Q1 - In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

A music promo is the main ingredient in a promo package that is used to attract and spark an interest within the audience. The objective of our assignment was to analyse current music promo’s, digipaks and magazine adverts to create a group of conventions and then adhere to these in order to make our own.

Then from creating these conventions we were able to plan and design our own which is highly important. The purpose of planning and designing a music promo, digipak and magazine advert is to hit a wider range of our target audience through the use of different mediums such as: media convergence. This enables us to widen our target audience through wider advertisement to people who may not have TV’s and also to people that many not have time to sit down a listen to the radio.

Through multi-media advertisement such as designing a music promo (TV & Radio), digipak (Consumer) and magazine advert (Magazine) we are allowing ourselves to reach more people who are interested in rock genre music but may not be surrounded by a lot of technology, using 3 types were sure to attract and spark an interest to them. One example of this is Oasis:

Oasis are a rock band from Manchester and were very successful. The genre of the band is very iconic with the style of music and the actual songs they performed. The band has a plain appearance which can be seen from their logo and also how they dress on stage but what attracted all of there audience was their advertising such as there magazine advert above.

From looking at other rock genre promo we established that the main convention for clothes mise-en-scene was a leather jacket, t-shirt and jeans. To look professional we adhered to this convention to show to the audience what type of band we are through stereotyping. This enabled the audience to instantly recognise whether they would like our style of music and if they wanted to carry on watching or not. To also hint to the audience that the protagonist in the narrative is the lead singer in the promo we had him dress is the same mise-en-scene that he wore when the performance was filmed, this allowed the audience to make the link between the two sides of the promo.

Also the use of the bat in the clock room narrative was used to show the genre of the song. The bat smashing up the artwork was meant to represent the brutality of the lyrics and emphasise their meaning. Hopefully from this the audience understood which genres to eliminate from the selection like pop, dance and house genres and choose rock and metal. An example of this is in a song called ‘Smells like teen spirit’ by Nirvana, at the end when the crowd come onto the stage, they start to take apart the drum kit and smash it apart.

During the post-production stage, I decided to use different techniques, transitions and effects depending on whether it was the performance or the narrative.
The screen grab used earlier shows how I have used an effect called ‘lights’ to add to the abstract element, which the narrative was carrying. This surreal effect made it clear to the audience that I was trying to emphasis something to them in the clip, this happens to be the costume mise-en-scene that the two actors are wearing. This use of effects is very unconventional for the type of genre the song is. Also, the editing techniques that I used were unconventional as well, when we were first analysing other promos we found that the pace of editing during the narrative was slower, by a fraction, when compared to the performance. When looking back over the pace of editing for our narrative it is easy to see that in some points the editing pace is very fast and then at some points its very slow. This was subverted common convention because of the inconsistent editing pace.

The screen grab here shows how I have used very conventional editing techniques throughout the performance side of the promo. When the first shot is used, of the first strum, the editing pace is very high and is cut to the beat. This is very common with other promos of the same genre. Also other conventions for the genre were adhered to as well. During the performance no effects were used to help put across the seriousness of the performance and help the audience understand that they are a professional band, this was a convention that we came to notice after viewing a number of promos of a the same genre. Lastly, we adhered to the convention of not using transition in the promo, this was found that same time as the other convention mentioned above, we used this to again show the audience that we are a serious band and that we are professional.

Q1 Continued

Q2 - How effective is the combination of of your main media product and ancillary texts?

Music Promo:



Magazine Advert:

Digipak: 

Q2 Continued...

Q3 - What have you learned from your audience feedback?

During the process of developing our initial ideas to the final ones that we used to construct our production, we used several websites and social media tools to help us gain audience feedback on them. This helped us to gain greater knowledge of how to improve our ideas so that they would attract our target audience. We used:

Poll Everywhere

Vox Pops

Example:

A vox pop an informal recorded interview that can be done in the public or in a private space. We thought this would be good to use because we could go around the school and ask for pupils opinions to get an general idea of what people liked to see in a music promo, digipak and magazine advert. We used this at the beginning of the production to get a clear understanding of what people liked to see in any type of genre promo. This initial technique influenced us to choose ideas based on the ones that the pupils suggested, this started us off in the right direction and then using the other feedback techniques we were able to refine them and develop them. The audience feedback method was important for us because it showed us what we needed to include in order for us to attract our target audience, e.g. types of clothing or the narrative.

