our advantage, for example in the grunge set up.

We used Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 when editing our music video. Although we were familiar with this software after working with it last year, the style of editing was completely different and there were effects which we had to learn how to do, for example making the dancer look as though he was disappearing and also make him dream-like with the grade.  We really upped the contrast and saturation, also adding an echo effect. Here is a short clip of some original clips compared with their graded versions:

We used a flash-based website (rather than HTML based) called Wix to create our website. It was easy to use and allowed us to make a website which was visual and interactive:

A massive benefit of Wix was that it allowed us to have links to all our forms of social media. There were essential for targeting our young, modern audience. Here is a video I created going through all of the links:

We also created a Facebook page which was linked to our website:

We also ensured to included lots of links to ITunes on the website. After doing research I found that the sales of CDs are declining and there is a bigger focus on digital downloads in the modern age. Here are a few of the headlines I found online:

When creating our album cover we used Adobe Photoshop. Like with Premiere Pro, we were familiar with the program but needed more advanced effects and techniques for this project. For example, when editing the images of the band members on the inside panels, we used a tool called the Skin Smoother, which gave the images a more professional sheen. We also had to edit everything within the digipack template.

Evaluation:

Web 2.0 was essential throughout the evaluation. It allowed us to find necessary tools such as Camtasia for screen-capturing, Voki for speaking avatars and website which can produce GIFs. It also proved useful when getting our audience feedback. We used a website called SurveyMonkey to create an online questionnaire. It was our most successful form of feedback as we received over 50 responses.  We also used social media as a means of getting feedback, asking people questions via messaging on Facebook.  A Facebook event was created to promote our screening and, even after the event, we were able to use it as a platform to get people to answer our SurveyMonkey Questionnaire.