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.

Editing

Today is editing day, so earlier, I went to e3 to try and edit some of our video. I ran into a few problems because the video and song would not play in Final Cut Express. This is because our video and music files were moved from one Mac to another, since another group were using the Mac we were origionally working on. The problem was that when I tried to play the video and music on Final Cut Express, it came up with a message saying 'some media is missing'. The mp3 file of the music and the video could not be found on the Mac. As a result of this, the video and song were both 'offline'.
When I was in e3 earlier, I figured out how to get the video to play, but the mp3 file for the song is still 'missing', so I will go to e3 later in the day to attempt to solve this problem and continue the editing of the video.

steve's progress

so far i have not done a lot of editing personaly but i have put forward the majority of filming and research + planning. Today i have sat on final cut express and re-arranged the shots into the order stated in my story boards and so far the video is looking a bit rushed and unorganised, although i know this is not the case, so far we have ran into many different problems with cameras, filming techniques and editing styles that actually do not exists which has lead to a few failed shots and the odd smile from our actor when we did not want one.

So far i am very pleased with what has been done and as we have having a planned day off timetable to finish editing i believe this will be finished by thursday evening.

Problem solved!!!!!!

Today we were able to successfully mute the background sound from the origional video recording and we therefore were able to mix the track with our video.

Now, we are able to begin our editing.

Mixing video and audio

I am still in the process of trying to mix the video and the audio together. The video plays fine, but when I attempt to mix it with the mp3 file, it doesn't work. I think this may be because the audio is not yet properly rendered. Another reason for this may be that our music video footage that we currently have on Final Cut Express was recorded with sound. It may be that I need to split the audio from our recorded video in order for it to work.

Today, I will again try to get the audio to play with the video.

Also, we should have the rest of our music video filmed soon so we will be ready to edit.

Music video

Last lesson, we uploaded some of our video footage from our camera onto Final Cut express. Today, I have also transfered our mp3 music file onto Final Cut Express. Right now, the full song and part of our video is on Final Cut Express. In this lesson, I will try to find out how to put the video and song together.

Also, I need to learn how to edit the video properly so that the music video matches the music effectively.

Plan for today!!!!!!!

We are now nearly done with our filming and we just need to film in a couple more locations: the drama studio and somewhere in Newport. I have gone to the drama studio to ask for permission to use it for filming, and we should be able to do some filming during our free periods (2nd, 3rd, and 5th). 

We are planning to get our filming finished very soon and another update will be posted shortly.

final song

on the last Friday before half term we finalized our song. On this day we cut the song down from 6 minutes to 3 minutes and recorded the lyrics onto the song. I then edited the lyrics onto the song and cut them into small samples and spread them over the song. I then put in several effects at the beginning of the first set of lyrics and just before the last set of lyrics. I aim to upload the song to YouTube sometime during this week. this in itself has been a problem because for the past 2 weeks i have been trying different things to upload it without success.

Update

over half term we did the majority of our filming. We still need to film our running scene that we attempted to film several times during dusk period to add a sense of enigma and to try and disguise the face of the runner. We found that it was too difficult to film at night because we lost light too quickly. To overcome this we have decided to film during the day and try to use a hat over the runners face to disguise him,in case we cant make the hat idea work we have a backup plan to use the drama studio as it is predominately all blacked out so we can use spot lights and low key lighting to give our desired effect. We plan to have all of our filming finished today (Monday 2nd November) and after that we can start editing.

Video ideas

ok to this post will be added the video of the filmed storybord by this monday.

We start with a push in of a man standing in a blacked out area, as the push in progresses the man starts to tilt his head up whilst looking slightly sinister. Whilst the push in is happening different cutting effects such as rewinds, slow-mo and super fast jump cuts will be used to make an uneasy feel.
After 15 seconds the first new noise begins which is the sound of running footsteps, with this we are going to have shots of somone running with somone standing in the far background only visible through street lights. Shots such as close ups of the persons feet running, worms eye views of the man running, and over the shoulder shots of the man in the background watching the man running. Whilst this is happening different effects will be used to enhance the sinister feel.
After the running noise has become a smaller part of the track we will move back to our push ins of the man in the blacked out area but with different lights such as lazers and acme LED's flasshing on and off with jump cuts to shorten the push in. Also rewinds and different slow-mo techniques shall be used to add to the sinister feel.
The song at this point comes to the drop and the music starts to become broken and twisted, we shall use this point as a turning point in the video where things start to go a bit mad. To do this we will use shots from the first section all messed up in an organised way and right befor the song drops a shot of the man in the darked out area smiling using either a close up or an extream close up of his face with a canted angle.
The song then drops and the shot of the man flickers out using a transition effect (undesided) and a still medium / long shot shows the man in the darkend out area with loads of people Dancing around him as he stands still, whilst using a stobe light we can cut it into sections where in one second you see loads of people around this man and in another second there is nowhan around him. As this is happening the camera eventualy pushes in but much slower depending on the chorus
Once the chorus has finished we move back to our narrative and use as many shots that we have already filmed as possible to fill small sections. The bridge will consist of strobing images of the man in the blacked out area and different tracking shots of the man running mixed together.

