In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Firstly, we selected a song, this was done from a website which called Jamendo. This website has songs that were sung by unsigned artists, and from this website we heard Allison Crowe's 'Lisa's Song.' as soon as we heard the song we all decided that this is going to be the song for our music video. Because we had a specific target audience and the song is from a pop genre, we knew that there were certain conventions that we would have to put in, because we wanted the audience to be able to relate to the music videos.
After we decided the song and were all happy, we did a brainstorm of a stereotypical female Pop artists, we focused on Kelly Clarkson, Leona Lewis, Taylor Swift, Cheryl Cole, etc). we did this so that our initial ideas would meet the conventions of a real pop media product. We specially focused on the above female artists, so that we could gather ideas on props, costume, make up and locations. In the music video we decided to concentrate on Jessica (our actress) and not on a guy. So we replaced the guy with a photograph to give the audience a better narrative and understanding of the music video. we also decided not to use a guy for the video, because we felt that since this was Jessica York's debut single we wanted the sole focus on her and her different emotions. Typical locations had to be used to follow the conventions of a pop music video. As a group, we decided that all the locations would include a bedroom, by the canal side, in front of a house, against a black backdrop, at a piano.
Although our actress Jessica was a friend and we knew she was reliable, we wanted an image that would suit the voice of our song, and hers did! She also looks a little older than eighteen which was perfect, because the character of Jessica York that we had created was in her twenties.
How effective is the combination of your main product and the ancillary texts?
As a group we decided that it was important that there is a link between the music video, the digipak and the magazine cover. We experimented with colours and photo shot a picture of Jessica in an Asda car park in front of a tree, this was for the magazine cover. The link between all three were the colours which were a combination of black, white and green. However we had a significant prop which was a green scarf, which Jessica is wearing in the picture used for the digital, magazine cover and in the music video. We did so that so the audience could recognise her as the same artist and form that link when deciding to buy the album.
Even though the majority of music listeners download songs from the internet, we wanted our audience to buy the CD because when designing the digipak we added a special feature to draw the audience in. We wanted them to support the artist by buying her album and to have a memorable piece that they could keep, we did this by having a signed photo of the artist with the lyrics of Lisa's Song on the back of the digipak.
What have you learned from your audience feedback?
We had different feedbacks and at different times. First we had one in the beginning when we chose our song. We asked the other media class to listen to our song and see what their reactions were. The second set of feedbacks were from looking at the blog. We decided to put up a poll on the blog along with a rough cut of our music video, people who visited the poll had to choose which hair they preferred meaning hair up or hair down, because we as a group couldn’t decide; it was half and half. The result was hair down and we went with our audiences feedback and the 4th time we shot the piano scene.
The next feedback we got was after we finished our music video and it was the first viewing. The audience suggested that we should use a clearer photograph of Jessica and the 'boyfriend' and perhaps more meaningful items in the box, like cinema tickets or a love letter. We thought about this carefully and took another photo of the guy and Jessica this time making sure that the lighting was much better and we put cinema ticket and a letter. Then there was another audience feedback; they were much happier with the photograph and could understand the narrative more clearly.
Regarding the ancillary task, the audience were able to make a link between the video, the magazine advert and the digipak including the colour scheme. However they suggested that the scarf should be a more vibrant green as the digipak seemed to be made of gloomy colours only.
How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning evaluation stages?
The internet was our main source of research, because we used the internet to search for our song. We also used the internet to research into the pop genre. We used youtube to watch pop videos and Google images to look at pictures of costume and what specific female artists wore, etc. We have gathered photos and have a folder containing photos of our locations and costumes. We also used Jamendo to download the song and lyrics, we transferred them to our phones so that we could have a copy on us when filming so that we could play the song wile our actress sang along to it. In addition we emailed the song to our actress so that she could learn the lyrics. We used an online website to create a 'wordle' of our lyrics which was used in the digipak also. For our costumes we surfed the internet, we visited websites such as Dorothy Perkins, New Look and Topshop to get the perfect look for our actress.
When filming we always used two video cameras; this was because we wanted to get as much footage as we could from different angles and shots. One person in the group take stills so that we could use them for photos for the digipak and magazine advert. We started the magazine advert in school and then Tamanna took it home to finish, because she was more familiar with photo shot.
We also used blogger to put all our information and keep a track of what we had been doing every media lesson. This included research ideas to the days we would be filming. We also got our main feedbacks from the blog. We communicated with each other through Facebook and mobile phone as it was easy to access all members in our group.
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