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.

Our final directors commentary

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.                          

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.

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)

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.