Evaluation question 1:
In this question I will look at how my media product uses, challenges or develops forms and conventions of real media products. I will be looking at elements that we have taken from other videos, and used the exact same technique, alongside how our video does things completely differently to other acoustic music videos. I will also be looking at how we have taken certain ideas and adapted and changed them to suit our own video. In this evaluation I will be looking at different elements such as titles, camera, work ect, and evaluating how we've used each element compared to other videos in the same genre.


Titles:
As you can see from the first frame on the picture above, we have titles at the start of the video., which include song name and artist. This can be common in music videos as a whole, often in pop videos. But after looking into several different acoustic artist (such as Ed Sheeran and some of Taylor swifts old songs) it is quite uncommon for this style of song to include titles. Music videos that tend to have titles want to create more of “film” image, acoustic songs tend to be a bit more low key and hence not have titles. Here we have challenged a typical convention.


Setting/Location:
Settings for music videos are so varied. In pop songs its normally on a stage, and rock songs tend to be set in abandoned warehouses or a darker setting. In the acoustic genre it’s a lot harder to pinpoint a particular location that’s used widely. In this style of music the setting normally runs parallel to the narrative. In Taylor swifts video for “You belong with me” it’s about a girl who falls for her neighbour, hence its set between the two houses. The narrative of our song features a lot of lyrics outside and by lakes, so in that sense we have met the typical codes and conventions for setting.


Above is a screen cap from Taylor Swifts video "You belong with me" and Taylor (who plays the main female lead in the video) looking out of her bedroom window across to the boy in his room.
Costumes and Props:
This is something we felt very strongly about keeping to the codes and conventions for. In acoustic videos the outfits worn are very nondescript, as it isn't a key part of the genre. In most acoustic videos I have studied the actors and artists have all worn “average” clothing. They just wear everyday things, not like the ridiculous dresses lady gaga would wear in a pop video, or the torn and ripped jeans a metal band would wear. Costumes aren't such a big part of acoustic videos as they don’t really add anything to it. Props are once again, strongly narrative. In the video for Ed Sheerans “Drunk”, a lot of alcohol is featured because the song is about drinking. Our song doesn't really have anything like that, so we stayed away from it. One thing we did notice in almost every acoustic video was the use of the acoustic guitar. In most videos it will display the artist or the character playing along to the song, something which we included, simply because (if filmed correctly) it can look really good. For props and costumes we once again tried to using these codes and conventions.



Above is a shot of Rupert Grint (whom guest starred) in the video for Ed Sheerans "Lego House". As you can see his hooded jumper isn't dissimilar from the one that our main character Jordon wears.


Technical aspects (Camera work and editing):
We really tried to vary our technical ability in this music video since acoustic songs are often slow, we tried to make it look as nice as possible with editing and camera work. We did a lot of research into this and found that often songs that have a sad/depressing tone are filmed in black and white (such as Ed Sheerans A team). The second half of our song happens to be a lot sadder than the first half, after the couple in the story have broken up. In the second half we decided to go with the black and white filter. A lot of acoustic videos also have quite long shots, like in Ed Sheerans "Small bump" video. The majority of that video is shot in a hospital waiting room and the shots are about 25-30 seconds long at a time. We tried to make our shots no longer than 10 seconds long as it can look quite boring if it goes on for too long. We developed the typical codes and conventions for our technical aspects.



Above is a shot from Ed Sheerans "A-Team" video. The narrative of the video is about a prostitute that struggles with drug problems. The black and white filter adds to the depressing tone of the video.

Narrative/Story:
Narrative is probably the most important thing about acoustic music videos, and there aren't many codes and conventions for it. The general rule that I found is that acoustic videos are nine times out of ten narrative. They almost always are completely linked to the lyrics as it allows the audience to hear and see the same thing at the same time. Our video starts with Jordon drawing Lauren sat on a bench, and setting the scene for the first half of the video of them as a couple. As you can see the first 5 frames are of them together. Acoustic videos really inspire creativity and every artist will want to start their video differently. The reason we chose the drawing and the playing of the guitar is because we wanted to put emphasis on how much Lauren meant to Jordon, and how much of an impact it have when he lost her. We stuck very strongly to the narrative, like most acoustic videos do, and once again kept within the codes and conventions.