In the end it turns out the man in the darkend out area is the man running away from himself.

The video will use alot of sigmunds theory of voyerism as many of the shots used will make it seem like you are watching the character running (or as if the man in the darkend area is watching himself whilst chasing himself) I thought this was a great influence as it works to bring out suspence and people like this!

OK, Deadlines.

We need ALL filming done by the end of next week.
This means i need all storybording done by monday.
Lets do it!

Did we meet the dealine?: see posts on 23rd

Album Cover

We have now finalised which album cover to go with. We decided to use the idea of making the artist shown on the cover wear dark clothing. We also discussed another idea. Instead of our origional idea where we wanted to conceal part of our artist's identity, we will now fully show who he is because we want the audience to know who the killer is in the narrative.

Now that we have finalised the idea for out album cover, we will upload an image of our cover onto our blog as soon as possible.

New narrative idea

Our idea for our narrative before was making most of our video a first person shot of events that happened in a party. At first we thought this was a good idea, but we later realised that most of the footage that we recorded from a party was too abstract, and would have therefore meant that the narrative would have been harder for the audience to follow.

Now, we have changed our ideas, so that the narrative is more clear and can more easily be followed. The main plot of our music video is now about a person being chased through a set location (which will be decided) after a night out partying. This way, we would not need to include as much abstract footage because the main focus of the video is what happens after the party, instead of what happens in the party.

album covers

Today, we decided to change the idea for our album cover. Our first main idea involved the person shown on the album cover wearing bright clothing, which would appeal to our audience as bright colours are a usual convention of psytrance music videos. Our album cover idea today involved concealing our artist's identity. Conventionally, psytrance artists are not seen during music videos, and we did not want to break this convention, so we made sure our artist's identity is partly covered.

We did this by making him wear shades and wearing a hoodie. This effectively created the impression that our artist's identity is not supposed to be seen by the audience, which is how we stuck to the conventions.

We now have to choose out of these two ideas. Both of the photo ideas have been uploaded onto a computer and we will soon decide which idea to use for our cover.

The full lyrics.

After further tests on convicts we have concluded that the excesive exposure to the frequency 65Hz can result in mass brain meltdown, causing th person to become insane or leave reality itself.

After repeating the 65Hz frequency at 145 BPM for 3 hours test subjects begin to throw there hands in the air wildly, stomp thier feet, but in some cases they couldnt handle the sound anymore, they went so mad they tried to murder everyone in sight.

But they dont kill you in a mad bloodlust manner, they tees you, mess with you head, almost as if they wanted you to become insane aswell.

These are our final lyrics although can be changed at any moment depending on development of ideas.

Props and settings

As I have said in a previous post, our location for our filming of our music video should be relevant to our genre of music. We decided that we should do most of the filming in a place like the school hall or drama, where it is a wide open space and it can easily be made to look like a party location.

We now also need to decide which props to incorporate in our music video. We would need to add props in the video that would relate to the conventions of our genre, psytrance. These props could be items such as decks, bright florescent lighting, etc. By doing this, we will more effectively appeal to our audience. We will do further research to help us find out more about conventional props used in psytrance videos and use the results from our research to help us to determine what prop will be used in our video.

Narrative finalized

Our Psytrance conventions have been decided. we are going to use a narrative whilst also using shots of the artist. So far what we want to do is use push ins of our artist on a white background with him mouthing the lyrics, whilst this is going on jump cuts will be used to move between different shots of  someone being chased through Newport at night. These different shots will include over the shoulder shots,tracking shots,POV and various different camera positions to give the idea of an intense chase happening.The chase being the narrative and the push ins of our artist as the abstract.

Story boarding

Today I started to story bored and had to start working out time scaling for the track, but we ran into a problem. The music from the CD is burnt as a CDA not as an MP3, also the original CD is broken. Because of the circumstances we have spoken to Clayden and requested another CD and we are meeting him today at 1:10 PM.

Once we have finalised our track, again we can finish off story bording and then film the story bored.

Artist's Image

Also in today's lesson, I will be explaining in more detail how our artist's image will be.

Our artist will be a musical performer as he did not go through an audition process, he instead performs his music at parties/clubs, etc.

As I have mentioned in a previous post, our artist will dress to appeal to our audience, and the best way to do this is to dress like you would in a party or social event. Therefore our artist displayed on our album cover will most likely be wearing conventional 'Chav' clothing to give off an impression that he is more 'accessible' to the audience. This would be a way of us incorporating John stewart's theory into our music video which states that the video allows more access to the performer than a stage performance can.

Our artist will also try to appeal to our target market in other ways such as publicity stunts. A publicity stunt is where an artist wants to be seen doing something (usually in a photo) which will send a message to their audience that the artist wants to send. In our artist's case, photos such as our album cover could create this effect. We will attempt to make our artist perform a publicity shot in our album cover to appeal more to our audience by sending them a message that would appeal or relate to them. Doing this will result in us having a stronger target audience and would therefore mean the sale of our music would be more likely to be successful.

