FInal Film

Evaluation

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

We decided on the 'indie' genre for our music video as this was the way in which the band we chose to focus on was going in terms of genre. We chose the band as they were at school with us and therefore could be easily accessed when needed as well as them also being publicly known around school. The idea of the indie genre is the whole 'do it yourself attitude' which was something that appealed to us due to the fact we would be making this video alone and therefore the idea of it being independently made would fit in with the genre. The term 'indie' is often presented as an artist or band who is not part of the mainstream culture and is / are making music outside these influences. The idea of these bands not being signed by a label is defined by NME as indie bands being bands who aren't signed by one of the 'Big Four' recording companies such as Warner, Universal, Sony BMG or EMI. Bands from the indie genre often go against the trends and have international appeal with small indie labels in the UK having great success in international countries. We chose this genre as we believed the whole idea of the indie genre would allow us to express our own ideas throughout as nothing can be right or wrong the genre is more about expanding the boundaries of mainstream. We wanted to give the audience what they wanted to see when watching a typical indie music video so research was very important for this reason we looked on sites such a Bing, Google and Youtube to research videos and gather information about various bands. When looking through the videos on Youtube we found that all the inspiration videos which we focused on all had the band within them as the main focus and then from this the set up of the scenes and locations was very simple and thus created the 'care free' attitude I have always associated to videos of this genre. This idea of the having the band within the music video can be seen in the third stage of Andrew Goodwin's theory of the music video whereby the music video is aiding the song with the artist telling us the story using vocals, this can also be said to be fulfilling demands of the record label by using close ups of the individuals to sell the image of the band. Looking at a video by Foals, an indie band from Oxford I noticed this was true for their song Cassius, in this video the band are featured in a studio with a white back drop and chunks of meat hanging from strings around the studio. This video is very simple and includes some fast forwards as well as fast cuts but gives the impression this could be easily made and shows that the band is more about the music yet the abstract video works and the jolty dance movements and dead pan faces of the band memers was something I also found common in the indie genre and was something me and my group used through out. From looking at the various indie videos we found that many of the videos were centred around the bands and didn't really have a story omit to them but was more about the music and the videos being abstract. We decided to look at this in our questionnaire and we found that the people we questioned preferred music videos to have a story to them and so we decided to take this point on board as the people questioned were our target audience and so we needed to provide them with what they wanted so here we almost went against the conventions of the indie genre. This was further pushed away from the general conventions of the indie genre when the band pulled out of filming as our schedules weren't in synch. However we moved away from this idea of using the band and we then gathered inspirations from looking at indie videos which didn't use the band members these were more hard to find but one that we found extremely useful was Metronomy - A thing for me, which is a video more focused around a small ball jumping between different scenes of the video, although it does include the band this is no the main focus. Our video due to its 'quirky' nature of the ideas behind it can be said to be following the conventions of an indie video due to anything can be done in abstract indie videos and our video both contains a sense of realism as well as an abstract nature. We didn't find practical constraints an issue as we didn't use special effects due to our video wanting to have some realism to it and the conventions of the indie genre for music videos one where special effects are rarely used. We used a high definition camcorder throughout filming as this was something we had used in the previous year and we were therefore used to it and it could be used effectively without having to get used to it and the quality being much better than that of a Flipcam. How effective is the combination of your main product and the ancillary texts?

To produce our ancillary tasks we gathered research from the research we conducted for our main music video. We did this by looking at the questionnaire that we conducted and we found that our target audience preferred to have art work on the cover of the album rather than a photograph of the band.By looking at our target audience we wanted to give them what they would expect from a typical indie single cover, our target audience is both males and females aged between 16 - 25 who are fans of indie music as well as the whole 'indie style'. We researched into the album and single covers of some of the bands that had inspired us throughout our production of our music video and we found these covers had a simple feel to them and the simplicity of the covers made the impact of them eye catching, original and interesting, for example Vampire Weekend's album cover shows a simple chandelier hanging above the heads of people in what seems to be a party, the focus is on the chandelier and the writing across the album is simple, block, white writing which stands out. Decided to look at the idea of focusing on one object with simple writing, the same can be said for the Maccabees single cover 'Can You Give It' here there is a photograph of leaves on a bush which again shows the focus is on one object with the same style of big, white writing across the single cover yet again making this stand out to the audience. After looking at these album and single covers as well as others we decided that the cover of our single would need to link to that of the music video we created so that both the single and the video had links between them. Throughout our video the focus for the video is biscuits, as the protagonist walks through what seems to be an ordinary world the idea of vast amounts of people consuming biscuits around her becomes confusing and therefore this once normal world turns into one of abnormality and becomes a dream world yet still containing some realism. Therefore this idea of biscuits needed to be used on our single cover, we decided from this that tea and biscuits link to the title 'Sit down have a biscuit', we set up the scene of a kitchen table with tea and biscuits, and this almost lulled the audience into a false sense of security as this scene seems to be very normal unlike our music video, but we found this idea of focusing on objects rather than people for our album cover was common with both the indie bands we looked at and also popular in our questionnaire. From these photographs we took we chose our favourite and then edited it using photoshop, we used a colour corrector to produce the brighter colour which is common on many of the album / single covers we researched as well as editing the tea to have steam coming out of it which added to the realism of the scene. We then chose a big font to put over the top of the photograph containing the bands name, we thought this would therefore attract our target audience like the other album covers had attracted us. On the back of the cover we used a slightly more quirky design still containing biscuits where they are pilled up on top of each other with the name of the song written down them, again using a font like the ones we saw on the front of other indie singles. CD

