Evaluation and powerpoint

1) In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products ?

- Camerawork: has an impact on the meaning of the video so we made sure that a variety of movement, angles and shots were included- a MUST convention in a music video as they all play a part in the representation of the band. (Close ups dominate for example)

- Editing: Fast-cut montage- (a series of short shots that are edited into a sequence to condense narrative. It is usually used to advance the story as a whole, suggesting a passage of time often accompanied by a song playing in the background to enhance the mood or reinforce the message being conveyed.)
Digital effects- we tampered with the original images for the audience’s satisfaction.

- Costume: We made sure that the characters in the music video were costumed appropriately according to the song, theme and setting and gender to add effect.

- Lyrics: they establish a general feeling/mood/sense of subject and have a lot of meaning- for example, they reflect on life issues that are common in today’s society.

- Genre: the genre is reflected in types of mise-en-scene, themes, performance, camera and editing styles- in our case the music style is pop/rock, but the video promotes the feminist ‘girl power’, especially through the use of close ups, body shots and the togetherness/companionship of the band.

- Exhibitionism: (extravagant behaviour intended to attract attention) is a theme that is becoming more and more popular within the music videos of female artists. We decided to develop this idea by portraying the scarlet avenue girls as powerful, independent, confident women who refuse to be tied down by men yet are still sexually provocative.

- Music: we used a soundtrack of a scarlet avenue song ‘Diamond in the Rough’, which was recorded professionally by the band in a recording studio and has been purposely created with a powerful tempo to entice the audience.

The video allows more access to the performer than a stage performance can. The mise-en-scene, in particular, can be used to emphasise an aspirational lifestyle.
We hoped to create characters to whom the younger members of our target audience could look up to and aspire too. This was clearly achieved from the responses we got in our audience feedback.
We challenged the forms and conventions of real media products, by portraying the band and their genre of music rather than them as individuals.

2) How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
The combination is very effective as the promo music video links both to the website and album cover in many successful ways. E.g:
- The video combines well with the album cover as they are both promoting the band and the band’s music.
- The video combines well with the website as it is once again promoting the band and its music. The website also creates an opportunity to display and promote the actual music video and allows the band’s music to be distributed via social networking (myspace, facebook, twitter) as well as provide most recent updates such as news about the band, concert/show times, information about new singles released, and photographs of the band.
- The use of the red, black and white colour scheme also helps to combine the main product and ancillary texts as these three specific colours have been kept consistent throughout each product. E.g. in the music video the girls are noticeably dressed in black and red and black & white backgrounds are used. On the album cover the house colours are once again black, red and white- black font, white background and the use of black and red clothing. The website layout is also made up of the colours black, red and white.
This has been purposely created so that the band ‘Scarlet Avenue’ can be easily recognised in this way- also to form uniqueness (separating the band from other female girlbands)

