Final Evaluation - Lauren Widdop

Introduction

For my A2 Media Studies coursework I was required to create; - A music video - An album cover - A magazine advert I worked with Hannah Tabor, Muhammad Patel and Lauren Pollard. I made a generous contribution to the planning and finalizing of the location shots, costume, genre, etc. I also filmed quite a lot of the footage as the majority of the planned locations were very near to were I live.

Target Audience We came to the conclusion that females, aged 16-25 would be most interested in our product after we tested the song amongst a varying group of people and distributed questionnaires, with results coming back showing this specific audience to be majorly satisfied.

Our U.S.P: To bring something different to the market, with a memorable artist whom audiences can realistically relate to.










The Music Video – “A distinctive art form which can allow really interesting creative opportunities” (P Fraser 2005)
- Absolutely anything?
- Does it follow the codes and conventions?
- Does it last the length of the song (or longer)?
- Does it feature the artist (although it doesn’t have to)?
- Does it tell a story? - Is it visually memorable and worth watching again?
- Does it create a strong brand image for your artist?
- Is it a creative artifact of interest itself?
- Is it the main reason you’d flick on the music channels?

YES! Genre

What genre is it?
There are two elements of genre within my coursework piece;

1. Music Video
2. Experimental

We thought that with the experimental genre we could be as creative and experimental (shall we say!) as we’d like.

Codes and Conventions

Okay, so we know what a music video SHOULD follow. Does ours?

Did I do anything different? Why is it vital to do something new with a genre?

Genre music videos must offer more of the same to satisfy the audience’s expectations. But also offer something new so that they don’t become boring.

- “Repetition is a key element in the way audiences understand and relate to narratives” (O’Sullivan, Dutton & Rayner, Arnold, 1994)

- “The idea of an audience’s foreknowledge will obviously lead to a certain set of expectations. It is these expectations which are then used to catch the attention of the audience whenever a film is being publicised” (Price)

My group didn’t follow the genre codes and conventions religiously - ‘the same, but different’ (N.Lacey)

We chose to follow an Experimental genre which basically enabled us to work on a blank canvas, including and getting rid of what we desired.

For example:
- We took inspiration from ‘Introducing Joss Stone’ - We based our album cover (very loosely) around it - We liked how the artist was facing away from the camera with her bare back












- We then had the idea to Photoshop our image of the artist onto a cartoon like cover – with inspiration from Paolo Nutini’s album, ‘Sunny Side Up’.
- Link in really well with our Experimental genre
- Produce something less predictable like your typical artist sat with a guitar, ripped jeans and back combed hair! With regards to our music video, I feel that we acted innovatively because most Pop/Folk songs don’t have an Experimental genre to them, they usually follow the typical Narrative and Performance genre.

“GENRES MAKE THE WORLD APPEAR MORE PREDICTABLE AND LESS COMPLICATED”

Why did I think my innovations were likely to prove successful?

Branding and Brand Image
One of the main and most important purposes of a music video is promotion. The music video is a promotional tool for the artist and is a way for the audience to see the music in a visual context. Although music videos sometimes (not always) serve as a catalyst for CD sales/artist song downloads. This is where branding comes into it!

"Advertising any given product is only one part of branding's grand plan" (Naomi Klein)

The above quote can be related to artists and music videos. It explains that a brand is not just there to advertise, but to create a foundation for where they can build up a relationship with the audience. Branding is about creating an image that people link to, this image should entice them into buying their music and make them want to watch their videos over and over again.

How did I attract my audience?
I did this through the different elements that make up my media project, these being;

Audience Feedback: My Thoughts
I believe that the feedback we retrieved through the questionnaire varied a lot. Of course I’d love to sit here and type about how my project got a 100% thumbs up, although that’s not the case.

We distributed 14 questionnaires amongst 8 males and 6 females, thus bearing in mind that females are our primary target audience and therefore I feel this reflected in our feedback.

“What are your initial reactions to this video?”:
- This question received a lot of similar answers with people commenting about how they enjoyed it.
- Although one thing that the majority of them slated was the lip syncing.
- I have to agree with this, as when I look back at our video, I feel there could be some minor tweaking with the miming.
- Although I am happy overall with everybody’s initial comment reactions.

“Is it something you would be interested in watching again?”:
- 70% of our audience stated that they would want to watch our video again.
- I feel that this is quite harsh because 30% claimed they wouldn’t want to watch it again.
- Although when I looked back these answers were from males, which could be why, as we primarily focused on pleasing a female audience. - It is important that our video is liked and people want to watch it again, because that is the focus of music videos for them to be repeated on music channels.
- Overall I am happy that over half said yes.



