The document summarizes the student's evaluation of their media product for a punk rock music video coursework. They researched conventions of the punk rock genre using YouTube and analyzed music videos. Key conventions included dark clothing. They organized filming using Facebook and filmed with a digital camera. They found their band on UnsignedActs.com. They stored research on Blogger and used Google images. They edited the video using iMovie and included performance and narrative scenes intertwined. Audience feedback confirmed this approach. Their album packaging and poster incorporated typical punk rock color schemes and repeated imagery to represent the band cohesively.

1. Evaluation of our Media
Product
(Punk Rock)
George Bramhall

2. How did you use new media technologies in the construction
and research, planning and evaluation stages?
• Whilst we were in the research stage of our coursework, our
key goals were to find suitable examples that expressed our
genre and the conventions that they used. There were many
aspects to look over including clothing, editing, positioning,
representation

3. An example of a convention I noticed during my research stage
was, the main costume colouring used in punk rock videos
consisted of dark/black and red clothing. (“21 guns green day”
and “The kill, 30 seconds to mars”)
It was clear that dark clothing was a typical convention of the
punk rock genre, and so we needed to include this in our video.

4. YouTube
• We used “YouTube” to find
and analyse music videos in
our genre. This allowed me
to watch any video I wanted
as many times as necessary
in order to analyse it
effectively. Using this
research tool, this enabled
me to easily find the key
conventions and ideology
that I can incorporate into
my coursework.

5. Facebook
• We used “Facebook” to arrange
when and where we were going to
film our product, this aided our
organisation as it meant everyone
in the group could contact each
other at any time.
• It was also useful for arranging
people together for filming the
concert scene, which consisted of a
large amount of people, Facebook
provided an outlet that was free
and commercially used by all of the
people we intended to incorporate
in our coursework.

6. Digital Camera
• The digital camera was the main
component of our music video, it allowed
us to capture the camera shots and
movements we wanted in order to create
the desired conventions that we had
previously decided upon to conform or
challenge the ideologies of our genre.
The digital camera provided the outlet to
which or entire music video relied on. It
aloud us to use different camera shots
and angles, which provided anchorage to
our particular genre, they would then be
edited in post-production.
UnsignedActs.com
• When deciding upon our band, we used
the website Unsigned.com to help us find
our artist, and it contained many
different artist of our genre, so it made
looking for the right band a lot easier.

7. Blogger/ Google
• Blogger allowed us to keep all of our
research and production stages and
work, on a place, that could be updated
anytime from any location. Blogger
aloud us to store relevant information
and keep a back log on all the work,
research, audience feedback and
audience research that would prove
most helpful in our pre/post production
• Another helpful resource for our
research was Google images, which
allowed us to find examples of album
covers and posters, which then could be
embedded to our blogs. Google also
provided a much needed information
outlet on dominant ideologies for the
punk rock genre.

8. Imovie (software)
• Imovie was completely crucial to our entire media coursework without it we would
have had no way to edit our music video. The program allowed us to put the clips
together, but also to overlay it with the background music, and make sure
everything was in time with the song. We could also use different transactions
between the shots such as fade out to portray a memory being shown, this was
used when the lead singer says "I remember the words I was told as soon as I
spoke of her". The shot fades to white to emphasise the fact it's a memory, and
changes to the girl love interest to make it clear who he is talking about.

9. Imovie also aloud us to use different edits and transactions between shots,
the most memorable ones were the fade in from performance to the memory
of the narrative and, this was played along side the lead singer singing "I
remember the words I was told as soon as I spoke of her“ the shot fades to
white to emphasise the fact it's in the past and the girl is centre frame to
show she is the love interest
Fade in used to
show a
memory
Fade out to end the
song

10. In what ways do your media products use, develop or challenge
forms and conventions of real media products?
• We used typical forms conventions of the punk rock genre, we did this to
enable the audience to identify the genre as punk rock, we then later
attempted to base our products are the stereotypes their dominant
ideologies.
• The main aspect of our media product is the switch between a
performance scene and a narrative and our research showed that many
other punk rock artists used the same technique.
• Examples of which are, “All American rejects, gives you hell” and “Avril
Lavigne, Girlfriend”

11. Audience feedback was the most important thing to consider when we were
creating our product. We sent out a questionnaire with all the important
variables we needed to consider. It also allowed a more broad horizon of
opinions of what people expected to see in a punk rock genre. The final
conclusion was most of the audience preferred a constant link between
performance and narrative, and as the questionnaire went out to the
same target audience as our music video, we could finally conclude that
our music video would be sectioned with intertwining scene of narrative
and performance.
The idea behind out music video was a scene in which the band performed to
a crowd of people, in which the band were seen in a sense of authority
among the audience and a narrative that followed the tribulations of the
lead singer who is in love with a girl and she doesn’t notice him, this is a
polar opposite of the performance as the lead singer is seen to be normal
and less important, this allowed the audience to empathise with the lead
singer whilst still seeing him in a position of dominance..

