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.

The DTP work- Poster idea's and finished product.

Using the CD as a way to start the design, we established the dark colours theme, not wanting to use too many strong colours as a) It would look ridiculous and b) It wouldn't fit in with the same theme as we have trying to promote. Establishing such a style, we used black, white and red to stick to conventions and developed a black background with different coloured texts.

Thinking about certain Magazine's that would want to advertise the album, we ran through a list of suitable candidates,  finally choosing:

After picking the Magazine/Sites we imagined would give decent reviews for our album, we would edit on to the poster the social networking and advertising companies who are popular in the music industry, picking the three main companies:

We were going to use Myspace, but since it's popularity has dropped considerably over the years, we wondered if this would be the wisest mood, so we stuck to what we had originally planned.

Asking for feedback, it became apparent rather quickly that whilst the information of the poster was a good element, the poster itself looked very much as if it was made by students, and didn't have a very professional quality about it. So we set to work trying to create a much more stylized piece, and came up with this idea:

We wanted a particular style with this one, and it didn't exactly work as the headlight's were being rather awkward on photoshop, and would only allow us one, thus making the effect useless.

Other ideas that we toyed with our shown below, but for various reasons, like miss matched colours and contradicting styles, we decided to go no further than these inital ideas.

 

Storyboarding- The Narrative and Peformance

For the Narrative we decided to stick with a similar style and theme of the original video, but changing elements to represent a different story and not exactly copying the original idea. The idea for our narrative was to show a woman who had been mistreated by a man she had met in a bar, whilst the band is an influence around the bar parts, The woman is shown to be very much depressed and as a response, roams around the streets and town with no ambition or goal with what to do next. To display our ideas, I was asked to draw out a rough narrative to illustrate what was going on.

Here's the animatic of the final version of our storyboard:
(PUT IT HEREEEE.)

In edition to the narrative, we started the performance storyboard too. Knowing that we would need the style of the angles to be a certain way for our video, I watched a number of different music videos to try and adapt a theme for the video throughout, that ranged from radio-head to Arctic monkey's. The usual camera shots of  CU and Midshot's would all be featured, as they are what's to be expected, and the harsh zooms also would be shown  as they create a sense of cramped, claustrophobic atmosphere that I feel would be present in a music video of our particular theme (The song's subject.)

Performance storyboard here:
(HERRRRRRRRRRRE.)

The First filming session- Performance footage.

Promotional Package- The digipack

In order to complete our promotion of the Music video, as a group we would have to develop and produce a digipack for the band and a poster that would be suitable for a magazine advertisement.

This is a digipak:

Something a little more sophisticated than a normal CD, which are usually used for special editions of albums, or promotional LPD's. These sort of designs are a lot more fragile than the usual plastic covering, and can easily be ripped if not careful. As it stands today, a lot more bands are diving into the style of digipacks to help promote other sources, or to create a sense of artistic development.

As a first idea, I drew concept art that would lead to the ideas of how to establish a theme for the band, and to play around with their title to create a different meaning. The idea was to use silhouette's as a 'headlight' projection to form rabbit shapes, or human's represented as rabbits by their shadows. Using a white background, we would shine a powerful torch onto the image, which in itself would create shadows. These elements could be twisted to form artistic styles.

Another idea was to use Fliss's car headlights to shine directly onto the band against a wall, thus creating an actual Rabbit in the Headlights effect. But these stylized ideas were dropped in favour of a more conventional route.

Instead we looked at other Indie artists to find inspiration for a similar design:

Whilst the first style from the Artic Monkey's didn't match the idea we were going for, also including smoking band members, I decided to look out for the grayscale style that would suit Rabbit In The Headlights. Whilst the KC's cover looked rather boring in comparison.  The Killers seemed to be the most interesting, as they suited both our bands style and were still trying to be creative at the same time.

Digipack back cover and ideas.

 Today starting the digipack design, as a group we had to come up with a image we thought was suitable for the Indie theme that represented our group. I had a few pictures at home that I thought would fit this genre, and bringing them in, we decided which ones would suit the direction we were planning to take the covers.

For example these are some of the pictures:

Finally deciding upon a more urban outlook, we picked the street-shot as it seemed to represent the rather grubby feel that you would expect from our song-type and the street's theme of the band.

In Photoshop we got to work editing the image so that we could use it for the back of our CD.

To create the style we used the font Bell Gothic and using different layers to not make the piece look too crowded, we arranged the suitable track names into an order that we found compelling to the eye and would not cause any off-putting features. We also edited the cover with the use of the filter CUT-OUT to give a more stylized feel. Finally adding the usual items we see on everyday CD's like the bar code and the record company, we had finalized our idea for the finished product.

The design of the D&M logo came about after it was decided that the logo needed to be eye-catching, yet more or less simple so we do not distract the attention from the actual subject. As for the fact that this is an independent record company, we had to make it as recognisable as possible, but still held a professional image. 

For the rest of the digipack inserts, we looked at the actual performance footage and capturing certain shots, we applied effects that we believed would suit the theme, all eventually deciding on CUT-OUT as the best style.

Finally deciding on Cut-out, we used much more colourful shots of the footage that would contrast greatly with the rest of the black and white image.

(INCLUDE THESE SHOTS.)