2. Question 1 – In what ways does your media product use,
develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media
products?
The song we chose for our music video ‘Heads Will Roll’ (A-Trak Remix) By the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. We decided on a dance genre song due to
the fact that we can create a sense of euphoria, and an almost feel good for our audience which will provoke a sense of higher self-esteem for
the audience and also glamourizes the idea of youth, something for our audience to aspire to.
After looking at certain videos by other pop artists, such as ‘We found Love’ by Rihanna we took some typical conventions and applied them
to our own video, such as bright colours, fast paced shots and bold text, in order to conform to the genre of dance.
We also used Kanye West’s ‘All Of The Lights’ as an inspiration for the bright colour block over our shots and the bold text used, as this is also
a pop/dance genre that had similar ideas to what we wanted in our video.
The main inspiration for our video is actually the American film ‘Project X’ as this is where we discovered the song in the first place, and then
took ideas of a ‘party scene’ filled with teenagers to incorporate into our own video, we decided to use this as it is was a very popular film
with our target audience, although it gives a very unrealistic view of house parties, it’s a somewhat accurate representation of teenagers,
which we then took and made into a more realistic representation, using real footage from parties and outings.
We also applied Goodwin's ‘notions of looking’ theory in order to subvert form the typical stereotype of how teenagers are portrayed. Instead
of showing shots of reckless youths, we decided to glamourize our particular age group in order to allow our target audience to aspire to this.
We also used Goodwin’s amplification theory as our video follows the same conventions as the song chosen using the fast paced shots and
the bright colours in order for it to link to the song.
Our video
Rihanna’s video
Kanye’s video
3. Question 2 - How effective is the combination of your main
product and ancillary texts?
When creating our digipak and website we aimed to keep the same house style
going throughout, as you can see in the three pictures on the left, we have used
the same font and colours in our ancillary products in order to give ourselves a
brand as such, so that our audience will recognise our band when seeing those
certain colours and fonts. We based our front cover and website background on
various other ‘Andy Warhol’ images that we had seen in the process of our
research and planning.
The digipak was created first, taking individual pictures and adding colour blocks
over them before merging them into one, we then used the same image to
create a background for our website.
We decided on these colours for our house style as they are the colours that
appear in our video and we wanted to keep that consistent throughout the rest
of our products.
4. Question 3 - What have you learned from your audience
feedback?
From our audience feedback we discovered that our target audience were mostly into
pop and dance music genres, which was a great benefit to us as this was the genre we
had picked. We then asked our target audience for their opinion on our choice of song
to see if it was going to be a success or not, it is essential that the audience approve of
the song in order to approve of the music video. We received feedback saying the
song was appropriate for the modern day of music and the song is relevant to our
target audience and links in with the research and planning posts have on our blogs.
5. Question 4 - How did you use media technologies in the
construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
The main media technology used in our research and planning stages was web 2.0. We
used this in order to research into different conventions of the dance music genre,
which helped us with creating our own. We used it to research existing products such
as other music videos and other artist’s websites.
We also used it to create social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter in order
to advertise our products to our target audience, as these are the sites used mostly by
our target audience. This helped boost our viewings and gather us more publicity for
our main product.
We used technology such as Photoshop, and final cut in order to actually create our
final products. We had to change the digipak many times in order to overcome
problems with the consistency of house style etc.
