Final Music Promo

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This is my A2 Media Studies blog.
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Thank you.

Olivia Sharkey
7201

Evaluation Q4. How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Evaluation Q.2 How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

The Written

The main purpose of our music promo and our ancillary texts was to advertise the artist and the album to the right target audience. Prior to the creation of this project, we made sure to carry out research and interviews for our target audience, so that we had a perfect understanding of what is required when producing a successful promo. Throughout our research, we discovered common iconography was used across all indie genres; the use of dark colours, referencing to nature and simplistic locations were used to combine the texts. We met these conventions in our texts by using black and white in our music promo and also in our digipak, while also continuing the eye catching colour red throughout all three texts. Another aspect that we noticed was that there was a common illustration that would appear throughout certain bands promos, for example, Ed Sheeran’s use of mathematical symbols throughout his advertisement, accompanied by the use of the colour orange; this is a clear relation to his ginger hair which is now associated with his colour theme. Futhermore, the use of the frequency waves for the Arctic Monkeys, the common illustration of the waves have now been made their own and are now associated with their band. We created synergy in our production by linking our promo with our ancillary texts in many ways, however I believe the most obvious connection was the red rose. The roses featured in every product in some way or another, the importance of the roses in our digipak was emphasised by the black and white effect which we applied to our star image, while keeping the flowers in a prominent red. This showed that the roses had more of an importance than our star image which conformed to the stereotypes of our indie genre, where you will find that they rarely feature the band on their front cover. The roses are the front panel for our digipak and also the whole magazine poster, the rose is a symbolic feature which represents the love between the couple, but also the notion of death as we watch the rose slowly decaying throughout the video. I think that using the rose enforced the xx’s recognition and gave the audience something to connect with; the use of this synergy helps the band identity sell the album and get the audience talking. Indie videos normally focus on the performance in a promo, whilst touching upon an interesting narrative to keep the audience interested. As you will see in our promo, we decided to keep the video primarily narrative based with conceptual aspects feeding into it; we kept the performance to a minimal by only featuring lip syncing without the feature of instruments. Challenging these conventions meant that we got to have our own twist on the band and also have the change of creating synergy through an inanimate object. We filmed in simplistic locations which we discovered was a key feature of an indie promo, this could be because of their low budget which they have to film with; we found this useful when it came to production as my partner and I also had a low budget. As for our magazine poster, I believe it is attractive yet informative and is clearly a part of the three production texts, this is obvious through the entire red theme and obviously the featuring of roses, to expose our conceptual theme, we decided to edit the photo of the roses onto our front cover and have the image against a white background. The white background reminds the audience of the male parts in the video and also brings a sense of simplicity to the panels as there isn’t much going on, meaning there is no chance for clashing colours. We used the same font across the two ancillary texts to create familiarity and recognition of the bands identity; this striking black font worked well to show the indie genre as it is quite edgy and not particularly bold.

Overall, the combination of our main product and ancillary texts are clear and attractive, its obvious there is a connection between the three as there are common themes which run throughout and the common mention of the roses helps.

Evaluation Q.3 What have you learned from your audience feedback?

We asked our target audience to meet with us to discuss our final music promo, to give us the opportunity to receive some valuable, critical feedback. The majority of feedback which we received was positive, however we were exposed to some comments on how to improve it which was particularly helpful.  Certain aspects of our music video appealed to our target audience, aged 17 - 24, for example, the conceptual appearance in the studio with our actor Joe was specifically enjoyed. This was popular because of the originality and the visual aesthetic which the projections onto the white screen deliver. On the other hand, we did get a clear understanding that the inaccuracy of our actress' lip syncing was rather prominent and obvious at points in the video; we agree that this is a fair point as this was one of the weaker parts which we also picked up on in the production stage of our promo.

What would you change if you had to complete this task again?

If I had the opportunity to restart this project, there are a few things which I would do differently. Firstly, I would make sure to allocate more rehearsal time for our actress so that she feels completely comfortable with lip syncing the lyrics and focus more on how she is moving her mouth clearly. However, after being told that the voice of the singer sounds too mature for the actress which we picked, maybe we would audition candidates that are a little older, just so we have a more diverse option to pick from. Another thing which I would possibly change is the constant snappy shots within the video, despite them working together nicely, we don't want them to come across too random or without context. Overall I am really proud of the piece that Delia and I produced.

Below are the audience responding to the music promo:

"I really enjoyed the video overall, the originality of your ideas intrigued me. The two actors looked really passionate about each other which made the video emotional. As for the timing of the music with the content of the video, I think it fit really well. Well done." Polly.

