A2 Media Studies Evaluation - How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

In m opinion, the combination of my main product and my ancillary texts is very effective. The design of the ancillary texts reflects the design and look of the video. Where the video is quite dark with glimmers of illuminous light, my magazine advertisement has a simple black background with Luke's illuminated face, which conveys the same themes and motifs as the video about glimmers of hope in the darkness of heartbreak.

As for my digipak, I went with a very retro and bleak design, which reflects the bleak feel of the video. The images of the beach, the rocks and the sea are taken from the same location that we shot the video, which our viewers will pick up on and identify with. This association of music video to CD design is an example of synergy. Viewers of the video will recognise it in the album and buyers of the album will recognise it in the video, meaning more consumers are coming in on both ends.

I think that using Luke's image as the main draw was effective, as he is the star of the video, featured most prominently, which Liam secondary. This is reflected in the advert, which features Luke's face lit up and no sign of Liam, and in the digipak, which features Luke at the forefront, with Liam featured in small doses throughout the digipak. They are a musical group called Omega, but with Luke as the frontman and most popular among viewers and listeners, he is featured the most in the advertising and ancillary texts. This is called good business.

I asked some students in my class if they would consider buying the album based on the advertisement and the digipak. These students are within our target demographic of working to middle class teenagers and nine out of the ten I asked said they would consider buying it. These are strong figures and I am confident I produced some effective ancillary texts.

A2 Media Studies Evaluation - What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Audience feedback is essential in discovering how successful a media production is as well as gaining information about how to improve the quality of it. The audience's response is the most important part as they are who the video is for the reason it was made in the first place, so their satisfaction is key. Interactivity with the audience is a great way to step back and see how the video looks from a third party perspective. This is not the only advantage, as there are many more:

• Increase knowledge retention
• Improve attentiveness
• Track individual response
• Confirm audience understanding of key points and narratives

The main way in which we gained audience feedback was face-to-face interaction with our target audience, young people aged 17-18 within our school who enjoy the pop music genre our video falls into. Their response was thus: "good use of locations," "loving the saturated effect," and "excellent use of angles, but change the font at the end of the song was quite jarring." We were very pleased with this feedback as it was overwhelmingly positive with very few negative comments to be made. However, the audience feedback still proved to be very helpful in reassuring us that the video we had made was good, but also alerting us to our boring font choice.

Without the audience feedback I would have kept the boring font, however, this exercise has given me and opportunity to take others opinions into consideration, and I agree with what was suggested. As another means of gaining valuable audience feedback I filmed two classmates immediately after they had watched our music video, to gain the instant first opinion. This didn’t give them much time to think about their answer, and so it would be a very basic yet concise answer singling out the main points which stood out for better or worse. 

Another way I gained information about my product was by uploading my Music video up on YouTube, an Internet site where four billion people worldwide, according to 2016 statistics, view videos every day. I then waited a week and checked my YouTube video page discovering that 150 people had viewed my music video. To get more in-depth information I clicked on “insight” on the YouTube page and I found that people tend to loose attention after 1:31 minutes which could suggest there is a necessity for more engaging content or perhaps shorter videos to accommodate shorter attention spans.

I believe that there are many benefits of asking individuals as I received a concise and straight to the point answer. However, the group identified weak points within my music video and offered a solution which was far more advantageous. We chose to film our classmates as this enabled us to conform to our target audience of teenagers. After receiving the feedback, I have learned that our target audience is very pleased with the music video as it adheres to most of the pop stereotypes. Furthermore, I have had much praise about the editing and flow of the music video,” even being acknowledged as “like a real music video.” The feedback which I have studied is very pleasing and promising emphasising that our music video is more than acceptable to be categorised in the pop genre.

A2 Media Studies Evaluation - How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

We used media technologies in the research stage, as I created an account on Survey Monkey and used the website to make an online survey in which the survey takers are asked what their gender and favourite genre of music are, and whether they regularly watch music videos. The information gathered in this survey was invaluable in the decision-making process for our own music video, as it gave us a clear idea of who was watching these videos, what their gender demographic was, and what genres they enjoyed.

Of those who responded to my survey, 40% were male and 60% were female, a near 50/50 split, meaning we would have to make a music video that would appeal to both a male and female audience, in order to cover all the bases. On the question of whether or not they watch the music videos, 100% of the survey takers answered ‘Yes,’ showing that music videos have universal appeal and a wide audience, giving us the freedom to choose what to do, rather than tailoring it to a certain demographic. The favourite music genres widely varied, as 20% of the survey takers responded to rock, 20% to pop, 20% to house, 20% to electronic, and 20% to classical, which shows that every genre has its own audience and that whatever we choose will find its own audience. We chose “Shine” by Years & Years due to its blending of two genres (electronic and pop) and its appeal to both a male and female audience, thus reaching the widest audience possible with the video.

We used the video sharing website YouTube to view real music videos from such artists as Years & Years, whose song we were doing the video for, Jess Glynne, Coldplay, and Bombay Bicycle Club, to get some ideas of the conventions of music videos in this genre, and for shots we could use in our own video.

