Note to Moderator

Dear Moderator, 
My brief was to create a music video, a Digipak and a website as a promotional package of an artist of my choice. As a group, we chose the singer Sam Sparro and his song 'Black and Gold'.
I have used labels to help you navigate my page.

Yours Sincerely,
Ruby Davies

Candidate Number: 9042
Center Number: 51111

Evaluation Question 1 Final

IN WHAT WAYS DOES YOUR MEDIA PRODUCT USE, DEVELOP OR CHALLENGE FORMS AND CONVENTIONS OF REAL MEDIA PRODUCTS?

MUSIC VIDEO

From my research and planning, I found that it's very important to follow the conventions of a music video, especially when shooting a production that falls into a particular genre of music as its important to connect with your target audience and listen to their needs/what they find entertaining to watch. Keeping this in mind, this affected our location choices, casting choices, costume choices and general mood/tone of our music video; we had to put all the right elements together in order for our production to be entertaining for our implied target audience. 

When researching the conventions of real music videos I discovered that each music genre generally has different conventions as they are produced to aim towards different target audiences. Therefore, as Sam Sparro is a dance/pop artist, it was important for us to do our research into this particular genre so we can produce a video that will entertain the watchers. From this research, I found that most pop videos were narrative based, so as a group we came up with a story line to keep our audience interested throughout. However, we  wanted our video to overall be about 60% performance based and 40% narrative based, so we could show as much of the artist as possible in their element as they're singing into the camera. But we kept the music video narrative based to intrigue watchers into a storyline and to make the video memorable. 

Below, I've created a running commentary illustrating some of the ways in which our music video used the conventions of real media products.

Overall, we didn't really challenge any forms or conventions of real media products as we felt it was important to create a video that would be entertaining for the general audience of a pop/dance artist to watch. 

DIGIPAK

Before making my digipak, I also did some research into the conventions of a digipak so I had some guidelines to go by.

The first thing I noticed was that the album covers usually featured an image of the artist so audiences can identify which artist the album belongs to and get to know the artists style. Therefore, I used a full frontal close up image of Eoghain looking directly into the camera to illustrate this convention. Below is the process in which I came to the final image.

Another convention is that the front cover usually has the artists name and the album name illustrated on the front, along with the name of the record company and a star review (however these are less common). I decided to add all these features to make the cover look as realistic as possible. My first draft didn't feature the name of the record company or a review and it looked too simple and there was too much spare space on it, so I added in these elements to give the audience more to look at. The first draft without the extra font is below.

The back cover of a digipak requires to have all the song titles, and often a different image of the artist. There's also usually a running colour scheme throughout to create a sense of continuity. I showed this by keeping the style and colour of font the same, the background colour the same and a darkly lit image of Eoghain. Eoghain's also wearing the same clothes and has the same hairstyle, which keeps this sense of continuity and shows a bit of his brand identity.

The theme of the digipak also has to reflect the album name and genre of music that the artist represents. As Sam Sparro is a pop artist and the name of the album is 'Life Through Technicolour', I decided to have add bright colours in somewhere to reflect the pop genre and 'technicolour'. However, I also made sure to create a link between the leading track and name of our music video song 'Black and Gold' by keeping most of the font in gold and using a black background. This will hopefully tie the whole digipak together in terms of keeping a sense of continuity throughout and a running theme. The similarities between all my media products hopefully present a promotional package for Sam Sparro as an artsy, pop artist and will persuade audiences who enjoy this type of music to buy his album.

Evaluation Question 2 Final

HOW EFFECTIVE IS THE COMBINATION OF YOUR MAIN PRODUCT AND ANCILLARY TEXTS?

For my ancillary tasks, I chose to create a digipak and website. I felt that it was important to make sure that there is a link between the ancillaries and main media product whether it was through the use of colour schemes, fonts or pictures to create a brand identity and a promotional package when it came to creating an image for the artist. Using the same colour schemes and image themes throughout allowed me to show my artists style and genre.

I combined my website to my digipak by making sure that the album was featured somewhere on my homepage. Below is a screenshot of my homepage featuring images of the front cover of my album.

As you can see, there is a large image of the album cover at the top of the homepage and a large space given to announce the release of the album. This helps in combining my two ancillary tasks and gives an effective colour scheme of a black background and gold font throughout. This will help 'sell' the digipak to the audience as the album is being advertised on this media platform and the website is a good thing to use as a form of promotion as fans will regulary check the site for updates.

