Final Three

Music Video- 

Digipak-

Magazine Poster-

Question 4

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

Throughout my construction, research and planning we used different media technologies in our work. These were a mix from the camera and the equipment which we used to the different applications which we used to help create our work.



Camera Products-

The first piece of equipment which we used was the cameras and the tripods which our college provided for us. The photographs to the right show the camera which we used throughout our filming process, we used these cameras as they have extremely high quality on them and we was able to play with the focus settings on the camera to create faded parts of the footage to make it look like that is show the artist is feeling due to him drinking too much and being under the influence of alcohol. This was effective as we was able to create point of view shots of the artist and show that his vision is not working how it should be and that drinking can affect the human body in negative ways.

The photo below shows the tripod which we used to stand the camera on when we didn't want the shot to be hand held. This ensured that the camera was safe and that it was stable on the tripod too ensure that the shot would be smooth and that the shot would remain still and have a professional feel towards it.  In the filming of our music video we used the tripod a lot to ensure that the scenes was still and there was no unnecessary movement of the camera in shots which it wasn't needed. The photo below to the right shows the stand which the camera is joint on to by the base of the camera and then it is secured onto the camera by the top part which in the photo to the left you can see that on the top of the tripod there is a line which guides you to a larger image of this which shows the section which the camera is connected too. When these are connected correctly the camera is secure and there will not be any sudden movements. Also on the tripod which we used there was a handle which is similar to the one in the photograph below which meant we could move the camera smoothly without making any large sudden movements which was effective in our music video.
























Apple Products-

When taking the photographs for our digipak and magazine poster they was taken on an Apple iPad Air as this has a high quality photo and where the iPad belonged to me we was able to go anywhere in Southampton we wanted in order to take photographs as this was also portable and easy to move around without the need of a large camera and tripod to balance the camera if too heavy to hold. By using this made taking the photographs easy to take as we was able to see them on a large screen whereas, if they was taken on an Apple iPhone then the photo quality may not of been as good as how it came out on the iPad and that the screen would be smaller so when it was expanded to fit the templates which we had it could have lost quality and became pixelated which wouldn't have helped create the effect which we was after.


Through the use of iMovie we was able to create our music video to Lose Yourself which was originally wrote and recorded by Eminem. We was able to import all of our footage recorded on the cameras onto this application on the Mac's at college and was able to edit the footage which we had done to put it all together to make our music video. Through the use of iMovie we was able to crop our footage, trim clips, apply filters to different shots, add audio and also cut, extend and fade audio. Being able to do all this over iMovie meant we could edit the whole video on this application and also where this is a free application on apple devices we was able to use this effectively and was able to learn all the different elements of iMovie.


Adobe Products-

To create the digipak and magazine poster we all used Photoshop CS5 as we was able to play around with all the photo effects on this and was able to create the right effects we wanted, was also able to fade other pictures on top of other images which helped us create the texture on them both. We could also merge different elements together and hold our digipak template on the photoshop file which enabled us to successfully be able to import our taken photographs onto the application and was able to move them around and change the different effects, filters and was also able to change the side of the image and add extra items on to them as well. Due to all the different features which are on Photoshop we decided to use this software to create our digipak and our magazine poster in order to have a professional finish to our items.
Another reason which we chose to use Photoshop rather than Adobe Fireworks because this would reduce the photo quality which the image already would have and we would not be able to change as many as the effects of which you can through the use of Photoshop.









Internet Products-

Another piece of software I used was the internet I used this through the use of Google Chrome and Safari depending on my location and what device I was on. I was able to research about the rap industry through the use of the internet as I was able to find out reliable information quickly through using the correct websites which belong to the organisations I was researching.

Another thing which I have done through the use of the internet was email Shady Records about using their song Lose Yourself by Eminem for our final music video. We chose this option as it was the fastest method as sending a letter to America from England will take a long time and there will also be a cost on top of sending a letter but this option was free and he received the email instantly.