Above is a picture from the video "The man who cant be moved" by soft rock band The Script. This song is a lot lighter than the bands other songs and uses acoustic guitars. Danny (the lead singer) plays the man in the narrative. The songs about a couple that break up, and the guy stays on a street corner until he attracts the press so that the girl can see him on the news, and see how much she means to him. This is a good example of a strong narrative video.

Genre:
Our music video is a love story, with a slight twist. Most acoustic songs tend to be based around relationships, as the previous videos ive mentioned in this answer are. typical endings for love themed videos are either the couple getting back together, or the person singing the song moving on. From the videos I have looked at that's the outcome almost every time. We have taken the traditional Genre and developed it further. We decided that since our video at the end gets quite depressing, we would end it in a dramatic way. We went along with a lot of typical codes and conventions in other areas so we wanted something to set our video apart from others. Our video actually ends with the main male lead played by Jordon, killing himself.

Character/Star image:

Its incredibly common for The artist to star in their own music videos. Taylor swift plays herself in all her narrative videos, As does Ed sheeran And the same with Danny from the script. We obviously didn't have the singer of our song to be in the video, so we used Jordon and modelled a character around him. As I said earlier in the "Costume and props" section, we really didn't want our character to be anything special at all. The key to a good acoustic song and video is about the audience being able to relate to the song and the characters. Star image isn't something we considered to be too important, so in this aspect we have challenged the typical conventions.

Above is another Taylor swift video of which she stars in, further showing star image in music videos.

Representation:
Like many other acoustic videos our representation focuses on couples, both together and after breaking up. There are often very few characters in acoustic videos, mainly just 2 or 3. We chose to focus more on Jordon as the male character to show how males deal with break up situations, as a lot of the time the media (in general) focus on how women find break ups very difficult. Acoustic videos as a whole don't really have a particular group in mind when they think about representation. These types of videos normally represent a situation, and make it a lot more personal to themselves. In that sense we met the codes and conventions, we kept it down to two characters, whilst keeping the narrative personal.

Relationship between lyrics and video:
I think this is the most important aspect for any good music video, within any genre. The lyrics tell a story and we tried our best to show that story on screen. Some videos take the lyrics quite literally and show every single thing the song is about in detail, where others will be more general with it. We tried to generalise a little bit, keeping the main theme of the lyrics and carrying that throughout. The main difference is at the end of the video. For our song there is no set ending, it doesn't actually say that the character killed himself, but that's how we interpreted it. A lot of songs have ambiguous lyrics, and its down to the people creating the video decide exactly what those lyrics mean. This is an area where we developed typical codes and conventions, we kept a strong narrative to the lyrics, then made the ending our own to create a more moving and emotional piece.

Digipak:


This is the final digipak we made. We really strongly followed the codes and conventions for this, we had 6 panels allowing for a front and back cover, as well as inside covers and a spine. Most digipaks are themed according to the album itself something else we did here. Since the album has 2 halves, empty days and sleepless nights (as can be seen on the back cover) we designed it with that in mind. We made half of the design bright, with the sun and sky as a focal point, and the rest gloomy and dull. Not only did this match with the title but also the video we had made. We also had the same logo on the digipak as we used at the start of the video. Dikipaks are often themed around a specific characteristic of the album, in our case it was the fact its in two halves.

Website:
We strictly followed the codes and conventions for our website. Not only acoustic artists but all artists have the same things on their websites. Tours, Merch, Band bio, Music, News are all tabs that can be found on a bands website. Also when an artist releases new material in the form of a song or video, that's normally on the homepage of their website too. Our website homepage has our video on it, along with logo and tabs to everything you'd expect to find on a bands page.

Evaluation Question 1

Evaluation question 1:

In this question I will look at how my media product uses, challenges or develops forms and conventions of real media products. I will be looking at elements that we have taken from other videos, and used the exact same technique, alongside how our video does things completely differently to other acoustic music videos. I will also be looking at how we have taken certain ideas and adapted and changed them to suit our own video. In this evaluation I will be looking at different elements such as titles, camera, work ect, and evaluating how we've used each element compared to other videos in the same genre.


