T2-38 Digi-pak analysis

In the digi-pak, they have clearly shown the members of their boy band in a colourful, natural location, which means the conventions have been challenged, since most R&B-pop digi-paks would show the performers wearing very little clothing and possibly wearing golden chains or partially exposing their boxers, which isn't the case for this particular digi-pak, but since they are trying to promote a boy band, and the song is partially a pop song, having a natural location and wearing hoodies and jeans would be an effective way of promoting an R&B-genre digi-pak.
Smaller pictures of the artist on the back cover, a greyscale image and the black and white font that has been used are another way in which they conformed to the conventions of standard digi-paks and therefore made the digi-pak seem like a digi-pak of a high standard.

T2-38s Director's Commentary Analysis

This group brought up specific details about how they portrayed their performers as members of a boy band, and how they managed to show this in all 3 parts of their promotional package. They also mentioned the use of close-ups, which they used to enable the audience to understand the emotions that are being portrayed by the performers. They also stated that their music video challenges two of the conventions of standard R&B-pop music videos, as they didn't include a narrative and the footage shows the performers messing about and being less serious than regular R&B-pop performers.
This group has also given good examples of shots and pictures of the 3 parts of their promotional package, which provides strong links between the points that they are making about the 3 parts of their promotional package, and the actual examples themselves, which means that they have backed up the statements they are making with evidence, which makes the commentary look professional.
In conclusion, I think that this group presented thier commentary very well, and feel that it is a commnentary of a very high standard.

Analysing a Magazine advert

This magazine advert is very sticking when you first look at it, the bright colours attract you to the advert straight away. The Advert has all the main conventions that are requried, for exmaple the name of the artist, release date, pictures of the artist and reviews. Having the writng in different colours help the readers to be drawn in to see what each one of them says. The picture of the artist is very natural and having the guiter in the advert tells the audience the genre of the music without even having to listen to the song/album.

Analysis of Q1-11s Director's Commentary

From analysing Q1-11s Commentary, it was interesting to see how they used the idea of short-duration shots from other music videos they'd seen, and used this concept in their own music video to appeal to their target audience. They also tried to express the emotion of the artist successfully using dark lighting, and used a close-up of the artist as a way of portraying how miserable the artist is at a time when he feels particularly vulnerable.
They have also clearly stated how they learned about what was necessary to improve their 3 products, using PhotoShop effectively to alter the colours of the 3 parts of their promotional package to express the strong emotions of the artist in the best way possible.
In conclusion, I would say that this group stated their ideas and presented them well.
However, I think the commentary could have been better if they had mentioned particular shots in their music video, their magazine advert and digi-pak and showed more of them in the commentary to give more examples of the changes they made, and how they helped to make the 3 parts of the package more appealing to their target audience.

Magazine Advert Analysis 2

Radiohead magazine advert

This magazine advert shows the artist from a band called "Radiohead" - who specialise in rock music.
Rock genre magazine adverts usually have dark colours, and in this magazine ad this is no exception, as there is some dark green and black in the background. The mood of the artist portrayed in a rock magazine advert can also be very serious, which is the kind of mood which is being expressed by this artist in this magazine advert.
There is also the company logo, the name of the company who produced the magazine, the bar code and the price of the magazine displayed on this magazine advert.
The artist is stood in the centre of the image so that the artist is the main focus of the magazind advert, and the bold, capital letters (mostly in white and yellow) make the writing stand out as well so that the viewers would take notice of it, since they would assume that writing that is in big capital letters is about something surprising related to a particular music artist, which therefore makes the magazine seem interesting to read, meaning that the audience would want to read more about this by purchasing the magazine.