3) What have you learned from your audience feedback?
We used an acronym to help with our audience feedback:
A nalysis - Who are they? How many will be there? The age group of 17 plus mixture of male and female audience but females for inspiration males for the typical male female relationship
U nderstanding - What is their knowledge of the subject? The music industry is open and available to everyone this means that the audience know what they are looking for because of the music they enjoy our job is to supply good music that they can listen and relate to in order to connect with the artist.
D emographics - What is their age, sex, educational background? 17 plus mainly girls because of the all female group giving them a feeling of idolisation and males because of the appeal of a new edgy girl group delivering music about the opposite sex. The music is available to anyone but those who are particular interested in the pop/rock genre and have access to social networking sites where the music is distributed.
I nterest - Why are they being asked? What do they know and understand? Because the audience are the ones that are being influenced, the ones that the music is being distributed and promoted to- therefore their preferences need to be taken into account if we want to exceed full satisfaction and interest. Our target audience will obviously have some knowledge about girl bands and the style of genre (rock/pop) because of the specific generation and because of today’s society. They will understand what should be expected from a music video, including what conventions should be involved, especially because the media is such a big part of advertising and promoting.
E nvironment - Where will they hear it? Can they all see & hear? Through social networking- such as Facebook, myspace and twitter. Our target audience that completed our surveys are all more than capable of seeing and hearing, but there will be some outside members of the audience that may either blind or deaf. By appealing to this audience we were able to promote using social networking as this age group will have a better understanding and knowledge of digital technology so will be able to access the bands website and sample the music through pull media which seems to be successful way of promoting at this moment in time.
N eeds - What are the needs? What are your needs? The video and the auxillary bits need to be informative original and run parellell with each other so that the brand name of the band and their music plus anything associated with them are recognisable and unique. We have done this by creating a webpage, digi pak and music video promoting the band’s name ‘Scarlet Avenue’ the music; ‘Diamond in the rough’ and the members; ‘Lucy, Becki, Steff and Rachel’. The audience were the main focus and by creating the four piece ensemble with the genre of edgy pop/rock, we felt it would bring something different and new to the industry. We would want the artists to be promoted using social networking to show the growth and strength of digital technology, through the use of new media with sites such as Photoshop and Dreamweaver for photo editing and website design and I movie for the video itself. The music is professional recorded and originally copyrighted creating a unique and defined soundtrack for the band recorded at Music Tek. We needed the piece to meet the needs of the target audience and portray a recognisable brand name that can be associated with the artist as well as the other products we created.
C ustomized - What specific needs did you need to address? We needed to make sure that each product linked we created a recognisable band name and used consistent colours that were both strong and sophisticated and not gender biased so that the target adolescent audience were attracted both male and female. We also had to make sure that all the work was original including the song and the band name, all which are now subject to copyright.
E xpectations - What do they expect to get from the product? As the artists are actually and unsigned band we hope that the music video and auxiliary products help to sell the band name and music and that the products make them known and their music widely sampled. The audience will expect to be able to sample good quality music that is easily accessible and written and performed by people of the same age. Influencing them and creating role models for today’s society in the form of a four piece girlband, that has the strength to compete with others around by communicating with their audience and creating catchy songs and an audience bond. These questions allowed the audience to tell us what they wanted. Essentially, we had to ask them what they wanted and give it to them.

From the feedback we have learnt that we had to understand the audience demographic and we needed to recognise that in the music industry you always have to have a specified audience. This includes appealing; to a specific gender, selling to a defined age group and portraying a certain genre. So by giving out questionnaires to the 17 plus age group we were able to see what they would want from a new band/artist. This helped us to shape our artists to appeal to the age group that we were looking at. We also learnt that from our feedback questionnaire that…(link to blog- audience feedback)

4. How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
Throughout our work we have used a fair quantity of media technology this includes the use of internet for research and for browsing existing websites, music videos and looking at album covers. To store this research as well as a running account of our work, we used a blog (an online diary) which enabled us to carry out our tasks with the use of digital technology; therefore no paper work was needed. However, this meant that if there was a hitch we were unable to access our blogging account and work- the downside of working with technology is that it can be an unreliable source and fixing the problem is time consuming. We also used PowerPoint to change Microsoft Word documents into picture files and uploaded them onto the blog. We did this by print screening, cropping and saving the file as a JPEG.

We used paint to create mood boards showing our experimentation with location, costume and camera work. This meant that we had a wider choice of photos for both the digipak and website. We used Photoshop to tidy the pictures and make them look professional so that they can compete with existing artists. This particularly came in handy when creating our album cover as photography and layout are an important convention in marketing and artists as well as well as representing their productions of music.
Keeping a tight colour scheme of white, red and black created strong photos and strong products that showed individuality but also togetherness within the group. Going back to our audience feedback this is what they felt linked our three products strongly together.

We created a story board using movie maker which gave us a template for our music video so that we had an idea of how we wanted the finished product to look. However, upon creating our products we decided that our storyboard was too simple, had too many transitions and no narrative; therefore not portraying the artists in the way that we wanted them to appear. Although, we did decide to keep the camera work relatively the same and we varied our location shots (which we originally wasn’t going to do). On completion, we realised that we could have used a bigger variety of set and location in order for our video to look more professional and for our narrative to have a stronger effect.
The program Dreamweaver helped us to create our website which hyperlinks to social networking sites such as facebook, twitter and myspace, as these are what smaller artists use as a means of file sharing in the music industry. Consequently this is what the band ‘Scarlet Avenue’ would use to promote their music as they are an unsigned girlband and do not belong to a label. Dreamweaver was a particularly technical program which having learnt to use has given us new skills for future reference.

Audience feedback

1) On a scale of 1-10 how well do you think our main product and ancillary texts work together?

