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

To create our course works final products we used a number of media technologies.

Using Adobe Premiere Pro to edit the footage we had filmed on Canon DV camera and occasionally using a tripod for scenes that needed much more work, like the narrative scene which in order to look even slightly effective, would have to be still and professional.

We decided against the use of a HD camera, as the Adobe couldn't handle the frame rate and struggled to even render properly. Even without the HD, the camera preformed remarkably, and at certain times you could only tell the slightest of differences. For the live performances we didn't use the Tripod, as the scenes were needed were a lot more flexible, and were hard to retrieve from a fixed point.

Mentioning using Adobe Premiere Pro on the actual music video to edit our footage and to tweak the sound and to add the effects we wished to use on the footage. This program gave the best results when editing the video because it is a flawless and easy way to produce a video that had similar quality to what we were looking for. There were different timelines in the program to enable us to change certain elements of the footage, like an audio for the soundtrack and other places to post footage to sync.

Using Adobe Photoshop to edit the Poster and digipack was a useful way to create detailed and good examples of our chosen genre. Whilst it isn't the most up to date version, it still gives the results we require in order to make a obvious difference in the quality of work. This gave us great effects to work with, and helped us in all our promotional packaging.

Finally what technologies we used fro research was mainly the internet as it is a useful tool for searching up information you probably wouldn't be able to find in books or magazines. The search engine I mainly used was Google, as it is much more efficient in finding exactly what you need, unlike Bing which tends to give you   nothing more than one search that relates to the topic.

Also the other site we mainly used was YouTube, which is a very handy site to find old music videos or research, especially in the music department, for current trends, interviews and other information in the video form. Any of the public has access to thousands of music videos that we can thankfully take advantage of with our research.

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

From the audience feedback I have learnt that whilst promoting material like a music video to be analysed isn't always going to get you accurate or reliable results.

From Chloe's forum, we can see that some effort has been made to critique our work. It's a decent paragraph explaining how much they enjoyed the film . It's nice that the review also understands the  genre of our project, which is helpful to give an accurate interpretation.

Mentioning that they like the infusion of colours clips was a helpful, as we were hoping that would be one of the key features that would make the music video stand out. By suggesting this was good, it proves that our decision was right to add colour to match the Artic Monkey style.

On Deviantart on the other hand, nothing useful ever came about, apart from a favourite, and many views. Whilst people have bothered to look at the post, there hasn't been a single comment, suggesting that sites for Art work aren't as useful as social media.

The exposure on other websites hasn't done too well either. It would seem that their is a lack of enthusiasm for such reviews, when a little bit of thought processing is required. At least we know others have viewed the video, but again such information isn't useful if you have no statement to back it up. Overall, using social media sites is much more efficient than using sites for specific function, like art of photography.

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

Whilst the major elements of the products are effective, we had to at points choose our own designs as we didn't need a carbon copy. The small things like the colour of the fonts helped with this decision to at least get some form of variation. Thankfully our main video was effectively matched with our other texts as they were similar in style and were generally looking for and the genre. 

  

If we didn't match all the pieces together, I doubt it would have made much sense in a sort of advertising perspective, as when most bands or labels wish to sell a product, a similar theme must be present in order to relate to the original bands image so they know exactly what the are buying. Usually a band would have their own style of font or image to represent them, for example:

In order to effectively combine all our final products, we needed the same recurring themes and styles in order to recreate the same technique other bands would achieve.

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

My media product develops the many forms of the Artic Monkey's style by imitating shots from the original source videos like Brianstorm and as the Sun Goes down. We also looked at real examples of effects used within the project and set about developing our own ideas through these examples. For the Digipack and poster, again we looked back at examples of previous work to give us an indication to what would look compatible with the genre.

 

The use of locations within the Artic Monkey's narrations usually consist of some sot of urban background relating to the topic. For our own music video we developed a similar idea, using a back alley and Pub in response to the theme of the song 'As the Sun Goes Down'.

For the Poster, the examples of the other Artic Monkey's products weren't as exact as our own, so we both developed and challenged how a poster can be seen in the Brit Indie genre by still using the Black and White like most examples, but including elements of colour that would give it an interesting edge.

Finally the actual album cover was originally planned to go along with the same conventions as other albums, but it was eventually decided that the Poster should really reflect the album, as it would help promote the same image and keep it memeorable.

Final Products

The final peices of the course are reflected as such,  with the final cut of the video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aa2eU4gvoY0&safe=active


The Digipack as a whole:

And The final poster that after many alterations has turned out exactly as we would have wanted:

 

 

Promoting the Music video

Compared to other members of our group, I have very limited resources when trying to show our music video, as I use similar sites to Chloe, but I can talk about how we used Youtube to hold our video. As the most popular site for sharing video's, it seemed like the most reasonable thing to when confronted with how we should promote it. By placing our music video on the site, it is open to millions of other viewers who could be experiencing or know exactly the sort of talent that is out there, and give us some decent feedback.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aa2eU4gvoY0

To promote the video further, I took Chloe example of using Deviantart as I have my own account and promoted her journal link through my favourites so that other people could see it against my favourited artwork. This way, instead of just sending it as a journal post, people are able to see it through other artwork, so it would probably be more accessible.



















http://otherbuttonjones.deviantart.com/

Final Poster idea.

After looking through certain styles, and changing around the image of over CD cover, we realised we should try a different technique, by using the actual album cover as the whole poster. So, following a more professional image, we fiddled around with Photoshop and ended up with a decent attempt:

To make it look more appealing, I photoshoped a little bit of the window to make it bigger, changing the quirky font and making it seem more natural. Now we had space to add the advertisements (excluding Kerrang as after a discussion, we realised they are more focused more on metal and not exactly indie like we were trying to portray, so swapped it for NME.) Staying with the same colours, this helped to keep a similar theme running, as we didn't want to make the poster look too 'out-there'. Re-adding Itunes, Twitter and Facebook to finally create a more effective poster. The Feedback this time was a lot more positive, and we decided to keep with this as our final product as we had finally met the target audience.