“Which was your favorite part and why?”:
- If I was to be asked this question, I would say that the best part of the video was the Green Screen, reason being because it is different to what you would usually see and increases the authenticity of the video, making it a lot more interesting to watch.
- Although, the majority of people said that their favourite part was the black and white scenes.
- I can understand why viewers would enjoy this section of the video because it does look professional and is just overly nice to look at.
- Although, it was one of the easiest parts of the video to create, which does anger me slightly, making me think that if the whole footage was edited black, white and slow-mo, then could it have been more successful with our target audience?
- Overall, we got a really positive amount of feedback from our audience with the majority claiming that the authenticity of the video was good.
- I was happy with this because one aspect that we worked hard on was making it look like something you would see on MTV/Viva.

“How authentic does our music video/magazine advert/CD album cover look?”:
- With regards to our CD album cover and magazine advert, I was really disappointed with the feedback we received.
- The majority of ratings gave evidence that our target audience believed our print pieces not to be authentic.
- All that I have to say to this is… EXPERIMENTAL
- We went out of our way to make both of these as cheesy and ‘kitch’ as possible, taking inspiration from Paulo Nutini’s album Sunny Side Up.
- I feel that our audience didn’t relate to our ancillary tasks and understand that we were expressing our artist’s individuality through the print products.
- Due to our plans for creating a cartoon-like album cover, we had to start from scratch and draw everything ourselves (for copyright purposes), thus leaving us with a piece of software that didn’t allow us to draw what we needed, hereby leaving us struggling.
- Although we worked with what material we had and produced good print products.
- If I was to produce my print products again, I would probably go about it in a simpler way to make the brand image more obvious and do something that the audience would connect with better i.e. a typical “indie” themed cover of the artist sat in a field with a guitar.



“How does our music video reflect the Experimental genre?”:
- This question received a lot of positive feedback and I was happy with the results.
- The majority of our target audience said that the black and white flashbacks were ‘extremely good’, this was presumed as a lot of people claimed this to be their favourite bit of the video.
- I personally feel that our music video did reflect the Experimental genre due to all of the elements from the green screen right through to the locations.
- I feel that my thoughts reflect in the feedback and we seem to have proven successful with the presentation of our genre through the music video.

“Overall, what do you think we could have improved on?”:
- I am happy with the constructive criticism gained from the customer feedback with nearly 100% of the people asked mentioning that we could have improved on the lip syncing – and I totally agree.
- Something that somebody mentioned was that we could have included a few more transitions and when I look back I agree.
- I feel that the video could have ran a lot more smoothly with a few more shot transitions.
- But, apart from these aspects, not a lot else was mentioned – which I have to say, I am relieved about.

What would I do differently?
There are two things that I would go back and mend if I could;
• Lip syncing
• The design of the print products

- The lip syncing was an obvious thing that needed changing because of the slight out of sync-ness about it. Although, I would probably have asked our artist to put a bit more emotion and expression into the miming, to make the video appear a bit more authentic.
- The design of the print products was one of the only thing that we received fairly negative feedback on,I feel that our audience didn’t really ‘get’ what we were trying to portray and the fact that we were reinforcing the Experimental genre. So, if I was given another chance I would change the design and create something more realistic and predictable.

Use of creative technologies – skills I have learnt... - Technology is the usage and knowledge of tools, techniques, and crafts.
- In today’s society technology plays such a huge part and without it a lot of organizations would fall apart because of how reliant people have become upon it.
- I believe that without the aid of the following technologies my media project would not have been created as successfully as it was.

Construction:

Research/Planning:

All of these technologies have been fantastic and extremely effective:
- Effective
- Played a huge part in the creation of my music video/ ancillary tasks - Without them I wouldn’t have been able to carry out this project
- The college provided me with up-to-date cameras and computers
- Proved effective because of how complex it was
- Offering me unlimited features for a professional-looking end product - The software was effective and up-to-date
- Had features that provided me with the opportunity to play around with and enhance the authenticity of my media product

Conclusion
Research and Planning
Throughout the research and planning stages I feel that I paid a really hefty contribution. At first we felt a bit intimidated by one of our group member’s conscientiousness towards the coursework, although when I look back I feel that this definitely sparred me on to work hard and up my game.

The first bit of research I did was an evaluation of a music video. I then researched into the song that we had chosen to use for our video. I was given the topic ‘narrative’ to research and display information with links to why narrative is important and what its all bout. I believe that I produced detail blog posts here but when I look back I feel I could have done more work on the research aspects and posted more on the research of the music video.

I also created a poster advertising our needs for a model for our video because we were struggling to find one. Once we had found our artist I displayed pictures of her on the blog and reasoning to how we found her. I took pictures of the shot locations and posted them onto our blog with a description of their whereabouts and why they are ideal destinations. As time went on I my contribution definitely increased and my posts were becoming more frequent on the blog.

