Question Four of Evaluation - How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Question Three of Evaluation - What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Question Two of Evaluation - How effective is the composition of your main product and ancillary texts?

Question One of Evaluation - In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products

Music Video

Close-Up Sketches

These are the sketches of the hand-drawn images on the digipak:

CD Album for Music Video

Album with and without template:

We found a digipak template on the internet and used it as an actual template for our pack by pasting it into gimp (something we will discuss further in our evaluation). By analysing CD albums we decided on the information we wanted to include in our pack.

Front cover of CD album:

The lead singer is on the front cover of the album as they are usually the most recognisable member of a rock band. We have incorporated a scale-like skin (dinosaur like) onto the singer's body to combine the two aspects of the music video: the performance and the narrative. The image of the busy city behind the singer is used because our music video is set in the city of Tokyo. We had to use an image from the internet because we needed a helicopter shot of the city, and as this was impossible for us to get ourselves, copying an image was our only viable option.

Inside cover no. 1 of CD album:

Again we have made the cover black and white, this time in order to enunciate the red lips of the band. From our primary research we found that making the lips stand out was a commonly used element of a CD album; we used the colour red as it symbolises anger, an emotion stereotypically associated with the rock genre. We have used hand-drawn images of Godzilla and flames to parallel the hand-drawn style of the skyscrapers in our music video.

Inside cover no. 2 of CD album:

We decided to keep the CD part of the inside cover to a bare minimum as we have plenty of detail in the other parts of the album. As Godzilla is the central image of the album, he is used many times. 

Back cover of CD album:

The barcode and writing at the bottom of the cover are included on all the CD album we analysed and we have continued to use the same font and colour to keep with the theme. We have placed the band members on top of skyscrapers which is just as we will do in the actual music video.

Album Poster

This is the album poster for our MV; we analysed various album posters and found the type of information we needed to include. We decided on a slightly 'blocky' type of font because it is assertive, thereby paralleling the song and its lyrics. The photo in the poster represents not only the dark side of the music video (namely the song) through the use of black and white, but also the fun, comical side through the expressions of the band. The font is green because that is the typical colour associated with Godzilla and we wanted to link the poster to the title of the song ('We Are Godzilla, You Are Japan').

How we produced the poster using the software 'Gimp' (step by step):

1. We imported the photograph we took into gimp as a layer. This allowed us to put more layers behind the photo and in front.

2. We added the desaturate effect to the photo so it was black and white.

3. We then went into the colour tab and went into 'levels' this allowed us to brighten and darken some aspects of the photo. We did this to emphasise some bits of the photo for example the rims of their eyes are very dark (Gothic look) and their faces are very light, creating a large contrast and eye catching effect.

4. Then we cropped the photo mainly because we wanted to focus in on their faces (emphasising the detail). Although this meant that the photo was the wrong shape for a poster so we added a black background that showed through at the bottom and top. We were easily able to do this because we imported the photo as a layer so we could send the black background to the back and have the photo layered on top.

5. Lastly we added the writing, we used the font tool already on there and chose a quite bold but Gothic styled font. We choose the green colour that has been used throughout the digipak, so they linked together. The writing was added as a layer and layered on top of the background and photograph layer, and then positioned.

Drafts for Our Poster

Posters on Research

Research on cityscape 

Further (in-depth) research on cityscape

Research on Digipak

Actors, Locations and Props

Presentation on 'What is Postmodernism?'

Ending Scene of 'Psycho' Interpretation

We will use the effect at the end of this scene (skull fading in) in our music video. 

Green Screen Workshop

We had a few difficulties with our green screen in that a purple outline of the person is seen. We intend to correct this in the future by ensuring that our actors don't wear the incorrect coloured clothing. 

We also realised that our green screen is not log enough to cover how space that we want to, and we will change this by purhcasing another green screen to make sure we have enough green screen material. 

Lip Synching Workshop

This is our Lip Synching (with added green screen) workshop.

