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

Chamber of Reflection - Music Video Final Cut

To finish off the video, we added this filter.

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

Genre

British Analytic philosopher Steve Neale stated that "Genres are instances of repetition and differences" basically saying that video, music etc within a genre all follow the same conventions but have slight differences which helps progress the genre. This is evident with what we did in our video, after researching many videos within the genre (Indie Rock) and looking at digipack/albums and magazine adds we ourselves were able to follow and challenge some conventions.

Genre Conventions: 

Music Video:

A convention of the Indie Rock music videos is the narrative of love, this is evident in the video for Lizard State by King Krule and Khmlwugh by HOMESHAKE. We also feature this theme within our video via flashbacks where we see the protagonist and a girl with one another. This is an example of Levi-Strauss' theory of binary opposites which states the majority of narratives have opposing characters which help thicken the plot, in this case a boy and a girl. The idea is developed in our video as in the two videos mention and in the many other of the genre the video is about a specific stage in the relationship while ours features the start, the middle and the end we also feature the pass tense via flash backs while in most indie rock videos, such as the ones mentioned, the theme of love is in the present. We developed the idea as we felt basic narrative of love generally over used.

The video challenges the genre most with it's masonic theme, after watching many videos in the indie rock genre i wasn't able to find one that featured the masonic theme of any other religious related theme. I think the reason for this is that most songs in this genre are generally about more common day to day things such as the aforementioned narrative of love. Although our video does include love the main feature is the masonic process of initiation while the story of love is a secondary story to help develop the main narrative. This complex structure also challenges the genres music videos as i've yet to see a video in this genre which switches between two time frames.

Another convention of Indie Rock is the use of low quality cameras to film this videos to give it a certain aesthetic, evident in Ode to Viceroy by Mac DeMarco and many other videos by him we took from this and used a VHS app to film parts of our video. We did it to differentiate between past and present shots. We developed the convention as we feature HD and low quality VHS (filter) shots which i personally haven't seen on any music videos within the genre. Ode to Viceroy by Mac Demarco did inspire our video in another way too, in this video we see a cigarette packet but instead a video of Mac Demarco smoking is masked on the top half of the box instead of a picture of a disease. We used this masking technique in our video but instead of a cigarette box we instead masked one of flash backs on to the glass of a mirror.

In almost any video of the genre the video features the singer of the band and the singer of the band at some point lip-syncing the words and this is the same within our video but unlike Another One by Mac Demarco or Dum Surfer by King Krule where lip syncing is throughout the majority of the video we only featured it for one line of the song. We challenged this convention because we wanted to focus more on the narrative of the song and not the performance. However we did use the convention of featuring the singer as much as possible as seen in the linked videos as the whole point is to promote the song and it's artist, no better way to promote the artist then featuring then in what is basically a promotional video.

Digipack:

After looking at a number of album covers and the album cover of Salad Days (which features the song we made a video for) we concluded that we should feature the singer on the front and the theme of the album should also be represented on the album cover but in the style of Demarco, on his album This Old Dog the cover features a lot of small hand drawn drawings of random objects, we copied this but instead of random objects we used freemason related drawings like a candle and the freemasonry 'G', this art was used for the inside of the digipack. To maintain relevance between the album cover and the albums songs (or in our case just the song Chamber of Reflection) we took two photos outside of a masonic hall which directly relates to the video which is based on freemasonry. To try link the digipack with the video and song is not only a convention of Indie Rock but a general convention of all music genres, the point of keeping them linked is that they are all there to sell the album and if there isn't a link between the video which intends to promote the album and the album it self then, obviously, the album wont sell as much as people are unable to make the link.

We followed the same conventions as most other digipack covers; name of the artist and the album on the front; tracklist on the back; bar code and record companies logo on the corners of the back. One thing that sort of unconventional was the placement of the tracklist. Usually the tracklist is seen in the centre or on the left of the album while on ours it features on the right, admittedly we were not trying to break conventions by doing this but instead just believed it looked best there due to the colours of the font.

Magazine Add:

From the research we did we found clear conventions in the indie rock genre which the majority of adds featured. Picture of the album, name of the album and artist, positive reviews of the album, similar art as the album, record company and the artist themselves. We followed all these conventions bar the album featuring on the add, these conventions we believed should be followed as they are all informative and help sell the album, breaking conventions is not as necessary here as there is general formula to selling albums which we followed however we did break one convention by not featuring the album cover on the poster, this does sound ridiculous however we believed the album cover and magazine add feature such a similar photo (same people, same location and same angle) that it simply wouldn't be needed to.

Digipack Final

Conventions
- Songlist on back to let the audience know the content of the album
- Artist and title on front to make the digipack immediately recognisable
- Links to album advert and music video in theme and people
- Record label and barcode are required
- Continuous colour theme to provide aesthetic appeal

Unconventional
- Songlist placement, unusual to have them in the top right hand corner instead of middle or left
- Drawings included on the inside. Although most digipacks are more likely to feature further photography, this is actually conventional of the artist - as seen on Mac Demarco's This Old Dog album.

How was it made?
- The drawings were scanned and put into adobe illustrator where they were individually selected and repositioned. Using the eyedropper, a rectangle of the same colour as the masonic hall's door was drawn across the digipack template. The drawings were then grouped together as a single object, repeated to form a pattern design and placed over the blue background
- Each photo was placed into the application before being cropped and moved into place
-Appropriate fonts were chosen for the writing and the eyedropper tool was employed again
- A barcode and record label were taken from the internet, made into vectors and put into place in the corners of the digipack

Survey

https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/RNTXL2M

Above is a link to the survey we sent out, using surveymonkey, to gather feedback on our products. To see an evaluation of the results, click here to go to our evauluation (question 3) video.

Evaluation Question 2 - How effective was our combination of video & ancillary products?

Above is our evaluation. It looks at how we appealed to the audience with these products, how we represented people within the products and how the different products and platforms were linked together. The video is narrated, so turn up your audio.

Evaluation Question 3 - What did we learn from audience feedback?

Below is our presentation showing audience feedback and what we learnt from it. There is narration alongside the images, so be sure to turn up your audio.