In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Our media product is our music video that we are creating for the song “Stronger Woman”, by Beyond Victoria. Our music video uses Steve Archer’s theory. Steve Archer is a well respected theorist of music videos. The convention used is that of the shots of the stage performance cut with scenes from the narrative of the song. This shows a real connection between the music and the artist, as her lyrics portray what is being seen in the music video. Steve Archer believes that this relationship is a necessity for a music video to be successful.
Our music is not in keeping with Laura Mulvey’s theory, who believes that because filmmakers are often male, “women are solely for the purpose of display”. In our music video our artist is in many shots and lots of close-ups of her face are used. These are used to show emotion, rather than portray a sexual image. Our artist is the main focus of our video; however she is there to tell a story from part of her life, and is not just there for display.
If people like the look of our poster they may be attracted to our artist and purchase her CD. Therefore I have inserted the album cover in the corner of the promotional poster. I thought that this was a good way of advertising as people will know what to be looking out for when they go to buy the CD.
The photo for our poster was taken outside, with the same natural lighting used as is on the CD cover. They are both outside because Beyond Victoria is perceived to love nature, which contributes greatly to her image.
How effective is the combination of main product and ancillary text?
The purpose of our poster is to promote our artist’s debut single. As she is a new and upcoming artist, she needs to be made known. This is done by giving informative information including the release date, price, featured song and album name as well as the artist’s name in a large and bold font.
The album cover clearly states from which genre our artist is and what the target audience is. Beyond Victoria’s genre is Country/Folk and is predominantly targeted at females between the ages of twenty five and fifty. The font used (Lucida handwriting) illustrates that our artist is targeted at females as it is subtle and soft and this is typically believed to be a feminine handwriting style. I chose the props that we used for the back of the album cover; the guitar was used to show consumers the genre of Beyond Victoria and I chose the rustic chair as it fitted the genre, with it's subtle and natural look.
Beyond Victoria's album contains a four page booklet with the lyrics to 'Stronger Woman' printed on these pages. This booklet gives Beyond Victoria's fans a connection with her as they can learn the words to her featured song.
Our album cover is also used to promote interest in our artist’s work, as it lists all the songs contained within.
The album cover needs to represent the music that Beyond Victoria plays, so that our target audience buy her album. The album cover picture is taken from our music video. I feel that this is a good way to promote the album because if people have watched the video, they will have seen the album cover image within the video. Therefore when potential consumers, who liked the music video are in a supermarket, they will recognise the connection between the two and buy the CD. The same font is used on the album cover as on the poster. This makes people associate this style of writing with Beyond Victoria.
Our music video promotes Beyond Victoria’s image and music. Her image is promoted through the mise en scene. From watching our music video consumers can clearly see the genre our artist uses and her style.
The target audience for Beyond Victoria is twenty five to fifty; she is trying to appeal mainly to women of this age. However a small proportion of men may listen to her music as well. This age group can relate the most to Beyond Victoria, as a lot of her songs are to do with love and relationships. Although all age groups experience intensity of relationships and sometimes the difficulties that go with these, it is most likely that the target audience will be at this stage in their lives. Beyond Victoria will probably not appeal to 65+ so greatly, however, as the majority of this age range have already experienced this stage of life and don’t identify so strongly with these sentiments.
The plan for Beyond Victoria’s publication is to sell her albums chiefly in supermarkets. This is because the target audience forms the main age-range of supermarket shoppers. Beyond Victoria would also be advertised on the television, showing a clip of her featured song “Stronger Woman”,including the price of the album, release date and retail outlets. As Beyond Victoria’s music is not mainstream her album would not be sold in every supermarket, but in the market leader (Tesco) and market challengers (Sainsbury's and Asda). Beyond Victoria’s song would be promoted on BBC Radio 2 as this is the radio station to which the majority of our target audience listen. Here are a number of shows on which Beyond Victoria's music could be promoted.
The narrative for the music video relates to what is being seen in the video. When we see the artist waiting for her boyfriend, the line in the song says, “Now you’re out of time”, so we have the boyfriend figure disappearing when this line is sung. By doing this we have linked the narrative to the video.
In the first shot of our music video Beyond Victoria’s image is made clear straight away. Her hair is worn loose and wavy, which gives an effortless effect, even though it has been styled and taken time to create this look This style is kept throughout the music video which clearly states her image and makes her a recognisable artist.
What have you learned from your audience feedback?
Before we started filming our music video we gave a questionnaire to a range of people. We asked them to put their age and gender on the questionnaire and asked them to choose from a multiple choice of answers as to what they would expect to see in an acoustic/folk music video.
We then saw from the questionnaire that the audience that gave the most useful feedback and knew the most about this genre were women aged 25-50. Therefore we decided to target our artist at this age range, as this is the area of greatest demand for this genre.
The demographics for Beyond Victoria are, female, 25-40, married, having children, living in a detached house in the country and having a dog. The psychographics for Beyond Victoria are:- listening to radio 2, enjoying going on walks, enjoying television dramas and taking part in charity activities.
We then looked more in depth into the acoustic/folk genre and asked our target audience to list things they would expect to see within a music video of this kind that had not been covered in the previous questionnaire.
Research into other music videos from this genre showed that a typical mise en scene for this genre might consist of fields, trees, flowers or anything to do with nature. The artist’s appearance would be natural. Therefore the artist would be wearing make up that gives a natural look, subtle and effortless hairstyle and feminine, innocent clothes. This appearance represents the artist's connection with nature.
