Question 1A

Question 1a from amber mackenzie

question 3- what have you learned from audience feedback?

Question 3 what have you learned from audiences from amber mackenzie

evaluation question 1bcd

Question 1 evaluation [autosaved] from amber mackenzie

Album advert

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

When I was constructing my digipak, I wanted to ensure there is continuity between the cd and the style of the music video in addition to the sound of the song. Keeping the entire product coherently fluid is likely to satisfy the audience and improve the quality of the overall product.

Aesthetic is the main way I have tied my digipak in with my product. The pastel theme is in my album and the music video. They’re both using very soft colours which is a stereotypically feminine aesthetic matching the likely demographic of the fans of the artist. The song is rather calm and does obtain a very feminine feel to it so the pastels reinforce it making the CD coherent to its content. My digipak has an overlaid filter of faint crinkles and my music video has a lot of filters done in post-production in order to age the clips. As half of the video has a nostalgic feel, I felt the image should match the emotions conveyed. The crinkles imply that something has aged as the video is a journey of two siblings growing up apart.

Another thing that I tried to do in the construction of my products was ensure that the digipak speaks to the audience. The audience are positioned with the girl in the video and for the majority of it, her journey of events is followed. The sound of the song is what this decision was based on due to the fact the voice is feminine and soft. The passivity of it is calming which I tried to carry through to the music video and the digipak as it takes a simple image done with muted, pastel colours. The abstract image was inspired by art from the 1970s where shapes and colours were often used in a way of simplicity to provide meaning and evoke thought. Henry Jenkins’ theory of audiences are textual poachers provides a useful way of understanding how audiences are able to create their own unique perspectives regarding deeper hidden meanings and that way, they are able to interpret their own meanings. The goal is to utilise the ambiguity of the cover to provoke wider conversations on social media regarding the subject of the digipak as fans discuss and debate possible meanings which is likely to generally raise awareness of the product. This would also be beneficial to the artist as they are unsigned and relatively unknown with a small following.

I have also included word pictures of two of the bands songs as the inside panels of my digipak as it continues the abstract theme of art. This deconstructs the songs and refocuses meaning upon significant words which could redirect the audience onto alternative representations of what the songs are about. The fragmentation of them conveys the symbolism of how things that are broken can still be art and adds an interesting twist to the passive digipak without sticking out to the point that it looks out of place. This has been done by remaining consistent with a pastel colour palette, mainly featuring blues and purples. Doing this also helps the artist establish their identity regarding the type of content they have to offer to audiences in society. It is important that the digipak depicts what the CD will contain in order to best establish tone so in production, I tried to create a product that did that. As the band produce some relaxed pop songs, I have the digipak a simplistic feel with pastels. Some twists like the textured background add to the aesthetic making it a CD that fans may want to showcase. This will, once again, lead to more conversations about the band.

Andrew Goodwin’s theory of suiting genre is another thing I have done. We kept a clear relationship between the song and its music video. As the song has many points where it builds, we used this to showcase the main parts of the video. This is when the key events happened in the narrative. It is additionally debatable that the sound of the song indicating that a journey is taking place. The high pitched notes suggest excitement which we tried to convey in the video as the journey of two long lost siblings reuniting occurs. Although here I conformed to the conventions of the song, I did change the song as we found it to be too long for the narrative we had. We cut out a chorus due to the fact that we found it to be a little to repetitive. As the band is new, we felt it was of great importance that we keep our audience engaged with the song and ensure they don’t become bored. Doing this will hopefully keep our audience captivated.

Digipak

Front

Back

Side 1

Side 2

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

The use of media technologies when making our video enabled us to work creatively as media producers in addition to aiding communication and collaboration with those I worked with.

There are many different technologies we used in order to be creative for this project. Having our coursework on a blog allows us to select the layout of our planning and evaluation making all blogs individual. This allows the blog owner to have full ownership of the product in addition to allowing for creative empowerment. As blogs on blogger are an ongoing multimedia platform, we can continue to update and edit them according to rapid feedback that is received, this makes blogs a practical, appropriate technology. My media blog allowed me to split my work under specific sections using the labelling tool which enabled my work to maintain an organised structure showing the breakdown of each section of this project, from research through to evaluation. Also, as blogs are accessed using the internet it permitted me to upload any required content such as stills from proficient sites due to the fact that blogger is a mass media. In addition to this, I could get feedback from my peers in addition to my teacher as they can access my blog as an audience. Editing our music video was also a way to be creative. Due to the high variety of post-production options, there was a lot of choice when it came to the techniques we wanted to use when editing. As we had the ability to edit our footage into a sequence, this provided as another creative outlet in addition to adding individuality to our music video. With the camera, we had control over the settings in terms of focus and zoom allowing creativity and further widening shot capability in terms of what we were able to produce and the addition of the instant playback setting allowed us to know straight away if the shot was okay giving us knowledge on if we need to re-shoot anything.

Use of technologies in media also enabled collaboration and communication to be a lot easier and more efficient. When we filmed, we used an SD card in order to get the footage onto the editing software. As the video was a collaborative production, this was convenient as we could separately film content and later piece it together when editing, the process of getting footage onto the computer using the SD card was relatively fast allowing us to get on with the edit with the time we allocated ourselves. The use of non-linear editing software further enabled collaboration as it let us edit our shots in any order, going back to things and further editing them non-chronologically so we could remove parts that were filmed again and improved. This let us refine our video to a higher quality. Technology also enabled us to communicate as we had to email the artist for permission to use their song “paper stars” for our music video and without technology, this could not have been done.

Technologies also allow access through the internet. Using the internet, we did all of the planning for our music video. Regarding my research, the internet held very high importance as without the use of google, it 
would not have been possible for me to find the unsigned band we used. This let us to the track we chose to make a music video for "paper stars", without the internet, it would have been very difficult to source such a variety of unheard-of bands to choose from. We additionally used YouTube to watch a large variety of videos in order to provide inspiration. I was also able to embed the video onto my media blog. This allowed my tutor to continually watch the progression of the video and provide feedback on how to improve. It was a clear way to share the video and present my work. We also used sites that show the demographic of target audiences to ensure the content we created was appropriate to the people who would listen to that genre of music. We also made visual plans online using technologies. The access to the software to do this allowed me to be creative with my planning.