Friday, 15 January 2016

Question 2


How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
Our three texts work together with synergy that flows with all three products, the music is based on a narrative to what we interpreted the song to be about and that was a breakup from a somewhat violent or troubled relationship with her boyfriend, the song represents her breaking free from her past with him escaping from her home where all her troubled memories lie to a new place at the beach where she can let go of her past with him and move on.   We then created two products for our ancillary tasks, one being the Digipak contacting the CD, lyrics of the song and images that represent the song and extreme close up images of ornaments and antiques features in the video and also the singer.

And our second ancillary task was of a Magazine Advert which is similar to the Digipak in terms of the typography and images used. The images of the actress is not the same but is similar in the sense we used the same filters and edited the photo in the same way by putting it in a black and white filter but leaving the bright red lips. Our promo needed to link together somehow and we did this by making some aspects lip like the bright red lips being included in our entire promotional package. The red lips relate to the 50’s glamour theme, which is why we found it so important to include this and make a key feature in our promotional package because it links to the Hollywood glamour we were inspired by Audrey Hepburn and Marilyn Munroe; these were the kind of stars from that time which influences the voluminous hair and the glamorous makeup in the house scenes we shot. In addition to this we included images of antiques and stuck to a black and white theme, this helped to make it look more 50’s.

We wanted to focus on particular elements of the ancillaries and we didn’t wanted to hide all the colour otherwise the synergy would be less clear we used Photoshop and brought back the bright red lips and we also brought back the colour of the bronze antique ornament and the long shot of our actress at the beach and the detail of the flowers on the piano but we kept all the colour to a minimum. We used extreme close ups of antiques in the music video and we used some of these images of the antiques ornaments to put onto the Digipak, this helped incorporate the three products together. The synergy of the three products link all three together and the red lips are a huge factor of that, this makes it easy for the audience to see the similarities of the three products and shows that they are all linked together.

We were also influenced by Laura Mulvey’s theory ‘The Male Gaze’ this is where women in the media are seen from a males perspective and women are to be gazed upon by men we showed this in our promo by focusing on the red lips, this is linked to this theory because red lips are perceived and promiscuous. The same typography is used in the promotional package; this also makes it easier for the audience to see the link between the products and makes it clearer for them when purchasing the package. The same filter is used with the focus image on both the ancillaries are very similar and we used the same editing effects on both of them with the black and white filter and the red lip, this helps the audience if they decide to purchase the package, this helps promote the package because the similarity of the three parts of the package. We were inspired by artists such as Adele, her album 21, the black and white filter and the singer posing in a seductive manner with the striking makeup. We were also inspired by Lana Del Rey, her ancillaries always have a similar theme to her styles which is along the 50’s theme.

Question 3

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

When we were planning our music promo we gathered feedback from students in our sixth form, we would ask them question on what type of music they like and which aspects they enjoy. We created Vox Pop’s to do this; this was an effective way for us to gain feedback from people. It was a good way of research as well because the feedback taught us things about what the audience are into and what things to take on board.
From this feedback we 
were able to plan and narrow down our ideas and adapt our ideas to what we found fitted more to what the audience liked best. We learned that people like a variety of different aspects in music a video but one thing we noticed that came up numerous times what a narrative and performance themed video, we took this on board and put this into consideration when we were planning what we were going to do for our music video.  We noticed most people we asked told us they liked a narrative story line, and glimpses of performance. So we wanted to make sure these aspects were shown in our promo. In our music promo we included many shots that following them drumming rhythm so that we could include they shots following this rhythm. This also would make the video more engaging as there were lots of shots to see. When we were designing our ancillary’s we came up with three designs and instead of choosing them ourselves we used a Poll Everywhere so the audience we able to decide which design they liked best.  When we completed our ancillary tasks we got feedback by posting images of them onto Facebook. 

 For our music video, we gathered a group of sixth form students to a Focus Group this
worked well because we got to ask them specific questions and we got the feedback that could benefit us in order to show us what could be improved on and which aspects of the music video the audience were most happy with. We did also show them our ancillary tasks and we were also able to gather feedback on them as well and we were also able to find out what particularly was poplar with the audience and got useful feedback on improvements we
could do. We created Vox pops because we found them the easiest to work with and it was easy to get specific feedback from the audience.

Also when doing Vox pops they person we’re asking is relaxed and is able to speak freely with their answers and we thought that would be more beneficial than getting them to fill out a questionnaire. When we did our Vox pop on our final music video we got answers on the video immediately after this was useful because we got peoples first impressions on the video. The feedback we got from the audience was fairly similar from everyone we filmed. The shots and location was a positive that most people told us they liked. Something that occurred a few times to improve was to include another actor to make the narrative a bit more clearly to the audience.

 The third question we asked was about the about whether the pace of the shots suit the rhythm of the song which everyone we asked said it did. Our final question was on the quality of the music video and everyone said that the quality was impressive.

Overall we were pleased with the audience feedback and their gave us useful responses on the video, as they liked the video overall. In our focus group for our final production we gathered not just media students, this was important because an outsiders perspective is helpful and gives us precise information on what they like to see in a music video and the feedback we got from this focus group was very positive. I think it was god that we didn’t post the final music video on social media as well because we could then explore more way of gathering feedback on our music video. Overall the feedback we got for our music promo we were happy with, we got feedback from people in lots of different ways which helped us get different perspectives. The feedback helped us adapt different aspects of our video into the final video we filmed. Three versions of the video is posted on YouTube and the first two takes and the feedback helped us to change parts going along with the feedback.