EVALUATION PT4

Using new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages was important as we really wanted to get as much detail as we could into the video.

Researching the different conventions of a music video was very important but also looking at the CD covers and the advertisement posters that came with it as a package was really key for us to succeed and make a product that was clear to our audience and that had a continuity in all areas.

Using things like youtube was perfect for us as we could watch any pop videos that we wanted including the song that we had chosen for ours, and pick out all of the conventions that we though where key. we also could use google to search for images of the CD covers and Promotional Posters for the artist of choice. The internet was a major player for us in the beginning as without it, it would have been very challenging for us to source all of the research we required. We used Itunes to get the track for the video its self and we used social networks to gain an audience and receive feedback!

We could also use the internet to create a facebook group for this production and this was a really easy and quick way to gain an audience and have them watch and feedback directly to us! Facebook is one of the biggest social networks on the internet and this was a really big factor for gaining audience feedback! Thinks like YouTube as i mentioned before where very useful in the research stages but also useful to us during post production as I posted the finished Music video onto YouTube and then posted a link to the facebook group so all of our friends and peers could watch the video and give us feedback to what they thought!

EVALUATION PT2.

Evaluation Pt 2

EVALUATION PT2

The way we have designed our main media product means that our target audience is girls in the age bracket of 11- 18 and this meant that when designing our ancillary products we had to take that into mind and make sure that our design revolved around that audience. The music video its self is very playful, fun and girly, we show ‘girl power’ through the narrative clips throughout the video and this addresses the target audience really well. But in the ancillary we don't have the power of video to get the message across, so we made sure that all of the photos we used would still be able to convey the message and speak to the audience with the same strength as the music video. We used costume and Photoshop to make all of the pictures bright girly and strong! For the CD cover and booklet we assigned each member of the band with a colour as this would give each of us an individuality but still maintain the unity of the band. We set up a simple picture using a chair against as modern backdrop and we each took it in turns to have a picture on the chair. I used Photoshop to add in the bright coloured text to match everyone's individual outfits. These individual photos where all used in main booklet and had everyone's lyrics that they sing in the song written out by their photo... This is another good way to link directly to the music video. The main cover for the CD was done once again in Photoshop and I managed to get all of our individual images and edit them together to create a group shot. I then added in ‘THE SUNDAYS’ to the bottom of the picture with all of the colours in the text. All though we didn't have individual colours for our outfits in the music video we could use dancing and narrative to appeal to the audience. So using colour in the pictures was the wisest choice for us as we had to keep the girl power message strong and make sure that we didn't loose the point of the song.

EVALUATION PT1

Evaluation Pt 1

EVALUATION PT3

This is a target audience member and this what shew thought of our music video. We have learned a lot from our target audience and they have really helped us along the way we have created our facebook page and this has provided us with plenty of feedback on our first edits and our ancilary tasks. I have a previous post that explains what our audience said about of rough cuts and our ancilary tasks! and what we could do to improve and change things!


Our final video has had really good feedback and everyone we expected to like it, loved it! we have deffinatly adressed our target audience. We used the right narrative, the right costume and the right setting. We made sure that we adressed all of the feedback that was given to us and we made sure that we could change the appropriate sections of the video, to make the audience totally happy.

THIS IS THE FINAL MUSIC VIDEO FULLY EDITED AND READY FOR RELEASE.

This is the Photoshop document with all of the finished Pictures for the CD cover and booklet inside. I managed to edit everything together and I think I have created a very flowing almost uniform look to the booklet. I used the bright fonts through out and made sure that all of the writing was in the same font throughout! I brightened all of the photos to make the coloured tops we were all wearing really pop out of the page!

FEEDBACK

WHAT THEY THOUGHT
After leaving up our rough cut on the facebook group we have managed to accumulate some feedback from our peers and it has been very useful to us as now we have moved onto the final edit we have managed to radically change what we are conveying in the video. we now have ideas for a narrative section and a new location for the dance routine!! The feedback we got was all relativly the same and referred back to the simillarty of the shots and little variety that was in the video we have obviously adressed this issue in the final cut as we deffinatly dont want to have a video that people find boring to watch!

NA NA NARRATIVE

NARRATIVE SECTION
Soooooo we have realised by reveiwing our rough cut that we have no hint to a narrative to the video and this does make it very linier and feel almost boring and very 'I know what is coming next' so we have decided to really bluckle down and have come up with a simple set up that we cab fil and slot into the video which will add to the veiwing content but also make the video feel like it is actualy going somewhere!
We have decided to go and find a guy who will probably just be a friend from media! The whole aim of this set up is to convey 'girl power' we will tie the guy to a chair and have him blindfolded, we will then come up to the camera and show close up shots of different jars labeled with things like- chocolate, jam and syrup, we will then add discusting things to them like- salt and coffee and make him eat them! this will make us look like we have the power and no guy could mess with us or tell us what to do!!