Also through the use of the internet I was able to use YouTube in order to look at previous Eminem music videos and other rap artists videos to gain inspiration for our music video and after we filmed our video we was able to upload it onto Youtube so people around the world are able to see our music video which we created. 

Question 3

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

After we had finished our music video, digipak and magazine poster I created a questionnaire which was answered by 50 different people which gave us a large variety of answers to ensure we appealed to the correct audience and to see if there was any recommended changes. We targeted the ages from 16-19 to fill out our questionnaire as this is the type of audience we are going for as we believe this is the audience which would currently listen to. In order to achieve the target range we wanted to answer the questionnaire we asked students at our college to watch and view our final pieces and to fill out our questionnaires.

This is a copy of the questionnaire I created:

Questionnaire answers:

1. What is your Gender?
As you can see in the pie chart below the population of our questionnaire was filled out mainly by a female audience which shows that our results are mainly based on this genders opinion. In these results we expected their to be a similar amount of numbers for each gender as we was asking members of our college to fill it out and the gender ratio is very similar. In our results we had 35 female fill out the questionnaire which meant 25 male filled our questionnaire out.

I put this question in the questionnaire to see what gender of people was answering my groups questionnaire, I believe it is good to do this as you can find out stuff about the audience and you can see what the different genders think about the work me and my group have created.

2. Rate your ability to use technology?
As you can see in the bar chart below I asked for people to rate their ability to use technology on the scale of 1-10 with 1 being lowest and 10 being highest. The results show that the highest amount of people selected 10 out of 10 which showed we was targeting an audience which have a high interest in technology which is the target audience which we wanted to achieve. The results show that 16 people out of 50 said that they would rate their technology ability 10 out of 10 and then there was 7 people that rated themselves 9 out of 10. I was expecting this outcome because the generation of people which we asked to fill out our questionnaire are technology based and we wanted to reach out to this audience as it fits within out Life Matrix audience.

I asked the audience to rate their ability to use technology because this would help us assure we was targeting our audience which we had originally set out for as we focused on the tribe wired audience and within this audience they are tech-savvy so they should be good with different types of technology. Which this question shows if we are asking the correct type of personalities to fill out our questionnaire.

3. How would you best describe yourself?
As you can see the pie chart below I asked for people to tick one of the options on the questionnaire on how they would best describe themselves. As you can see in the results below that most of the audience said that they was energetic which received 16 out of 50 in the results and outgoing which received 15 out of 50. This was the answers which we was aiming for in our results as this would mean that we was having our target audience fill out our questionnaire. Only 5 people out of 50 stated that they was quiet within this question.

In the questionnaire I asked the audience to tick one of these boxes of how they would best describe themselves. This was to see if the people answering our questionnaire fit within our target audience.

4. Do you feel that we have a professional finish to our music video?
As you can see in the pie chart below that we asked if we had a professional finish to our music video and the results came back in stating that 39 out of 50 people stated that they thought we had a professional finish to our music video. This was a large success for us as we then met the codes and conventions of a rap music video and the audience we was appealing to had through we has done this to a professional finish.

I included this question into our questionnaire because we wanted to know what our audience thought of our music video and to see if they believed that it was professional.

5. What genre do you think this music video is in?
In the bar chart below you can see that the audience had thought that the music video was from the rap music genre with 29 people out of 50 choosing this option out of the other 7 choices we gave. This is the outcome which we wanted as a group as it showed we was successful in making our music video.

We included this question in our questionnaire to see if we had met the codes and conventions of a rap music video and to see if it was easily noticeable to the audience of the music genre that it is in.

6. Do you think the locations within our music video fit in with the song effectively?

In the pie chart below you can see that more of our audience believed that the locations we used fit well within our music video with 40 out of 50 people saying this. This is the result which as a group we was hoping for as it would mean we captured the song in the correct way.