I've also used this media platform to promote our music video, as the screenshots below show.

This ties all the ancillary tasks together as I've added a YouTube link that takes you to the site to watch the video, and a gallery of screenshots of the video. This has meant that I've made the use of different media technologies so the audience can go on the website and find everything they need to 'buy' the album or watch the music video. It also shows how all three media products have a running theme and mood. For example, we can see from the above image of the music video that the screenshot is darkly lit with a golden light on the characters, which runs with the colour scheme of both the website and digipak - all having some type of dark or black background and then a golden or colourful style featured on top. This also gives an indication to the brand identity of Sparro as an artist; we can gather that the mood and tone of his songs are quite meaningful and serious, hense the use of dark colours, however his pop genre comes across through the use of bright colours whenever 'technicolour' is mentioned. 

All media products also feature similar images, with Sparro in a full frontal shot looking directly at the camera. This allows the audience to identify with him and get to know his image. This will help 'sell' the album as audiences may feel that they can identify with who he is as his image is shown a lot, therefore his style is memorable. These images are shown below, with screenshots of the website, digipak and music video.

The back cover of my digipak is also an image taken from our music video. This shows that the two media products have the same colour theme and style and will persuade audiences to watch the video as they may be intrigued on what will happen in the video. The images are illustrated in the screenshots below.

The website is also an effective form of promotion as I've added social media icons that, when clicked, take you straight to his social media pages. This is a great form of promotion as it allows audiences to further get to know Sparro as they're his personal accounts and it will help represent his image and style better.

The similar image styles, fonts, colour schemes and themes help create a promotional package for Sparro and help present him as a pop artist due to the combination of each media product. This makes the media products effective as a combination as we can now identify with his music genre and know a little bit more about him as an artist.

Evaluation Question 3 Final

WHAT HAVE YOU LEARNED FROM YOUR AUDIENCE FEEDBACK?

For our audience feedback, we made a questionnaire and gave it to viewers to fill in after they had watched our video. Below are some of the questionnaires that we got back.

         

 

Just from looking at this, we can see that most viewers were impressed of our special effects and camera work. I was pleased with this as I spent a lot of time editing the green screen and putting effects on all of the clips, ensuring that they were up to our standards. All the questionnaires that we got back ticked the box to say that they enjoyed our music video, which was good as the people who filled them in also fell into our target audience (15+). However, some wrote that they didn't like the main singer - this meant that maybe they didn't feel that Eoghain fit the role properly. This would be something to keep in mind for next time to make sure that we cast our main artist to fit his style as best we can.

I found that getting audience feedback has been important since the beginning of research and planning so we could make the best video that would entertain our audience the most. Below is a focus group that we did to gain audience feedback on ideas that our target audience felt would be the best to use in our song. One suggestion that we received was that we should film some scenes in front of a solid background and have some shots in gold, which is what we did for our final video. Using a gold effect also became one of the main themes within our video so doing this focus group was useful as it gave us a direction to go in.

Teacher feedback

Our teacher feedback was definitely extremely helpful during this process as we were receiving feedback from someone who is experienced and familiar with the industry. Before we even started filming, we had a focus group with our teacher to tell her our initial ideas and what we wanted to include in our video. This was helpful as she told us what she thought was good and bad about our ideas so we didn't waste time filming anything that we wouldn't use later. My teacher also commented a lot on my blog posts and read my progress updates so she could see the progress we were making and would comment when she thought that there were bits that I could improve, for example my ancillary tasks. We told our teacher in this feedback that we wanted to make our video performance based as well as narrative based to conform to the conventions of a pop genre video, and she agreed that this would be a good idea. Our teacher also suggested that we should go back and analyse our lyrics in order for our story line to conform to the lyrics that our artist was singing. This meant that we had to go back to our storyboard and think over some new ideas that would create the link between lyrics and visuals.

Evaluation Question 4 Final

HOW DID YOU USE MEDIA TECHNOLOGIES IN THE CONSTRUCTION AND RESEARCH, PLANNING AND EVALUATION STAGES?

Here is a running comentary I made that shows how I used FinalCut Pro and Motion in the making of our music video.

Here's a presentation that I made showing all the other media technologies that we used and how we used them.



If the presentation above doesn't work, follow this link evaluation question 4

Final music video.

Here is our final music video. Unfortunately, due to exporting issues there is a slight distortion in some of the frames which couldn't have been avoided.

Final website ancillary

Here's the link to my website.
http://rubydavies.wix.com/sam-sparro