Magazine advert analysis 1

 

  
Florence and the Machine

Florence and the Machine are an indie-pop band.
Although this is the case, this particular magazine advert challenges the standard conventions of indie-pop genre magazine adverts because there is no natural location shown in the background, and there is no review or rating of the artist's album on the front cover, which is unusual.
However, this magazine advert also conforms to the indie-pop genre in some aspects as well, as there are long vines with flowers on them which the artist is wearing (as flowers would normally be seen in indie-pop music videos and digi-paks) and a bold font in capital letters in bright red, white and black, which are flashy colours that are normally seen in magzine adverts of this particular genre.
As with standard magazine adverts, the bar code and the price of the magazine, as well as a big image showing the music artist, can be seen clearly in this magazine advert, as well as a web address, the company logo (Motown), and the name of the magazine (New Musical Express).

Our final directors commentary

Janna's Evaluation

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

Our music video, more than anything else, challenges forms and conventions of other media products. We wanted our product to be really unique, and an artist who really inspired us with this was Ellie Goulding. The video for her song ‘Starry Eyed’ had effects that we thought would work really well with the genre of our song. We used an effect which made the water in the pond shot look like it was sparkling, and it really added a sense of mystery to our video, and this really complimented the mysterious genre of Indie-Pop that our track ‘XV Wondaland’ is.

Throughout our video we tried to include all of Goodwin’s points, including visuals fitting with the lyrics of the song. I really believe that we did this justice for the duration of the video. Lines such as ‘take me back to wonderland’ we would get our artist to use hand gestures and body language to imply that she was being taken to wonderland, then having a cut to a different, more relaxed location, it would take the audience to the wonderland with her.

For inspiration on our digi-pack we looked at more artists’ album covers and magazine adds who had inspired us. Rihanna’s album cover had a sense of innocence to it, yet still attracted people. This is the type of effect we wanted our cover to have, therefore we took some of the conventions she had used (soft colours) and added them into our own.

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

I think that our music video, digi-pak and magazine advert all really complement each other in the indie-pop genre. We really wanted our target audience to understand and like the genre we have to work with, therefore we decided to make sure the album cover was one that wouldn’t bore people.

We did many photo shoots to make sure we had a photo which would best sell our artist as an innocent, but fun, person. As our song is very laid back and easy to listen to, we used very picturesque and quiet locations for taking the photos. Hopefully this would allow the audience to see straight away what type of songs they would be expecting to hear on this album. I think this really did us justice, from feedback we’ve had from our peers (the age of our target audience) we were able to see that the innocent feel we had been trying to get across had worked. Our magazine advert also proved to get the right message across, there are no gimmicks or quirkiness on it and this is what people were noticing straight away. This really made us feel satisfied with all the hard work that had gone into it.

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?


Our constant feedback throughout the making of this product is what has shaped it to be how it is now. We’ve taken any advice and criticisms on board and worked them into all three of our products. The feedback that we had on our rough cut was mainly that we needed to make sure that all of our lipsyncing was perfect, as sometimes it was slightly out of time. As a group we hadn’t noticed that some parts were the tiniest out of time, however when it was pointed out to us it’s all we could notice. After sorting this out, our final piece was finished. We’ve had really positive feedback, such as the video really fits with the genre, and the visuals really fit with the lyrics. However, we were told that some of the lipsyncing was still out of time, and we could've added  in a few more close up shots. The main need for close up shots was because the viewers felt that they weren't seeing enough of the artist's face, therefore not promoting her quite as much as we could have. In all, everyone commented on how smooth flowing the video was to watch as a viewer, and we were really happy with this.
After looking at our final video compared to the ideas from our initial pitch, we can see that most of the ideas that we first wante to include in our video we did incorperate. As our teachers seemed to like our first ideas and seemed to think they would work well with our genre, we really wanted to make sure that we didn't change too many of our ideas. Our main teacher seemed really pleased with our final product, and throughout the whole making of our video she never really gave us too harsher criticisms.