"The colouring of your promo really stood out for me, the bright colours in the beginning of the video really contrasted the black and white at the end and it worked significantly to portray the love loss between them. However, I do think that the male actor didn't have enough camera time, we didn't see much emotion from him, especially in the studio - actually that could be because she was your star image." Fred.

"The end part was my absolute favourite, with the shots of the roses. I thought the meaning behind the decaying plant was deep and you clearly portrayed it by showing the rose slowly decaying and fading into black and white. Even though this was spectacular, the timing could be seen as slightly off, if we are being picky." Tyler.

"Im going to start off with my only negative point, the footage of the rose could be seen as a bit grainy at times and also a bit shaky, however they are used nicely to signify love and also create the synergy between your ancillary. The shots of the swans were amazing, and when you reversed the shot it worked really well in time with the music." Isabelle.

We also received some more feedback over email:

Evaluation Q.1 In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Magazine Poster

Audience Response:

Sophie, 21. "It looks visually attractive and informative. It's very effective with the use of bold headings and use of red colour."

Josh, 19. "The XX is bold and eye catching; you can tell that its the band name as it jumps out at you with the white shadowing. I think including the singles is a good idea however it could be seen as a bit tacky."

Rosie, 24. "I don't like the white boxes at the bottom which are placed behind the track names, but i like the roses agains the white box. However, everything else looks really professional and slick; portraying the vibe which the album is going for."

Jack, 18. "The continuity of the rose appearance is a fantastic way of creating synergy, the red colour really stands out and helps connote the idea of love."  

2nd Draft

Due to a reoccurring comment from our audience feedback, we decided to remove the two white boxes which included the track names. We realised that it wasn't necessary and looked like a more professional advertisement.

Below are a selection of possible images to use in our magazine advertisement, they were taken with a Cannon 700D. Some rose petals were placed in a bowl of water to emphasise the saturation and purity of the red.

The Creation of our Digipak / The Inside Panel

The Inside Panel

Just like one of my favourite bands, The 1975, we took inspiration from their advertisement techniques and put this image in black and white, in order to create an edgy feel. However, our panel has a slight twist as it is not solidly black and white like other bands, we left the symbolic red roses in bright colour. By doing this we are making the audience think about the meaning of the flowers and also familiarising them with the repetition within our promo; this creates a sense of band/fan loyalty. The colour choices work well with our indie genre well and appeals to our teenage target audience of both sexes. We used Photoshop CS6 to edit this picture and it took about an hour to finalise; the photo was taken on the first day of filming in Eton. Tallulah being featured on the inside panel helps with promoting our star image without it primarily being about her; which is one of the reasons we kept her in black and white. We also didn’t select an image where she is looking straight at the camera, we discovered that most indie genre bands promote their lead singers in a subtle way, which I believe we conform to.

After we narrowed the images down to just two, we received a class vote which determined which one to use as the panel. We began the tedious activity of editing; in order to convert everything but the roses to a black and white effect we used the quick selection tool to select the roses. We then duplicated the original image and then cut around the black and white roses, revealing the coloured original roses.

For the final couple of adjustments, we lowered the brightness of the image to make it look as if we shot it at night time, thus linking to the music promo ‘Night time – The xx’

The Creation of our Digipak / The CD Panel

As you can see above, this is our CD panel for the disk part of our digipak. The continuous theme of the rose is featured on this as we discovered that after a few drafts, the circular shape of the rose fitted nicely with the disk template. As for the piercing red colour which catches your eye straight away, this is placed where the CD is going to be, to indicate where the rawest, vivid emotion is located. Originally we were going to keep the background a plain white colour, however after experimenting and playing with other pastel neutral backgrounds, we decided that the light blue colour compliments the rose best. The ‘sky blue’ tone fits with the theme of nature within our specific genre of indie rock. Again, we took a screenshot of a video which was taken of the rose in the decaying process for our promo, we just increased the contrast saturating levels in Photoshop to emphasise the shadows between the layers of petals, which makes the rose look extremely defined and visually attractive.

Firstly, we simply searched google images for the correct colour which we were interested in using for the background. We then dragged the photo from the website, into the application of Photoshop and created it as a new layer of our Digipak. As we were unaware of how to make all of the sides an equal size, we manually got a ruler and put it against the screen and took down the measurements. Later we googled how to do it within Photoshop, for next time.

Next step was inserting the picture of the rose. We chose the perfect screenshot and then took the lasso tool to remove any unwanted pieces of the image. Zooming in really helped to get into the tiny corners of the petals to make sure we have the cleanest image with no black background involved.

Below is the step by step process with screenshots.

The original image

The magic wand tool was used to automatically select certain parts to delete

The rose without the background 

The final piece!