THE FINAL SCHEDULE

MONDAY 8TH- Book the studio for the photoshoot for steph on the tuesday, Then book it for the friday the 11th for the photoshoot for the CD cover
FRIDAY 11TH- Filming everything all costumes and locations, and do photoshoot for the CD cover
WEDNESDAY 16TH- Begin the final edit!!!

CONSTRUTION

WHATS WORKING WELL
-We are really working well and pulling together as a group we are having a blast doing this project which is good as if we didnt get on it would be hard to complete this!
-We have had some really good feedback on our rough cut from our peers, they said that we had a really good structure to the video and they said that our dance routine was really good.
-We have sucsessfully come up and finished our dance routine and managed to use it in our video
WHAT NEEDS TO BE IMPROVED
-We need to film in a wider range of locations to show a little more variety in our video as we only have one location for the dance routine and it gets a little boring.
-We have to work on meeting the deadlines and not freaking out and rushing near the end.

FINAL ROUGH CUT VID.

THE FINAL ROUGH CUT!!!

So we managed to all sit down as a group and finsh roughly editing the video this gave us the chance to reveiw footage and gave us the opportunity to see what needed refilming and so on. We put together a rough cut of the video and this let us think about the structure and where the unfilmed narrtive sections where going to be placed. above you can watch the whole rough cut of the video. We also uploaded it to the facbook group to provide our audience and peers to watch and comment and for us to gain posotive and negative feedback.

RISK ASSESMENT 2

When we are doing our photoshoot we will need to be carefull and aware of the risks involved when doing this.

Risks involved when doing our photoshoot could include:-

-If we have any wires on the floor that we are using we need to make sure that no one trips over them and inguries themselves.

-If weare taking photos outside we need to make sure we bring a umbrella to cover the equipment and ourselves from the rain.

-Being aware of hot lamps and lighting and not going to near as there is a risk of burning.

We need to be aware of risks and do as much as we can to lower the risk of ourselves and others getting hurt by taking the nessicary precations needed to preven these risks from becoming a reality.

What different groups of people do you have in your genre?

The genre that me and my group are following to create our music video is 'Pop' and involves young women singing, dancing around dressed quite provoctively. The genre involves the girls in the music video looking sexy and seductive, although in the genre it does not only involve using women by male characters can also be used to represent the 'Pop' genre. In this genre when using male characters to respresent the genre by having the male characters looking quite attractive, clean looking and stylish.

What are the common stereotypes?

The common stereotypes of girl bands are girls dressed very stylish and trendy clothing and wearing a lot of make up. In the media today we see a lot of news and stories about girl bands doing bad things or getting in trouble. Girl bands such as 'Girls Aloud' and 'The Saturdays' have been seen to be quite troublesome but are conventionally very good dancers. All the female and male artists in this convention seemed to be very well groomed, always being up to date on the fashion and wearing a lot of designer clothing.However, in their photoshoots or in their music videos they can be airbrushed which gives a false perception of who they are and how they truely look.

Are they traditional or modern respresentations?

In the meida, it is a traditional representation in the media of females more so than males, because women were seen as 'House wifes'. This meant women having to stay at home, keep the house clean, cook and look after the husband as well as their house. However, over a long period of time the typical image of a women has changed, this is due to the moving of the times where women now dress showing a lot more flesh and look more provoctive rather than covered up.The Pop era was that ultimately in the 90's where bands such as 'The Spice Girls' and 'Steps' were created and made a huge hit and the image of women began to change. This was a turning point for the media as women where seen from a different perspecitve.

MOCK UP

ANCILLARY TASK 1

As part of our ancilary task we have to create an ''advertisement to appear in a magazine advertising our new song/ product.'' The advertisement has to be appealing, catchy and include a clear message of the product we are tring to advertise. As a group we had a big ideas session and came up with the idea of having each of the member of the band in a different costume to respresnt our song 'Work'. By having the girls dressed up in their work outfits to represent our song we thought would be a creative idea and would show to our audience that we are creative and unique to other existing girl bands. The costumes we have choosen are; A receptionist, a policewomen, lifeguard and a builder. We wanted the outfits to be suitable yet still give that femine, sexy and stylish look to them, which is one of the common conventions we are trying to stick to! Above you can see the rough mock up I have created for the magazine advertisment using the photo we took as a group, with us all in costume!