A2 folders

In today's lesson, i decided to organise our work in a folder to make it all easier to find. At the moment, it just has our youtube research that we used to find our main target audience, but we will soon be storing more of our research there such as costume ideas, location ideas, etc.

Audience finalisation

Our audience was looked at in detail with data sources from youtube. Our conclusions were that our audience are aged between 18 and 22 with some ages above 22 listening but the majority are aged between 18 and 22 (sources: youtube). This means that our audience when looked at in britain are predominatly students but when you look into the illegal rave scene most of the people their probably cant afford univercity.

This means our target market are devided equaly between medium to high income people and low income people, which means we should look to advertise our album in mainly univercitys but also selling CD's at partys and social event such as Strawberry Fair or Junktion Warning. This would mean a balanced mix of people are awar of our artist and his music.

Our audience is predominantly male but there are still alot of female listeners (sources: youtube) which means we need to advertise our album to both genders without being suggestive to either males or females.

Further Costume Decision

Clothes: Green relaxed french connection hoodie
Black and grey hoodie
Saggy hate with flat peak
Grey tracksuit bottoms
Green bomber jacket
Camo chords
Trippy T-shirt

Locations

We now need to make a list of locations which we will be using for our music video. We already have some footage of a party we went to which will be used in our video. Other locations which may be used includes the school hall and the drama studio. We thought it would be a good idea to use these locations because it would be quite simple to layout these locations so that they look like party venues. They are both clear open spaces which can help us make the effect that it's a party venue.

Other locations include rural and town roads whilst driving so that we can use jump cuts and use the shots themselfs to create a jump between scenes. I have seen this in videos such as smack my bitch up where a driving scene with loads of jump cuts is used to create a jump.

Also we would need to use a small studio as one of our latest ideas includes a push in of clayden lip syncing some of the lyrics whilst stood in a completely white washed backgroud, to create a sence of difference between the artist and what is going on in the narrative video.

Star Image

Star image is the image a star portrays about his or her self. Our artist Clayden is a music producer of many different styles, his recent music has been of psytrance orientation. After looking at image conventions of psytrance we have made final decisions on what he will look like.

After looking through countless boxes of costumes we have selected a few items f clothing that we are going to use, the colors still relate to our blog, white, green, black, the reason we are using these colors is because they are commonly found in the rave scene (refer to disclaimer).

The colors are all vibrent and stand out, we have decided to use photoshop to make predominant colors stand out on a black and white background, this is because we want to make a contrast between the artist and everything around him. The reason we want to create a contrast is because we would like to follow the convention of the artist being better, or worse than everyone els, this is because it makes it easier to make a narrative with the artist.

Today we are going to take our final pictures and edit them in photoshop, this deadline must be met and pictures posted on blog. This must be done as a group!

Costumes

After yesterday's lesson, it was decided that I should deal with gathering the costumes that we may use for our photo on our album cover. Today, I have put together some costumes that I think would be suitable to wear for the cover.

As we discussed in our last lesson, the costume worn on the album cover should appeal to our main target audience. I have stated in previous posts that our main audience will be the older teen group who like listening to our genre of music (psytrance) in social events or parties. Our group thought that the best way to appeal to our audience is to relate to them. In order to do this in our album cover, I believe we should make the person shown on the cover dress the same way as people would who often go to parties or social events where dance music is played.

Doing this will result in our target audience being able to relate more to the artist and would therefore mean we have a stronger target market.
The costumes I think would be most suitable is casual clothing. I will soon get pictures of our costume ideas and have them uploaded onto our blog.

Early bird gets the post!

OK. Its thiry two minutes past midnight and iv been up since ten pm posting. so far I have revised EVERY POST....... ALL is up to date.

New pictures of psytrance album covers have been added around the blog and will continue to be published with every post written, from this as a group we can be reminded of usual conventions as we work, this will help us focus of the subject in hand.

I have written 4 Personal posts today alone and i expect atleast 3 more from both nathan and adam. This will finalise planning. This must all be finished in TWO WEEKS from the 29th of september, These final personal posts from everyone should consist of costumes, locations, final image analysis, effects analysis, lyrics analysis.

Once this is finished we can oficialy start filming. Whilst filming each member of the group will be made to write a separate post each on what they did indevidualy whilst filming, outlineing specific details on what they learnt, or found difficult as this will all be extreamly valuable during our evaluations. The same technique shall be used whilst editing, also to help with the evaluation.

Psytrance Revelation

"Psy is both universe and infinitesimal particles, the Nanospheric psy is an abstract construct beyond our imagination and comprehension. It is a machine deity that forms matter in its own will."

This quote describes Nanospheric which is the fourth album from Cybernetika, an independent German producer from Cologne. Since 2003 he has been writing many different types of electronic music with science fiction influences: psychedelic trance, techno, industrial, and drum ‘n bass. Hints of these other styles can be heard on Nanospheric, but it is primarily an atmospheric psytrance album with a heavy emphasis on story-telling. Cybernetika begins the tale with a virtual story line.

This album was written in FL Studio, mastered with Wavelab, and features cover artwork by Angie.