Advanced Portfolio: Evaluation

Introduction:

• My project is a pop punk music video, I worked in a group with two other students to complete the product. We all evenly contributed to the production of our video and ancillary products. This included editing the footage and putting the video together using final cut express, as well as using photoshop to create the ancillary tasks.

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

• Our video is based on the pop punk genre, we attempted to use typical elements and conventions of this genre to make our product appear authentic. We used elements such as, band performance, typical locations, typical clothing, bright colours and so on to create this authenticity. It is vital to use these elements in our video for it to appeal to our target audience and for it to attract attention in the real world.

• In our video we wanted to try something new to keep the video feeling fresh and interesting, we didn’t want to go ahead with the obvious. For this reason we cut out video and created a very jumpy and therefore fast paced effect, to further emphasise these sections of the video we desaturated this footage. Within this basic outline for the video we cut in different elements of the band performance and included these in bright colours as would be expected. We also incorporated different angled shots of each performer as well as close ups of the lead singer. We did this as from our research we are aware that the audience likes to see ‘the same but different’ and for this reason we decided to break some conventions but also follow others. In our ancillary products we also followed this same pattern, to link with our video we produced the back of our album cover and magazine advertisement with the band in black and white and the background in colour, we also incorporated some cartoon effects into our album cover to emphasise the brand image of fun and teen anarchy.

• We believed that our innovations were likely to prove successful because we did a large amount of extensive research before hand to ensure that our products would create the correct brand image and therefore appeal to the desired audience, as a result of this research we created our products in a manor similar although not identical to that of established media products

• I believe that our choices worked effectively for our audience as when reviewing our feedback we received many positive comments: 9/12 people answered yes when we asked them if a)the ancillarys worked well with the video b)they create a good punk image c) if they would buy this single

• 6/12 answered ‘Very’ to all when asked if the costume/props/location were appropriate and the remaining 6 answered ‘very’ to 2 out of the 3.

• The majority of the audience said that the video made them feel either happy or excited and said they would watch this video again and 12/12 said the video fit with the song and brand image.

• Therefore I believe that our choices worked very effectively and we created an authentic and enjoyable music video along with effective and fitting ancillary products.

• If we were to do anything differently we would probably have added narrative into the video so it wasn’t entirely performance based, this may have attracted a wider audience.

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

• Our brand image is decidedly ‘pop-punk’ and for this reason we decided to use a relatively punky image as our logo. We went with the bright colours as our target audience is primarily teenagers this is obviously attractive to them.

• We managed to maintain a brand image across our products by incorporating this logo into many aspects of our ancillary products. We also maintained the brand image by keeping the theme of some black and white aspects and some bright coloured. This contrast portratyed the individuality of our band. We kept similar colours, reds, yellows, etc throughout our products and stuck to two main fonts, one for the writing and one for the bands name. I believe that the mixture of bright colours in our products creates the image of fun and excitement which is exactly what we wanted to portray as our brand image.

• In the real world we would hope that record labels that already hold many ‘pop-punk’ bands may consider distributing our music video, for example ‘Filter records’ in the US. We believe, that although our product follows many typical conventions and for that reason appeals to the market, we have something a little different with our band and its produce. I feel that our band delivers traditional punk music with a slightly mainstream feel without being classed as ‘bubblegum punk’ and still appealing to the original punk fans. Real bands that inspired our image were bands such as blink182, rolling stones, and so on.

What have we learnt from our audience feedback...

• To discover our target audience we looked at phsychographic and demographic profiling, we discovered thay phsychographic profiling was much more effective. Psychographic profiling is aware the consumer are complex and can have many different needs. Therefore the media aim to please all the needs a consumer may have. The media may then look at Maslow's hierarchy of needs and incorporate this into their advertisement to incite the consumer into buying their product as they believe by buying such they will fulfill all their needs.  In order to create an effective music video we had to consider these factors.

• We decided that the target audience for our video will be based in the age range of 16-25 as the younger generation are more interested in the pop-punk genre (although there is a good range of older people also interested in this genre). We will aimed to target the rebellious teen and portray this in our brand image. As this is a niche market we have a very loyal fan base and were be able to portray the correct image and target the right people which enabled our music video to succeed. 

• Throughout our project we have used audience feedback to help us create the best products possible, we did this through the use of several questionnaires and in depth research into our target audience.

• The results of such influenced our final products in a number of different ways. We discovered that our audience liked band perfomance and believed band performance is a key concept of punk videos .

• We attracted our audience by using similar techniques and conventions they would be already used to, for example the bright colours in our logo and album design immediately suggest the punk brand, the black and white sections are lowering the tone a little to attract the more mainstream audience as well.

How we used media technologies...

• During the production of our products we used many different media technologies. When we first began our project we used Blogger to log all our research and initial ideas. This enabled us to edit and add to posts if we needed to along with being able to access our work from anywhere we needed to which proved to be very helpful. During the use of Blogger we also learnt how to upload videos from YouTube which was also helpful to back up our research along with many other things Blogger aloud us to do such as upload images and graphs.

• During the construction of our music video i learnt how to use finial cut express. After using imovive last year this was a big step which aloud us to experiment a lot more with different effects and techniques. We used a lot of the ‘desaturate’ tool in our video to form the black and white effect. As well as adjusting the colour grading tools to give the footage a more professional look.

• When we were filming our video and taking the primary images we learnt how to use the video and stills camera to their best ability in order to create a authentic product. To edit the images for our ancillary tasks we used Photoshop, we discovered many new techniques to edit our images. We used to magic wand tool to select aspects of our images and desaturate only certain elements, as well as using the saturation and hue tools to adjust the colour in the images.

• Some times some of the software proved to be challenging, for example the use of blogger could some times freeze the macs, and if it hadn’t automatically saved you could lose posts. Also final cut proved to be difficult when we attempted to use effects some times things didn’t go exactly how we had planned and so we had to find different ways of doing this.

• Over all i feel that the technology we had access to really helped us to create the most authentic products as possible and have advanced our skills dramatically since the AS projects.

To conclude..

• I feel that the research and planning we initially did has really helped us to come up with and create the best idea/product we could have done with the technologies we had. The research into target audience and looking at already established videos enabled us to create a video that was appealing to our target audience and successful in becoming an authentic product.

• I am very pleased with the way that the products came out at the end. I believe that the music video is very authentic and traditional of our genre as well as meeting the conventions we originally planned we broke other to create a different experience to add something new to the market.

• The ancillary products were also very effective and definitely authentic enough to be used. I was really pleased with these products and thought that we really brought across the image we intended.

• Overall i feel that i worked well as a team member to the group and displayed a fair contribution to all aspects of our 3 products, the video, album cover and advert. I have learnt a lot of new techniques and over come many challenges in order to create the products we wanted. I feel that we have succeeded in doing so and therefore have 3 great products.