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

Without final cut, photoshop and blogger, our promotional package would not be to the standard that it is. All the effects on final cut really helped us shape the video that we had pictured in our head right from the start of this project. The HD cameras allowed our video to be to the best quality it could be, and the stills cameras allowed us to have really clear photos for our magazine aadvert, and the cover of our album. Once we had shot the footage for our video, we uploaded it to final cut and began to edit it and add in effects. The dissolve effect between cuts was our most used. It gave our video a really soft flowing feel, where as if we'd had a jump cut between shots it may have added unwanted pace to our video that didn't fit with the song or genre. We also used an effect on our shot of the pond, it allowed the water to look like it was magically glistening, and this really complimented the quirkiness of the indie-pop genre. Photoshop allowed us to make the photo for the album cover our own. We added a black and white effect, and this portrayed that our artist is completely stripped back, and it is just her voice we're trying to sell, not what she's wearing or what make up she's got on.
However, we thought this looked slightly too boring. We decided to turn the scarf that our artist was wearing back to it's origional colour (pink). This was when we knew that this picture was to be the album cover. We also edited the photo for our magazine advert on photoshop, however this was a much simpler edit. Changing the saturation and contrast gave the photo a soft yet colourful tome. The high contrast made our artist really stand out, and I really think it will attract our target audience of teenagers. Without these technologies none of this would've been possible, and we are so grateful that we got the chance to use them and learn more skills for future use in media.

Sophie's Evaluation

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

Our music video follows most of the conventions that are required to make the video the best it can be. Goodwin’s theory helped largely as it gave us the main conventions to follow for example, matching the visuals with the lyrics and filming lots of the artist to help the record label promote that particular artist. We have analysed other music videos for example Ellie Goulding’s because of her unique style of music and styling. She is really different to what people what could the norm and that’s what we really liked about her so we tried to create a similar effect. Another artist that we looked at was Rihanna and we really liked her album cover as she uses soft colours and the whole atmosphere of the front cover was seemed really natural. Our video uses a mixture of conventions from many different genre’s due to the song being a mixture of many for example its indie, soul and R & B all put together, so we had to have a little of each genre put into our video. We had the soft and natural setting for the soul side, we then used the costume to create the indie feel and finally we used some of the posing and camera positioning to create the R&B feel to the video. All of this put together I think has created a great product. 

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

Our media products as a package work effectively together a group because you can clearly see that there is continuous theme seen throughout the video, digi-pak and magazine advert.  The theme of pinks, greens and natural surrounding is clearly shown in all products. The video tries to portray an innocent girl stuck in a dream land and we did this by creating a bubbly and fun character. This helps to attract our target audience of 9-20 year olds of both sexes.  Both pictures displayed on the album are of the artist in mid shot with her not looking directly at the camera this shows that she’s quite a reserved and shy character who focuses on the music. It also shows that the artist doesn’t need to be theatricalised and have all the special affects to make her big, she can do the basic and get away with it. And the colours of pink and green also help to attract that teenage audience and that mature audience to. 

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

The feedback that our group received for our rough cut was all very helpful towards making our final video better. We had some very good comments for example the mise-en-scene was used to a great standard. However we did have some criticisms for example we needed to make our video seem dreamier and having more effects would help to improve this. We then added these effects into our video by making the water sparkle and making the setting around the artist sparkly too, this helped to make the video seem more wonderland way. They also said that the video had a great flow to it and matched with the music which worked really well. We also got told that more close-ups of the artist would have benefited the video a lot more. But our video breaks that convention because we are trying to portray a shy character so we didn’t want a lot of close-ups. Our teachers said that our editing was really good and we had established a pattern. They also said it was great improvement from the rough cut to the final video with lip syncing better than what it was before and our added special effects.