2) When creating our products we aimed to provide for a target audience similar to our own age group (17-18). As our audience, how appealing do you find our products? (unappealing, quite appealing, very appealing)

3) Do you think we have successfully matched the codes and conventions of our chosen products in comparison to those that already exist? (yes, partly, no)

4) Do you think our products would be good competition for existing artists and bands already in the music industry? (yes, maybe, no)

5) Do you think our products appeal to and consider both genders? (yes, no)

6) If we were able re-do this task again, what advice would you give and what would you suggest we change in order to improve our products?

These are the questions that we created in order to gain efficient audience feedback. We asked 10 males and 10 females aged 17+ for their opinions/responses, so that we can analyse what was found to be successful and what improvements need to be made for future reference.

Results:

In reply to question 1- 90% of the audience rated our main product and ancillary texts a 9 on the likert scale, whilst the other 10% rated the products no lower than 6.

In reply to question 2- 20% found the products unappealing, 30% found the products quite appealing and the remaining 50% found the products very appealing.

In reply to question 3- 70% agreed, 20% said 'partly' and 10% disagreed.

In reply to question 4- 40% said 'yes', 50% said 'maybe' and the other 10% said 'no'.

In reply to question 5- 70% believed the products considered both genders and the other 30% did not.

In reply to question 6- The majority of the participants suggested that if we had the chance to re-do the task it would be best to use a wider variety of costume and location in the music video and to become more advanced when using the programme 'imovie' in order for the video to look more professional. With reference to the website, participants agreed that the layout could be improved by being less simplistic- adding a bit more oomph, fun and style and with reference to the album cover, participants suggested to include more pictures of the band- both as a group and individually to show off their full potential.

Website template and decisions

This is the link to our website:


After looking at the layout of our researched existing band websites we decided to follow in the steps of the young, and newly starting out band 'Alphabeat', as the genre and style closely link to that of the band that we are representing. Although we have chosen this path, we have included some of our own individual ideas and designs e.g. The creation of the band name and the use of the rose logo, which portrays double meaning- between the theme behind the band name and the colours used. E.g. red and black. This can also be seen within the band's clothing, showing unity but individuality at the same time- like the bands 'JLS' and 'The Saturdays'. The layout and writing has been kept within the consistent colour scheme (black, red and white) throughout the website, again portraying simplicity, sophistication, membership and a unique selling point of the band.
We have also tried to incorporate as many codes and conventions of a band's/artist's 'website homepage' as we can- for example the hyperlinks to different pages, a log in area for our fans/members (audience), exclusive photography, relevant videos, links to social networking (facebook, myspace and twitter), a copyright license as well as original special effects in order to make the site look more attractive.

Chosen pictures and writing

Banner 3- The third, chosen creation

Banner 2- The second, improved creation

Banner 1- The first creation

We decided on the name of the band because each member did at one point have different shades of red hair, hense the use of the word 'scarlet', and the new young edgyness of the members creates a new avenue for the audience to venture towards therefore the name 'Scarlet Avenue' was created.
The three designs were successfully created by one of the band members. We chose banner three as we felt it wold be a recognizable advertisement logo to an audience representing the band. We will use the band name as a trademark of their work and make sure it is included within the products that are associated with the band to make it exclusive, identifiable and also to promote the artists within the band.

story board of music video

This is our self-created, moving image storyboard presenting our ideas. We created it by taking images of an already drawn out storyboard and then uploaded it onto Imovie. We then put the images into chronological order and edited each slide by using the program's special effects and editing options. We split each slide, making it the correct length of time to fit with the soundtrack of our music video. We then added transitions to move from one slide to the next, to fit with how our actual music video will be presented. At first we were going to create our music video based on this template by having the band members infront of a green photographic screen, adding a background and then using editing techniques we used for our storyboard to produce our finished product.

However, once the soundtrack was a recorded we decided that it would be much better to give our music video a narrative. We decided we would use a drama studio with black background to portray backstage at a concert/gig and on staging with a white background to show the performing side of the band the clothing stayed the same throughout as we wanted it to look professional and as if all taking place during the preparation and performing of a show. However, by having snippets of narrative using the same male but the four different girls portrays the strong characters of the females showing that they are walking away and ending things drawing the line with the male. Using the male throughout is a bias towards males as it portrays the meaning that all men are the same attracting the female audience but making a male audience want to prove them wrong.

The outdoor clothing gave a different view on the song with personal feelings of the girls and a narrative the audience could understand and relate to as well as making it professional and attractive to the audience it was intended for.