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.

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)

Our front, back and inside front

Inside front cover

We have used an image from the video to help sell the video and the song. But we have also added twitter/facebook and youtube to try and sell the artist as much as possible. We used this image because of its innocent look to it a long with its soft pinks and natural setting which links in with our theme. As a group it was one of out best shots as the artist isn't looking at directly at the camera showing the type of person she is. The picture also shows the type of location that has been used to create such a strong a powerful image.

Editing of our Album Cover

We have changed our picture for the front of our album cover this is due to the fact it doesn't want to be seen as a single. Our previous image was print screened from the video itself and we though it looked too similar. The group then went out to shoot some photo's of our main artist that could be used for our front cover. The picture still links in with the genre and theme that we are using. the colour of the scarf is the same as the writing and other pictures used. We also changed the colouring of the image to black and white to show that shes an artist who has no gimmicks what you see is what you get.

Draft of our album cover

Music Video Final Production

Draft of the back of our album cover

Track listings

1. XV Wondaland
2. Sunlight
3. Feeling free
4. The Wind in My Hair
5. Forbidden Fantasy 
6. Lights
7. You found me
8. Happiness 
9. Lost Love
10. Brown coat 
11. lollipop 
12. beyond the skies

An example of a back cover of an album(katy Perry)

We liked the back of this album because of its girly nature and fantasy setting. Its also contains all of her track listing and anything extra like special tracks exclusively for people who buy the album.

Example spine for album

Album Cover examples

This is an artist that has given us a good idea of how to present our artist for our own album cover. It clearly illustrates the artist and album so that the listeners know exactly who and what to expect. The natural lighting creates a soft feel, which is the similar affect we want our album cover to have on the public.

Another Draft of our Album Front Cover

This is a our initial idea for our Front cover of our Album.

Feedback from Amar on music video

He says that we have established an effective timeline with a pattern that isn't predictable. This helps to keep the audience interested. He also told us that our editing was really well presented, as there were a few cut-aways used which fitted well together to establish a pace to the music video. We need to make two of our clips shorter to ensure that our music video stays unpredictable.