There are various ways in which our media product uses conventions. Our product is a psytrance music video and methods such as the font shown on the front cover of the CD contribute to helping us stick to psytrance conventions. We achieved this by making the name 'Clayden' shown in 'Cracked' font and we made it red. This made the font look urban and also having 'Clayden' in red font relates to conventions of psytrance, which involves bright colours. We wanted to stick to this convention because we wanted to have something on the front cover that would relate to our target market as the front cover is the first thing they would see when looking at the CD. This would result in our target market being more likely to buy the product and would mean our music video will be more successful.
The back cover is another way in which we have stuck to psytrance conventions. A usual convention of psytrance involves images that are 'weird' or look distorted, which is what we have used in our back cover. We did this by incorporating the use of a canted angle shot and using an effect in Photoshop in order for the back cover to have an eerie look. Again, this is one of the first things our audience will see when looking at the CD, so having an image that will appeal to psytrance conventions will increase the chances of our music video being sold. The use of canted angle shots is again used in our music video combined with a ripple effect we used in Final Cut Express in order to give the video an eerie feel. There are other popular music videos with a genre similar to ours that use this effect. For example, in the music video 'Spitfire' by 'Prodigy', flashing lights and quick cuts are often used whilst shaking the camera.
Another example of how we have stuck to conventions of psytrance is the clothing worn by the artist. The artist in the video is shown wearing a black hoodie, which is a convention of the clothing often worn at venues where psytrance music is played. For example, Infected Mushroom's live performances. By using a convention such as this, we are more likely to appeal to our audience and therefore receive a better fan base response, meaning our audience respond positively to our product. This could result in them recommending our product to others, meaning the sales of our music video is likely to increase.
There are also ways in which we have gone against common conventions of psytrance music videos. For example, we have decided not to use a theme where a party is a main idea of the narrative. Videos with a similar audience to ours such as 'Smack my bitch up' by 'Prodigy' often use a party location to narrate a large part of the music video, whereas although we origionally wanted to go with this idea, we decided to change the narrative in the end and go against conventions. This is because the lyrics of our song would not have related enough to the actual video and would have therefore meant the video wouldn't have made sense to some viewers. Also, we wanted to develop our product, meaning we wanted to make changes to our product in order to give customers reason to buy it. Changing the narrative of our music video will result in our product being new to consumers and will therefore give them more incentive to want to buy our product.
How effective the combination of our main product and ancillary text is.
I believe the combination of our main product and ancillary text is very effective. We have carefully thought out how we produced our ancillary texts because we wanted to appeal to our target age group (males 17-24 and females 13-17) as best as we could.
As mentioned previously, we incorporated the use of font in order to more successfully appeal to our market. The artist shown on the front cover of our digi pack is near bright red colored font that is 'cracked'. By doing this we wanted to achieve an 'urban' look so that the font cover appeals more to places where this genre of music is predominantly played (social events, parties, illegal raves, etc). We feel doing this will help us appeal more effectively to our audience and will therefore result in us gaining a stronger market.
Another way of our main product combining well with our ancillary text is the 'Parental Advisory' logo displayed on the front and back cover of the digi pack. This logo is often shown on music CD covers that want to create a 'dangerous' look.
We wanted to create this 'dangerous' look because this genre of music is often played at events such as illegal raves, which are considered to be dangerous (read disclaimer). We therefore felt that including the 'Parental Advisory' logo on the front and back cover would result in our music video appealing more to our target market, increasing the chances of our product's success.
What we have learned from our audience feedback/research.
There are many parts of the video we have added in response to our audience feedback. Parts of the researched we used was secondary research, which involved collecting data from YouTube. We searched psytrance music videos on YouTube and clicked the 'Statistics and data' link which gave us information on where our genre of music is most popular. We will use this feedback to decide where is is best to distribute our product.
As mentioned before, we aimed to make our video look distorted and 'weird' for target audience appeal. This is because we discovered from research that it is a convention of psytrance to incorporate images that look distorted, so it would therefore be more likely to appeal to the audience. The way we gathered this research was to search for psytrance images on google, where it came up with weird looking images; we also searched psytrance videos on YouTube, where most of the videos were of distorted moving images with psytrance music playing.
Another part of target audience appeal we incorporated in our video is the florescent lights. We used the florescent lights by doing some of our filming in the drama suite and flashing the strobe lights there on our artist. This technique looked very effective and was used to make parts of the video look similar to places where this type of music is often played such as illegal raves , parties, etc. The reason for this is we did some research and discovered that florescent lights are also a convention of music played in venues that play psytrance music. We found our this research by questioning one of our group members who often go to these types of social events where psytrance music is played, and he confirmed that there are often florescent lights in these venues.
How we used media technologies
We used the cameras provided in e3 to do the filming. During filming, I feel I have gained a lot of knowledge of the camera functions since the start of the year. The technology we used to actually put the video and audio in place is Final Cut Express on the Apple Macs. This was a very effective program to use because it enabled us to use editing that was vital in the production of our music video. An example would be the cutting tool that enabled us to cut a part of the video and move it to a place of our choice, which helped our video look more organised and professional. There were also a variety of effects we used on Final Cut express which helped our video look more effective. Because a usual convention of our music video is to make images look distorted, we used Final Cut Express to incorporate effects such as 'Ripple' and 'Lineart'.
We also had to change the format of our audio file so that it could be played with the video, which is why we used the program 'GarageBand'. This program did not only enable us to change the the format of our audio file to mp3 so that it could be played in Final Cut Express, but it also enabled us to record the lyrics with the audio, so this proved a very effective program to use.
We also needed to use media technologies when it came to our research and planning. An example of some media technology that was used is YouTube. We used YouTube in the initial stages of our research task in order to find out which places our genre of music (psytrance) is most popular in. By doing this, we are more likely to find a stronger audience, which could increase the chances of the sale of our media product being successful. We used YouTube by searching for songs that were similar to our genre of music and clicking on a link labelled 'Statistics and data'. When we did this, it came up with a world map which showed us which areas of the world most listened to music similar to our genre, and also which age groups our genre of music is most popular with.
These results will help us with the distribution of our product and will again, increase the likelihood of the sale of our product being successful.
The technology that proved most helpful during our research and planning stage was blogspot. We used this website to post updates on what we have done on our coursework. We also used it to put the results of our research there for easy reference. It was a very effective website to use, mainly because posts could be tagged, meaning the names of the people who wrote the posts is written under each post. This helped us to more easily refer to our posts. We could also tag the posts as, for example, 'planning', so if we wanted to see all the posts that were to do with planning, all we had to do was click on the 'planning' link. This resulted in our posts being easier to refer to and also made our blog more orgnanised.
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