I contributed to the research of CD covers that were an inspiration to us for our album design. We all wrote a post on the blog about our day out filming our the Christmas holidays to keep our blog updated as to what stage we were up to in the planning and early creation stages of our music video.

I filmed a lot of the first bits of footage and believe that I was a major player in the filming process, I think the only footage I wasn’t there for, was the Manchester green screen shots due to other commitments.

Throughout the editing stages of our music video, I do feel that I may have been a bit too active, as I took control quite a bit but I put this down to me being extremely conscientious and I wanted our pieces to be finished by the deadline but to a really high standard.

I contributed to the creation of a mood board for our ancillary tasks and I also produced an analysis of an album cover, keeping my contribution to the blog and the workload overall high. Me and Muhammad shared an equally active role in the production of our album cover and magazine advert, we were together for the shooting of our photographs and frequently updated the blog together. We edited all of our material together and contributed both of our ideas, showing both personalities in them.

Once our video was complete and uploaded, our blog had 70+ posts on it, which I think is really impressive! I played an extremely active role within the production of our video and print tasks and enjoyed the highs (not so much the lows) and would definitely do it again.

My products

On a whole, I am extremely proud of the outcome of both the video and ancillary tasks. I believe that the video would be something that you would see on MTV or The Hits with its authentic look, this is also backed up by the audience feedback we retrieved.

My favorite part of the video would definitely be the Green Screen. This was such a challenging task, which we took onboard and made a success. Our audience feedback proved that the black and white memory aspects were popular, this increasing the interest of our video.

I believe that our ancillary tasks worked really well together, although the audience feedback claimed that they didn’t match with the music video. This riled me because when creating our album cover we did it with Paulo Nutinis, ‘Sunny Side Up’ album for inspiration, making it as cheesy as possible to link perfectly with the Experimental genre. I feel that our audience didn’t relate to, or ‘get’ our print pieces at all, which isn’t good on our behalf because the target audience are important for us to link strongly with.

One aspect that I think we could have included to improve on our video, would be to include shot transitions to make the general feel of the video run more smoothly. Although, apart from this I am genuinely chuffed with how our coursework has resulted.

Overall
I feel that I was a really good team member and played a consistent and active role within the researching, planning and creation of our coursework. I am proud of how involved I was and I don’t feel that I could have done anymore, thus proving that I worked to my full capability.

If I was to do this coursework again, the only thing I would change would be the design of the album cover because our audience didn’t relate to the image we had in mind. Overall, I am the proud creator of a music video, album cover and magazine advert. Good work gang!

Index

Our Finished Ancillary Tasks

Below are our final products for our auncillary task. We created the following;

• Album- Including the front, back and the insides
• Magazine Advert

Album


Cover
Inside 1
Inside 2- CD


Back Cover







Magazine Advert

Update

Unfortunately, the images of our ancillary tasks may not show up on the blog so if they do not look below. I have uploaded a mini presentation (below), just scroll down to see all the images:

Ancillary Tasks

View more documents from hot_chocolate.

By Muhammad Patel and Lauren Widdop

Designs For Auncillary Task

We forgot to upload the designs before so we have done that now.

Below are the designs of the album including all four sides and the design of the magazine advert

Album Design:

Magazine Advert Design:

By Muhammad Patel and Lauren Widdop

My Summary

From the beginning right through to the end, this project has had its definite ups and downs. At the beginning we brainstormed and gathered ideas and images for what we wanted our final product to end up like quite quickly. We shot our first piece of footage (Manchester for the Green Screen) without any problems, then we were stunted when our model was on holiday and then failed to turn up to numerous shootings.

We then had to go through the process of finding a new model, which took quite abit of our time, but then Emily seemed to appear from nowhere! She was a good model to use and helped us along the way, even when we made her pose half naked, or stand in the middle of a road imitating an Egyptian, she stuck it out.

I feel that our group were very organised and we managed to capture our footage with a comfortable amount of time before the deadline.

During the editing we all paid contribution and the video reflects all of our hard work and dedication in it.

I believe that initially, FinalCut is quite a difficult piece of software to get the hang of, but once we found our feet we cruised through our editing.

I am particularly proud of my group because we managed to include a green screen effect which not allot of people in our age range have managed to do. It wasn't as complex as what i expected it to be and would definitly like to give it a go again sometime.

Regrading the ancillary tasks, me and Muhammad experienced quite abit of difficulty because we were inspired by Joss Stone/Paolo Nutini's album covers and had an image in our heads of what we wanted to achieve. I felt that we were a little limited to resources and therefore our cover didn't look as "kitch" as originally planned, but I am overall, extremely happy with it!

Overall, I am overjoyed at the result of our project and feel that the hard work really did pay off.

By Lauren Widdop

Photos-26/01/2010

Today, we shot some photographs of our artist for our auncillary tasks, we used a empty room in college and took some shots of our artist in front of a white screen so there was no background. We took a number of close-up/extreme close-up shots of her face and a medium clode-up shot of her. We took some photos of her naked from the back (waist up) showing a side view of her face.