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

The software that we used to create our music video was final cut and we had used this programme before so we were familiar with the software which meant we had knowledge and understanding of the basic’s but as we developed our video more our skill base increased which meant the quality of the video was a lot better than predicted.  The programme allowed us as a group to be able to play with the footage that we had and try many different things to make the video great.  Photoshop is another programme that we used but this was for our digi-pak and magazine advert. This software allowed us to be able to edit images that we had taken on our photo shoots and edit photos taken on the shooting of the video. The programme let edit out pictures in many different ways, for example changing the colour of pictures to black and white, adding on logo and being able to have writing on top of the pictures in our own style.  We have also used Blogger to help with our planning, everything that have done including, film footage, photo shoots, research on other artists, research of locations and Costumes. By putting all of this information onto blogger in enable us to look back and get organised to create a successful music video, it also helped us to see what was needed to be done and what has already been done. Some of the equipment that we had was HD Video Camera to film our music video this was good to help capture the natural surrounding that we used and it helped to show the detail that surrounded the artist.  We also had HD Still Camera that we used for our photo shoot and this did the same thing to show a lot more detail on the artist for our album cover and magazine advert. This really helped to show the artist as a natural character. All three media technologies were helped our group to develop our skills that we already head and improved them a whole lot more. They enabled us to create the music video that we had imagined.                          

Jolyon's Evaluation

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

Since we have produced an indie-R&B-soul music video, it was important to ensure that I analyzed many different music videos made by professional music artists who made either an indie, R&B or soul music videos (or genres which are similar).

Therefore I analyzed the following music videos using Goodwin's theory:

R&B music videos

• Cee Lo Green – Bright Lights Bigger City
• Bruno Mars – The Lazy Song
• Bruno Mars – Grenade
• Eminem – Not Afraid

Indie-rock music videos

• Avi Buffalo – What's in it for?
• Ben Kweller – The Rules
• Johnny Flynn – Kentucky Pill
• PJ Harvey – A Perfect Day Elise

R&B-soul music videos

• Mariah Carey – Obsessed
• Alicia Keys – Fallin'
• Rihanna – Rude Boy
• Whitney Houston – I Have Nothing
• Gnarls Barkley – Going On
• Chris Brown – Yeah 3x

Alternative hip-hop

• B.o.B – Airplanes

I also analyzed a CD cover which I thought would be useful to look at so that I could get a good idea of what most CD covers would normally have (eg a bar code, a track listing, price, the company logo, etc). This was a CD cover by Amy Millan, which I looked at in detail so I could come up with an idea as to how I wanted Sophie (our music video artist) to be presented on the digi-pack and the magazine advert.

Our media product uses some of the conventions of indie-genre themes in the sense that our digi-pak, magazine advert and our music video showed images of objects that are formed naturally (eg bubbles, trees and grass) which you would expect to see in a standard indie-genre album. We also used bright colours for the words in our digi-pack and magazine advert (a whitish-pink and whitish-green) which matched up well with the whitish-pink colour of the artist's scarf on the outside front cover of our digi-pak.

However, we also challenged some of the conventions of standard indie-genre music videos by using a brick wall as a background on the inside-front cover of our digi-pack, since brick walls aren't made through natural processes, and in most indie-genre music videos you normally have someone playing an instrument in the background, but in our music video, our artist skipped and moved around in a forest background and played with piles of leaves, which makes our music video unique in that particular aspect.

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

All three parts of our media product work together as a promotional package because they all represent the innocent nature of the artist and portray her as a cheerful person, and they all show some aspects of nature (such as bubbles, trees, leaves etc).

The bright colours that have been used are another feature which all three parts of the package have in common.

The concept that we were trying to communicate is the idea of the natural environment encouraging the artist to be playful and innocent, and that theme has been kept constant not only in our music video, but in our digi-pak and magazine advert as well.