We have managed to match the timings perfectly and we managed this through playing the song in the background so it could be easily sung along to.

However, we had a few difficulties with the green screen, and the picture being able to be seen through the shirts. 

We will correct this by making sure that our actors don't wear light coloured clothing. 

'Technologic' (Daft Punk) Interpretation with Stop Motion

This is our Stop Motion Animation workshop; we intend to use this in our actual music video. 

We found that our times were not matched perfectly and so when using this feature in our actual video we will make sure that the timings are completely accurate. 

The lighting in the video is also not as effective as we hoped because some words can not be seen.

This is something else we will fix when undergoing our actual task.

Storyboard

Here is our storyboard for our music video (with the comic strip sequence below):

Posturised Comic Strip Sequence:

   

Focus Group Video

This is our video for our focus group. It helped us to choose the themes, actors, locations and props for our music video

Costume Research

We carried out research on the types of costumers worn by members of rock bands to give us an idea of what the band in our music video should wear.

Above is an image of a costume based around the album 'Kiss'; we decided that we wanted our band to wear something subtler (demonstrated in the two images below), as that is more frequent among the rock bands of today.

Skinny jeans are the predominant form of trousers worn, therefore our band wore them as well. As well as this, makeup is thick and black which is another factor we mirrored in our band's appearance.

Semiotic Analyses of Album Covers

Semiotic Analyses of Band Posters

As you can see from above, the general theme of a 'rock' genred poster is that it is black, along with images that connote death, such as skulls. 

The name of the band is always the largest text and is usually in the font that the band normally has; the font is stereotypically block writing).

If it is a poster for a concert, then the venue and other details are given at the bottom, and are all in the same font (although not typically the same font as the band).

Finally, the name of the record company that the band belongs to is always placed at the bottom of the poster, as well as the band's website address.

Survey Results

We used Survey Monkey to create a questionnaire which was filled out by a sample of 20 individuals. 

This graph indicates that the majority of our samples came from males; this may have an impact on our results because they may have slightly different genre preferences, and different ideas on the conventions that symbolise those genres. 

A very high percentage of our sample were in the 17-18 age bracket which was ideal because this was our target audience, meaning that they would know about the types of conventions involved in genres preferred by our target age group.

We found that our sample preferred the indie genre most, with rock coming a close second. However, before we conducted the questionnaire we already had the intention of doing something in the rock genre, which is what we ended up going with.

Narrative and performance music video types were agreed on by the target audience as both playing a key part, and this is something that we agreed with because we wanted to subvert typical conventions by not just including performance.

The sample group generally agreed upon rock conventions which correlated with our ideas, and other research that we conducted; these conventions are typical and so we made the decision to include them so that our music video was easily relatable.

Enter Shikari - 'Ssssnakepit' Textual Analysis

Here is our textual analysis of Enter Shikari:

Enter Shikari - Music Video of 'Sssnakepit' Textual Analysis

One Missed Call - Trailer Textual Analysis

Start: 20 seconds, End: 50 seconds

Here is our Textual Analysis of One Missed Call: 

One Missed Call Textual Analysis

Ju-On (The Grudge) Trailer

Start: 0 seconds, End: 36 seconds

Here is our Textual Analysis of (Ju-On The Grudge)

Ju-On (The Grudge) Textual Analysis

Rush Hour 2 - Fight Scene

Start: 2 minutes, End: 2 minutes 53 seconds

Here is our Textual Analysis of Rush Hour 2:

Rush Hour 2 Textual Analysis

The Karate Kid - First Fight Scene

Start: 6 seconds, End: 1 minute 11 seconds

Here is our Textual Analysis of The Karate Kid:

The Karate Kid Textual Analysis

What Genre is my Music Video?

What genre is my Music Video? on Prezi

Presentation on 'Initial Ideas for our Music Video'

Presentation on 'What is a Digipack?'

Presentation on 'What is a Music Video?'