1)In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Our music video 'Ill Wind' certainly uses develops and challenges the real conventions of real media products.
We use a lot of real media conventions throughout our piece, for instance, by the mise en scene of each character. We have stereotypically used the costume in which society would generally associate with each of our characters. For instance as it is a dark eerie music video, we believe that using a dark eerie mise en scene throughout is essential. We do this in our costume of the 'ritual leader' by having him completely dressed in black with just a visual white face.
As i previously said our video is a dark, eerie meaning behind it 'Ill Wind represents the gust of misfortune blowing through you life, it is symbolic of all the downs your have, and it is always the pain and hurtful memories that are so vivid in your minds' this is the direct quote meaning from the band 'Our Krypton Son'. therefore by using such things as dark effects and adding a 'cinematic' look to the video therefore allowing us to develop the conventions of real media products.
We also challenge the conventions of real media products by introducing such things as time lapse between each character. Most conventions would relate around the same century, and by having an upbeat song and using an 'ancient' character it completely clashes with the music. The music which would most likely relate to this century would be choral gregorian chants and so on.
We also challenged the conventions of real media products by using a dark, eerie video to this right upbeat song. For instance you wouldn't put 'ba ba black sheep' to the video of a band such a slipknot, but after looking into the true meaning of the song, we depicted that the song had this despairing lyrical message.
2)How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
I believe that our main product and our ancillary texts were very effective. We kept with the same spiritual explanation throughout all of our final products. And we also kept everything dark coloured and downhearted. For instance our digipack, the whole backdrop of it is black and then we added dark edited photos over the top. These photos consisted of myself with a kind of zombie mutation to it with half a head, this was done on photoshop very easily. Also the same was done to Jonathan on the opposite side of the digipack. Throughout all the products we also created the same text, this kind of scary 1920's carnival text, which adds effect to the creepiness of the overall products. Also throughout the products we introduced the idea of tarot cards. On our front cover, we used a bunch of tarot cards that we scanned into the mac. We played around with he opacity and made a collage of them all. We also introduced these into the actual video product, during the flashback scenes. Having them jumping around and popping up over the screen. We believe that this represents the association with death and also to the overall pain to the products.
Also with our website we kept to the dark, bland colours, and also the band photos we added to the website had to be put into black and white, so this again i relating to the development of real media conventions. We believe these tones used were very effective in creating an overall downhearted tone to the piece.
With the video we believe that the overall video was effective. But the downfall of it i believe was the fact that the song was so upbeat, yet the meaning of the song was so downhearted and dark. To some viewers i believe this wont be effective and could be very confusing, but i think we have tried our hardest to really make poignant the idea behind the lyrics.
3)What have you learned from your audience feedback?
The overall audience feedback has been really positive in my opinion. We set up a Facebook page asking people to watch the video and comment on any feedback they had, whether good or bad. But the overall vibe of the comments seems to be very positive. We had a few problems such as people didn't realise the spirit entering the box at the start of the video, therefore they were unsure to as what was in this box. This is something we should have tried to get audience feedback on before the making of the video, we could have possibly made a short sample/teaser video and asked for audience feedback on this to see if they could piece together what is going on the box.
It also seems that people have had to watch the video at least twice over to get the understanding of the video as it is such a dark meaning, but it seems when people listen to the lyrics it all pieces together.
Other things that we have been told to work on is to make the opening scene more sinister. We could have possibly have done things such as a large ritual scene with maybe 5 or 6 more characters taking the spirit out of a person or possibly an animal. But due to our zero budget on this piece we found that very difficult to do, even though we thought about doing it. But trying to find things such as costume on a large scale would have been very difficult.
4)How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?It also seems that people have had to watch the video at least twice over to get the understanding of the video as it is such a dark meaning, but it seems when people listen to the lyrics it all pieces together.
Other things that we have been told to work on is to make the opening scene more sinister. We could have possibly have done things such as a large ritual scene with maybe 5 or 6 more characters taking the spirit out of a person or possibly an animal. But due to our zero budget on this piece we found that very difficult to do, even though we thought about doing it. But trying to find things such as costume on a large scale would have been very difficult.
Well as all great products start off we needed to come up with an idea, therefore we used the internet to search such things as 'how to make a music video' and also used youtube to do research into similar bands video styles. Our main technological device was our Apple Macs. The whole product was created on this, from research into our band, to creating our logo, to adding the final effects on our music video. Without these we would have been lost. Throughout all the productions we used two different types of macs, every student had laptops to do individual work on, as well as having a desktop to create our music video on, as the memory is a lot bigger so it allows for more footage to be placed onto it without it running slow!
Last year we used IMovie, a built it product that comes with apple products, but this year we learnt how to use Final Cut Pro X. This software is a lot more prominent and advanced than IMovie, which was needed this years, as it allowed us to push the boundaries of what we were able to do, for instance it allowed us to introduce the idea of a 'soul sucker' to take the spirit out of the body at the start of the video. I personally had succeeded to do this on another software Motion 5, but the problem i then faced was trying to import the right sized clip back into Final Cut, therefore, Ryan had found a way to create the soul sucker on Final Cut from the plug in i had created! We also used Final Cut Pro to create our anamatics and uploaded these to our youtube page! Also using such social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter to promote our product, as well as using blogger to create our evaluations throughout the year.
I also used Photoshop when it came to design the digipack. I found it very difficult to use this at first because i had never really looked at the programme before, but by using such websites as Youtube and Vevo to search tutorials i actually found using Photoshop very easy. It was very frustrating at certain times, for instance when you want to move something you have to select the layer, and also trying to get the resolution right, but i believe our digipack truned out very well in the end. To cut things out i would use the pen tool, then make selection then use layering to get the perfect cut each time, which took a lot of work, believe it our not.
For the likes of the filming we used great spec Samsung HD cameras, which were absolutely fantastic, the difference in quality between the ones we used last year was outstanding. You could perform such things as touch focus, manual focus, as well as use focus pulls and blur the image out of focus if you liked. As well as this we used such things as scanners and printers for creating digipacks and so on.
I believe we used a very large variety of technological devices when creating out piece which helped our final product be so successful.
