Jack Snelling's evaluation Question 4.

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

In our initial research stage we simply used sites like YouTube to look at videos that we liked and analyse what it was that made them successful. With this and Blogger we were able to embed each video into our portfolio so that we could constantly reference back to each video and had a clear log of our process. Other sites we used were Social Networking sites such as Myspace and Facebook. We could see who was following or friends with the artist that we had chosen and then from that find a demographic which we could aim our product at.

When looking at new ways of marketing our product we looked at the rise of Spotify and it's effectiveness in promoting artists. We looked at how the adverts were laid out and what the average Spotify advert sounded like and created our own in response this popular new platform.

For our ancillary texts we used Adobe Photoshop to create all of our promotional artwork, in order to give high quality photo's a vintage look and finish to follow the genre's general aesthetic. This was much easier and reliable than taking actual Polaroid photographs and altering them so they looked vintage, and also wouldn't of been feasible in the time we had.

We used the same program to create our magazine advert, in order to give it that professional high gloss look as if it was actually from a magazine.

In our main product we used many different technologies together to create the effects that we wanted. Using Final Cut Pro we were able to change our HD filmed vintage cinema scene into an olden time silent movie by changing the hue of the footage and also speed it up to add to it's comedic effect. We were also able to use a green-screen to create a realistic looking newsroom without having to leave the actual college. This was extremely useful to us, as it saved us having to find a large space and decorating it to make it look official.

Finally in the heavy metal scene we utilized steadicam to keep as much of the footagee in focus as we could, as this was a scene with last of fast pans and cuts.

Jack Snelling's evaluation Question 3.

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

When pitching our basic idea to the class we wanted as much feedback as we could we could alter or manage our idea's so that it was as good as it could be and manageable in the time we had.

Initially one thing that did seem to be a potential pitfall was the time constraints put on our slightly ambitious idea.

"You have set yourselves a lot of work to do but it is achievable if the right planning and preparation is made."

"I would think about cutting down the amount of scenes you have as you have a lot to do!"

This made us really think about how we were going to set up each scene, how long each one was going to last, and how many different scenes we were going to do. Later while filming we set up production plans so that we could be as efficient as possible with he time we had. Here is an example of one of them, http://thestentor.blogspot.com/2010/11/251110-production-planning-and-schedule.html.

After producing a rough cut of our music video we showed it to our class as well as other classes to gain a wider scope of feedback and ways to improve. People said that it was difficult to understand the idea of changing television channels and that it did not flow as well as it could. We responded to this by adding a crackle effect between scene changes, which added to it aesthetically as well as making the changes more distinguishable. It also helped people understand what the video was trying to achieve as before it wasn't entirely clear. We also added a short "opening" to the video, of a young boy pointing a remote at the camera so that it was instantly obvious what the concept of the video was.

Jack Snelling's evaluation Question 2.

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

Jack Snelling's evaluation Question 1.

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

There are obvious limitations that we were presented when choosing the song for which we wanted to make a music video. For example, the technology we used was not industry standard and high quality that is now used by most popular recording artists. We realized that we had to make the best of what we had, so making a low quality video for a song by someone like Lady Gaga for instance would look somewhat ridiculous and ineffective as audiences now expect these artists to have high quality professionally made videos. With this in mind we chose a band that weren't massively successful but still had a strong cult following. This level of recognition with an artists married perfectly with our initial pitch of a series of pastiches of popular television shows, coming from the independent music scene, Good Shoes have to have a very strong DIY ethic like most indie bands, so that they can be heard by the widest audience possible with the minimal budget that they have, so audiences will expect to see the sort of quality of our music video.

In our music video however we wanted to focus more on presenting the band themselves as opposed to the song, where most independent artists early videos feature simple live performance e.g. Japanese Voyeurs

we wanted to present the band as people. Not that there is anything wrong with live performance video's but it just felt like the "safe" option, and not something that would make our video particularly stand out. We wanted to be present our group as fun and approachable much like the band Weezer, who we researched initially, and not make a serious music video that almost puts them on a pedestal. By doing this we have already separated our group from the rest of the pack.

Our video relies on the audience to be able to loosely interpret every show that it makes light of, and is a music video that belongs firmly in the 21st century or the "digital age" because it takes existing products and to a certain degree changes them or edits them to fit the needs of the new product, in this sense our video is "postmodern".

Will Hooper's Evaluation Question Four

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

Research

YouTube, Twitter and Facebook

As well as using old media (magazines, posters) when researching ideas for our music video we also used YouTube, predominantly, but also Facebook and Twitter to see what was being "trended" at the time. Each three of these tools are new media at it's best. YouTube was so crucial to us as we could access thousands of videos that got our creative juices flowing and allowed us to respond to things we saw, considering if it has potential to be included in our music video. Facebook and Twitter also played a big part as, at the start we didn't know what type of music or video we wanted to cover. So we used them both to see what was being talked about in terms of music- what videos were racking up lots of views at the moment in time.