The target audience (which would consist of males and females aged 9-20) would be successfully attracted by: -

• The bright colours and the editing techniques we used (eg making some of the shots sparkly, slowing down some of the shots, and using cross-dissolve transitions) would make our artist's movements seem graceful to the audience, and therefore our audience would find the music video very entertaining, especially since short duration shots were used to match with the cheerful mood and steady pace of the song
• The bright colours and font we used for our magazine advert match up well with the kinds of colours you would expect to see in a natural setting (eg green and whitish-pink), and since the artist is wearing a whitish-pink scarf and she has been brightened using an effect, this makes the artist the main focus of the magazine advert since she is the brightest thing in the image, which draws the audience's attention to her which therefore makes the magazine advert look appealing to our audience.

• What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

When we showed our initial pitch to our other class members, the feedback we were given was that we needed to think about how we were going to make our location look as if it is taking place in a dream, as the world shown in our song isn't supposed to be a real one since the song is about a dream world, so when we got around to doing our editing, we learned about this effect that could make some of our shots look as if they have bright sparkles in them, and we also learned how to adjust the colours of some of our shots, so we were able to make some of our shots look very appealing and make certain shots in the music video look “dream-like” because of this. Originally our initial pitch had been criticised because we didn't have a set narrative for our music video. However, this turned out not to be an issue because after doing some research, we discovered that the majority of indie-genre music videos have no narrative whatsoever, and use many shots of natural locations and the artist performing in those locations, which is exactly what we have tried to do with our music video.

When we uploaded our rough cut for our peers to analyze, one of the problems they noticed was that there were some background noises in the music video that shouldn't have been there, so we had to check over our music video again to get rid of those background noises. The camerawork was also criticised for being unsteady, but this is because the camera had to be moved in various directions to ensure that the artist could still be seen in most of the shots and show her every movement, so if the camera hadn't been moved around a lot, the focus on the artist wouldn't have been as good and therefore our target audience would lose interest in the music video.

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

For our music video, we used Final Cut Express to speed up some of the shots, add cross-dissolve transitions, cut bits off of certain shots, and added a fade in from white and fade out to white transitions at the beginning and end of our music video respectively.

Using Photoshop, we were able to use the magic rubber tool to get rid of any background colours from the images we added that we didn't want, and we copied and pasted images from Google that we thought would be appropriate to have in our digi-pack and magazine advert. We were also able to manipulate the colour scheme of our picture of our artist that we used for the inside front cover of our digi-pack by making it a greyscale image, but then we used the magnetic lasoo tool around the scarf she is wearing, and adjusted the colour of the scarf to make it a bright pink which matches up well with the bright pink we used for some of the words in our digi-pack and magazine advert. Also, another colour we used for some of the words in our digi-pack and magazine advert was a whitish-green colour, and the font type we used for the words on our digi-pack and magazine advert are very similar, as we wanted some writing that would be ideal for representing an indie-R&B-soul genre promotional package.

We used some stills cameras to take some pictures of our music video artist (Sophie) in different parts of the college campus, and we used the HD Camcorders to record the footage for our music video, which consisted of some tracking shots and some zooming in and zooming out to follow the artist's movements effectively and from many different angles. This made it possible for us to have a variety of different shots in our music video (such as panning shots, high-angle shots, wide shots, etc), and since lots of shots in our music video have similar short durations, this means that the audience wouldn't be looking at one particular action happening or one location for too long, which is good because this means that the audience doesn't get bored of what they are watching, which makes our   music video very unique and succesful in that aspect. Since we had to take our pictures of the artist in a very short amount of time, this somewhat limited our creativity since we didn't have the time to pick a location outside of the college grounds that we could use to do this, and therefore we had to take the pictures in whichever parts of the college grounds looked best for our photo shoot.

Final Cut Express however, gave us many opportunities to be creative when it came to the use of cross-dissolve transitions, and the way in which our shots were put together to create motifs which recurred throughout the music video, which is what standard indie-genre music videos normally have.

Using Blogger, we were able to type in comments about particular music videos that we had analyzed and uploaded some images to many of my posts to make them look more interesting, as well as a CD cover example that I thought would be useful to critique. It was also useful for me to learn from what my other group members had analyzed, such as ideas for our magazine advert, target audience research and what we learned from the filming sessions we took part in.

