Directors Commentry

  In this Directors Commentary we review what creative decisions we made, why and how we presented them.

Task 4- How Did You Use New Media Technologies In The Construction And Research, Planning and Evaluation Stages?

 Through out the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages we used a large variety of new media technologies to aim us, ranging from Prezi, Final Cut Pro, Google and Digital Cameras.

  Once the song had been decided, Warriors Dance by The Prodigy, we began to research who are target audience would be.
  I used Twitter to see who was 'Following' The Prodigy , looking at other bands that they were 'following', what sort of clothes they wore and what their interests were to establish and build up a profile for a typical member of our target audience.
For Example I found one Twitter used names 'Prodigy_Fanboy' which I thought was a pretty good start. I saw that he was also following 'KerrangMagazine' 'DaftPunkFanboy' and 'MixMag' which is the worlds leading Dance/Club music Magazine.
Here is a link for his page:
https://twitter.com/#!/Prodigy_Fanboy/following
I also noticed that 'FanBoy' had 417 followers himself so decided to have a little stalk of them too.

FanBoy had set up his own website aswell, which acted as a forum, somewhere to find out concert dates and even had links to site where you can book tickets, as well as the latest news on the band.

The fan boy site allowed other prodigy fans to talk together in an online forum, swap videos and photograph, to Fanboy has set up a Knowledge Community with his website that allows the sharing of loads of different files. i sent him Our finished video to see how easy it is to put videos and other information on him website and he replied almost instantly suggesting that he has a lot of E-mail's coming in from other Fans, so from that I decided that our target audience is active in the internet, so i would be able to find a lot about them on social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook.

Here is the E-mail he sent me:

 After Twitter I looked on Google at some images of Prodigy concerts, looking at the lighting, stage props, what the band were wearing and what the fans looked like.

I saw that the Logo and lighting put together had suggestions of both Gothic and Punk/Club Music (which is why we chose the slightly gothic costume with club lighting in the video and the punk style logo in the digipack)

We took inspiration from the lighting design to create a club-like yet dark, slightly threatening atmosphere

These Images really helped up design our video and digipack. It told us what a fan of our band would want to see. 

We used Ebay to find our masks and some props, Ebay also gave us some other suggestions that we may also like, we found some other masks and neon face-paint's which added to the fantasy theme of our video.

when looking for a location, we used Camera-phone's to take test shots of some locations that we might use. This helped us to envisage what the video may look like as it is hard to tell what something will look like on screen if you just go to see it with out taking photo's. 

We found head-shots and put them on to Paint....

then took some images off Google of people wearing what sort of things we may dress our band in. We then took the heads of our band members and out them on the bodies to see what they will all look like together. this made us see that the band would look better if they were all in black. We also wanted them to have tattoos like The Prodigy members, so as to avoid the band looking too young and 'innocent'.

We used Photoshop to create out Digipack.

We drew an image of lips and tongue piercing, we photographer it on a Digital Camera and uploaded the image onto Photoshop. We then tried out a number of tools to try different backgrounds that we found off Google . We used photoshop tools, changing the colour and contrast until we were happy with out poster and digipack. We used the Stamp Tool to put 5 start onto out poster to look like ratings from Kerrang and Rolling Stone Magazine.

This is the finished version of our Digipack cover.

We used Digital Camera's to film our video and we edited on Final Cut Pro. I used Final Cut Pro to select the best shots and cut them to the soundtrack. I synced all of the rushes to the locked and edited soundtrack, then cut them rather than putting in rushes as i go. Last year i did that, just took the shots out of the rush bin when i needed them but this meant that there were some really good shots that i had forgotten. By syncing all the rushes right after we uploaded them, whilst they were fresh in my mind, there were no wasted takes. I then used the Blade Tool to isolate sections of the take that looked best.

We used Effects such as Earthquake and Mirror to add to the visually spectacular chaos. 

 Earthquake added even more action to the video.

mirror create distorted images and silhouettes.

I also used Final Cut Pro to layer 2 images over each other. this added to the chaos yet still told the story and showed what was happening. In this shot we see the girl from the creatures point of view and layered over it is a shot of the creatures from the girls point of view. 

