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

Final front cover of album

Here is my final front cover of my digipak album. Below I have put up the pictures from the original picture to the final album cover now to show the process I went through in making it. 

This is the original image that I took to use as the front cover. I found that taking the picture infront of the green screen wasn't the best idea as it was hard to edit the green out of the edges of his hair on Serif, but eventually I managed to do so. I used a face frontal close up to show his image and so buyers can identify that the album is his.

Here I began to edit. I had already thought of the name of my album 'Life Through Technicolour' so knew I had to put elements of different colours on the cover somewhere. I chose to do this over his eyes to represent seeing life 'through' technicolour. I edited the whole of the front cover on Serif PagePlus, so started off by using the wand tool to bring Eoghain's silhouette out from the green screen.

This was my last draft before my final product. Following the feedback I recieved from my teacher, I added the name that we came up with for our record company and a review that you can see on the final product. Also, I noticed that the blocks of colour over the eyes are much lighter and more transparent than the shapes on the blakc background, so I made sure to correct this for my final product.

Final Digipak

Here is my final digipak, all together in one post.

Final album back cover

Here is my final back cover to my digipak. I've probably spent the most time on the back cover of the digipak as there were so many elements that I had to think about and I had so many different ideas with the font and colours that I could have used. Ultimately, I feel that this one is the best as it features the same colours and font types as the rest of the digipak, and has an image taken from our music video which ties in all my ancillary products.

Final album CD

Here is my final CD for the inside of my digipak album. Following the feedback from my teacher on the drafts I posted, I've changed the name of the company from 'Silverwing Productions' to 'Silverwing Records', to make the brand sound more like a record company.
To make this CD, I used Serif PagePlus X6 and a CD template. From there, I made the CD colour gold and then put a transparency effect on it to make the image appear black from the inner circle and then fade to gold towards the outer of the CD. I did this to create a link between the colour themes of the album and the leading track 'Black and Gold', which is also the song we have made our music video to. I kept the font black to stand out against the gold background and put the word 'technicolour' in multicoloured to ensure a consistency through the album name and themes on the front cover of the album. I also put a transparency effect on the font to carry on this sense of continuity.

Problems we faced and how we overcame them

The first time we ever filmed we had a rough idea of our storyline and the direction we wanted to go in as we had pre-planned drawing storyboards and brainstorming ideas. However, as we started filming we began to come up with new ideas and started to sway away from our original ideas. This meant that when it came to editing, I had random bits of film that didn’t really fit into any kind of storyline and didn't carry any kind of continuity. So we had to pick our best bits of film and work around these clips. Even after our second draft, the feedback that we received from our teacher was that the storyline wasn't clear as the emotions portrayed by the characters in certain clips caused the video to have a light-hearted feel, which is the opposite of what we wanted. We wanted the overall mood of our video to be serious and artsy, reflecting the tone and tempo of our song. Therefore, I replaced these clips in editing with shots that reflected what we wanted. Also, during filming we weren't able to see what we were filming actually looked like until I exported it onto the Mac. This was especially a problem for us when we were filming the shots in front of the green screen, as when we brought it up on the Mac we noticed that the lighting wasn't how we wanted it and the green screen wasn't flat or consistent in colour. This caused problems when trying to edit special effects onto it as it caused the image to become distorted. We then had to re film these parts quite a few times until we got it right; we found that using natural daylight was much better than using the floodlights that we had hired from school. 

I didn't find many problems in editing as I had used the Final Cut Pro and Motion software before in recent projects. The only issue that I had was that during our first two drafts we didn't have enough footage which meant that there were a few blank spaces that didn't have any shots in them. This meant that we had to go back and film more footage which took up more of our time and resulted in us rushing to meet our deadline. However, Final Cut Pro and Motion has all the elements that I needed to use to create our music video so I didn't find that there was something I needed that they didn't offer.