We didn’t actually use the camera offered to us by the school. Instead, we used Paddy’s camera which his older sister gave him upon completing her own Media Studies course with it, as his has a larger lens with a better zoom function that doesn’t distort the picture quality during a zoom. It also has a greater resolution than the ones available at school, so it made sense for us to use his instead. DSLR is typically used for taking photographs, but it has a video recording function and it worked out great for us. There were numerous other features which we decided utilise down the road, such as the ability to reduce the shutter speed. This would increase the light exposed to the shot, and give us Abrams’ signature lens flare, so we used that as a nod to the geek behind The Force Awakens. If we have one concern, it’s that the zoom is manually controlled using the lens, rather than an automatic zoom, so some zooms were not be as smooth and became jumpy, though in some cases we found a way to use that to good effect in the vein of the gritty, choppily edited Jason Bourne franchise.

Our tripod was quite basic, with no enhanced features, but it did as required and stabilised the camera during the steadier shots. We can also move the camera with a handle, which depends on the steadiness of the user’s hand. This handle can be set tighter or loose for handling, but if the user has shaky hands, the movements aren’t going to be smooth.

We used the dolly briefly as a way of increasing the height and manoeuvrability of the tripod. Dollies are very expensive bits of kit, so we couldn’t provide our own and had to borrow one from school. The use of the dolly, a platform on wheels, was to help diversify our choice of shots, which it did as it allowed us to do otherwise complicated, smooth tracking shots.

This year has seen the introduction of a new piece of equipment we’ve never used before, an artificial lighting rig, which allows us to film in the dark and still see the focal point of the shot (in our case Luke’s face). So far we’ve seen huge improvements. The project looks overall much more professional. We had lighting problems in the dark during our previous project last year, as we relied on limited sunlight and the focus of the shot was often missed, causing further complications and a lack of professional appearance to the film. This new project looks a lot better thanks to this lighting rig - as well as this one missing my poor acting skills.

We edited with Final Cut Pro X, which is a popular film editing software amongst independent filmmakers. Also, a number of major Hollywood productions have been edited using Final Cut Pro, including: The Ring (2002), Jarhead (2005), 300 (2007), No Country for Old Men (2007), Burn After Reading (2008), The Social Network (2010), and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011), the latter two winning the Academy Award for Best Film Editing.

A2 Media Studies Evaluation - In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? Does your video meet or challenge conventions of music videos?

Our music video both conforms to and subverts the various tropes and conventions of typical pop music videos. We used a closed structure as it is a convention of music videos and it is more satisfying for the audience to have closure. It is ambiguous in the sense that we don’t know where this boy is going with his life next, but we have the clear, definitive end to the story and closure as we know he has moved on from the breakup of his relationship.




Laura Mulvey talks about the male gaze in the media. We challenge the representation of women in music videos. My research shows that 44%-81% of music videos contain sexual imagery. Women are far more likely than men to be presented in provocative or revealing clothing and sexually objectified, often through imagery linked to the sex industry, such as pole/lap dancing. We subvert this convention by having a fully clothed female character presented in a completely non-sexualised way. However, our female does not do any of the singing and is not shown to have any musical ability whatsoever. Women in music videos are frequently portrayed as decorative objects that dance and pose and do not play any instruments.




According the 1999 Children Now report, the majority of male characters in the media are heterosexual, associated with the world of work, and hide their emotions. While we adhere to the convention of the heterosexual character by showing his relationship with a female as well as another male-female romantic relationship, we challenge the other two as our lead protagonist has no association with work during the video and opens up to put his emotions on full display.




Our video adheres to Marx and Gramsci’s idea of hegemony involving the domination of a culturally diverse society by the ruling class, who manipulate the culture of that society, as we feature white characters in a society where other races are still minorities and therefore whites are dominant.




Todorov’s narrative theory dictates that every narrative must follow this structure: equilibrium is disrupted, the characters recognise the disruption and attempt to fix it, and in the end, there is a new equilibrium in place. Our video contains all of the stages of Todorov’s theory, albeit edited out of order for a nonlinear structure. The story begins with the equilibrium of a boy in a relationship with a girl, the disruption is the girl having an affair, the recognition is the boy catching them in the act, the attempt to repair is a conversation between the two to try and work through their issues, and the new equilibrium is the boy having moved on from his girlfriend and happy with the way things worked out. We used this structure because audiences are accustomed to it and comfortable with those kinds of stories.




Vladimir Propp developed a theory about characters in media texts that suggest there are seven broad character tropes in all of the stories he studied. There are: the villain who struggles against the hero; the donor who prepares the hero or gives the hero some kind of magical object; the helper, possibly with magical powers, who helps the hero in the quest; the princess, the person that the hero marries, often sought for during the narrative; the false hero who is perceived as good character in beginning but later emerges as evil; the dispatcher who makes the lack known and sends the hero off; and the hero, also known as the victim, the seeker, the paladin, or the winner, who reacts to the donor, weds the princess, and struggles against the villain. Our video adheres to three of these tropes. Our main protagonist is the hero, the girlfriend who cheats on him is the villain, and the other boy she has the affair with is the helper in a way, because he helped to set the protagonist on the path to true happiness and helped him to realise he’s better off without a partner who is going to cheat on him.

Magazine ad

This is an advertisement I designed for a magazine, promoting Omega's album "Hello Yesterday," containing the song from our video, "Shine." I went with a very simple, black-and-white design showing Luke with a troubled look which I think is emotionally resonant and will play to our target audience who appreciate the work of troubled, emotionally tortured artists.

Digipak - mid-back cover

 



This panel goes in the middle of the back of the digipak

Digipak - lyrics panel

 

 



This is the lyrics panel, containing all the lyrics to the song "Shine" from our music video