12. • The general convention for punk rock is that the cover of the albums didn't
show the artist/band’s image, but more something that represents
something that important or significant towards their album. In my
research the following albums showed this “Green Day, 21st century
breakdown, “Sum 41, does this look infected” and “Pink Floyd, a
momentary lapse of reason.”
• Showing the artist on the cover of an album allows the audience to relate
the artists whereas having an image means they can relate to what they
stand for which is the main concept of punk rock.
• Although our research suggested that having the artist on the cover would
be counter productive in our genre, we decided to challenge the dominant
ideologies and both our poster and digipack consisted of images of the
band

14. Digi-Pak

15. Social Animal Digipack
• The majority of the album covers and posters we researched all seemed to
have the same colour schemes, the dominant colours being black, white
and red, the reason for this is it allows the artists to express their thoughts
and feelings through colour and not just their music, as the colours black
and red, strongly connote anger or isolation from society, the white
seemed to only be there as a contrast to heighten the emotion, or to
signify the rebellion against society.
• The album covers that showed these colour schemes included, “Sum 41,
all killer no filler” and “21st Century Breakdown by Green Day”. Our
research enabled us to design our digipack using the colour scheme
suggested, red and black were both used through out, but I thought it
would be a good idea to have the background in black and white as our
band was primarily Caucasian so adding the black and white background
eliminated all racial indifferences and allowed the music to connect with
any ethnical audiences.

16. Poster

17. Social Animal Poster
• In punk rock I found that the band usually had a significant
image or design that worked with their music which they
incorporated with their album covers and posters and thus
repeated the image on both, artists that did this were “the
rasmus, Led zeppelin and the white stripes.
• After this we thought it would be only wise to incorporate
the same image on the poster as the digipack, it would not
only allow the target audience to relate back to the album
if they saw the poster but it also created a sense of unity
with the image our band gave off, we didn't want to stray
from the image, doing so meant the audience didn't get
confused with the bands concepts and views, and punk
rock the majority of their lyrics are about their views.

18. How effective is the combination of
your main product and ancillary texts?
• I believe overall that our products do justice to the artists, it creates
a relatable vibe and contains all the codes and conventions that
other punk rock bands include, so if someone were to see our band,
they would be able to identify the genre. I am sure of this because
we used similar costume, editing, colour scheme and album
conventions as that of the artists we researched. “Social Animal is
clearly represented with punk rock related conventions. Punk rock
bands and artists tend to stick with relaxed but active body
language stern expressions and their apparel usually consists of
either darker clothes perhaps with ties or jackets or informal attire
with ripped jeans and profanity. We needed to keep the main
conventions the same in order to create a product that was typically
and noticeably punk rock.

19. Social animal (our band)
Avril Lavigne

20. What have you learned from your audience feedback?
We wanted to use Dennis Mcquails theory of
uses and gratification, in which the highest
ranking result from the question would be used
to satisfy the audience demands. These were the
4 options that our questionnaire
gave, yet it all seemed on too big of a scale so we
decided to use the most chosen topic “freedom”
as less of its literal meaning, and using it as a
metaphor for being trapped in youth, therefore
still conforming to the ideologies of punk rock.
The number of people who chose “yes” for Do you
expect a CD cover to feature the band/artist? Shows
that the feedback from the target audience approved
of our band appearing on the cd cover. The Life
Matrix theory explains this as, consumers view the
artists that are most similar to their tastes as how
they view themselves, therefore in order to fully
connect with the target audience we needed to
incorporate the band onto the CD cover

21. Audience comments on music video
• Positive
• Most of the comments we received on the music video were all to do with how
well it could be distinguished as punk rock, one person said , “Very obvious what
the genre is”, another said something similar "The video follows a sense of genre
quite well since the majority of it is performance based, which is what you
associate with the punk rock genre” and a third person said “ Good identification
of the band” all of the comments have the same sub tone of clarity on which genre
the music video was portraying, which is why I am glad we followed the uses and
gratifications theory we established from our audience research.
• Negative
• The main cause of concern was the narrative, many of the viewers found it
confusing and not clear, one of the comments was; “The storyline just stops
halfway, it doesn’t make sense”, now that we are aware of this, if we were to ever
create a punk rock genre music video we would add more narrative into the story
as, we focused too much on the performance side and neglected the narrative, as
the research had shown us it was less important to the overall convention.

22. Audience comments on Digipack
• Positive
• Like with the music video the positive comments were due to the clarity of the genre,
comments like; “good use of colours, match genre” and “the paw print is continued
throughout your product” allows us to see that not only has the uses and gratification
theory paid off but the continuity of the design logo was substantial enough to
designate a response.
• Negative
• The main flaw with our digipack was the alteration between the flamboyant and wild
writing of the title and the boring inner text. Which is why one of the comments was;
“The font used for the track list is very simple which looks a bit odd compared to the
unusual band name font “ which may have caused some confusion when the audience
looked over our digipack.

23. Audience feedback on poster
• Positive
• The most helpful comment that was provided was; “The poster shows the band to be
representing youth by the united front they are taking and the colours used give the
impression that they are serious about their music” This means that the codes and
conventions of punk rock and how the youth are portrayed has been noticed by the target
audience. Another comment that allows us to speculate over how well we have achieved the
representation of punk rock was; “use of the word 'unleashed' works well with the band
name” Its good that the audience picked up on that as, throughout our product one of the
main focuses was the animal ideology and how the significance of teenage rebellion and
animal behaviour were linked, the purpose for the word “unleashed” was in order to
emphasise the similarities between them
• Negative
• Although all the good feedback there were some bad comments weakness we were told
about our poster was “looks like a film poster”, this allows us to know that in order for our
poster to be more suitable and generally more successful in capturing our target audience,
we should have included an indication to what we were advertising . To fix this i would
suggest making the font that informs the consumers that it is an album more clear, by
increasing the size or highlighting the background. Also we found another weakness was “the
use of a paw print for the letter ‘A’ This meant our poster was somewhat unclear and the
only solution to solve it would have been to make the paw prints more A shaped