To record our progress, I made a blog on Blogger, which allowed me to upload Prezi's, Power Points and YouTube video's. We could have recorded out progression in a book but this would have been easy to lose and less visual interesting. 

Finally, We used an iPad to record the Focus Group. This made it easier to hear all of their points as we could listen whilst they were talking rather than writing down, and we could watch the video back incase we missed anything.

Task 3- What Have You Learned From Your Audience Feedback?

We used an AS media class as a focus group to give us some feedback on our video:
  Using Stuart Hall's Models of the Audience theory of Encoding and Decoding Derives from his work  at the BCCCS, we came so the conclusion that the majority of our focus group had a 'Preffered Reading'.  Hall says that the audience are active in their consuming of media texts and that they can have three possible types of reading:
 Preferred reading- Where the audience understand and accept the test in the way the producer intended.
Negotiated Reading- The audience see what the producer mean but do not agree with it.
Oppositional Reading- The audience absorb the text with a compleately different meaning to how the Producer intended.

  The majority of our focus group gave a preferred reading towards the video and digi-pack.

They understood and agreed that Holly was meant to be sexualized and slightly dangerous with her tight black clothing and that Abby represented innocence in white.
They also agreed that the Digi-pack suggests a rebellious, anti-authoritarian attutide of the artists.

However, one person gave a Negotiated Reading towards Holly. He understood that she was intended to be sexualized and dangerouse but did not think this himself. He thought that she looked non-threatening by singing into the camera and did not think her costume was overtly sexual.
 This is helpful becuase, as a femal dominated group, we though Holly's clothing was very sexualized yet from a boys perspective it was not overly so. one boy said 'I can see that she is meant to be sexy, but personally I don't think she is'- Which showed us that our intentions were clear but everyone has different taste.
  I will add that the focus group was predominantley female.
I think that to make her look more threatening when singing into the camera we could have used a low angle shot, where we filmed from below her eye level so she was looking down to the camera rather that at her eye level where she may be seen as singing to the consumer, therefore engaging with them and becoming less threatening.


 This low Angle shot give status and suggests power/ dominance

An Eye-Level shot makes the person look approachable. NOt what we really wanted, although we did not want Holly to look like the Antagonist, we still wanted our veiwers to empathize with her so if we had a low angle shot we would not have it as low as the one above which would make her look to threatening.

  I think that this focus group really helped us to understand how others percieved our text. It also allowed us to applie audience models theories.
Lazarfeld, Blumler and Katz wrote the Uses and Gratifications model. This says that audience members consume texts for personal reasons.
Their theory says that an audienec will proberbally consumer a media text for the following reasons:

Diversion: To allow escape from their life. E.G If someone has a stressfull day they might watch a film or read a book to get an hour or so's release and relaxation.

Personal Relationships: Companionship with characters of narrative. To discuss with others. E.G by watching a franchise of films, like Harry Potter, the audience may feel that they 'know' the characters.  Also, people join book and film clubs to comsume a media text and discuss it.

Personal identity:  To identify ones own life with the narrative or lives of the characters. E.G someone in mourning may find a documentary about someone who went through the same thing and came out the other side.

Survailence: to understand the world better. E.G watching the news allows us to hear about global affairs.

  We wanted our audience to be able to identify with our band. Our target audience was male and female alike ages 16-25, so we chose clothing that was not unfamiliar to people that age. The tattoo's also implied youth.
 The Digi-Pack suggested youth and rebellion which is something that young people can identify with, rebellion against the older generation through tatoo's and piercings (the tongue peircing was clear in the digi-pack and also suggested that the band would have tattoo's and piercings.)

The focus group said that although the band members had a particular look (slightly punk/Goth) they could easily be one of their friends. They seemed like any other group of teenagers which made them appealing for our target audience.

