4. How effective is the combination of your main product and the ancillary tasks?

 

The image above is a still from a Katy Perry music video, and as you can see, the colours of her clothes and her locations are very natural. This is in great contrast her to album covers.

As you can see from this image, unusual props are used, such as the brightly coloured wig. There are a lot of effects and bright coloured used which is highly different from the music video.


This is quite similar to ours. Our ancillary tasks all consist of lots of bright colours and computerised effects where as our music video is more natural and realistic. Therefore I do feel our work works well together in relation to similar products of our chosen genre

We tried to keep a theme among both the ancillary task and the music video, so that they would relate and work well together. We did this through a number of ways. Firstly, as a lot of the music video was filmed within the studio, we tried to continue this by taking the ancillary task images in there also. We wanted to keep a professional, clean-cut look and we felt we could do this by keeping the same location, where we would be surrounded by high quality media equipment. 

We also tried to make sure, that Jess was wearing similar style outfits in both ancillary task and the music video. We did not use the same outfit, but we did try to keep to the same colours tones and styles of clothing. We did this so that the costume would be recognisable to an audience and would also reflect the genre we were trying to portray as well as appealing to our target audience.

Secondly, we tried to reflect the same upbeat way that Katy Perry has. The song we chose is very upbeat and happy, and so we tried to keep that within the video by using quick cuts to keep to the beat and showing Jess and the actor smiling throughout. We also showed this through the happy narrative of two people falling in love. To try to adapt this to our ancillary tasks we used bright and bold colours to reflect the same feeling.


I do feel we really made a good attempt to make the ancillary tasks and the main product work together well, as I do feel that we have partially succeeded in this, i do feel we could have made them link together more. However when i consider Katy Perry's album covers and advertisements in comparison to her actual music video, this is actually quite common. Katy Perry’s album artwork, inserts and advertisements, are all very bold. They all consist of lots of bold colours, and styles of fonts, and usually consist of unusual props such as bright coloured wigs. This is in contrast to her music videos where they are much more realistic and feel more natural.

The Indie Pop genre focuses alot around people being very happy, positive, original and unique. This is something we really wanted to reflect. Therefore when we were creating our 'artist'; 'Jessie J'. We wanted to portray an image to an audience that really reflected those factors. 

To do this we tried to make sure Jess was always smiling when filming and performing. We wanted her always look very happy and positive. We also tried to do this by having Jess really enjoying her performance, by dancing slightly as she sang. We did this in order to reflect a very happy upbeat feeling and type of person. 

We did try to include the 'unique' and 'original' factors, however we actually found this quite challenging. At first we had tried to show this by using lot's of people in the background, whilst Jess was singing, to try to show her, as if she didn't mind any of the people around her and was just focused on herself and her own person. However we struggled finding large numbers of people to do this. Secondly, we tried to do this through bold costume choices, and we came to find we had a lack of clothes that would reflect this well enough, eg brightly coloured tops est.

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

Technology has played a very vital part within every stage of our project,

One of these was the internet. The internet was very beneficial during our research and planning stages as it allowed us to analyse existing music videos and real media products of our chosen genre, in a really efficient way. By using websites such as 'You Tube', we were able to view large numbers of music videos with in short spaces of time, and this was really beneficial to us as it allowed our general time keeping of the project to remain on track. The internet also allowed us to help learn more on our target audience and gain direct opinions from them through social networking sites, such as blog’s, Facebook and Twitter, this was highly beneficial to us, as it allowed to come up with more ideas of how our music video should look, and ways in which to make it more successful by creating something that would really appeal to our target audience by finding out what they really wanted in a music video to what they didn’t.

Another piece of technology that became very useful to us was Blogger! It was a really great way for us to display all of our work and to show the stages of the project, and how each developed over time. It also allowed us too see in a really clear way how we were getting on, and the ability to always be able to look back at our research and plans in order for us to keep on the track we had wanted rather than steering off course.

PowerPoint presentation software proved very beneficial when presenting our work in a very clear and organised way. It avoided our blog’s becoming to 'wordy' and allowed us to use our new skills we had learned through creating slideshows.