I included this question in the questionnaire to see if the locations fit the music video so that we could see if we met the codes and conventions of the rap genre or created the right effect of which we wanted.

7. What do you believe our moral message about drinking is in our music video?
In this graph you can see that most people said that 'It's ok to drink, but be cautious' on this question, this was the impression which we wanted to create as we did not want to encourage drinking in our music video so we showed the bad effects of drinking off being too drunk where you get chucked out, falling over, passing out and barely being able to walk, 23 out of 50 people said that it's ok to drink, but be cautious in our questionnaire and 17 out of 50 people said that it's not ok to drink which is the response we wanted.

I asked this question within the questionnaire because we didn't want to encourage the lifestyle of drinking as it can reflect badly on people so we wanted to make bad scenarios in the video to not let young people think it is ok to freely drink alcohol.

8. What age range to you think this music video would appeal to the most and why?
In this pie chart below you can see that the audience which answered our questionnaire said that age they think our music video appeal to the most with 26 out of 50 people saying that this mostly appeals to the age range of 15 to 18 and 22 out of 50 people saying that it appeals to the range range of 19 to 24 which is the age range which was was targeting our music video at.

I asked this question in the questionnaire to see if the target audience which we wanted to attract was presentable within our music video.

10. Does our digipak look professional?
In the pie chart below you can see the results of the question asking if the audience through that the digipak looked professional. 37 out of 50 people said yes on this question which shows that our digipak had a professional finish to it and it gives us confidence that it was a success.

I asked this question within the questionnaire because  we wanted to know if the digipak had a professional finish to it and if not too see if we needed to add anything extra to it to make it look more professional.

17. What is your favourite item out of the three?
For our final question on the questionnaire I wanted to find out what was our audience's favourite item our of the three this was in order to see what appealed to our audience the most. In the results 20 out of 50 people who answered our questionnaire said that they prefered the digipak out of the three prints which we created.

I asked this question within the questionnaire to see what items was more preferred our of the three and then how we could have improved them to make them look similar if we was to do this again, as the results show there was a mix out of the three of which was preferred which gave me confidence that the items which we had created met the codes and conventions of a rap genre music task. 

In the questionnaire created for our digipak research (shown on 'digipak research' post) we asked if they liked the font which we had on the mock up of the digpak and more than half of the people who answered the questionnaire said that they did not like the font that was being used. Due to this we changed the font which we wanted to use. We looked on DaFont.com for different font styles and as a group we picked the Railway to Hells font which we used throughout our final digipak and poster. The screenshot below shows the website and the font which we chose for our work. We chose this font due to its originality and that it fits with the codes and conventions of a rap genre. 

From all of our questionnaire results within our questionnaire we achieved the feedback which we was hoping for which gave us the confidence within our three final items which we created as a group. We targeted this audience to fill out our questionnaire as this was the target audience which we was appealing our items at which would have gained the feedback which we needed to meet the expectations of this generation. We successfully created our three final pieces to the standard which made the audience happy with our items and that they would purchase them if they saw them within a shop. 

Question 2

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

Please watch my PowToon below for my evaluation answer to question 2.

Question 1

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

Question 1 from EmilyRawles

Music Video - Lose Yourself

For our final task we decided to create a music video to the song Lose Yourself by Eminem, we chose to do this music video as we was able to interpret the lyrics in another way which shamed drinking to make this educational at the same time of making the video.

This is the original music video created by Eminem:

We wanted to re-create this music video as this is the song which our group liked the most out of Eminem's songs and we believed we could make a successful rap music video to the track of this song by using our own footage.













This is our version of Lose Yourself:

This is our final music video which we created as a group, though the feedback from the questionnaires of our preliminary task we decided to keep Jordan Gregson as our main artist as he matched how Eminem looks as they are both blonde and they have a similar build so it was easier to film the music video.