Titles:

As you can see from the first frame on the picture above, we have titles at the start of the video., which include song name and artist. This can be common in music videos as a whole, often in pop videos. But after looking into several different acoustic artist (such as Ed Sheeran and some of Taylor swifts old songs) it is quite uncommon for this style of song to include titles. Music videos that tend to have titles want to create more of “film” image, acoustic songs tend to be a bit more low key and hence not have titles. Here we have challenged a typical convention.


Setting/Location:

Settings for music videos are so varied. In pop songs its normally on a stage, and rock songs tend to be set in abandoned warehouses or a darker setting. In the acoustic genre it’s a lot harder to pinpoint a particular location that’s used widely. In this style of music the setting normally runs parallel to the narrative. In Taylor swifts video for “You belong with me” it’s about a girl who falls for her neighbour, hence its set between the two houses. The narrative of our song features a lot of lyrics outside and by lakes, so in that sense we have met the typical codes and conventions for setting.




Above is a screen cap from Taylor Swifts video "You belong with me" and Taylor (who plays the main female lead in the video) looking out of her bedroom window across to the boy in his room.

Costumes and Props:

This is something we felt very strongly about keeping to the codes and conventions for. In acoustic videos the outfits worn are very nondescript, as it isn't a key part of the genre. In most acoustic videos I have studied the actors and artists have all worn “average” clothing. They just wear everyday things, not like the ridiculous dresses lady gaga would wear in a pop video, or the torn and ripped jeans a metal band would wear. Costumes aren't such a big part of acoustic videos as they don’t really add anything to it. Props are once again, strongly narrative. In the video for Ed Sheerans “Drunk”, a lot of alcohol is featured because the song is about drinking. Our song doesn't really have anything like that, so we stayed away from it. One thing we did notice in almost every acoustic video was the use of the acoustic guitar. In most videos it will display the artist or the character playing along to the song, something which we included, simply because (if filmed correctly) it can look really good. For props and costumes we once again tried to using these codes and conventions.




Above is a shot of Rupert Grint (whom guest starred) in the video for Ed Sheerans "Lego House". As you can see his hooded jumper isn't dissimilar from the one that our main character Jordon wears.

Technical aspects (Camera work and editing):

We really tried to vary our technical ability in this music video since acoustic songs are often slow, we tried to make it look as nice as possible with editing and camera work. We did a lot of research into this and found that often songs that have a sad/depressing tone are filmed in black and white (such as Ed Sheerans A team). The second half of our song happens to be a lot sadder than the first half, after the couple in the story have broken up. In the second half we decided to go with the black and white filter. A lot of acoustic videos also have quite long shots, like in Ed Sheerans "Small bump" video. The majority of that video is shot in a hospital waiting room and the shots are about 25-30 seconds long at a time. We tried to make our shots no longer than 10 seconds long as it can look quite boring if it goes on for too long. We developed the typical codes and conventions for our technical aspects.





Above is a shot from Ed Sheerans "A-Team" video. The narrative of the video is about a prostitute that struggles with drug problems. The black and white filter adds to the depressing tone of the video.

Narrative/Story:

Narrative is probably the most important thing about acoustic music videos, and there aren't many codes and conventions for it. The general rule that I found is that acoustic videos are nine times out of ten narrative. They almost always are completely linked to the lyrics as it allows the audience to hear and see the same thing at the same time. Our video starts with Jordon drawing Lauren sat on a bench, and setting the scene for the first half of the video of them as a couple. As you can see the first 5 frames are of them together. Acoustic videos really inspire creativity and every artist will want to start their video differently. The reason we chose the drawing and the playing of the guitar is because we wanted to put emphasis on how much Lauren meant to Jordon, and how much of an impact it have when he lost her. We stuck very strongly to the narrative, like most acoustic videos do, and once again kept within the codes and conventions.




Above is a picture from the video "The man who cant be moved" by soft rock band The Script. This song is a lot lighter than the bands other songs and uses acoustic guitars. Danny (the lead singer) plays the man in the narrative. The songs about a couple that break up, and the guy stays on a street corner until he attracts the press so that the girl can see him on the news, and see how much she means to him. This is a good example of a strong narrative video.