Trending like shown in the highlighted section in YouTube below

Planning

There wasn't a huge amount of new media used in this process, however, on completion of our storyboards we created something that is called an animatic. An animatic is still frames taken from the story board but placed in time with the audio. This enabled us to get some understanding of how long each scene needed to be and also suggested to us whether or not each scene was dragging on. To create this animatic I used Final Cut Pro a video editing programme so it was literally a case of cropping the individual frames from the storyboard and place them in (kind of like creating an stop motion animation).

Construction

All in all, I used endless amounts of new media technologies in creation of the main text and ancillary texts.

MAIN TEXT

The element of the video that I am most happy with as it required a fair amount of time to construct is each of the layered visuals sat on top of the footage.

These are four images of a total of 8 all together. Each graphic was created individually on Photoshop using a series of vector graphics and texts. To make the images an overlay, I had to first set the background to transparent and then save the file as a .PNG which allows the image to sit on top of the video without distorting it or covering it.

Here are some other points we considered and problems we encountered during the filming process.

Use of steadicam

In the “metal scene” there was many fast paced camera shots which required a stedicam to retain as much clarity within the footage. Following this, for all the stiller shots we used a decent tripod that gave no camera shake.

We shot all our footage in HD to ensure our video was of the highest possible standard.

We actually used a HD handy cam, which was really “handy” as it was so compact it allowed us to capture shots from high angles without the use of a crane and also tracking shots were made easier in the preliminary exercises.

In the metal scene we wanted stobe lighting, however , we couldn’t source a strobe light in time.

We made do with flicking the room light on and off to create a similar effect.

Green screen issue

Due to poor lighting when we shot the “childrens show” scene the green screen overlay was patchy and didn’t look effective so we chose to just leave the backdrop green. Which in hindsight actually doesn’t too bad at all.

Will Hooper's Evaluation Question Three

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

We received on going feedback from another group in our media studies class. We felt this was essential as we had very specific and similar ideas as a group and wanted to gain knowledge from another source who were approaching our work from another angel.

INITIAL PITCH

After gathering all the research we required and planned a rough idea of what our video will look like (including storyboards) we presented a pitch to the class and asked for feedback after. Due to past problems with getting solid and helpful feedback we channeled the feedback that the class would give us into three sections that we felt was important to develop our product. The three sections were: Ideas, Possibility (whether it was actually doable) and Construction (how it can be filmed).

IDEAS

• "Maybe you should consider how to signify the changing of each channel."
• "I think you should have an still of a television at the beginning of the video to set the scene."

POSSIBILITY

• "You have set yourselves a lot of work to do but it is achievable if the right planning and preparation is made."
• "I would think about cutting down the amount of scenes you have as you have a lot to do!"
• "Work hard, job done."

CONSTRUCTION

• "For the Lost scene idea you had, you should think about using a dolly for the moving camera. Or maybe even using some sort of transport and fixing the camera to it (bike, car, skateboard).

This feedback was really helpful and some of the points raised above were discussed in detail with the person who made the point and we had clear ideas on some of the things we were worrying about achieving.

ROUGH CUT

We did another pitch regarding a rough cut of our main text we created. And a lot of the feedback provided to us was about the confusion between the changing of the channels. People stated that "it was not clear enough that a channel had been changed." So responding to this I created a second long crackle and old television changing sound and inserted it between each scene.This then was much more clear and actually made the video become more aesthetic, giving it another dimension.

Other than this one problem, the feedback was very positive:

• "Best one I have seen yet."
• "Very funny and interesting."
• "AWESOME!"
• "I really enjoyed it. I was entertained throughout and thought it was very creative."

This boosted morals in our group and went on to finish our main text with the knowledge that it was highly regarded. Which made me feel very proud.

Will Hooper's Evaluation Question Two

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

ARTIST REPRESENTATION

As Good Shoes are not a hugely mainstream band and have a smaller more loyal fanbase than someone who would appear in the UK Top 40 Charts, we ensured that in both ancillary texts and the main texts we portrayed the band as being interesting and took a step away from the glossy "celebrity" style that is seen associated with mainstream acts.

Another two important ideas we were trying to get through each text was that the band were fresh/exciting and also fun/quirky. The ancillary texts are the main port of call between the band's image and the audience, so felt it was essential for them to look smart and interesting to entice potential fans. The adverts actually featured the band themselves which is conventional of "new band" advertising.