  Usign Dyre's theory of Star image, this fit in with the paradox that a star is both ordinary and extraordinary. The band seem like normal Teens yet they are there making music videos to be sold world wide.
This makes the target audience like them more because it means that they too can become a sucsessfull star. The band's image make the band inspirational and approachable to the target audience.
Our focus Group agreed with this, that the band are more appealing because they are both ordinary and extraordinary. We used a group of AS students as a focus group to give us feedback on the video and Digi-pack



The Focus Group
We made a questionair of some open question which allowed them to give them a structured critical response to the products and to expand on their opinions of the video.
 The majority of our group was girls, only two boys, but this was actually useful as it was clear to see what the girls opinion was compared to the boys rather than just hearing ideas as one big group.
 Some of the group had seen the video before and some hadn't.
 a large part of the reasoning behind our choice of alternative editing was to add the the repeatability of the video. The people who had seen the video before said that they noticed so much more second time round and the people who hadn't seen it before said that they wanted to watch it again because 'it feels like were...missing out, because we cant see everything because there is so much going on at one time in a very short shot..but in a good way' said one girl.



Editing
We found that the group liked the editing of the video. They thought that the fast paced jump cuts worked well with the pace and dance genre of the music. Although, because we lost our woods location in the last few days due to rain we only had the studio shots, the group found that only having the performance and animal shots the video got a little repeatative but the fast, jumpy editing managed to maintain interest.
One girl said that 'The crazy, jumpy cuts makes that video seem really trippy, like the characters are all on drugs, but we are seeing what they are seeing'- this had't occurred to us, that the viewer could be seeing through a characters eyes. in this case maybe we could have shown the person that we are seeing the action from in the beginning. 
 Feed back like this is really useful because the  'fresh eyes' of someone who has not worked on the video see many more new idea and take thing differently for how we see it. 





Characters and narrative
The focus group said that they would have liked a little more narrative to tie the band and animals together, I agree with this comment and think that if we had the woods sene we could have tied it all together beter. However, the group did say that this was not a big problem, they accpeted the animals in the video thinking that, although they seemed a little random in the video, they worked with the 'Trippy' theme. The narrative that we originally planned in the research and planning stage (where a girl, Abby, passes out in a club, wakes up in the forest and is lead by an animal/man to a forest party) was lost due to only being able to shoot in the studio. This would have created a hopefully clear relationship between all of the character. The group felt that this would have made the video more alluring becuase people like to understand what they are watching. I agree with this but then they also said that nat having a clear narrative and fast shots which hid detail made them want to watch the video again. So not having the woods location has its nagatives but also positives.

Costume and Brand image



Out of the focus group, it was the girls whoacknolaged Holly's black tight costume, indicating a sense of danger and sexuality which contrasted with Abby's innocent appearance in white and thought that this was a good contrast which established that the two girls were not connected. However the boys noticed Holly's low cut top and revealed cleavage. This indicated that our video has something appealing for both genders, the girls we more focused on the narrative and costume meanwhile the boys were preoccupied with the exposed flesh.


The group noticed that tattoo's, the club lights and scrap-yard set. To them,this created the image of rebellion, youthfullness and pride in their values as the band do not attempt to hid any of their clothes or props that indicate thair beliefes.
  the group saw the song names such as 'Acid Drop' as indicators of the groups rebellious attitudes. 'They [track names]would make my mum not buy the CD because she knows it is aimed at people my age (16-25)' said one girl. This is good because it showed us that it was clear to the audience who are target audience was.
 On boy noticed that on the list of band members, it said 'Holly Finlay- philosophy' He said that this suggested the bands look and image was not just a way to say that they are rebellious, but that their rebellion is actually a way of life for them, not just a publicity stunt.


  The focus group proved to be really helpful, they showed us that the public understood our intentions (to show the band as rebellious, unashamed of their life-style) and they also brought new ideas that we would not have thought of, like seeing the video through a characters eyes.

Task 2- How Effective Is The Combination Of Your Main Product And Ancillary Texts?

on the back cover, when listing the band members it writes 'Holly Finlay- Philosophy' suggesting that the band take their life-style seriousley and their beliefs combine to make a way of life for the band.

 Using encoded symbols such as costume, fonts, colour schemes and track names we have created a digi-pack that clearly shows the consumer what sort of genre our bands music is, what age they are playing for and their values and attitude.

Codes and Conventions: Task 1

Richard Dyer's theories of star image are based on paradox's. One of these paradox's is that a star must be both present and absent. By singing into the camera Holly, our lead singer, appears to be singing personally to the audience member. In the same way, by belonging to this demonic fantasy world, she is absent.

