Nath's evaluation

Ways in which our media product uses, develops or challenges forms and conventions of real media products.

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.

Steven's evaluation

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

during the pre-production stages of making our music video we used a wide range of different technologies, most of which are found on the apple mac.

Tasks such as audience profiling and market research were performed using secondary sources found on youtube e.g. Where the genera is listened to predominantly or what social class the listeners are. The reason we used youtube to compile our data is because it is comprehensive and accurate whilst also offering a wide range of sources to use.

Some primary research was conducted but our sources were limited as the genera is not widely listened to in our area. However what we did find out allowed us us to chose colours and create a steriotypical view of our audience. We did this because we wanted to make our product seem different and bold.

During the period in which we were chosing our final song we had out artists working on frootyloops studio a lot because we wanted as many different ideas as possible and as frooty loops is relatively simple to use we had no problem getting plenty of musical ideas. The only problem we had with frooty loops is converting the file types in to files that are compatible with final cut express.

Blogging became a huge part of the whole experience. As I had never blogged before it was a new and interesting way of jotting down ideas or explaining theorys. this is because blogging is very easy and adding things like pictures and videos is also simple and works very effectively at putting across a point.

During construction of our music video we used final cut express (fcx) which is a very good, simple whilst still able to cater for experts. as i had very little knowledge of fcx it was a shock that within half an hour of fiddling i had a good idea of how t properly use the program which was great because we were behind schedual. Although I was only using the basic procedures the final product was what we wanted and I believe it looks good.

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

Our media product uses develops and challenges many different conventions that psy-trance beholds. Psy-trance has a usual convention of psychodelic influences and trippy motifes, the music itself is based around a four to the floor beat with the use of different baselines and synth sounds to give a psychodelic feel. This is portrayed in its music videos as well. The convention of most psytrance videos is based around madness, e.g. infected mushroom becoming insane.

Our group have decided to use this convention and use the motife of madness and insanity. We achieved this by using a song from our artist which involves a running sound, this is menacing and torments the mind as you listen which is only made stronger by using shots of someone running away and effects such as distort.

The lyrics of our song also help in making the video more menacing. They are spoken instead of being sung which is a typical convention of psytrance music which we have also used. the reason we have used this lyrical style is because it gives a great effect, and splits us apart from conventional music which is predominantly sung which is not the effect we want.

Another typical feature of psytrance videos is the use of psychodelic colours and trippy pictures, we have decided not to use this in our video because it is to simple. Although giving a great effect we want to offer something different to our audience as we want to be different to conventional psytrance labels. As we are losing out on one convention we have decided that instead of using loads of weird colours we have used an array of different and interesting effects to make the video almost seem supernatural which is acctualy a reacoring convention in some trance videos. e.g. infected mushroom becoming insane.

One video i took a lot of influence from was chase and status, end credits. Although the genera is not psytrance the label is underground dance music which we are part of. The videos basic narrative is a guy who has just died reliving parts of his life in which he ruined his chances at everything good. Our group took this idea and changed it slightly, instead of some one die'ing, we used some one killing some one and going through what happend, this turned out to become our narrative which we changed slightly as we went along but it gave us a basis to work around. In the end our narrative came out as "some one going mad and chasing them selves and eventually killing them selves though madness." We believed this narrative brought on typical conventions whilst also using new ideas from the underground scene.

Our group is trying to bring a new look for psytrance in what i call "the pendulum effect" This is when a predominantly underground group suddenly becomes very popular though turning into a "indi band" rather than just being a dj. Many groups recently have done this, including pendulum, chase and status and simon bassline smith and they have all seen a huge increase in fans, this is because they have noticed how many new audiences they can bring in by becoming an indi band, this brings in scene kids, emo kids, rockers, ravers, and the typical rig rats whilst also keeping there old audiences who enjoy there oridgional music. Although i have found myself disliking all these artists because of the pendulum effect which is one downside to converting to an indi backing.

Overall our video has used developed and challenged many conventions of psytrance. We have tried to use the pendulum effect to become more appealing to more people and we have held to the madness motife that is a usual convention in many psytrance videos. this has opened our video to many different audiences whilst also keeping to our oridgional fans which is the desired effect.