Genre:

Our music video is a love story, with a slight twist. Most acoustic songs tend to be based around relationships, as the previous videos ive mentioned in this answer are. typical endings for love themed videos are either the couple getting back together, or the person singing the song moving on. From the videos I have looked at that's the outcome almost every time. We have taken the traditional Genre and developed it further. We decided that since our video at the end gets quite depressing, we would end it in a dramatic way. We went along with a lot of typical codes and conventions in other areas so we wanted something to set our video apart from others. Our video actually ends with the main male lead played by Jordon, killing himself.

Character/Star image:

Its incredibly common for The artist to star in their own music videos. Taylor swift plays herself in all her narrative videos, As does Ed sheeran And the same with Danny from the script. We obviously didn't have the singer of our song to be in the video, so we used Jordon and modelled a character around him. As I said earlier in the "Costume and props" section, we really didn't want our character to be anything special at all. The key to a good acoustic song and video is about the audience being able to relate to the song and the characters. Star image isn't something we considered to be too important, so in this aspect we have challenged the typical conventions.



Above is another Taylor swift video of which she stars in, further showing star image in music videos.

Representation:

Like many other acoustic videos our representation focuses on couples, both together and after breaking up. There are often very few characters in acoustic videos, mainly just 2 or 3. We chose to focus more on Jordon as the male character to show how males deal with break up situations, as a lot of the time the media (in general) focus on how women find break ups very difficult. Acoustic videos as a whole don't really have a particular group in mind when they think about representation. These types of videos normally represent a situation, and make it a lot more personal to themselves. In that sense we met the codes and conventions, we kept it down to two characters, whilst keeping the narrative personal.

Relationship between lyrics and video:

I think this is the most important aspect for any good music video, within any genre. The lyrics tell a story and we tried our best to show that story on screen. Some videos take the lyrics quite literally and show every single thing the song is about in detail, where others will be more general with it. We tried to generalise a little bit, keeping the main theme of the lyrics and carrying that throughout. The main difference is at the end of the video. For our song there is no set ending, it doesn't actually say that the character killed himself, but that's how we interpreted it. A lot of songs have ambiguous lyrics, and its down to the people creating the video decide exactly what those lyrics mean. This is an area where we developed typical codes and conventions, we kept a strong narrative to the lyrics, then made the ending our own to create a more moving and emotional piece.

Digipak:




This is the final digipak we made. We really strongly followed the codes and conventions for this, we had 6 panels allowing for a front and back cover, as well as inside covers and a spine. Most digipaks are themed according to the album itself something else we did here. Since the album has 2 halves, empty days and sleepless nights (as can be seen on the back cover) we designed it with that in mind. We made half of the design bright, with the sun and sky as a focal point, and the rest gloomy and dull. Not only did this match with the title but also the video we had made. We also had the same logo on the digipak as we used at the start of the video. Dikipaks are often themed around a specific characteristic of the album, in our case it was the fact its in two halves.


Website:

We strictly followed the codes and conventions for our website. Not only acoustic artists but all artists have the same things on their websites. Tours, Merch, Band bio, Music, News are all tabs that can be found on a bands website. Also when an artist releases new material in the form of a song or video, that's normally on the homepage of their website too. Our website homepage has our video on it, along with logo and tabs to everything you'd expect to find on a bands page.

Evaluation question 4

Camera in action

Camera

Tripod in action

Presentation been given using the Projector

Editing our music video in Premiere Pro

Digipak creation in Fireworks

Polishing the digipak using Photoshop

Lyrics to shots and movements on a Word document

Creating our ideas presentation using Powerpoint

Editing audio in audacity

Blogger site being used to document the project.

Google search engine

Researching Premiere Pro on YouTube

Evaluation Question 3

Evaluation Question 2

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




For our band's digipak, we used most of our own designed products and designs for our media film and digipak.


Logos and Digipak:


For the digipak, we designed a new album cover for the album "Empty Days and Sleepless Nights" using our ownimages and also a newly designed band logo, including screencaps from our own video onto the different panels of the digipak. Our logo also features on the opening of our music video to signify the band. Considering we asked the record label if we could use the song, to which they happily agreed, we thought it would be best to use their record label's (Bridge Nine Records) real logo. This features on the front, spine and back of the digipak.