covers which were suggested as memorable in our questionnaire, we analysed these covers and found a repetition in the style of having symbolism with encoded meanings. For our magazine advert, which was going to advertise the single we began by looking at the most popular magazine from our questionnaire which was NME, here we looked at the front covers of the magazines and found that the band features heavily on the front of these, usually the whole band or just one member. We decided that although we weren't doing a magazine cover we would take this idea on board as this idea of having the band or band members on the front seemed to be attracting people to buy NME and read it and this might us to get people to look at our advert. We used a member of the band and dressed in his normal clothes he represented to us what style their music was and for people who enjoy this genre of music who are are target audience they would be able to see this too. We decided that he would be positioned in a care free posture and holding an instrument whilst sitting on an amp shows instantly that this advert it for something musical.We then edited the photograph in photoshop yet again adding writing that we thought fitted the genre of music this time using font that was in the style of a typewriter and was almost 'grimy' looking. This was something we found also by looking at magazine covers that the more interesting styles of bold writing attracted us to them. We then decided to further edit the photograph to produce a photograph that almost looked painted which added a quirky almost dark nature to the photograph which is what we wanted to portray in our video. I think that both of our ancillary tasks and our main product link together well as they all stick to the genre as well as each different item linking together in some way, this can also link to Goodwin's theory of intertextual references, with all the products linking in some way. The choosing of the ancillary tasks followed the production of our video as the CD would need a single cover if this was marketed and distributed as well as the magazine advert publicising the single.

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Throughout our production and pre-production stages we relied on both our own ideas and audience feedback to support the decisions we were making and from this see if the video fitted in with the indie genre. Our most important form of audience feedback was our questionnaire which allowed us to gather opinions from our target audience (those people who liked indie music), from this questionnaire we also gathered information on the ancillary tasks both the magazine advert and the CD cover. We got the questionnaire filled in by walking round and asking 23 people the various questions on it, we aimed to go for a range of both sexes as well as various ages, we chose this way so that we didn't have to wait for responses through email but instead got the answers to the questions there and then, however this method does have draw backs, such as the information not being confidential and the person in question may answer the question how he or she thinks you want it to be answered. Our ideas changed due to the questionnaire both in the case of the band not being available for filming but also due to the fact that the audience would prefer a abstract idea to be put across rather than a story for this however we adapted it to be a abstract story which is has a sense of confusion portrayed through following the protagonist through a dream like world, yet this world still contains elements of realism. Taking the audience's opinion into consideration was a big part of the pre-production and also planning the ancillary tasks as we used art work for the front of our CD cover in the form of a photograph due to the target audience preferring art work to appear on the cover of an CD. From taking in our audiences advice I hope that it was a well received piece of work as it had the most hits on Youtube and seems to have been a success. In the planning stages of our product if I was given the chance to do it again I may have taken out a flip cam and recorded peoples ideas for our video and what they like and maybe even try another interview with one of the band members to ask them how they see the video to be made and what they want to include within this. In hindsight I may have also asked people who did not fit into our target audience to have answered the questionnaire too as by looking at our statistics on youtube our music video is also popular with females ages 35 - 44 years old. After making the video we asked people to watch it and then comment on it the response we got from this was a positive one with Jamie Makower the bands singer saying 'I thoroughly enjoyed it'. These responses clarified that we had achieved our goal of not only making a music video that the band themselves would like but also it created an audience around this.

There were also two questions in the questionnaire which had conflicting answers, whilst the other questions had clear answers, the answers to question 3 and question 8 were conflicting.

Question 3; the audience shows negativity towards a music video orientated towards telling a story.

Whereas Question 8; showed the audience liked a story as long as the video had some relevance to the lyrics.

From these results we had to make some decisions on how to shoot our video due to the minor conflicts of the questionnaire, this turned out to be a good thing as not only did we listen to what our audience wanted but we also took our own opinion into regard.

