Adam's evaluation

In what ways does your media product use,develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
My music video both uses and challenges the normal conventions of a psytrance music video.
It uses the conventions in the fact that the song is almost hypnotic in its beats and melodies. This helps to get the audience, males 17-24 and females 13-17,involved with the song and draws them into dancing.Our narrative lyrics also fit with the conventions because the music is normally made using electronic, synthesised instruments and constructed on a laptop, or computer. The lyrics of our song help to keep the song interesting and the audience dancing.
The fact that we are making a music video for our song challenges the conventions of our genre. This is because the songs are nor

m

ally thought of,constructed and played live at a party on a laptop using a virtual DJ programme such as 'tractor' or 'ableton live'.

Because of this there is very rarely a video to accompany the song, instead 'random' visuals that are projected onto a wall using a projector or a laser. The visuals are normally weird and wonderful pictures or short video clips that are projected onto the

wall and change with the beat of the song. The video that we have created is on

e that would be used for publication and public viewing. it would therefore be produced solely for the use on a music channel such as MTV or for use in a home environment. It would also b used to upload to YouTube or to various other sites such as face book or my space. The video that would be shown at a party environment would be that of a light show or projections of random images,as this would fit in better with the environment

and nature of psytrance parties.

The album cover again in its self challenges the conventions of our genre because, if the tracks are ever released onto CD they rarely show the artists face, instead they

choose to use random images

that fit with the artists identity

and image for himself, or again they use different colours and shapes that look like they have come out of a light show. I recently purchased a CD by a

local DJ known as 'Ghost', the album itself was called 'kaleidoscope' and the album cover, as the name suggests was of colours and shapes that are typical of those you would see in a kaleidoscope.
When making our video and then our album cover, we decided to show and star our artist in both cases. This was

because we wanted to make him different an

d to stand out from the crowd.
This challenges the conventions of the psytrance genre in three ways. The first i mentioned above, t

he second is that there is normally little chance to see the artist due to the fact that the majority of the time the DJ appears live it

is at a free party, in the middle of no-where, using high voltage,coloured laser

s and 'disco lights', so there is little opportunity to see the artist as he plays.The third reason is a serious one. Where psytrance and the related genre's, e.g. drum and base,house, garage etc., are played are at

illegal raves. To overcome this the artists,instead of using there real name, are identified by nicknames or a certain costume, e.g. deadmouse who always appears wearing a large,plastic, mouse mask over his face. We wanted to challenge this convention when developing our artist by making him the star of our video. Even

though his face is clearly visible throughout the video we used lighting to give the effect that he is mysterious.

We did this by filming in a totally dark room and by using a single spot light above his head we managed to create various shadows such as above one of

his eyes. We also decided that our artist would also only appear live at licenced,legal parties. Most DJ's don't

make music for the money. The majority of them make it for the enjoyment, and satisfaction of

it, therefore most of them are unsigned and make little or no money from performing. This is a convention that we wanted to use,as

our group mainly felt the same way about this convention and agreed with it. for our artist, and many others like him, as he becomes more successful and thus more well known,money will be a major issue in what he does in the future. At the beginning of his 'career' he stated making music for the love of it, but only appearing at licenced and legal par

ties will be costly, so part of the reason he does it is for the money.

How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

We used new media technologies in several stages of the production of our music video.
The first stage we used new media technologies was in the research stage. H

ere we used the Internet, mainly Youtube. We used YouTube to gather information on the ages and distribution of the general audience of pystrance music(http://nfgsclaydenproductions.blogspot.com/2009/09/target-audience-research.html). We then took a screenshot of this information and posted it onto our blog. We then used this information to fine tune our target audience. The information we gathered for distribution we used to decide whether our artist would be marketed globally or just within

the UK or Europe.

We also used the internet to research our lyrics. here we mainly used google to search out weird stories that we could put to our music. Our first idea was to use quotes from Alice in wonderland or a ghost story called 'The Phantom Hitchhiker'. We posted both of these ideas and the results from our reasearch onto our blog,  http://nfgsclaydenproductions.blogspot.com/2009/09/lyrical-research.html.

In the construction of our video we used Final Cut express on the Apple Macs to edit the filming that we had taken previously.

As well as using final cut express we used adobe photo shop to make our digipack (poster and CD covers). For this we took a screen shot from our video and placed it into photo shop. From here we added our text and various logos, such as 'parental advisory' logo's. F

or the planning of the video we used mainly the Internet and blogspot to research and post idea's that we could use and in some cases to check the viability of idea's we had. The image right above is from our inside cover for our CD. The image above left is the same image taken straight out of our video before we edited it in photo shop.

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

our used our audience feedback to help us to make our video more appealing and attractive to our target audience. We asked a group of 'Psytrance lovers' what they would

expect and desire to see within our video. a large proportion of them stated that they would like 'weird effects' in it. To try and adhere to our audience

feedback we went through and put different,weird and wonderful effects into the video.

The most effective effect that we put into our video is one that is like a pond ripple across the screen from a focus point in the centre of it. This effect is shown in the picture to the right. It gives that part of the video an almost drunk perspective to the video.  

We used a lot of inter laying shots in much of our film. They were mainly used in the abstract parts of the video where our artist was standing alone in the black room.

Our audience also stated that they wanted both abstract and narrative elements within the video. This was mainly because they felt that if it was just either narrative or abstract that we wouldn't keep interest because they aren't used to watching video's from the psytrance genre. This aided our decision in applying this piece of feedback because we already felt that the video and song were a bit boring and we didn't want our target audience to also get bored and thus go off of the song and possibly eventually our artist.

How effective is the combination of your main product and the ancillary texts?

The combination of our main product and the ancillary texts ( CD album covers and advertising poster), I believe work well because they all slightly challenge the psytrance conventions. The ancillary texts, as well as the music video, do challenge the conventions of

psytrance because, A) we are releasing our artists song onto CD and B) in the front album cover we show an image of our artists face from the video. If we had stuck with the conventions of the psytrance genre we wouldn't have mad

e anything apart from a song for our coursework,but because we wanted our artist to be different and to stand out from other, competing, artists we decided to break the conventions. When making our poster we have again broken the conventions of psytrance as the picture on the poster is in black and white and the words that are on the poster are in black. We decided to do this because we felt it fitted in with elements of our video, in the narrative parts of the video the artist is only illuminated by a single spot light above his head and in the abstract parts of it the only light we have used is natural light, which is in my opinion low key at the time of filming. All of our ancillary texts are similar in the sense that they are all quite dark in colour. The front album cover is a shot of our artists face from the video in which the camera has a medium shot of him with the single spot light above him that gives him a mysterious and dangerous look about him. All of our ancillary texts were made using images from our video. The fact that we have done this, I think enable them to work well together.