Emi's A2 Media Blog ♥: April 2012

Saturday 14 April 2012

Evaluation Question 2.

Evaluation Question 2

View more presentations from EmiStickland.

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

After deciding on our song 'Dreaming Out Loud' by Sally J Johnson, my group and I set out to create a music video appropriate to the genre as well as the song meaning. After concluding our genre was 'Indie, Abstract and Alternative' we then set out to develop ideas and seek inspiration from other media products that could help us do this task.

We researched the genre and discovered some similar artists and their style of music videos.

After researching 'Enya' we gathered that her style of music was very similar to our artist we had picked.

After researching some of her videos we saw that most of her videos tell a story, so we wanted to make a set narrative in our own music video - just like Enya does.

Another similar artist was 'Florence and the Machine'.

Florence has a very abstract/alternative genre that we found elements of in our chosen artist. Almost unique. We researched Florence more then Enya as our target audience were more likely to know more of and listen to Florence. Our target audience are more of a younger generation (16 - 21 year olds).

We taken a lot of inspiration from the 'Shake It Out' video. We liked how abstract and random it was. It was almost as if it was all a dream and we liked that element to it.

Here's an element we got inspired by from Florence and the Machine. All the characters in her 'Shake it out' video wore masks and it looked very abstract and unusual. We liked this element and decided to use animal masks in our video. Instead of using real animals we wanted to add to the strangeness and have people with animals masks on, this was also a way for us to be more creative and kind of original. Our target audience also liked this and thought it made a good impact on the video.

We also took great inspiration from films 'Alice and Wonderland' 'Inception' and 'Black Swan'. We tried to include some intertexual references so that our target audience could identify them within the video.

Alice in Wonderland also inspired us to feature Woodland animal masks in our video, including a girl walking through a woods and being lost. We researched that our target audience of the 'Indie' and 'Alternative' genre like 'Alice in Wonderland' so thats how we decided to feature some inspiration in our video. On a creative level, we costumed the main character in a 'innocent' looking dress just like 'Alice' wears from Alice in Wonderland.

As Inception and our chosen song 'Dreaming Out Loud' are both about dreaming, we took the basic idea of going into a dream/sub concious from this movie.

We wanted to experiment with some of the famous scenes from the film like the "Zero Gravity" Hall scene, but however we were challenged as we had no budget to pull off something spectacular like a real media product. The only difference was the budget as it's probably an expensive process to pull off. We really wanted to be creative with this but it was literally impossible without the budget and equipment.

Finally, we took the concept of the imagery used from Black Swan. We decided to have a ballerina in our video who is the dead sister of the other main character. We wanted her dressed in black to represent evil. Just like it does in Black Swan.

After showing our target audience our mood board we'd created:

This helped us gather our creativity. It guided us into what our target audience wanted and what we'd like to achieve from the video. They really liked the Alice in Wonderland/ Inception concept and were really eager to see some aspects in the video. Also inspiration from other artists directed our creativity and helped us find inspiration for our video.

On terms of Entropy and Redundancy, we intended it to be more entropic to suite our genre and ideal for our target audience. The Indie genre tends to be more entropic with visuals but quite redundant on the conventional message - being random, free-spirited and unique.

Entropic elements:

Girl waking up in a Woods
People pretending to be animals - wearing animal masks.
Dead Ballerina's dancing around
Narrative - Ballerina being murdered.

(An entropic element - murder of a child)

Redundant Elements:

Fear of the main girl
Performance element from the main character. As seen in 'Shake it out' by Florence and the Machine - she's the main character so she sings the song (happens in many indie/abstract videos).
Unique. We think our video is very unique in its own way so there's an redundant element of the indie genre being unique.

(Redundant element - Main character singing the song, used frequently in Indie music videos).

When showing the audience the video, they felt very saddened by the narrative of the story and thought it was very entropic. They appreciated both the entropic and redundant elements to the video. They thought it appealed to them greatly, so these elements proved successful into the Indie genre.

On an Originality point, we chose this song to do as it challenges conventional music because there are hardly any lyrics. Its mainly music based. We tried to portray a very dark/sad video which was against the conventions of our genre as Indie is usually very positive, happy and bright. Its doesn't portray a very happy story or positive thinking so this was probably the most original factor within our chosen genre.

Very Dark Elements from our music video - against the conventional typical indie genre.

Bright elements from indie band 'Mumford and Son's song "The Cave'. Typical of the genre, smiling people, bright lighting etc

Our product is obviously different from a 'real' media product probably only because of equipment and budget available. We didn't have big cameras they use for proper music videos. Our college had offered for us to use their video cameras, and we only used that for one scene. The other parts were filmed on personal cameras as the college cameras were old compared to our own ones. We bought the props ourselves e.g. animal masks but apart from that we didn't have a big budget. The effects we used were on the editing software we had available. This contrasts to 'real' media products for they are given budgets and can spend it on whatever they please. However the technology available still gave us the chance to be original as we'd all had experience with the editing programs.

To Sum up, the only problem we thought we have by challenging conventions is that our audience wouldn't understand the narrative. When we'd shown the audience our video, they understood the concept but not clearly of what it was about. This was proven in the audience feedback video. However, the indie genre is very vast and they really liked the unpredictability and not clearly understanding what happens.

Audience Feedback - Video

We asked out target audience a series of questions about our music video. We showed it them before we asked the questions.

Final Video Feedback

This is our audience feedback from our groups on Facebook that my group had created.

Final Video

and here we have it ladies and gentlemen..... our final cut. Enjoy.

Its been uploaded on Youtube.

Rough Cut Feedback

We haven't had much feedback on our rough cut - but we've taken on what they've said.

Tuesday 10 April 2012

Tuesday 3 April 2012

Monday 2 April 2012

Digipak Draft Pictures

These are some of the images I'm considering for my inside right (where the cd goes). I'm thinking the top image because it actually looks like a CD.

Feedback So Far.

This is some audience feedback I've been getting on Facebook about my print products so far.

I've had really positive feedback on my front cover. Everybody seems to of liked it and I've had no criticism. So this shall be my final piece.

For my adverts, different people have liked the two different adverts. Some prefer the bigger one with more text on it.

Some prefer the smaller one with less text. More people have liked the smaller one so I'll be going this one. I'll add on a website too to make it look more generic.