Like Adele, who often is featured in her video's singing into the camera wearing very normal clothing can be seen, by the audience, as 'normal', we can relate to her, she is singing to us yet at the same time she live's a life full of camera's and fame.

Because the video has the running theme of a demonic, nightmarish party, we wanted to have a set that reflected this. Originally we were going to film in a forest with the forest creatures coming out of the trees but due to wether condition this was not possible. This meant we had to build a set. We decided that instead of haveing a predictable setting, having a scrap yard with club lighting would make the creatures even more strange and threatening. I felt that this worked really well. Bringing in club lighting brought us back to the music as the genre is dance/club/elector with a hint of metal hence the nightmare creatures.
In this 'Daft Punk' video of 'Da Funk' it features a man with a dog's head walking through the street. a strang characture in a compleatly juxtaposing world seem's strange yet makes the video memorable and add's to the repeatability, as we hoped our strange animals and set would by subverting the accepted convention that set and characters must match. It gives the video something different.

We used fast cuts to match the fast pace of the song but by having very quick cuts that don't allow the audience to fully see the image on screen makes them want to watch the video again because they feel that they missed something. not revealing every detail also means that everytime the video is replayed, the veiwer notices something else, therefore preventing the video from getting boaring after one veiwing.

These are the Codes and Conventions we followed or subverted within our music video, to show our audience themes demonstrated through lighting, set, shots and characters.

Digipak and Advert

For our poster we used the background of a rough wall in a dark colour to show that our band is connected to the street, youth, city life. The dark grey was used to show that the band is not the average mainstream band who might use bright neon and electric colours. the mouth image is instantly recognisable as similar to the Rolling Stones, who were a sign of rebelion in their era, with the dark lips wich suggests rebelion and possibly a hint of gothica, together with the tongue piercing show that our band go against stereotypes of respectable people, are rebeliouse and possible even anarchists. The writing in an off white stands out again the background and the font has relations to graffitii artand other bands who follow the electro/dance/soft metal genre.

This is 'Lost Prophets' poster. The lay out of band name at the top, album name then information at the bottom is similar to ours. It makes it easy to read with the information clearly presented in a easy to understand way.

This poster is similar to our. With the bands trademark image in the middle with white writing on a dark back ground to make is attention grabbing and clear to read. the fornt, although different in some respects to our, holds similarities to graffitii art. The cracks in the font remind me of barbed wire and city life.

Like ours, both of these posters define the music as slightly anarchic and non-conformist, aimed at youth, maby 15-25 male.

The DigiPack:

Our CD has a simple design and matches our digipack and poster so that the image becomes recognised.

This is our digipack. we had the running theme throughout 'Back Bones' of the wall background. This neutral yet textured background provided a unique but black canvas to print easily readably information onto.

We kept the text in off-white to maintain continuity and not over crowd the album cover, making it unreadable.

Here are some other Album Covers:

 This is Borgore, a Dubstep DJ. Although the gernre of music is different it can still be traced back to the club/electro.dance genre that our band folows. Here a simple textured background has been used, the image in the center of the cover and the information around it. This shows that we have conformed to the convention of album cover layouts because they have been tried and testes, resulting that they are the easiest to read when a consumer is browsing over albums and wants to get the information quickley and effectively without haveing to pick it up and study the cover. If the consumer can not read the cover the chances are that he or she will not take the time to work it out, rather that they will just find another album that gives them all the information they need to know in a few seconds.

Pendulum, a similar band to ours, have opted for a simple background with a bright, contrasting image in the center and a simple font to convey their information.

'Daft Punk' have conveyed their electro genre to their youthful target audience with graffitii inspired writing, electric colours on a dark background. because they are a well established band not much information is needed, only their name which stands out boldy against the album cover.

The final Video

  When it came to  editing, because there were not as many shots as we would have liked due to the sudden change in location, we decided to cut the same shots together to give a jumps video fitting in with the styke of the music. doing this allowed hsots to be repeated in different sections because only small parts of each shot were being used.

The Final Video