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

.

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.