FACEBOOK

Nicole created a group on a large social networking site, which is used by all of our peers and our target audience! Facebook was a good way to get audience feedback and keep all our work together because it means that a wide variety of people are allowed to view, comment and like our work and give us feedback on improvements. The facebook group has been a major help for us to get audience feedback, as we can upload videos and images we have filmed and photographed and ask our audience if they like it and if there is anyhthing that can be imporved. It enables us to get our audience involved and keep them up to date on our project. Audience feedback is very important when producing a product because the product has to appeal and be aimed at them, so to have a website/ group where an audience can go and leave them thoughts wants helps them to express to us what we need to include in our product to satisfy their wants and needs. We recently uploaded a photo of us dressed up for one of ancillary tasks and are awaiting audience feedback for it.

SHOOTING THE VIDEO

WHEN AND WHERE
As a group we have all decided to organise photoshoots and filming shoots for parts of the music video and the ancillary tasks every week, preferbly on a Friday, as this is the one day a week where we are all free all day and have media in the afternoon. We started taking pictures, creating designs and setting ourselves a plan on when we were going to finish our music video and begin the editing process. Our shooting schedules for each week vary depending on if all of the members of our group as free. Our next shoot for filming and photographs is; 'Friday 4th March 2011' during this time we are going to make sure our ancilary tasks are complete, most of the footage is done and focus mainly on editing our final footage to make sure we complete our practical on time and to the highest standard. We have begun to experiment with the edting structure of our video and have completed a rough cut with rough footage to see what the video could look like.

BRANDING

UNDERSTANDING
We have to create and market our self as a brand otherwise we wont have created a promotional package that is right for marketing.
It is important for us as a band to portray ourselves as a posotive and good image so that we can appeal to our audience in the right way. We have branded our band 'The Sundays' and we are making sure that we have a good image and that we show off all good things in our music video. We have to give off a good vibe as a girl band and make sure that we can give a good message out to our audience and as brand be marketable, we have taken great time and detail into thinking out all of cotumes and our looks to make sure that we give off a good vibe and message.

COSTUMES

OUTFITS
These are a few of the outfits we will be using, The black dress and the red dress are both from the music video shoot and the builders outfit is for one of our ancillary tasks. The ancillary task we will use this for is the magazine advert single page spread advertising our single to the public! We all chose a proffession to dress up as Nicole is a receptionist, Steph is a doctor, Daisy is a police woman, I am a builder and Megan is a lifeguard. We will set up a set in the photography studio and do a group photo of us all, we thought this would be a clever choice of costume as the song we have created a music video for and are promoting is called 'Work'

COSTUME PLANNING

THE VIDEO
During the music video we will all be in a range of different outfits as we want to show a range of looks in the video and 'The Saturdays' also use a range of different outfits in their music videos. It is a common convention in mainstream music videos that the artist/ band will wear two or three looks and this creates more interest and can help with the narrative of the video.
We have three different outfits in our video and therefore three different looks for our audience to see. The first outfit in the video is all black, we all wore cute dresses, tops, leggings and skirts but we where all in black. This created a sense of unity at the start and made us look like a group. The all black look was really effective and made us all look like we where all wearing the same! The black look was used forthe main group shots of the song and the dance routine.
The next outfit in the video was coloured dresses and jumpsuits, We all wore different dresses and jumpsuits in different colours and bright patterns so we could all stand out as our own individual characters. We used these outfits for our single shots for each of our verses. we also used the outfit for the second location group shots where we all walk across the zebra crossing.
The final outfits are plain vest tops and skirts and shorts, thes outfits are for the narrative part of the video, when we have a boy character and we tie him to a chair and tease and taunt him. We chose these outfits because they are plain and we didnt want to have on clothes that drew the attention away from the story line of the scene.

ROLES

EVERYBODYS JOB
As we are working in a group we have an advantage of splitting up the work load between us and each taking different roles to make the production run a lot smoother. The roles are as follows-
Everyone
- Performing in the music video as a band member
- Filming different camera shots and movements
- Editing part of the music video
Daisy
- Reasearch and preparation for ancillary tasks
- Genre reasearch
Nicole
- Created the facebook page
- Got audience feedback
Issy
- Designs for ancillary tasks
Steph
- Created storyboards
With everyone doing these different tasks we managed to complete them a lot quicker than we would have done if we'd have taken each on one at a time.

ROUGH CUT

THE FIRST MINUTE
This is a link straight to nicoles blog where we uploaded our first edited section of our music video.

