Note To Moderator

This blog is my Advanced Portfolio that has recorded my progress throughout the construction of a Music Video, Digipak and Poster.

Name: William Savill

Candidate Number: 4039

School: Brentwood County High School

Year: 13

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

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

Initial Audience Representation

Final Audience Representation

Evaluation Question 2: How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

Evaluation Question 1: In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media texts?

      What media platforms have you used to present you texts?

We decided that the best platform to exhibit our music video on is YouTube. This is because it is the largest website of its type and will offer us the opportunity to share our product with the largest audience possible. Compared to other sights such as Vimeo and Vevo, which offer very similar services to YouTube, and the genre our product is, we don’t necessarily aim to grow our audience but make it as accessible as possible to its target audience making YouTube the best choice.

The Digipaks main purpose is to act as the physical product for our audience to buy however its cover could be used online on such platforms as iTunes and Spotify as the image that promotes the song.

Our poster was uploaded to Facebook and twitter along with other social media websites as this is the best way to spread awareness for our artist and music video. This is because of how connected the websites make people therefore our audience is more connected making it easier to show them our poster.

What are the conventions of your genre?

The genre our song fits into doesn’t have typically defined conventions. The alternative/indie funk genre is one that tries to exist away from society’s norms, though conventions can be identified such as the use of guitar as a performance element and a focus on star image. For example, the Indie star Darwin Deez keeps a lot of focus on him and the outlandish and un-normal characters he creates for his music videos. His music videos are relatively typical for our genre due to his large use of lip-syncing and guitar imagery.

If our genre is applied to John Cawelti’s genre theory, then we can see that our culture deems it a niche genre due to its relatively small popularity.


How have you conformed to the forms and conventions of your genre?
Our character was designed to be unique. By doing that, we conformed to the convention of our genre that our character needs to stand out compared to the mainstream artists. This is a useful convention that helps to build star image. Our artists costume helped us achieve this by allowing it to tell us much about the charter in one glance.

Furthermore, the guitar imagery we used in throughout the final products but mainly in relation to the song was conventional for the indie/alternative genre however this convention is usually used as a performance element whereas we have manipulated it into a narrative tool that acts like the role of the princess from Vladmir Propp's Dramatis Personae.

Goodwin's genre theory states that a music video that conforms to its genre if there is an apparent link between the lyrics and the visuals. This is typical for our genre should the video be narrative based over performance based similar to ours meaning that we met this convention.


Which conventions did you challenge?

Something which is rarely seen in our genre is the use of intertextuality that references more popular culture, for example we used a hand sign which is very similar to an iconic moment from Star Trek that means essentially to be at peace on our Digipak to show our characters nerdines as well as how our character accepts who he is.

On our Digipak and poster, we also used colour in an unconventional way compared to the rest of the genre. By using solid colours in simple geometric patterns, we gave our ancillary texts a modern feel which made it more striking and unique to the genre.

How successful did this prove?
I believe that we have been successful in challenging the conventions of our genre as well as the mainstream media, as we have been able to create a character that comes across as fun and interesting, whilst also being different and unique to the genre. It is important that an audience understands and relates to the present star image you have created for your artist and i believe that we have proven successful in this aspect. However, it was only achieved by taking the codes and conventions of the genre relating to star image and building upon them.

I believe that our music video and ancillary texts have taken the coeds and conventions of the indie/alternative genre and interpreted them in a unique way because this was identified in our audience feedback.

Final Ancillary Text: Digipak

    Upside-down view.      

Final Ancillary Text: Poster

Final Product: Gamma Ray

Second Draft Feedback

Gamma Ray: Draft 2

This is our next draft. We have made some alterations based on audience feedback and our general feelings. in our audience feedback we found that the freeze framing of the shots at the end should be changed so that they slow down instead of freeze instantly so we changed that. Furthermore, we decided to try and colourise certain shots to create effects and see what feedback we get on them. We also changed the font to match up with the Digipak and poster.

Ancillary Text Draft Feedback

Along with finding out opinions on our music video to help us improve upon it, we used this time to also question some people about the drafts we had for our Digipak and Poster. We found out that on the poster they want there to be more continuity with the colour and suggested that we change the white bars on the top and bottom to beige to match the tertiary colour on the Digipack.

Initial Draft Feedback

Ancillary Texts Draft

Poster

Digipak

Gamma Ray: Draft 1

This is the first draft of our music video.
We plan to get audience feedback to improve it as well as make changes that we believe need to be changed. For example, we can improve the combination of this product with our ancillary texts by matching up the typography.

Digipak Research

This is the digipak for Coldplay's Viva La Vida. It has four sides with an outside cover and back as well as inside artwork. The back shows the songs which are on the album and hosts the bar code. The front shows the artwork that remains consistent throughout the rest of the products relating to this album. This is done to create synergy. The inside has images relating to the band and to the product to further create synergy. By analysing this digipak, we've learnt that the back of the digipak will be where most of the information is kept. Furthermore, we have learned that the images on the inside must help to create synergy.

Production Diary: Day 1 Shooting

Pre-filming:
Today is the first day of production on set at the house. We plan to shoot the artist at his computer today. We have a tripod and dolly at hand to help us create dynamic shots if we choose to. We have taken photographs of the scene so when we come back to shoot in here again we can keep the mise-en-scene consistent for continuity purposes.

Post-filming:
We have finished the day up now and have gathered many clips we can use during the post production stage of our project. There were a few issues we had today however. For example, there was a shoot that we were using the dolly for which we didn't think was effective so we re-shoot something to replace it if we don't choose to use it.

Indie Audience

Gender: The split of gender for the indie genre is negligible however it tends slightly more male than female.

Class: An ABC1 audience is the audience we'll target because we plan for our video to be more about narrative than performance and this will appeal more to an ABC1 audience then a CDE2 audience however we want to make it as universal as possible to appeal to as much as the CDE2 audience as possible because they account for a majority of the United Kingdoms population.

Age: 16-50. I believe that the indie audience is quite broad in age range despite its nichenes.

Religion: We don't plan on appealing to any specific religion however, we may make use of religious imagery and symbolism to build our narrative.

Education: Since we would be aiming at an ABC1 audience, peoples levels of education would need to be higher than that of the general population to best appreciate the video, however we will still try and not seclude those with a lower level of education.

Marital: I believe that this will be of no concern.

Income: This wont be of too much concern because our target audience's income will range from high to not earning at all.

Nationality: I believe that the nationality of our demographic will be mostly British because we will be using Great Britain as the shooting location.

Production Diary: Casting and Finalising Ideas

After deciding to cast James Silk-Tyler in our music video as our artist, we have been able to really begin to visualise the music video and begin understand how it should feel. The interpretation of the lyrics gave us many initial ideas however after story-boarding, we now how a much clearer vision of how our music video will play out. The fact that the song has no obvious real meaning is perfect for us, as it means we had much more creative freedom when it came to creating our own meaning.

Costume Update

For our video, the costume our artist will wear needs to be symbolic of his character as well as unique to help create his star image. We have decided that we want him dressed in a white/grey t-shirt, that we will tuck into some beige chinos. We got this inspiration from characters such as Napoleon Dynamite and Cameron from "Ferris Buellers Day Off", who are both conventional 'outcasts'. Our character will wear a belt that is black, which will hopefully stand out from his relatively light clothing, he will also wear a watch and large black glasses. The strong contrast in colour between light and dark will hopefully be symbolic for the contrast between out artist and society. These things all link him directly to the stereotype.