The filming cameras were of course, one of the key elements of our project. Our use of them and the skills we have with them have developed massively, as for myself and Jess, the use of the cameras were quite new to us, as in our AS pieces we had both chosen to create magazine covers using digital cameras. Jess was the 'artist' for our music video, and therefore I filmed all of the footage. Jess was really helpful in helping me set up all of the shots and worked with me to plan out the ways the shots would be set and what would be involved with in them.

We used the digital cameras to capture the images for our ancillary tasks. For this we were able to use the skills we had learnt over the AS part of the course.

The last stages of our project highly involved the editing software on the editing machines. This programme is called Adobe Premiere. It was a completely new experience for Jess as she had never used the software before, and i had only had little experience with it during my media studies GCSE. Therefore it took us a while to get used too. However once we got the hang of it, it became vital to the really creating the overall music video, it helped us to really shape it and to add in 'cuts' and effects to make it look like a real music video. It also allowed us to correct any errors we had made whilst filming, such as cropping shots that people had accidentally walked in to shot, and brightening up shots we had filmed that were too dark.

When creating the ancillary tasks, we used the 'Adobe Photoshop' software. Hess had had alot of experience with this, and was really good at showing me how to use it also. We used it to edit our images for our CD cover, inserts and magazine advertisements. We were able to use tools to create different fonts, backgrounds, and layouts which all reflected both the indie pop genre and the look of the actual existing products.

The fact that majourity of the equipemnent and technology we used was digital, was a hightly benefical factor to us. During the ancillary task, when taking the images on the digital camera, was a really quick and effcient process. We were able to capture the images, and view them on the back of the camera so that we could view whether they were what we wanted, before uploading them and realising this later, which would have meant we would have had to performed a re-shoot. It also meant that we could take a large number of images on the SD cards and place that straight in to the computers and store them ready for use later. This was a really quick process and allowed us to continue with the project within great time.

This was very similar to when we used the recording cameras to film the shots for our music video. We were able to watch the clips back after filming, which allowed us to see if we needed to re-do the shot, or if we we had what we needed.

A final aspect of this was being able to upload our ancillary task pieces and our final music video on to social networking sites, where we were able to recieve direct feedback from our audiences. This is something that professional artists do in the present day.

Without Web 2.0 and all of the digital equipment, we would not have been able to do some things, and our entire process would have been a lot more time consuming.

2. What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Upon completing our music video and our ancillary task we arranged a number of tasks in order to gain some feedback from our target audience.
By doing this it would allow us to see how successful our video had been or where, if we were to do the project again, the changes we would have made, looking back.
In order to gain the feedback we used social networking sites to have direct feedback from real people. We used sites such as Facebook and YouTube.

(You may follow the hyperlinks above in order to review any comments we had)

During the production stages of our music video, feedback was very crucial to us. We tried asking a number of people from our target audience to watch it at different stages of completion, to tell us what they thought about it; factors they liked, and didn't like. This was a great way for us, to always make sure we were making the music video appealing to our target audience.

We created a questionnaire as another source to find some answers from our target audience regarding what they would want from a music video. The questionnaire is below.
Media Survey

This allowed us to gain some extra knowledge on what our target audience wanted from a music video.
During this time we did recieve feedback suggesting that the music video, at the stage it was at, at the time, consisted of to many shots in to many different locations. They felt it was not very consistent, and caused the video not to flow nicely from one shot to the next. Therefore we worked on this, and removed some shots that we had only filmed from one angle. We then made sure we introduced all of the scenes we would be using early on in the video, and that we returned to those shots frequently.

Another piece of feedback we had was that some of the shots were not being cut in the right places. They felt that the shots were not cutting from one shot to the next on the right beat of the song. Therefore we looked at this, and made each shot cut on clear beats of the song, or particular words. This actually made the music video alot better, as the cuts became alot more effective.

At the end of our practical work, our responses were very positive. Everyone enjoyed watching the music video and really liked the ancillary task pieces. Many of the comments talked about how they felt the  ancillary pieces looked realistic and believable and that the music video was really enjoyable to watch.

