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

Question 4:
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What have you learned from your audience feedback?

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

Question 2: 

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

Question 1:

Final Digi Pack and Poster

Final CD front and back cover 

Final Poster

I am really pleased with the final products. I think that they successfully advertise the artist, in terms of the consistent themes within the digi pack, poster and the video showing off who she is as a person, making her an inspirational artist to look up to as an audience (teens). 

Planning Our Digi Pack And Poster

Brainstorming ideas
For our Digi pack, it is key to us that the feel of it is the same as the video. We want to make sure that it includes something that girls at the age of 16 and 17 will think looks nice and appealing to pick up if they were to see it, or if it were a poster that they would read it and want to learn more about the artist. We also want to make sure that it conforms to the stock settings of the indie acoustic genre, maybe including some props we discovered in the research stage or things which or audience like to see. Our analysis of existing CD and Posters will be extremely useful as we already have an idea of what we need to include: the style of font, the colours, the composition, costume, the consistency etc.
I have created collages of 4 main ideas we have thought of in the process of creating our whole media product, these are ideas we believe can represent our artist correctly, we will then pick our favourite and develop this.

Idea 1: Theme of daisies

Idea 2: Theme of Books 

Idea 3: Theme of fairy lights

Idea 4: Theme of polaroid cameras and film

Possible album cover design: 

This is the first idea that we came up with to do with the theme of dasies. We created this on paint using an image from the storyboard, and although it is messy, it shows our idea well and the kind of thing we wanted to do. We know that we wanted to include the artist in the centre of the frame which is what we did, and also have the hand written style fonts. I likes this idea as i think it looked summery and matched her personality however i didn't think that it linked as well as it could do to the video and the kind of conventions which surround our genre. therefore we have come up with another idea and have made that in paint roughly too to show another idea.

Second album cover design:
After deciding that the last cover wasn't as conventional as we wanted, and didn't represent the artist as well as it could have done, we put together another rough draft, this time using the theme of polaroids. We thought that this idea would be using Bournville park (a scene which we were originally going to us as it was conventional but the weather caused difficulties) to take a picture of Beth on a polaroid which would then be held up in front of the setting it was taken in. We thought that this idea conforms to the conventions of the genre way more, including the iconography of the polaroid but also remains with the artist in the centre of the frame, and if anything focusing on her a lot more. In terms of costume, we want her to wear something similar to existing artists and like what she wore in the music video. To keep some of the themes of daises we want to include a daisy chain head band for Beth so that we have that element to show her personality more.

Process of picking the font:
In order to pick a font we visited a website called dafont.com. This allowed us to view a large range of different fonts based on a general search. For instance we types in a key word of 'cute' which came up with some really nice fonts which we felt matched our genre well too. We knew from these that we wanted one main font for the artist name 'Auria Hart', as all the artists from the indie acoustic genre have a consistent font for their name to make them more memorable. We then knew we wanted a consistency with that album title name, therefore we had to pick two fonts which we would use throughout the digi pack and poster. We made a collage of all the different fonts we picked and liked best from the website and put them together in a collage like manner so that they are easily comparable ready to pick the correct one. 

Linking to existing products

When looking at the artists we already analysed, i am able to see a clear link between the fonts we have picked up on, but also the fact that we have decided to pick two different fonts. As you can see from the top row of images, Gabrielle aplin always uses the same font for her artist name, and the same font for her album titles. The font she uses for her album title is also used for all the track lists. Lewis Watson uses an elongated font, as well as a handwritten style font which i feel we have definitely adapted. We have also noticed that the artist name seems to come first, followed by the album name, with the artist name remaining biggest as well as the actual artist featuring on the front cover. The artist tends to be positioned in the centre of the frame, and the costume tends to be fairly plain and casual, including a plain dress or t shirt and shorts in Lucy rose's covers. These are all aspects we will consider with our cover as well as advertisement.

Also, when going back to the results of our audience research, we noticed that some of the target audience mentioned that they liked the simplicity of the fonts used in these covers, and therefore we would like to conform to this as well as making sure that they are readable and clear to the reader. 

Creating our Digi Pack and poster 

Similar to the front and back cover of the digi pack, as well as the poster - we used the same techniques to create the inside cover. We wanted to keep the theme of polaroids running throughout the entire album to match the video, and the special thing behind the inside cover is that all the images are memories of hers which link to songs but are also snaps from the music video, again linking all of our products together. 

We used: An iphone and ipccy. 

The iphone allowed us to capture a fairly high quality image which we could then import into ipiccy and edit together the image overlay over the polaroids. We also added a warm filter as well as the film flare to give it a more welcoming and personal feel for the audience. 

Finished Video

Production planning

Shooting Schedule 

In our video treatment we included images of our story board and what we hoped to achieve from our video in terms of shots and narrative. We then created this shooting schedule to show where and when we would film to fit around all the characters within the video as well as making sure that the weather was okay for the day, which sometimes caused alterations in which parts we would film - however this is the final, accurate filming schedule of what we stuck to.

We encountered an issue with our product when trying to film, however. One point of the narrative was that the video would show a progression of seasons to show the time passing and the relationship getting weaker as the weather got colder. For this we wanted to start with the Bournville park scene which is the summer scene. When trying to film this we kept changing the date due to the weather being poor, we only have october weather and this was mainly cloudy and rainy. Time was running short and we really needed to edit it all together and get it finished so we came up with a plan B that actually fit the narrative better. 

Our new plan: 
In replacement of the Bournville park scene, we took the time the following monday to take a trip to town where we would film a montage of clips of aaron and Beth together. In all of these clips our aim was to ensure they looked happy together, as well as showing some other shot oft them happy form the other scenes we had filmed. All together this montage would show the relationship when they were happy, the audience will familiarise themselves with the couple as happy and therefore the arguments and the ex girlfriend will come as a larger shock. By changing this we also challenged a lot of stereotypes and theories, which we saw as better and we conformed to more of the narrative theories giving our video more interest.

Shot list
We spent some time creating a shot list. This was created before we filmed, however it went through a lot of stages as we filmed as we added in shots, and in fact completely altered what happened within the time the first verse was playing. Therefore this was an ongoing process and we now have a complete shot list which is accurate and explains the different shots and movement we used which will be useful in out evaluation stages in linking to existing products and the conventional shot of the indie acoustic genre. 

Overall, our shot list really did help us when filming, alongside the story board ensuring that we were taking all the right shots but also helped us realise along the way what shot we could include to improve our video and reflect upon decisions we were making. 

Video Treatment

Story Board
For our story board we tried our best to replicate the shots and the setting as best as we could in the time that we had. We managed to go to the actual library setting we will use in our video and the domestic scenes will also be the same as the video. We didn't manage to go to the park we will use of the lickey hills due to time but be manages to replicate the kind of shots you will see in the actual video when it is complete. This story board really reflects our research in terms of shots, propps and the kind of techniques with the camera we will use. 

ADD IN THE POLAROID BIT*****

Film Flare Montage 
Staying alongside the cute and girly aspect of the video, we have put together some videos with film flares we have downloaded over the top to present how we could make our videos look. This is based on ou research stages of effects on existing videos.




To show our finished idea as a concept we used imovie to put together our storyboard of images to show general timings working alongside our timeline we previously created. Of course, this is just a storyboard and film flares, brightness and costumes etc will be different on the actual product. The acting will hopefully be a little better and more serious, making it look less cheesy - that will come with practice. We can't wait to start filming our actual final product and so we shall leave you with this stop motion storyboard. 

Our presentation: 

Planning our music video

Short re-cap of the documentary

After creating our documentary we really had a grasp on what we wanted to include in our music video and what would be possible when thinking about the money we have for props, transport to places to film and just generally the equipment we have to make it with.

At the end of the documentary we included this: 

Picking the correct song

All the elements above were things we were pretty much certain we wanted to include but also knew that we could due to the software that we have, the camera and the props which we already own. Following on from this we had a search though different indie acoustic songs, covers of songs that male artists had done on a variety of websites and apps. These included Spotify, YouTube and general Google search options. We found that a lot of the covers which females did weren't professionally recorded, or the song in fact didn't have a very good narrative or potential for us to create an effective video. From this we concluded that the best song we found in our searches was a cover which Ellie Goulding did of a Kodaline song - who are also an indie band however she creates a female vocal version in an acoustic means.

These comments from the youtube video for the song are evidence that it appeals to a female audience which is who we are aiming our music video at. Also, the fact that the song was a cover was something that attracted us as there isn't a video to go with this version of the song so we won't get any influences from an original but will make the video purely from our ideas and our research.

Planning our video:

We created a fairly detailed plan of our video showing the lines when each part of the storyline would be filmed. We also included the amount of seconds (roughly) that each line was however made sure that we kept it simple without shots and character names which we will include in the story board and timeline of the video.

Further characters

After knowing what our artist would look like and what her personality would entail, furthermore knowing that we want to create a video (supported by the popular opinion of our audience) with both a narrative and performance, we would need some other characters. These include Aaron and Becky who are included within our note plan. This meant that me and Katie really needed to think about how we would present these characters in order to show off the story line but also whether they reinforce or challenge stereotypes. To do this we did the same as Beth's character: a mood board and a character profile.

The love interest: "Aaron"

The Ex-girlfriend: "Becky"