The font for the logo is in a neat but handwritten font, somewhat similar to Defeater's actual logo. We thought this would be best to suit the theme of the video and also the whole album. Dom did it by hand and we scanned it onto the system, where we could use it in our digipak and the website etc. We feel it somewhat resembles the original logo (above) and gives off the same kind of theme to it.






We also created a logo for our own Media Productions, called CLDB Productions. This is somewhat similar to the Bridge 9 Records logo, as it appears simple and suits the simplistic kind of genre of the music. This allows the audience to authenticate between our logo and the ones Defeater and Bridge Nine records already use.




The Video


In the video we have kept to the story of the album itself; I Don't Mind is a song the lead character singing about his wife, who unfortunately died. We have added our own modern twist to it, using modern day clothes etc despite the album itself being set around World War II. We have kept a similar location as to what the lyrics portrays, such as the lake. We also have a lot of black and white parts in the video, which represent the depression the lead character feels after the death of his girlfriend.


The Digipak






Like the music video, we have added our own modern twist onto the album cover. The album cover is a photoshoppedpicture of the lake we filmed at, this again relates to the modern twist we put on the album. We have also included important aspects of the album and the music video, such as the train track and a much clearer shot of the lake, with the lead character looking out onto it. It repesents all of the main events not only in the album but in the music video for the song as well and we think they are the most significant parts. The main focus is the character and the events leading to his death which is why we fell it is much more important. In comparison to the old broken 1940's house on the original "Empty Days and Sleepless Nights" cover it is a much more modern aspect having the lake being photoshopped onto it as it represents a much more modern take on the album, which is more relatable to our target audience.

Final Website

To view the final version of the website Click Here

Final Video

DigiPak

This is the final and finished Digi-pak.

Digipak Creation

One of our tasks was to create a Digipak to go with our video. The Digipak is for an album of the band in which the song we used to create our video from is. We again looked at conventions and the branding of the band. The original bands website was a large influence to me when creating the look and style of the digipak. It's colour pallet contains mainly blacks and greys without almost any other colours being present. I started by looking into the sort of digipak we would use and then decided on this.

Once the type was decided the group gave their opinions on what should be placed where on the Digipak, with the following all being factors which needed to be included in the product.
- Defeater Logo
- Managing company's Logo (Bridge Nine)
- Album Name
- Song Titles
With the addition of Some lyrics and photo stills from our video, which was a design choice.

I started the creation by editing a still from the video. This was the front cover of the product.
To create cover art i took the still and changed the contrast, brightness and colour saturation. I then cropped part of the image and copied it, mirrored it and changed the transparency of all 4 images to create the background.
Then i asked a group member to write Defeater in a close yet different way to the current logo. The new logo was scanned onto the computer and a few small edits and cleaning was done to the image. For example the trailing part of the D was shortened and a few small white specks in the letters were blacked out.

Once this was done I placed the background onto the template and added the new logo, the bridge nine logo and the production company logo which was created by myself towards the start of the project onto the cover as well. The finished cover looks like this.

The song titles side was created by using a still from our shoot and making it very dark, mirroring it, cropping it and finally rotating the image. The text was then placed onto and both were added to the template. The disc holder side also uses the same image without the text, and the image was also flipped.

The remaining blanks in our digipak are filled with colour corrected and minor edited stills from our video. The train track image for example has had some blurring also done.






Quickly created mock ups were also done for some panels but I didn't further use any of them.

Website Creation

The first step of creating a website was to find a web editor which was easy to use. Myself and Lauren decided to use Wix due to its easy editing layout. First I imported the two different edits of the defeater logo then typed the names of the albums and prices in the side panel.
I added the image we created for our digipak and the cover art of the band previous songs. This is because the majority of similar websites did the same thing, as it helps cross sell products.
I added a background and navigation bar. I positioned the background so that the focus is around the centre of the page, to draw attention to the video.
Next I moved the navigation up to the top of the page like the codes and convention research had told me. I also placed the white logo next to the Home button up near the navigation bar.

The main feature of the websites home page is the embedded video because of this i imported the video and centred it.

The last image you can see the the live finished version of the website.