When our video was complete we set up a screening in one of the classrooms at our school, to get audience feedback. The audience that we selected were mainly from our target group so the feedback we got was as relevant as it could be and as useful as posible in helping us to improve our video ,if elements required change. Thirty-five invitations were sent out in the teachers' registers, to invite them to the screening. On the day of our screening we had 12 teachers attend; 10 female, 2 male. The questions asked in the questionnaire were,:-
Would you consider purchasing music from this artist?
Would you attend a gig/concert of this artist?
Would you listen to music of the genre usually?
Here are the results of the questionnaires, which I have uploaded. I uploaded the questionnaires by scanning them onto Word Documents. However as some of the teachers used a faint pen I went over their writing, so it would show up once the questionnaires had been uploaded. After this I had to screenprint and upload to the blog. This is because I had saved the questionnaires in PDF format, which is not compatable with the blog.
Generally the feedback was good with a common answer in the questionnaires being that our digipack looked very professional. Only one viewer raised some issues with our video content, namely the use of red wellies, the male figure and the prom style dress. The wellies had been included to illustrate a connection with the outside environment and the young man was supposed to represent the singer's boyfriend. The criticism of the prom dress could perhaps be justified and on reflection, we could have chosen a more casual looking dress in a natural fabric, but we had hoped to keep the image simple by lack of jewellery, accessories or make-up. The colour red had been chosen to be in keeping with the song title, "Stronger Woman," as red is seen as a dominant colour.
How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
In the construction and research stage of planning our music video, I used Google Images to search for locations that could be used within the video. Here is one of Katie Melua's album covers, which was used in the research stage, to get ideas for an album cover.
I also used Youtube to search for female artists from the Country/Folk genre to get inspiration for our music video.
Heather Richards a singer songwriter, who writes songs to express her emotions has been very helpful in my research. In her music video for " I can't forget you", she is seen with bare feet, in beautiful surroundings. This frequent use of nature has been used in our video.
Christina Martin is another singer songwriter and has composed a music video for her song, " Hard Day in June". This video is very influencial for our music video. This is because she is seen to have bare feet, which connects her with nature. She is seen in different locations outside, these locations are all beautiful settings:- fields, trees, flowers. She is seen playing her guitar in parts of the video, which I felt was important for our artist to do in our music video as it shows her passion for music. She is also seen hugging a tree. We have used this action on our CD album cover. This is done to show her love for nature.
I viewed Katie Melua's music video "Closest Thing to Crazy", in the research stage. This song is about a relationship Katie is having with a man. It cuts between a performance of her singing the song to the music video. This video uses Steve Archer's theory, (as explained previously).
Google images
YouTube
MySpace was also used to help us find possible artists. MySpace is a great place to look for unsigned artists, as you can view a description of their type of music and have the opportunity to listen to clips of their songs.
MySpaceA common theme throughout the videos that I watched, is that the artist is seen playing their guitar in parts of their videos. This is because acoustic artists want to share their musical talent with their audience. As seen in the video by Laura Marling - New Romantic
Facebook was also used to set up a group. The group was set up to get people's opinions of our music video. A link was attached to the group, where people could go to watch the video. However this type of research has not been successful as nobody actually discussed the music video, they merely joined the group.
When communicating with our chosen artist we used Facebook to ask for permission to use her song. Facebook was the chosen medium as it is more widely used than email accounts within the student population. We thought that this would be the quickest way to get permission, and once granted, we could move forward with planning our video. Here is a screen print of the permission given.
Jamwave was used to search for unsigned artists and we managed to find two artists on this site who fitted our genre criteria perfectly. I sent these two artists an email asking whether we could have permission to use their songs. We did not get a response from the artist Sydney Waser, who is a twenty year old singer songwriter. She was our first choice of artist, with her song "Carousel". However following my further investigation she appeared to have a music video on Youtube. It became apparent that she had been signed by a record company as she had a music video and her Jamwave site had not been updated. The other response we did get, however was from Feonais, another singer songwriter, with her song ' I would do Anything'. However by the time it had been received we had moved on and found another artist. Rachel Foxley was a friend of someone in my group. If we had waited any longer for a response from our initial choice of artist, we would have fallen behind and our music video could not have been planned without being rushed.
In the research stage of our video I uploaded images of locations and props to the blog. This allowed all my group members easy access to the images, so decisions on which to use could be made.The genre research helped us piece together a storyboard for our music video . Our storyboard was also uploaded to the blog. This was so everyone in my group could view and refer to it when they wanted, and if the storyboard got lost then we could always refer to the uploaded version.
In the planning stage I practiced filming with the camera. I practiced panning, tracking and zoom in and out, to perfect it for when the product was filmed.
Final Cut Express is an editing programme on the Apple I-Mac. It allows footage to be uploaded and manipulated. We used this programme to edit our music video. It enabled us to lipsync Beyondvictoria's lyrics with the miming throughout the video. This was done by placing footage on the time line with the corresponding part of the song placed on the audio line.
Final Cut Express also allowed us to speed up the footage of our artist cycling over the bridge. This was sped up so it would fit with the music. It is important in a music video for the images to match the tempo otherwise the video does not flow and is not easy to watch.
Blogger was the chosen media for my evaluation as it let me type up my work and save it as a draft. Once stages of my evaluation were complete I was able to publish posts, which meant that my teacher could view my progress. Blogger enabled me to easily upload pictures from the internet or desktop. Pictures appearing on the blog can be justified to the left or right or centered. A helpful aspect of Blogger is the hyperlink feature which facilitates a link between information or images from the internet to my text.
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