The method was good for finding peoples views and opinions out quickly, it takes up 2 minutes of time meaning that over the course of an hour lots of feedback can be gathered. However, the editing stage of the interview takes up a lot of time, this time could be used more effectively with other planning work for the production. From this I then learned that i needed to be methodical with my editing, meaning that i needed to things bit by bit and in order, this then further influenced our promo in the same way because it made me realise to get the same quality i needed to do it in the same methodical way. 

Focus Groups





Example:

Focus Group - Powerpoint

Facebook

This is a screen grab of a Facebook post I put on to get feedback from our audience. This was a good place to post it because it allowed me to get feedback fairly quickly and allowed other people to share it to get further feedback from people I’m not friends with. I was then able to click the shares link sand then see what other people had put. A negative of this method was the time it took to get feedback, when I first uploaded it; it took 10 minutes to get one response and then a further 20 minutes to get anymore. The only time it started to get significant response was when it was shared, this enabled results to be obtained from a wider range of people. 

Audience Feedback

Audience Feedback Analysis

Q4 - How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

During the construction stage of the production we used a variety of websites in order to make our ideas, but before making our idea we had to choose an initial song on a website called ‘www.unsigned.com’. We used this website because it allowed us to choose a variety of artists from different genres easily and without coming into copy write issues because they had no record label owning their work. This allowed us to go on to choose a song called ‘Midnight Wanderer’ by the Silent Sundays, which was what we were looking for because it was the right genre style and it sounded good. The benefits of using this website were that the songs on the website were all free to use because no record labels were supporting them and also the majority of the song were on YouTube which allowed us to take the song from there.

After we had chosen the song by the band we did some initial research on them to find a little bit about them. Firstly we used ‘www.unsigned.com’ because under the list of songs, they had a biography of the band listing where they were from and information about each band member. This was good for base information but we really needed a little more, soon the side of the website they have put a link to a social media website, MySpace, listing more information about themselves and also more of their songs and photos.  

There is also a promo of a live performance they have done in Birmingham which was published on MySpace, this shows that they have done one before but because the band split, which we found out from MySpace, there aren’t anymore videos or songs.

Q4 Continued...

30 Seconds To Mars - 'The Kill'



Foo Fighters - 'Everlong'



Foo Fighters - 'Pretender'

 

There were also other pieces of technology that I used that help us to create our production, one of these technologies was; www.blogger.com. Blogger is an online, free to use website that allows users to set up a page about a specific subject, in this case A2 media studies, and publish different posts about anything. This was very helpful for me because it allowed me to post all of my work out on this page and organise through the use of tabs dividing all of my work into sub-sections and then further if needed. An example of this was a Word Document about intertextuality which was a part of the initial research.

Another technology that I used was a search engine called Google. This search engine allowed me to search for anything that required information on or for pictures. This let me add pictures to my work, get extra information or do further research into a topic.

Also I had used YouTube which is an online video base website allowing people to post videos of anything. This was useful to me because I used it to research existing promos, tutorials and techniques I could use throughout the production. I found that this was the second most used website out of the others above, Blogger being the most.

When we had finished our production I published it on 2 new media websites, Facebook and YouTube. I had done this because both of them are worldwide meaning that our target audience can watch it all around the world. Also YouTube is a free website meaning that it doesn’t charge me anything for posting it onto it and other people can comment on it saying whether its good and what they liked.

I posted the production onto Facebook because the majority of our target audience have Facebook so eventually all of them will see it through the suggested banner down the side of the site and groups to do with music and the similar genre. This way, even if the target audience don’t go search for it they might have a high chance of coming across it and if they do go search for it they can find it easily on YouTube.

The benefits of me using all of this technology are that it allows me to create my project on a website that can be viewed by everyone. This allows me to communicate my work to audience of similar ages and allows me to show my work to people who are interested in the subject. This is very beneficial because it allows all of my work to be store in one place which allows for easy alterations when correcting and also allows for it to all be uploaded or taken off the internet in one easy click.