Above are the three visual adverts (right to left MAGAZINE, iTUNES, SPOTIFY)

Will Hooper's Evaluation Question One

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

It’s a fact that music video has endless forms and conventions and it has to be taken very loosely as not one specific genre of music necessarily has to coincide with a certain style or type of video. However, constant evolution of music video and technologies has seen a wave of videos that have become common to certain genres of music. For example, a lot of modern popular music (Rihanna, Katy Perry e.t.c.) typically have fairly high budget productions that have a pristine glossy finish. Furthermore, after the birth of MTV in 1981, oodles of other channels have spawned fronted with exactly the same cause as MTV. Not only is music video seen on television, with the rise of “The Digital Age” endless amounts of music videos can be viewed online on sites like YouTube.

So with a concept that is so vastly accessible and also so broad in terms of audience and who views it, it leads me to believe that the importance of music video in the 21st Century is considerably great, especially with the problems with illegal music downloading, music video has huge importance.

Conventionally speaking, the NME music channel would be the obvious choice to show our music video. Not only does the genre of music featured in our video fit the NME’s genre range but they are renown for showing the quirkier music videos, which ours is. I suppose in industry conventions it is a fairly “out there video for a first single. But we think it’s important that it’s different because of what the band stands for- it’s about being fun and the video sells the band as people having fun, just as much as it sells the song. If this video was to have been a conventional, “here’s the band” performance video then that immediately takes away all the excitement and fun from the advertising and branding that we have done in succession to product. In terms of it being a marketing device, I feel it works well as it doesn’t only advertise the song but the band members, which related to the indie genre of music that is highly fuelled by festivals and live gigs. The reason why we have produced a video that establishes a connection with the members is because of the interaction between audience and band that you get at festivals and live gigs.

Picking up on the fact that the entirety of our product is based around mini pastiches, echoes the fact that it is a product of post modernism. We are relying on the fact that our audience knows what each scene is but they are viewing our version of it and they are taking in what they already know about the scene whilst watching ours. And that’s where a lot of the entertainment comes from the appreciation of the certain film or programme that our interpretation comes from.

It’s difficult to give music videos a certain genre in general. But it is specifically difficult for our video as it a compilation of vast amounts of genres. However, what we have done is marketed it towards our target audience. We noticed from the start that our target audience wasn’t an audience who was going to sit there and critique a certain camera angle or comment how progression is made in the video. From our research into the audience and looking at similar bands to Good Shoes we found that it was all about fun - simple fun. And that is what our music video is. So if it was given a genre, that genre would be fun.

Construction.

Animation Sequence

Here is a pitcure of our animation sequence, each character can be freely moved around, this is so we can take many picture of the them moving their arms and ones mouth to produce the animation.

27/01/11 Production Plan- Re-filming Childrens Television Sequence

Today we intended to finish all filming by re-shooting our failed kids tv show scene and lost scene during our college lesson, while later on in the day Will and Jack would film the remaining slot of a babestation replacement and film the intro and outro to this music video ( a young boy turning the TV on and off).

However,due to extreme restraints on the ability to film the lost section(extremely difficult weather conditions,causing the filming to look to amateur and all round feeling that this section would be way too difficult to produce correctly) We decided this section would be replaced with a stop motion animation style sequence. We also decided that the replacement for the babestation section (this was cancelled as the member willing to do this scene quit mid filming),would be a top gear style driving show.

9:00am- Due to a change in band member, we have decided to re-film the Children's Television Sequence. We have chosen to use a plain background as the previous one was too noisy and drew attention away from the actors. We also used a puppet to ensure that it was clear it was a children's television programme.

9:30am- we had completed the kids scene section and decided to move onto the animation section we have decided to use instead of our proposed 'lost' sequence.

10:00am- We began to prepare our cutouts and backdrop for our animation.

1:00pm- We started filming our animation. This took some time as we needed to make it look semi-fluent so it will be easier to sync in editing.

3:00pm- We had captured all the images we needed for the animation. We then edited them into our final sequence.

4:00pm- After college,we went to wills house and with the use of his car were able to film a short 'top gear' style short as a quick replacement to babe station, this sequence was very simple to do as in terms of costume,only smart casual clothes were required and the only prop was simply the car.

4:30pm- We then used Will's brother and living room for the shooting of the intro and outro scenes,these were shot fairly quickly also due to the simplicity in the nature of each shot.

(Single angle continuous shot of both the boy sitting down and turning the TV on and then turning the TV off and walking out the room) The outro was adapted last minute to include the boy to say 'Mum i want good shoes new single! Mum' this speech was used at the end as a pun on promotion and the usage of music video in terms of music sales.

(These last two sections were then edited into our final cut the next day,leaving only minor adjustments needed such as the channel logos in the top of the screen and small parts of lip syncing to be edited to create the final cut in the next week)

Scene Change.

Due to time constraints, and members of our group being unavailable, we have to decided to change our "Lost scene", which will most likely be the hardest to film, into a "South Park-esque" animation, with stop motion and cut-outs. This will be easier and quicker to make, and possibly more effective in our music video.