AUDIENCE

We created our video with a specific audience in mind,our target audience will be for a wide range of people but wont really aim for really young people or really old people!. The age for our target audience can range from 14- 36 as pop is the genre that any range of age can listen to. Our particular song and video is set for a audience of teenage girls ranging from the age of 11-25. The girls would be into fashion and make up as that is a main convention of our video and we want to be able to really apeal to the audience we know will be watching this video. When our audience have finished watching the video we want them to feel as though they admire the clothing and make up that we are wearing, and reallly want to aspire to look like us and be luike us as thats what a good girl band really acheives from their audience. We want the target audience to feel like they really have been able to relate to what they are watching and enable them to feel as though it could have been them dancing in the video and attracting the attention of the opposite sex (boys!). Another aim of our video is to make the viewers want to get up and dance with us and learn the routine we perform we made sure that we show thr routine a lot during the video so we made the moves accessible for people to learn, so therefore they are not to complex to copy. We want the audience to feel sexy as they dance to the choreography so it is important that that is how we come across to the the target audience.Audience engagement.In order to engadge our audince we must keep them entertained in what they are watching. This means that no shot should go on too long as that can give the audience chance to get bored with what the are watching. The shots need to be quite choppy and include lots of visual light and camera angles to make it more interesting. The music in the video is quite choppy in the beat and pretty fast in tempo, this means that the video and dancing must be simular to it and cohere with the tempo of the song.

ANCILLARY TASK DESIGN

ANCILLARY TASK RESEARCH

SUCSESSFUL ADVERTSING
The 'Got Milk' campaign is one of the most famous advertising campaigns and many famous faces have apeared with the trade mark milk moustache. This advert is not only really sucsessful but is really simple and we can easily create a picture just like this for our campaign! we have realised that we dont have to have a complex, and really crazy picture for our campaign so we have planned our photoshoot using a black backdrop, and three plain chairs whith balloons and ice cream as the only props we need and outfit wise we will all bewearing plain vest tops with a plain pair of denim shorts. Using a simple program like photoshop will enable us to get a proffessional look to our photo's and we wont need to worry about editing the pictures too much!

RISK ASSESSMENT

When filming we do come across certain risks that we need to adress and make sure we try and avoid or prevent.
- One of our locations was on a zebra crossing, we made sure that to keep the risk factor down we picked a zevra crossing on a quiet road which was rarely used by cars we also made sure that we had a clear veiw of the road whilst filming so that we could be aware if any cars came our way and we would have time to movw onto the pavement.
- Another risk for filming outside is if bad weather strikes, for example wind and rain we would have to ensure that we protected the camera and other equiptment and that we watched our footing as the rain can make the ground slippery.
- When we where charging the camera whilst filmingtracking shots we had to make sure that we had one person oppererating the camera and another member of the group holding the wire to prevent tripping over and hurting either your self or damaging the camera.
- Another location that we had chosen to film at was a flight of concrete steps outside, and this brought a lot of risks to attention such as, Slipping over in the rain, falling down the stairs and triping over whilst filming the dance! we made sure that we where very careful whist filming and eliminated any hazards that may cause one of use to trip up!

After going through all the risks involved in filming we now know that we will be much safer whilt shotting the music video. And hopefully we have done enough to prevent all the risks from happening.

FILMING... SECOND TIME LUCKY

THE WHOLE SHABANG!

Today we will all be attempting to film the whole of our video or at least 90% of it! as we have everyone here... everyone being- Me, Steph, Nicole, Megan and Daisy.We have all day to do this and we have to do all the single shots for the verses, the single shots in a different location, the group shots dancing for the chorus and the group shots on the zebra crossing! We have all brought our many ourfits for the video and this mean that we can hopefully just film everything, then change and film everytrhing and then change and film everything. We have had to make a few changes to the locations for today as we dont have the photography white backdrops to hand we are having to improvise with a plain whit wall that is just as good! we also have been told that the stage wont be a possibility as there exams on and we realised that the video may look a bit awfullon a school stage so we have found a large space with white walls, a plain floor and lots of space to dance! We have made these changes to the location and hopefully this wont affect the videos overall outcome!

GENRE

HOW USEFUL IS THE CONCEPT OF GENRE IN YOUR WORK?
The concept of genre is very important when it comes to media as when it comes to my practical production of creating a music video for the saturdays song 'work' we have to able to research codes and conventions.
Rick Altman disagrees with the importance of codes and conventions as he thinks that if you stick to them ten everything is too predicatable but in atguement to that theorist audiences dont really like to be suprised by things, as most people select what they watch on TV for instace. some people might choose to watch a thriller as they like that genre of film and they have seen a trailer which portrays a film as a typical trailer but when they go and see it there isnt any of the typical thriller conventions in the film and it ends up being really disapointing as, as an audience we expect things and if we dont see them we get disapointed!
We have managed to defy coventions in our music video for our media production as we do agree with challengeing some predictable elements of the traditional girl band genre but we want to stick to most of the typical expectations as we dont want the audience to be disapointed.
In conclusion genre is one of the most important elements when it comes to audience and without it you wouldnt be able to furfill the audiences expectations and wishes for film, music and TV!!!!