Digipak

I took on the role to create the digipak with Tommy Brading while constantly consulting Jordan Gregson and Kirsty Robertson about what was going on with it to ensure that our digpak and poster kept the same style to them to make the continuity good between the both. The digpak took a lot of time to create and we looked at different styles of it and kept seeing what we could have added to make it better to improve it to ensure we met the codes and conventions of the rap music genre.

In this screenshot to the right, you can see that we have faded the colour down to black and white through the use of photoshop and by playing with the settings of the colour on the photographs I was able to create this effect of making the sky look really dark and miserable as this is a stereotype of the United Kingdom so I believed this fit in well within the digipalk. The top right hand image is suppose to be the front cover and this photo was taken in New York City when I went there as a school trip 3 years ago, we thought his would have been a good image to use as it would fit well within the rap industry but through looking at the other images within the digipak we realised that it did not fit well within the digipak and the other images looked like too much of a UK city and the front cover represented too much of New York so we decided to change the image.

In this screenshot to the left you can see that I have changed the front image to a picture of our artist Eminem (Jordan Gregson) as we believed that this looked more effective and that it fit well within the digipak more than the original photograph which I took in New York City. I liked the photograph of New York but it did not fit in well with the other Southampton images, we could have used more New York images which I had but it would not then be consistent with the music video as there would be no possible way to film in New York or a similar looking city so we had to remain with the Southampton images to enable us to keep our theme consistent throughout our work. In this screenshot I have also added the Parent Advisory tag as the songs which we have listed on the digipak have a lot of swearing in them and it would not be suitable for young children to listen to, this is also another code and convention of a rap music video as a lot of other digipaks which I have looked at through my research all have the Parent Advisory tag as this makes the digipak and the artist have more of a 'badboy' look.
Also in this photograph I have started to play around with backgrounds of concrete to make the photo look distorted and it creates more of an impression of a rap music digipak. In the photo on the top right you can see that there is more of a concrete texture on it, this was because I felt it was a plain image and that it needed a larger effect on it than what it had in the first place, I believe this added well to the final piece.

In this screenshot you can see that I have added a barcode, the Shady Records logo, moved the song list to the top left hand corner of the digipak so that we could out the copyright section on the bottom of the digipak as we believed this looked better and more effective. I like this idea of keeping the colour scheme black and white throughout the design of the digipak as it fits well within the codes and conventions of a rap music video which meets all requirements which we set ourself.


Our finished Digipak:

In this screenshot you can see the finished product of our digipak. we created it like this as it fits within the codes and conventions of a rap genre music digipak as we have kept the colours dull but have a small aspect with colour which is why the use of the colour red is only used a little bit on the elements which we want noticeable as this will make it more visible to the human eye as it will naturally been drawn to the colour on the digipak.
We added the quote which was originally said by Eminem so we believed that this would be a good thing to add in to our work and the photograph looked to plain without it so we wanted to create more of an effect on it. We decided to make the title of the album and the artists name to remain the same from the magazine poster in order to keep it consistent.
I also changed the song 'FACK' on the digipak to 'Love The Way You Lie' which is featuring Rihanna so then we could mention Rihanna on our digipak to appeal to a larger audience of her fans as this will attract a larger audience base which would make it a larger success, it also makes Eminem fans want to purchase it as well as it states that it is limited edition which will encourage more people to purchase it with the Rihanna song on there.

Magazine Poster

Our poster was created by Jordan Gregson and Kirsty Robinson along side me and Tommy Brading creating the digipak, we all worked together to create them both to keep the layouts and the different features of them both to keep it consistent.

This was created on Photoshop, the original image was taken on the road near our college and we decided to zoom in on the photograph to have more of an overall focus on the artist so that he would be in the middle of the frame. This is effective because it shows a clear representation of the artist as he is the main feature within the magazine poster.


To the right you can see the original image which has been used in the magazine poster which shows the creation which we have done as a group to ensure that we created the correct effect which we had set out to create.














This is our final magazine poster which was created by Kirsty Robertson and Jordan Gregson with the help of me and Tommy Brading: