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.

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.

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.

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.

Locations

Over the weekend I did some work on possible locations and how we could transform them into a party scene. In several locations i visited it would have been easy to transform them because they all had capabilities to hold lights, DJ equipment and house enough people to look convincing. the majority of them had large open spaces that can,with a small amount of people, look busy. This would be achieved by using medium shots and having low key lighting. We could also use low angle shots from the floor looking up at people to give the effect that there are a lot of people in a small area.

ADD PHOTO'S

personal objectives(A)

so far for our project I have done a lot of work on the finding and using the lyrics. Researching the lyrics me and Nathan worked together and then Nathan went and did a post on his understanding of the psytrance genre I worked on refining the lyrics. I had to do this because the lyrics that we finally decided on were from a story. When i refined the lyrics I looked at the story and started to turn it into a poem so that we could fit it easier to the beat of our song. While i was refining it i took a big proportion of the story out and changed a large proportion of what remained.

After this I look to listen to our chosen song so that i can get an idea of the beat pattern and then further refine the song so that it is easier to match.

To date I have uploaded my own understanding of the psytrance genre and aim to put two deconstructions of psytrance music video's onto the blog by Wednesday.

still left to be done is location scouting and getting the relevant permissions to film there,story boarding, casting, costumes,filming and editing. We have decided as a group to split the remanding tasks into workable chunks so that we can work individually.

Psytrance conventions

My understanding of the psytrance genre is that it is typically hypnotic and has medium to fast beats. It is normally played at social events and parties. I believe that it is popular at these sort of events because it is easy to get into the rhythm of the song and also easy to dance to.

Most psytrance songs are without lyrics but, there are several that do contain lyrics. Unlike Pop songs the lyrics are normally spoken or resisted as if someone is sitting next to you talking to you instead of being sung or rapped and they are normally broken up within the song instead of being heard throughout the whole duration of it.

From the research that we have done, on YouTube and by talking to our friends and acquaintances, i understand that this genre is popular with mainly males age 18-24. on our YouTube research we found that it is also popular with females aged 13-17, we thought that this was an anonomly

Lyric finalisation: first draft

A lone man is driving down a lonely road late at night,

he spots a woman,dressed in white

he stops and offers to give her a lift.

The woman accepts, and he drives her home,

along the way he gives her his coat,

she is beautiful, but quiet.

As they arrive at her house, he turns and she is gone, 

he goes to the house,and speaks to the owners,

they say the woman died,some time ago on this same night.

she was murdered they say,

at the spot he picked her up. 

the man visits her grave,

and finds his coat draped across the tombstone.

Today (28/09/09) we rewrote and carefully looked at these lyrics but came to a final decision that they are not suitable as we do not want to film "the phantom hitchhiker" as our narrative because its to complicated and does not go with psytrance, more horror rock.

Lyrical research

Today we decided to research material to use as our lyrics. We needed to ensure that the lyrics we found were not copywrited. We also had personal search criteria such as the need for it to have little or no meaning and we needed the lyrics to fit with the track to create a 'dark' mood. We needed to do this because it is a common convention of our music genre, which is psytrance. We first looked at Alice in wonderland and got the following quotes:

•  You mean you can't take less; it's very easy to take more than nothing.
  
• That's the reason they're called lessons, because they lessen from day to day.
  
• I can't explain myself, I'm afraid, Sir, because I'm not myself you see.
  
• We're all mad here.
  
• Twinkle, twinkle, little bat! How I wonder what you're at.
  
• Off with her head!
  
• Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end: then stop.
  
• I don't believe there's an atom of meaning in it.
  
• Sentence first -- verdict afterwards.
  
• It would be so nice if something made sense for a change.

We thought these quotes fitted well with our conventions because they have little meaning and some make no sense. Our target audience will most likely be older teens, possibly aged 16-24+ and will mainly be played at parties or social gatherings, where people will typically be drinking and may not pay too much attention to the lyrics of the song.

We have researched several psytrance songs with lyrics and noticed that they would make little or no sense to even a sober audience.

Ghost stories

We have decided to research ghost stories for possible use for our lyrics:

Phantom Hitchhikers

A man is driving along a lonely back road late at night. He suddenly spots a woman, often dressed in white, standing at the side of the road. The man pulls over and offers to give the woman a lift. The woman accepts, and it just so happens her destination is the same town the man is heading to. The man then offers to drive the woman home. Along the way he may give her his coat, especially if it has been raining and the woman is wet. The woman is usually very beautiful, but very quiet and withdrawn and barely says another word. As they arrive at the woman's home, the man turns to look at her and is bewildered to find she has vanished. Undaunted he continues to the address given. There he speaks to the residents of the house and is amazed to hear the woman was killed on this same night some time ago. The spot where the man picked her up was the location of her murder or fatal accident. If the man then goes to visit her grave, he will find his coat (if he had given it to her) draped across the tombstone.

We decided to look into ghost stories as well because they are typically 'dark' in meaning which again, would fit well with our conventions. If we decided to use this story, we need to change the rhythm in which the words are said because at the moment they have no rhythm.

We have decided not to use the Absence  lyrics that we researched in the last group meeting because we found idea's that fitted better with the psytrance conventions.

21/09/09 group meeting

We recently found out that we need to have lyrics within our song. None of the songs that our artist makes come with lyrics, this is usually because lyrics are not a usual conventions in psytrance. We decided to take the lyrics out of an uncopywrited song, poem or book and put them on top of the song itself, this is because some of the best lyrics we have herd are not even sung they are literally read, not in any rap or singing style. We find this the best because it challenges usual song conventions in general because lyrics are meant to be sung.

We discovered this song that we thought would go well with the type of music and the theme that we are doing this is because the lyrics are ever so slightly messed up whilst also talking of love. We are yet to decide whether to use these lyrics or not as we still need to discuss. Our other option is to choose some lines out of Alice in Wonderland or use a ghost story because of the darkness and moody feel.

Psytrance Conventions

Psytrance videos, along with other dance music genres have a standard convention of only using a narrative in their videos, this is done because psytrance doesnt usualy have any insturments as it is electronic music, only realy made up on a laptop and a midi keybourd.

We are desiding to go against these conventions as it would be much more interesting for somone within the age range on 18 to 22 to watch a narrative whilst also seeing the artist at work. This is because just watching a narrative can be boring and watching just the artist at work can be boring. This is shown well in the infected mushroom video for becoming insane where both a narrative and shots of the artists working are used.

Definition of Psytrance

As you may have noticed I have been saying the word Psytrance alot, the best said defenition is Psychedelic trance or psytrance is a form of electronic music characterized by hypnotic arrangements of synthetic rhythms and mesmerizing melodies. Mouthful, eh?

Target Audience research

in our 17/09/09 group meeting we did some research on YouTube into the psytrance genre. We discovered that the majority of viewings of psytrance are based around Mexico and Brazil and occasionally in Sweden,Switzerland and Scandinavia. We also noticed that this genre is more internationally widespread than say Drum and Base music which is mainly focused around the UK.

The age range of psytrance is mainly males 18-24 and females 13-17. This music is mainly played in rave or club scenes,this is mainly because of the use of drugs and alcohol and the enhancement these can bring for some people.

the images above show the distribution of of views from 6 video's of psytrance music that we watched on YouTube. Based upon the demographics found from this information we have concluded to aim our video and general product toward the 18 to 22 age range whilst also not limiting our audience to only the UK, hopefully worldwide.

The following three maps and data are from 3 drum and base video's. They show the difference in distribution between drum and base and psytrance. drum and base music video's from YouTube are mainly watched from people within the UK. There are small viewing from Russia and other and eastern European countries 

Our audience will be mainly made up of serious clubers or ravers who's aspirations will either be DJ'ing or living for the weekend, probably not very wealthy or at least an E on the social scale which means our music is best sold in an album or cut to a vinyl, another selling possibility would be to sell the tracks as mp3's over the internet which i know most every digital DJ is doing, including myself.

The begining

Our first group meeting was held on the 7,9,09 and we first started our blog.
We are still debating what colours to use and because of the limited customisation possibilities of the blog we are finding it difficult to come to a conclusion, this shall be discussed further on the 10,9,09 when all members are present.

Out of school on the 9,9,09 Adam and I met with our artist (Chris) Clayden and went through 12 selected tracks of different styles, no conclusions were met over which song is to be used but because we now have our music we can start to look at our image, this also will be discussed further on the 10th.