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

The course work project consists of two parts. The main product which is the music video, and the digi pack which consists of the posters, front cover, back cover and inside cover. All these parts come together and without each other they mean nothing.

The video its self is effective and gives a clear message whilst showing a good motife of psytrance but the video does need the album covers to make sence. The covers all show the character in the videos in his different states, sane, insane and running from himself.

Our ancillary texts all challenge conventions of typical albums, we use our artist in the shots which is unusual as most album covers made by psytrance use digitaly enhanced fractial geometry. We believe in using shot of our artist instead of not we will be advertising to new audiences in what i call the pendulum effect, which is where underground scene music advertises to more scene kids instead of just the oridgional fans.

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

After showing our video to groups of year 10's and 11's we aquired a lot of possitive and negative feedback. After showing them the video we asked them questions such as, did you enjoy the video? do you understand the narrative plot? and if there were any changes they would have made. We recieved mixed opinions and were pleased overall.

One of the main possitive points made was hat the use of different camera shots and visual effects was extensive and effective, they were apparently bord by the song, but kept interested by the different shots and effects, and general interests in the narative.

This links to the point that the song was apparently boring and uninteresting although we didnt realy have the most extensive list of audience members mainly made up of kids that do not appreciate good psytrance, this means that or results were negatively biassed.

Overall we learnt that we should have looked into our genera choice with more care. The song we used was to experimentle for new listeners and we should have used a more upbeat song that would appeal to a larger market. Although greater care should have been taken in chosing our audience to test upon.

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.

Digipack

Today we finished our digi pack. This involved finalising the front cover, back cover, inside cover and poster. We have currently done drafts of them all and we will come back when our whole group is here to add the finishing touches.

Finishing our media

We have had a lot of problems whlst producing our music video, resulting in our group taking longer then expected to finish the production of our music video. Despite this, there are now no more problems.
The Video itself is now finished and all that needs to be done is to change the format of the video (preferably to mp4) and upload it so that it can be played on other computers.
Also, I need to finish making the digi pack. The front and back cover are both done, now I need to make the advertising poster and the inside of the CD cover. Once these are done, our media product will be finished, meaning I will be able to begin my evaluation of the media product.

Digipack

The front CD cover for the digipack is finished and looks effective. There are a few ideas for the back of the CD cover and I'm unsure which one to go with yet as I want it to look as effective as possible. A likely idea that I will use will be showing the artist in our music video running away from the camera. I think this would be a good idea as it would help show the narrative of the music video.

Both the shots that will be used for the front and back cover of the digipack will be taken directly from the music video because I decided this would be the best possible way to describe the narrative of the video from our CD cover.

The front of the cover will show the evil part of the artist who is in power because of the low angle shot, whilst the back of the CD cover will show the artist running away, so the audience will know he is running away from someone, which shows the narrative.

I have used shots in the CD cover which are conventions of psytrance music. An example would be the light flashing on the artist on the front of the cover. Florescent lights are a convention of parties/ social events where this genre of music is often played, which is why I have incorporated this, to appeal more to our audience.

Another convention included is the use of a canted angle shot in the back cover. This is used to make the image seem eerie, which is a common convention of many psytrance images. Earlier in our project, we searched on Google for psytrance images and they all came up with images that looked 'weird' and distorted. This effect is used to create an eerie feel to the images, which is why I wanted to use this effect in the CD cover.

There are other effects I have used because of conventions of psytrance, which will be explained in my evaluation.

Digipack

Today, I have finished the music video. Now all there is left to do is the digipack. So far, I have done the front cover and back cover.

Despite what we have talked about in previous lessons, I have decided to change the idea of our digipack. Our initial idea for our front cover involved editing two pictures of our artist so that half of his face is smiling and the other half frowning. This was supposed to create the effect that there are two personalities to the artist (one good and one evil), which is how the narrative would have been shown, because the narrative is supposed to portray the artist running away from himself.

The idea now is to show a picture of the evil version of the artist in a low angle shot. I decided to use this idea because I feel it makes the front cover look very effective. The reason for the low angle shot is to make the evil version of the artist look like he is in power, and to show who the main focus of the video is on.

The digipack will be updated soon and images will be uploaded onto the blog.