Commentary Script

 Jolyon
- We conformed to the conventions of indie-music videos by using bright colours (whitish-green and whitish-pink) which was used for the writing in both our digi-pak and magazine advert, and we challenged them by not having someone playing an instrument, and using a brick wall as the background on the outside front cover of our digi-pak.
The main age group we were trying to attract with our promotional package was 9-20 year olds. This is mainly due to the age of the artist since people of these ages can relate to the artist because of this.

Janna
An artist who really inspired us in the making of our video was Ellie Goulding. The genre of her music is quite similar to ours, and we really like all the music videos she has produced as an artist. Her music video 'Starry Eyed' had many of the effects which we wanted to incorporate into our own, such as the sprarkly effect she had which made things look like they were glistening, in a way, very over the top.
We also had inspiration from Rihanna's album cover for the making of our own - no vibrant colours were used, and we knew straight away that this was the type of image we wanted on the front of our album cover.

Sophie
We tried our best throughout the video to match the lyrics with the visuals, although this was difficult due to the fact that the lyrics of our song are meaningless. For example, when the song says "she thinks she left her underpants" this would have been hard to find a visual link that would match with it. However, there was a part of the video where we did the lyrics justice with the visuals.

Jolyon
Since part of our song says "Don't you freak and hide", this matched well with the visuals since Sophie was running behind the tree, as if she was trying to hide from something in the wonderland, although we left the idea of what she was actually hiding from for our viewers to decide.

Jolyon
The digi-pak, magazine advert and the music video all share some similarities in terms of how they match the indie-genre conventions, as all three parts of the package show bright colours and natural environments in the background, and the artist portrays herself as an innocent and playful character, which was kept the same in the three parts of the package.

Janna
We tried our best to use very picturesque locations when taking photoshoots for both our album cover and our magazine add. Hopefully this would allow the audience to see what type of genre of songs they would be expecting to find on he album. We believe that the pictures gave our digi-pack and magazine advert a very innocent and relaxed vibe, and really did our genre justice.


Sophie
We were trying to promote our artist in a way that would portray the genre. We tried to keep the bright green and pink colours in our magazine advert and digi-pak so that the target audience we were aiming at, and the genre of our promotional package was clear.

Jolyon
We were told not to edit the colours too much, and that some of the lip-syncing in our rough cut was off, so the feedback from our rough cut shaped our music video was very helpful. The background noises were something else we needed to remove from the music video. When we presented our initial pitch to our peers, we were told that we needed to think about how our location was going to be edited in the shots to make it look like a wonderland.

Janna
So taking all of this on board, we found that reducing the speed to some of our footage gave a feel essence of gracefulness to the video. Even though this was only a very small tweak in our editing, as a group we agree that it made all the difference. We also added in some sparkles into a shot of our artist playing with the water in the pond.

Sophie
Yes, this is one of the aspects we took from Ellie Goulding's video "Starry-Eyed". We really thought that this effect would fit well with the genre and appeal to our audience because this effect makes some of our shots look very mystical, which makes this video match up effectively with our indie-genre.
Our final cut feedback was very positive from both teachers and peers, and that our music video portrayed our music genre very well as it was very mystical, but our lip-syncing at the beginning was slightly out of sync with the lyrics of the song.

Jolyon
Another point that was made was that there needed to be more shots of the artist looking at the camera, because in some of the shots she is looking down at the grass or facing away from the camera. We were also told that we needed to include more close-ups, a wider variety of camera shots and transitions could have been used, which we will try to include in our next project. 

Janna
We all agree that without final cut, photoshop and blogger, our promotional package would not be to the standard it is. All the effects on final cut really helped us shape the initial pitch that we had in our heads, and we're s pleased that we could bring all of these unique ideas to life. We also couldn't have had such amazing quality photos on our album cover and magazine adds without the HD cameras.