Rough Cut Feedback

(Additional Notes:Upon uploading the video to this post we noticed that our video now includes

'Contains content from PIAS' and an itunes link to Good Shoes' 'ice age'

This is positive as it shows their distribution has allowed our video online,and are using it as promotion for the song.)

We shown our unfinished rough cut to other groups to get feedback on the current status of our video.

The overall reaction was positive but we received a lot of criticism around the theme,as many people didn't understand some of the ideas of the channels being changed. But this is due to the fact it is unfinished without the Tv static cuts and Logos/Graphics on each page.

This is a scanned version of all of our feedback from the lesson.

INSERT SCAN

We will also ask people to comment on our youtube video for extra feedback and post when complete.

Rough Cut

Production plan 20th January

Today we intend on shooting our black and white vintage cinema piece, which has now turned into a chaplin esque slapstick silent film due to filming restraints.

10:00- We began the day by changing into our costumes to look more appropriate for the silent 1930s film style.

10:30- We then chose a close location to college due to wanting to shoot this quickly to finish editing our final piece.

11:00- We shot our sequence close by,taking various takes of each shot to ensure we get a perfect scene. We used two bananas as props,one as the eating banana,one as the throwing banana. We also used a financial times as a prop as we needed to use a paper that will look more 1930's than something like the sun or daily star.

11:15- We ended this section with shooting various running away scenes,this is as we had multiples ideas on how to end this scene,but were unsure,so we shot them all and intend to pick the final one as we begin editing.

Tuesday January 18th production plan.

Today we all intend to top up and finish all existing incomplete blog posts and begin to edit in our footage filmed last thursday into our final cut,ready to film the final three scenes next week.

Thursday 13th January Production Plan

On Thursday we plan to film a considerable portion of our music video. The scenes we intend to film are:

• QVC scene
• Babe station scene
• Big Brother scene
• Music Channel scene
• Introduction scene

10:30- We arrived at our location and set up the first scene we intended to film.

We chose to film the big brother diary room scenes in jacks house as opposed to holly's due tofilming restraints.

We filmed Jack,Kane and Joe's scene shorty after.

(jack and will stayed in normal clothes so GIFs are not required)

10:45- We came across a major problem in our filming as Sam our second guitarist sadly had to quit filming due to other commitments. We decided to replace him with out group member Will,and shot his scene in the big brother diary room. We will now how to re film the Children's show due to the fact this was the only scene Sam had been in so far.

This has also put us in a predicament in terms of the Babe station scene as Sam was the only one who was willing to do this scene,so we have decided to cut this and replace it with a short Superhero film style shot.

11:15- We decided to shoot our lost practise shots by strapping a video camera to the front of a bike and do various speeds of running practises.

(BIKE PHOTOS)

11:25- Following this we used this technique to film a short Superhero scene with Jack and Joestarring. Only a small amount of this will be used in the final sequence.

(Joe used the same outfit to this as the big brother scene,hence the same GIF)

11:45- We have now began to prepare for our ending pastiche metal scene,we have a pile of various 'metal' and 'punk' pieces of clothing to get into costume and will be using thick make up to go for a style similar to 80s glam rock and death metal.

14.00- We decided the final piece of filming we would do today would be the QVC introduction and the band playing at the start of the video. this was filmed reletively quickly with Will acting as the presenter and a member of the band. We attempted the final scene of each member playing the final chord but this didn't really work out,so the end of our video will now consist of the end of the 'metal' music programme going into a tv fuzz and cutting out.

(INSERT WILL GIF)

(INSERT BAND PHOTO)

16.00- Will will film the introduction and outro with his brother at home at a later date this week as we didn't have a good cast type to portray this character.

Our final scenes (vintage cinema and lost) will be filmed next week on tuesday or thursday.

Final filming plans

Kids TV show costume inspiration.

For our kids TV show we wanted it to be instantly recognisable as a childrens show, so we made the two members ofour band, costumes that were based on popular childrens shows,

- Noddy

-Sporticus

We used the "Noddy" rosy cheeks and scarf, and used the stylised moustache and hat of "Sporticus".

7/12/10 Children's Television Show Production Plan

2.00pm- We are preparing our children's television show scene today. We need a set that we can turn into our studio for filming.

2.05pm- We have decided to use a spare computer room within the college to film. We will use the images that we created in a previous lesson as the back drop.

(INSERT IMAGE)

2.30pm- The backdrop has now been put up and we are ready to get our actor's into costume and begin filming.

INSERT SAM AND JACK GIFS

3.10pm- We have now successfully captured the footage we need, we had to shoot the particular scene as there was a choreographed dance routine that needed a few attempts to get right.

3.30pm- The footage has now been logged and captured onto the computer and added to our master template ready for final editing.