Music video analysis

We've made three music video drafts before coming to our final product. From our first draft to our final, you can see a drastic difference! The drafts have helped us immensely as we've been able to see what frames need re-filming due to wrong lighting or not putting across the right mood/tone. The biggest change we made was the use of the green screen; in our first draft, you can see the inconsistencies where the lighting was too bright and the screen wasn't flat so it caused the backdrop to become discoloured and fuzzy. However, as we had made a draft within plenty of time of our deadline, we were then able to re film until we got it perfect. The images below show a screenshot from our first draft and a screenshot from our final product and you can see the difference.

The drafts also show how not only the filming improved but also the content of what was filmed and the editing. After doing our first two drafts we were able to get feedback from our teacher and realized that we needed a stronger story line to follow as our video is narrative based, therefore we got rid of a lot of material and replaced it with new tape that allowed us to portray some type of story line. In terms of editing, you can see that the visual effects are a lot more effective and tie in better with the mood of the song, for example the tinted gold filter. Also, the cuts are a lot tighter and the lip syncing is noticeably more in sync with the music. The beginning titles from the first draft didn't tie in with the mood or themes of the video or song at all so I made sure to create titles reflected the tone of the song with an effective transition.

Music Video third draft

Here is our third draft for our music video. The video is very nearly complete, however, I need to make the cuts a bit tighter and cleaner and replace some shots where Eoghain and I are smiling and replace them.

Digipak back cover draft 2

Here is another draft of my back cover. Here, I have changed the font colour to be multicoloured, to link with the title of the album. However, it makes the writing much harder to read so I think I will stay with the gold font.

This other draft I've kept the font colour gold, but changed the font type so that it's the same as the font used on the front cover to keep a sense on continuity. I've also kept the number at the side, however, they are quite hard to distinguish from the name of the songs.

For this draft I changed the colour of the song numbers to multicoloured, making them easier to distinguish from the song titles and ties in with the name and colour themes of the album. I think I like this one the best as it has all the other elements used throughout the digipak.

Digipak back cover draft

For the back cover of my album digipak, I used a shot from our music video as the back picture. The image is of Sparro which I've placed to the left of the back cover so I was able to fit the writing on the right without having to squeeze it in. I used a black background with stars which I manipulated on FinalCut Pro, so it is my own image. I used this to create the link with the music video and give the album a theme of being 'out of this world'. For the writing, I used a capitalised font which is to create a continuity throughout the album as all the font is capitalised and spaced out. I wrote it in gold which is the same as the writing on the CD. I also used a fade effect to make full use of Serif PagePlus and put a transparency on it to make the writing appear to be 'black and gold' which is the title of the song we have filmed our video to. The four covers below are drafts that I have come up with, so now I will wait for feedback and choose my final one.

This first one has the song titles numbered to the left side of the wording

This second one doesn't have any of the song titles numbered

This third one has each song title numbered down the right side of the wording

This last one has the song titles numbered down the right side and the text is a bit larger, covering up more of the back cover than the others.

Website draft 3

Here is another draft of my website, I have added a few more photos and the second draft of the music video. Plus I've added a few more text boxes to fill up the spaces.

Website draft 3

Music Video second draft

This is our unfinished second draft of our music video. There are still a few clips that are out of time and some clips that shouldn't be in there, however I feel that its a big improvement upon our first draft. This video is still missing opening titles, plus the last 30 seconds hasn't been edited. There is also a random clip at the end - so ignore that!

Music video second draft

Progress Update 06/02/15

Wednesday night and last night I stayed after school to edit the whole music video, and will finish editing today. I will also have to try write second drafts of my evaluation questions and finish off theback cover of my digipak, ready for the final deadlines next Thursday.

Progress Update 04/02/15

Today we have finally managed to do some of our final bits of filming. I will now start editing the new scenes that we have shot to see whether we need to film a few scenes later tonight to save us going back another time. There were also a few scenes that we couldn't shoot now due to it being daylight, so we are shooting the last bits later when it's darker.