Jolyon
Using the HD Cameras, we were able to take some good pictures of Sophie and natural locations which we altered effectively on Photoshop. We changed the colour of our outside front cover by changing it to greyscale to make it clear that it is the voice of the artist we are trying to promote, rather than the clothes she is wearing. Then we changed the colour of the scarf to make it a bright pink, which matches with the bright pink on some of the words on our magazine advert and digi-pak.

Sophie
Using Blogger, it allowed us to see our progress as producers, and as the artist I became more confident as we took more footage, and I saw the ideas that I had from the start of our project and incorporated those ideas into my own performance. The other directors took my ideas into account and tried to incorporate them as best they could, and I'm really happy with the final product.

Janna's Director's Commentary Research

A directors commentary can be presented in many different ways which include an audio over the film/music video or there can be atual footage of directors, which is where the producers and editors are talking to the camera about the product they have created. On disc-based video formats, an audio commentary is an additional audio track consisting of a lecture or comments by one or more speakers, that plays in real time with the video. Commentaries can be serious or entertaining in nature, and can add information which otherwise would not be disclosed to audience members.

There are several different types of commentary. The two main types simply define the length of the commentary rather than the type of content. They are:

• Partial or scene-specific, which only covers selected scenes of the film. Sometimes these are recorded without the speaker viewing the film and thus the commentator may make more general comments than pointing out specific details.
• Feature-length or screen-specific, which is recorded in one session: the speakers watch the movie from beginning to end and give their thoughts directly based on what is happening on-screen.

Album cover Before and After

Photoshop was used to change this image and make it suitable for our album cover. We used the lassoo tool to make the scarf a different colour to the rest of the image.

Editing of our Album Cover

We had to edit all of these pictures into our digi-pak and Magazine advert using photoshop. The tool the that we used was the magic eraser tool to get rid of any unwanted background to get the best look. We then dragged the images onto our work. 

Final Digi-Pak

As you can see, we have included all conventions needed for a digi-pak. This includes:

• The name of the artist
• Name of the album
• Track listing (including bonus track)
• Website and MySpace addresses
• Record label branding
• Pictures of the band members

Final Magazine Advert

As you can see we have included all the conventions of a magazine ad, which include:

• The name of the artist
• The name of the album
• The release date
• The website and MySpace addresses
• Reviews and ratings of the album
• Record label branding
• Pictures of the band members or relevant visual imagery to sell the digi-pak, and it has been manipulated in some way (ie an effect applied to it)

Jolyon's Director's Commentary Research

Directors commentaries can be effectively presented in various ways, which are using audio over the film or music video. There is always real footage of the producers, editors and directors talking to the camera about what their product is, and how they constructed it. Audio commentaries are additional audio tracks made up of lectures or comments by one or more speakers, which match up with the video in real time. Commentaries can either be entertaining or serious in the way they are presented, and there is usually additional information which would not be explained to audience members.

There are a lot of different types of commentaries. The two main types define the length of the commentary rather than the content type. They are:

• Partial or scene-specific, which discusses only the selected scenes of the film. These are usually recorded without the speaker watching the film and therefore, the commentator can make more general comments, as opposed to critiquing certain details.
• Feature-length or screen-specific, which is recorded in one session: the speakers will view the movie from start to finish and provide their opinions based entirely on what is happening in each part of the movie.

Here is an example of a director's commentary

Ediiting our music video again

Another great technique that our group used to edit our music video was the use of slowing and speeding up the the clips. By doing this it helped to make our lyrics that the artist is singing in time with the music being played. We were either able to slow it up to make the artist sing in time with the music or make it faster to catch up. This was used to make the visuals and lyrics in sync with each other which makes the appearance of the video a lot better. Our group also used another technique which enable us to make clips run in reverse, we did this on one clip to create an edge to the video and make it feel like its in a fantasy world.