1. In what ways does your media product use, develop, or challenge forms of conventions of real media products? (How does it fit or not fit the genre)

For our A2 course this year, we were asked to create a number of practical pieces. This consisted of a music video, an album, including insets and finally a magazine advertisement advertising that album.
These all had to be based around the same 'artist' or 'band' we had created. This in our case was ‘Jessie A’. It also had to reflect our chosen genre, of indie pop.
Before beginning any kind of production work we had to look carefully in to the typical codes and conventions of the 'indie pop' genre. Myself and my media partner Jess, had to perform a mass of research in to existing music videos for this.
By doing this it allowed us to gain an understanding of the genre, and to learn what you would ‘typically’ find in any music video within that genre. This then allowed us the ability to consider our own ideas for what we wanted our own music video to look like, and the ways in which we could represent and reflect the genre within our own work.
We chose to re-create a music video to the song ‘Teenage Dream’ by Katy Perry; this is an artist whose music would be categorised as ‘indie pop’.

In the official Katy Perry music video for the song 'Teenage Love', the narrative is quite simple and basic and continues on one level throughout. The narrative and the lyrics together, suggest and express a story of how a young woman is experiencing 'love' for the first time and how happy this is making her. It expresses the feelings that come with your 'first' love or your 'teenage love' as a young person. This is shown through a number of shots of the artist and an actor spending time together and how happy they are in each others company. I and my partner Jess really loved this narrative and felt it was something we could both individually relate to in our own lives as teenagers now, and would therefore be able to capture this better when making our own music video. However when working alongside the narrative of the original song, we found it very hard to show this narrative visually. We did not want to simply use very stereotypical basic shots of the artist and the actor acting 'in love', and wanted to be more creative. As a result of this we developed the story we wanted to portray as our narrative alongside the song. We chose to make it more about the stages of the artist and the actor and how they try to begin their relationship. We felt this would be much easier to show visually, and it would be clearer to an audience what the story was. We also felt it would be easier upon our actors to act being 'in love' with each other, without feeling embarrassed, as we wanted the performance to remain realistic and believable. We filmed Jess showing her trying to get the 'boyfriend' to notice her, and continued this story throughout the video, the actor eventually notices her back and this leads to the beginning of their relationship. We found this a lot easier to portray visually. However we considered the research we had found from looking at other music videos. For example we had previously looked at 'Starry Eyed' by Ellie Goulding, this had a narrative of a young couple in love, and its narrative was similar to Katy Perry's.  Therefore we feel we have challenged this narrative convention slightly, by having a strong narrative develop throughout the video, rather than just having one repeated theme story.

The music video consisted of both performance shots and narrative shots. Through looking at our research we have presented on our blog you can see how we analysed the different shot types used with music videos of the 'indie pop' genre. We feel that we really captured the typical shots well. Our understanding of shot types was forced to develop from our quite basic understanding that we had in the AS part of the course, but this was a great advantage as it caused us to try to create more creative looking shots to try to attempt similar shots used within similar music videos. Although we partially succeeded in doing this, I do not believe that we fully captured the conventions and shots that we had been aiming for. We instead used more basic shots as a result of not having the elaborate sets and camera equipment that would have been used to make many of the video's we had looked at.

Within the original 'Teenage Dream' music video we found that she used alot more people/actors within her shots. This was something we did not do as we found it a struggle capturing the shots with larger numbers of people in, however in other music videos of the same genre it is very popular to find either single people in the shot or a two shot, and this was something we were much more comfortable doing as we were able to do it well.

Final Music Video

This is our final music video to the song of 'Teenage Dream' by Katy Perry.

Ancillary Task - Magazine Advertisement

This is our magazine advertisement. Jess took alot of control over the ancillary tasks, and I think she did a brilliant job. I think they really capture our genre well, and look visually appealing.

Album Insert- Tour Dates

This is one of the insert's to our album. We decided to include a list of tour dates and locations, as this is something you would typically find within an album. I really like this insert, i think the use of colours and fonts really reflects the genre well as well as the 'positive', 'unique' and 'original' image we wanted to portray.