Evaluation

In what ways does your media produce use, develop or challenege forms and conventions of real media products?
Our media product uses numerous elements of forms and conventions of media. The camerawork used in our video includes close-ups of the people singing, which is typical of music videos, making it look more like a real music video, longer shots where all the dancers can be seen at the same time, which work because they show all the action and make it more humourous as all the silly dancing can be seen together. The costumes which we used in our video, particulcarly the clothing of the raver, stand out as bright and silly, because they are not what the normal conventions of clothing on the street are. On our storyboards, we made a narrative storyline which I think breaks the conventions of the music videos from Basement Jaxx and this genre of music in a way, because they are more focuses on the dance elements, but when we had filmed and edited the video, because of various factors, the storyline seemed much weaker, although it can still be seen as a sort of storyline within our video. For the sound/music from our video, we used the album version of the song rather than the version that Basement Jaxx used on their music video because we preferred this version, however, this version of the song is much longer so we had to cut it down to fit the amount of footage that we had, which in a way, makes it different because it is a changed version of the song.

For our digipack, the colours and styles that we used we based around the style of the band, and as I have explain in previous posts the things that tried for our digipack based on elements used by Basement Jaxx such as the animals etc., but I think that our digipack breaks certain conventions in that we used images where we are pulling faces which is something that you would not expect to see on a cd or digipack type product because it is not very serious and random.

I think that our poster uses conventions of media in that we typed reviews, the band websites and laid it out with the title at the top etc. like you would expect to see on an advertisement, but I think that this works because it makes it more recogniseable as an advert, and shows that it is promotional. Also, the image in the middle is quite striking with the contrasts of the bright colours on the darker shades.


How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
I feel that the combination of my main product and ancillary texts is quite effective at promoting the album, as each item ties in with the others as they all fit with the bright, vibrant and quirky stylings of the band. In terms of convergance, I think that each product helps the others and all tie in perfectly, adding to the promoting effect of the whole project. The target audience from our research is teenagers and the younger generations and I feel that our products would attract to this age group because of the eye-catching bright colours which we have used on each item. Looking back at the album covers, and advertisements from my research, I feel that we have captured the style of these well and that our advert was attractive and stood out like the Basement Jaxx ones. Below I have placed the Basement Jaxx poster, next to the advertisement that my group produced so that the similarities can be seen:









What have you learned from your audience feedback?
The majority of our audience feedback came from uploading our music video onto Youtube and at the time of writing, our video has 347 views. Below I have placed an image showing the comments which we had recieved at the time of writing this post.














Overall the comments are quite positive, praising the way we kept the video upbeat, matching the song and the part where we spelt out 'Do Your Thing' with the chips. So far none of the comments have had criticisms about our video. We also posted a link to our video on Facebook to distribute it more, but this produced more views and comments on Youtube, rather than comments etc. on Facebook. Comments like: 'I really like how everyone is jumping and dancing around as it reflects the genre of the song, and all the shots are really fast paced which works with the beat of the music.' - shows that viewers enjoyed the dancing and fast paced editing and effects, and other comments like 'I love how the songs quirkiness matches your own and you bring that across well. Your spirit matches the song perfectly and it would appeal to fans of the song strongly' show how we have captured the quirky style well and effectivly
In terms of how effective our video is, I think that the feedback comments on Youtube show that it is quite effective in the way that we managed to capture the upbeat, colourful, fun style of Basement Jaxx through the dancing and humour, and made it overall entertaining


How did you use media technologies in the construction & research, planning & evaluation stages?
http://www.blogger.com/ is the website that I have used for my blog, and I feel that this website was really easy to use and that the blog entering is simple and layed out neatly. The ability to add pictures to the posts is something which I think is very good on this website because a lot of my posts needed. Other sites that we have used are youtube, where we uploaded our music video, which I think was the perfect site to upload it because it is a highly popular website where distributing our video would make it most likely to be seen by more people, and this was also a good site to collect feedback from the comment and rating features. Our music video was also linked on facebook, where we typed the link to the youtube video and posted it on Facebook, which distributed the video more as it is a popular social networking site, and collected us more views and comments.
The technology we used for the filming was a digital camcorder and a tripod. I did not handle the camera much as I was one of the people in our music video, but the small amount of filming that I did, I found that the camera was simple in that the buttons were easy, but timing when to stop and start and rewind to watch it back on the camera were slightly difficult, aside from this, the cameras were good.
The software programs that we used were Photoshop, which I think was really good for making the digipack and poster as it makes for easy manipulation of the pictures, and as a lot of them needed to be changed to have brighter vibrant colours, the saturate feature did it very quickly and how we wanted. It also allowed us to place the images together, which particularly helped with making the inside of our digipack. Premium, the editing program that we used also was perfect for editing because it had the seperate section where the captured clip is dragged, so it can be shortened and manipulated before being dragged into the timeline, also, it has special effects like speeding up which we need to use within our video, as it would add to the lively, upbeat style of the video and Basement Jaxx.
Premium and Photoshop are both made by the same company, Adobe and the websites that I use all tie in with eachother in the way that they are all about posting thoughts. Each part of technology that I have used relates to eachother and I dont think that my music video, digipack and magazine advert, would have been as styled to Basement Jaxx as I feel they are without all of them being available.

Magazine Advert

This is the magazine advert which we created along with the digipack and music video for the album promotion. We chose an image from a set that one of the group members had taken whilse we were out filming. I think that the choice of image works really well as it shows all 5 of the group members from the video and makes it look like we having a good time.
We chose to make everything but the people black and white, because it highlights them as bright and colourful and makes them stand out like in the posters which I looked at for my research into advertisements, reflecting the style of Basement Jaxx. I think that this works really well because it makes them stand out and very eye-catching. We also heightened the colours on photoshop, making them brighter than in the original photo to add to this effective link to the style of the band.
The colour pink that we chose for the font matches the tights on the girl at the left and also, we think that this was a bright colour to choose and so would stand out to anybody looking at this advert
The reviews that we wrote are from NME and Q which we chose because they are quite famous and influential music magazines, and the quote on the NME review is one that we looked up on the website for NME magazine on one of their reviews about the band. We used the layout of words, then stars, then magazine name because this is how reviews and usually laid out and so makes it more recogniseable.
In the bottom left corner, we placed the Basement Jaxx symbol, linking to the band, and making the poster more realisitic. Next to it we placed the band website and myspace, and also the website of Basement Jaxx's record label, as reference points and also to make the poster look more realisitic because real posters use the websites for the bands etc.
In terms of what we could have done better, I think that the font we chose for the writing is a bit uninteresting, although I do think that it works to a certain extent, I think that a more interesting font would have been better, because it would make it more attractive and perhaps link better to the band.

Magazine Advert Research

This is a promotional poster/advertisement for the album 'Rooty' showing an albino gorilla, which matches the quirky random style of the band by featuring such a rare animal within this poster. The classic font of the band and elements of bright colours can be seen in this poster, but what stands out to me is the way that the starry background emphasises the white fur of the gorilla because of the contrasting colours

This is a promotional poster/advertisement for the album 'Crazy Itch Radio' which I think fits the random style of the band even more than the 'Rooty' poster because although the albino gorilla is rare, it is existant, the dog with a radio body is much more imaginary. The radio links to loud music, showing the genre of the band. Also, the orange colour across the poster makes the dog stand out in the same way as the gorilla in the other poster. Also, the areas of white make this poster overall more eye-catching as it is much brighter/lighter

I think that the main element of the styling that we are going to take from this is the idea of using contrasting colours to make the main feature of the image stand out and become very eye-catching.

Digipack

I think that our digipack has turned out really well and captures the style of Basement Jaxx in a good way, by basing it around the fluorescent bright colours of the band and using images which we took during our filming for the music video make it match well and all tie in with eachother. To make the inside of our digipack, we selected an image of a filmstrip from google and placed the spare images we had and some screen captures from our video in all the seperate boxes, then changed the edges of the strip to bright colours. I think that this works really well because the bright colours match the style, and most of the images are when we were being silly, random and having a laugh, which I think is what Basement Jaxx are all about

Digipak/Album Research and Creation

These are the album covers from all of the albums by Basement Jaxx which I have looked into as research for the digipak which we are going to make. The key theme with these album covers is that they are very bold, striking and use a lot of bright fluorescent colours to attract attention and look appealing, which we are going to use on our digipak so that we can capture the style of Basement Jaxx and make ours attractive in the same way. All of the album covers use the classic Basement Jaxx font which we would like to use as it instantly shows people that it is that band and makes it instantly recognisable, but it would be unoriginal for us to use the lettering.

Also, a lot of their album covers feature animals/animal heads within them, quite a lot of them being strange or rare animals like the albino gorilla from the cover for 'Rooty' and the dog with a radio body from 'Crazy Itch Radio', which again fits with the quirky style of the band. This is something which we attempted during the process of making our digipak initially. A screen capture is shown below:













We decided not to use this idea/image because although the use of the animal heads worked well in terms of the styling of the Basement Jaxx, particular the cover of the album 'Scars', as well as the other album covers, and was quirky and random, it looks messy as they did not fit perfectly on the bodies of the people and do not work well with the human bodies. We planned to return to this if our new idea did not work out well, but the file corrupted and we had to delete it.













This is the style which we chose for the digipack. As one of the key features of the style of Basement Jaxx is using bright vibrant colours, we decided to saturate the colours of the background to make them bold and standout, also emphasising the people, making them standout from the background, making the image eye-catching.













We used this image for the front cover and added a pink font because it was bright against the white sky. We also added the symbol for Basement Jaxx's record label, Atlantic Jaxx, because we felt it was a symbol which linked directly to the band, making it recogniseable. For the back of the digipack with the tracklistings, we used the same saturating of colours and used an image of a forest as it looks like it links up with the hedges in the background of the front cover, making a sort of double image when the digipack is opened up. The tracks we chose were ones which we read on wikipedia were the highest charting and ones that we personally knew by the band from our initial research and own knowledge. For the dvd, we used things that would typically be on a dvd with a cd, such as live performances and interviews, as well as our music video, which we wrote as a track.

Final Video

This is the final edit of our video. I think that it has turned out really well, and captures the style of Basement Jaxx in the right ways, through the random things that happen within the video, and the bright colours, particularly on the clothes of the raver. In response to our audience research we put in more dance moves (we did have footage of the macarena however it was corrupted and we couldn't use it), and I think that it adds to the good feelings of our video and makes it much more funny and random.

The process of filming was particularly stressful to begin with as we had a few problems with organisation as we had all the costumes and needed a number of people to act in our video, but once we had got going, we found that it became easier and quicker to film, however, our footage differs from our storyboards slightly, yet still keeps the basic storyline, just in a slightly different order and things taken out/put in, for example, parts using the food in macdonalds, and we added in more dance moves and dancing.

Editing

This is a screen caption of the editing process showing the timeline of our video towards the bottom, the clips we used along the left hand side, and the video in the top right corner. The screen next to it is the current clip being worked with. Personally I feel that the editing process went well and we didn't encounted any major problems and managed to produce the video swiftly, however, we did have some minor problems with corruption of some of the footage and the sound, but we worked around them by shortening the footage, salvaging whatever we could and it all worked out well. I feel that the program we used, Premium, was very simple to use and made it easy for us to quickly, and efficiently edit our video.