How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

In our early planning stages we focused on building up our ideas together by researching our various bands and their music videos by using sites such as Google, Bing and Youtube, band videos were easy to access Youtube and the information and research behind the indie bands we looked at were easily available from the bands websites and search engines. Using Google docs we could write down our notes and from these all of my group could add information to these documents and we could keep our information together, in retrospect I think this would have been useful to use for our media diary as we decided to write it on paper instead meaning we had one copy and this was hard not to lose. During these early stages of planning we also used a flip camera to film one of the band members, Jamie, and get his opinions on what he pictures the video for his song to be like and how he was inspired to write the song, this didn't work out particularly well, due to Jamie appearing nervous infront of the camera and not really having answers prepared, so we decided not to use this and instead just wrote down what he said instead. To gather our target audiences feedback we produced a questionnaire using Pages on the Mac and then printed off one of these and took it round asking people to fill it in for us, we did this on 23 people, we decided to use the method of questioning people there and then so that we could gather the information quickly and not have to wait for people to respond. I found this method effective, we could have emailed out the questionnaire but then we would have to make sure enough people responded, however our method of collecting the questionnaires meant that people may have answered how they thought we wanted them to answer as well as putting people on the spot when questioning them, so its hard to say if this questionnaire was trustworthy or not.

As we started to film our video we produced our shooting schedule on a word document which we could send to each other to plan the days we could film, we used a digital HD camcorder which we had used last year to film our previous films and so we were familiar with the workings of the camera which saved time. The HD camera would also help with the running shots which we filmed as well as it was good at creating the sense of realism that we wanted to produce in our film. With the editing of the film we used final cut express and from this we added the bands track to the music video and synched this in time with the music video. Also by using the HD camera this reduced the need for visual editing as in past experience it didn't create the realism we wanted to produce. In the after stages of our filming we put our final product on Youtube to raise the awareness of our film and allow people to watch it as well as promoting it on facebook to draw in an audience.

Storyboard

Open publication - Free publishing - More a2

Ancillary Tasks

As part of our ancillary task we had to create both a magazine advert for our single and also the cover for the CD. Both of these we took the photographs for ourselves and then edited them on photoshop which is a program that none of us were extremely familiar with but we enjoyed using it to produce the final outcomes. For the magazine advert we decided to use a band member as we found this was a convention of many of the adverts in magazines such as NME and Rollingstone both of which were magazines which support indie bands and they are ones we looked at when gathering inspiration of our advert. A single band member was used and the clothes that he wore were important to convey the right genre of our video, I feel this came across successfully. The font chosen was also important as we did not want this to be too formal but instead one that was 'quirky' and we therefore chose the typewriter font as it was both different and grimy / care free looking, as well as standing out so that people would look at the advert and therefore be attracted to buying the product. The photograph was chosen from a selection of photos we took when doing a photo shoot with the band member, we tried to get the pose to be as relaxed as possible and have a instrument involved to give across the idea of him being a musician as well as the subtle idea of him sitting on a amplifier. The photograph was then putt into photoshop and edited heavily to give an almost electronic feel to the photograph that can be seen as a feature of band photographs in our genre as the musician is almost unrecognisable and it draws in the audience to looking at the advert. For our second part of the ancillary task we created a single cover for the song, this was done by setting up a photo shoot consisting of a plate of biscuits which continues the continuity of the theme of biscuits throughout our various tasks, with this we also placed a cup of tea and then photographed. With these photos we chose our favourite and then edited it using photoshop to balance the colours of the photograph and also to add steam to the tea. The back of the cover contained the singles name which was writen on a pile of biscuits which continued the continuity of the single cover. This idea of the cover was inspired by other indie bands cover such as The Maccabees and Vampire Weekend these album covers were simple and focused on an specific object and there was big, bold writing across these photographs with the title of the album or single on it. This was the same idea that we used for our single cover.

Editing

To build up the sense of paranoia throughout our music video we used a series of quick cuts between various scenes so that we would create the idea of our protagonist arriving in a dream world. An example of which can be seen as the main character begins to notice the people around her are consuming biscuits and the music reaches a climax too showing how the cuts build up as the music builds up, creating a sense of realism as the music and the actions on the screen are in time with one another. This idea of quick cuts was inspired from watching Math Class - Emporio Laser where the cuts are quick building up tension and heightening as the song climaxes. This overall created the effect of the action on the screen being linked with the lyrics of the song which is something that we originally set out to achieve.

The continuity of our video was slightly disrupted by the snow however this only effected the final scenes of our video, this idea of the snow also linked in with the unrealistic nature of the rest of our film and can therefore be seen as another 'strange' occurrence in the protagonists day. The end of the film could be linked to the theory of Todorov as the end of the video the protagonist accepts the biscuit offered to her and therefore a new equilibrium is established and as the music fades out the scene fades and the audience are left feeling peaceful that a new normal has been established.