Below are the images we photoghraphed:

By Muhammad Patel and Lauren Widdop

Analysis of album cover- By Lauren Widdop

The album "walking on a dream" is the debut album of Australian electronic music duo Empire of the sun (Luke Steele and Nick Littlemore).



Firstly, the album cover follows a number of conventions such as:

• Shows Title of the album


• Shows the bands name


• Shows the duo on the front cover


• One of the members is facing towards the audience (giving direct eye contact)

Secondly, the album uses some intertextuality, intertextuality is when artists use references that create nostalgia and associations for the audience. The artwork for the album is brilliant, parodying iconic star wars posters however they replace R2-D2 and others with dinosaurs, tigers and futuristic buildaings. The tile of the band is also a reference to the film "empire of the sun" which was released in the 1980's.

The album cover represents the band's inspiration and influences such as 80's movies, artists and synthpop/rock. The clothes they where on the album of the cover is similar to another famous 80's rock group Adam and the ants.

The album is eye catching and has been voted as one of the best album covers of 2009 because of it's use of spectacular imagery and 80's nostalgia.

By Lauren Widdop

Filming for music video- 18/01/2010

Today, we filmed a short piece of footage in a local shop for our music video, we wanted to use weird,strange locations so we decided to film our artist in the shop walking up,down and around the aisle picking up odd onjects, We are going to incorporate some of the footage into our music video.

Below is a list of props, equipment and the location we used:

• Location- Local grocery shop, we used one of the ailses which contained usual food related items
• Head band, clothes- to show the feel and genre of the music and to reinforce our brand
• Food items- Used in the shots
• We used a shot which showed the full length of her physique and the angle of the camera was angled straight at the artist
• Camera, tape, charged battery and tripod to use for our filming

We believe this filming session went sucessfully because we captured the footage we needed and throughout filming we have reinforced our brand image.

By Muhammad Patel, Hannah Tabor and Lauren Widdop

Magazine Advertisment

Below is an image of a magazine advert of a album found ina music magazine:

Below is the analysis of the magazine advert:

By Lauren Widdop and Muhammad Patel

Mood Board (album/advertisment)

We have created a mood board for our auncillary task (album and magazine advert) to show the styles, messages and colours we wanted to incorporate into our print tasks.



























Below are some bullet points highlighting our influences for our print task:

• Indie,bohemian sound
• strange,unusual artist
• bold,earthy fashion
• fun, cartoon type print tasks
• artist who is strong,independent

By Muhammad Patel and Lauren Widdop

Filming for music video- 12/01/2010

I filmed some footage for our music video, I filmed different shots e.g. a clock, two people playing chess because in our music video we wanted to include quirky, odd shots that could be incorporated into the music video to add to the unique, folk style of the music.

I used a number of props such as

• Scales
• clock
• weights
• chess board
• chess pieces
• candles
• guitar
• wood (logs) from a fireplace
• Dice

Below is a list of the eqipment I used to film the music video:

• Video Camera
• Tripod
• Charged battery for the camera
• Video Tape

Below is a list of the different types of footage I filmed:

• Clock- I filmed an extreme-close up shot of a clock face with the hands moving, We have decided to spped up this shot and use it in our music video
• Scales and weights- I filmed a close up shot of some traditional brass metal scales, My brother showing only his (mid-drift and hands) places weights onto the scales. We are planning to use this footage but add different effects to it such as sepia
• Candle- We filmed a candle placed in front of some props (guitar/wooden logs)
• Chessgame- I filmed a chess game and we have deicided we will use the end of that footage (a scene where one of the players knocks all the chess pieces of the board)
• Dice- As a group we also filmed a couple of close up, canted angle shots of dice being thrown down some stone steps

We will incorporate all this footage into the music video.

By Lauren Widdop

Inspirational CD Covers

When creating the CD package we will have to create all 4 sides of the package (outside and inside cover) below is an exmaple of the CD package:

Below are some examples of album covers from artists who use the kind of genre (pop/folk) music that we are using in our media product.

Below are examples of CD packages that have inspired us:

By Muhammad Patel and Lauren Widdop

Shot Locations

Below are two definite shot locations for where we will be filming parts of our music video.

To the left is a caravan located not far from my house. We feel that due to its quirky appearance, it will be perfect for the look we are trying to achieve. We will have the artist walking around this location in bare foot, to give out an idea of freedom and independance.

By Lauren Widdop

Our Artist

This is the model that we will be using to stand for our artist in our music video. We feel that her style is exactly what we are aiming for.
In order to make progress, we have given her a copy of the CD and lyrics for her to familiarise herself with the song, ready for filming.

By Lauren Widdop