Welcome

Welcome to my A2 media blog, on this blog you will find all of my A2 coursework in terms of research and planning and also the final stages of the making of our A2 products. These being A music video from the track Look Right Through and 3 ancillary texts, these being a digipak and 2 magazine adverts

Final Cut

This is our final cut of our media product which is our music video of the song Look Right through from the artist Storm Queen which is a remix by MK.

Ancillary Texts Video

This video is our finished final ancillary texts and they consist of our Digipak, Lyric Booklet and our magazine adverts.

Final Digipak

Digipak Front Cover

Digipak Inner Pannels



Lyric Booklet Cover

Lyric Booklet Page 1

Lyric Booklet Page 2



Lyric Booklet Page 3

Final Magazine Adverts/Teasers

Magazine Ad 1

Magazine Ad 2

Teaser Ad 1

Teaser Ad 2

Evaluation Question 1

For our coursework, we were set the task of creating a music video, a magazine ad and a digipak. We had to look at the common codes and conventions for each product and create our own. Below are the common codes and conventions for all of these.

Common conventions

Magazine Ads 

• They always show the artists name in large lettering to make it stand out in the magazine, the smaller the artist the bigger the writing tends to be. 
• They show the dates when the tickets are for sale or a cd is on sale. 
• Star reviews help promote the artist and make people want to buy the song or songs or tickets which are being advertised. 
• The artists information and websites, so people know where they can find out more information about the artist. These are usually shown through the use of Twitter or Facebook icons. Which we have included to promote our own track
• Record label information and a copyright statement. 
• Artist image or cd image. 

Digipak

• They tend to be made from plastic and are most commonly known as a CD case and this is where the artists CD goes but is how the marketing of the cd is done via the front and back covers
• The artists name and song title are usually clear on the front. 
• The artists image or print work is on the front, usually recognisable and have a close link to the artist or the songs which are on the CD
• Website information and Artist website for people to find out more information. 
• The artists and album name on the side, including category number and company logo. 
• A brief description of the artist or a lyrics booklet which we have included in ours is in usually found on the inside. This provide you with information and song lyrics.
• A sellers barcode
• And a Copyright statement and record label information. 

Music Video

• They tend to include both a mixture of performance and narrative, a study done by Goodwin looks more into this concept idea. 
• They use a wide variety of shots. Panning and short shots are commonly used to create a fast paced look and feel for the song. House music videos mainly use short snappy shots of the main character and club footage on screen to add more emphasis. Whereas in other genres they tend to use close ups of the characters and of the performance members. An example of a video where the camera angles used are to hide the artist face is Run this Town by Rihanna. A lot of close-up shots of the singer are used with constant camera movement. 
• Lip syncing is commonly used to portray the sense of a performance going on. Most artist use this nowadays, mainly incorporating it in with the video. Unless the video does not contain a performance aspect. However in our video this is not the case as we didn't have much performance footage other than the old man on the DJ Decks
• Music videos feature jump cutting and the footage which matches what is going on on screen. Producers tend to edit the video to the beat of the soundtrack and to sometimes in our case as you can see in the first 30 seconds to the song lyrics.
• The mise-en-scene is usually selected to match the genre of the artist e.g An RnB artist would use some sort of warehouse or studio or urbanised area to create a mysterious feeling, whereas a House artist would use a brighter and stranger place. 

We then moved onto looking at the common codes and conventions for each product for our chosen genre, house genre. This was to help us when making our final products.  A Film that inspired a lot of our idea was the Film Bad Grandpa and some songs from Storm Queen such as the original video for look right through


Firstly we looked at some of storm queens video. We found that House music originated in America in the early 1980's in the American city or Chicago. Early house music was generally dance-based music characterized by repetitive beats over and over again which meant that the repetitive rhythm of house was more important than the song itself. House music today, while keeping several of these core elements has changed drastically where by now you get less vocals used in the songs and when you do get some lyrics its only either for a short length of time or is repeated over and over again. Then we looked at and found the video for Look Right Through very helpful for filming our video.They used a lot of close-ups of the old mans features and a lot of steady camera work. We decided to go for the same sort of feel when filming ours which added to the inter textually. Although the performance was not very prominent in this video, we were mainly looking at how they filmed their narrative footage. We also looked at the fast pace of editing used in this video, it matched well with what was going on on screen. Also this video incorporated a diegetic opening which we chose to do so it fit in well with our choice of what we were going to film and we believed that it worked very well.

After, we looked at a magazine ad's. We noticed again they used a very simple design. The image colour chosen was black with limited text used. It used some of the main codes and conventions of a normal magazine ad and was well edited and had a lot of imagination. In order for us to gain full marks we had to include more conventions from the house genre, also because they artist is barely known we needed to put more text with it. We included Facebook and Twitter links in order to help promote our digipak and get all the information across with a QR code aswell.


We then looked at the digipaks. We noticed MK went for a very simple design. Apart from the common codes and conventions we mainly liked the black and white backgrounds which he has used for the covers. We then decided that for our digipak we also went for a black and white image on the front to solidly signify the house genre. There was also a lack of textual information on the front. So we also went along with that theme and put on the artists name, album name and the information about the bonus video. We found that the majority of the images which are brighter in colour and depth and most of the information was included on the inside. Therefore we chose to do this as well.

Evaluaton Question 2

Our task was to create a Music Video, Digipak and a Magazine advertisement for our chosen band or Artist. We chose to do it on a song from an Artist who does remixes called Marc Kinchen (MK)  and these all contribute to our final grade at the end of the year. Our primary target audience is males aged 15-24. The reason we chose this was because we believed that the mainstream genre aimed more towards a male audience than a female one however this is rapidly becoming not the case.  This is because in our video text we show a relationship between the old man and society. With our selection of artist being in the house genre, it is quite obvious where the texts would be displayed. NME and MTV are a huge organisation who mainly focus their attention on the House genre. I believe this would be the perfect magazine to put our advertisement in, we would be aiming our product at our targeting audience. Youtube is a great place to promote our videos. However, if our video was to shown on a particular channel I believe it would be MTV or NME or VIVO. These are some if not the biggest music channels in the world and mainly focuses on House, RnB and rock music. Finally, we would have our digipak available to buy on websites such as; Amazon and hmv also mainly itunes. These are three huge companies which would allow us to target both our secondary and primary audiences. 


Magazine Ads

We found that in real life, separate companies are given the roles of producing, advertising and designing these products.  Companies such as; Wewow tend to deal with the designing of an album cover or a magazine ad, they don't deal with the mass production of it. Whereas companies such as; Creando deal with the making of the music video and Image works LTD deal with the designing of advertisements. This shows that it is not just one singular company that produce every text. These two mainly focus on the designs and the creative aspects for the artist. It is then usually left down to the record labels to find the right magazines and websites to promote their own artists under their record label on.As a result of this research we decided that our media text would ideally fit into magazines and on the covers of papers and websites such as

• NME

• MTV

• Q Magazine

• MOJO Magazines

• Music News

• FACT Magazines

Our magazine adverts would fit in well with these magazines if shown in them due to the popularity of the magazines and the type of genre which appears in such magazines in our magazine adverts The main image on the magazine advert should follow the same colours and image themes as the album cover this is usually seen due to the images been taken for the album cover and the magazine ad are similar in many ways due to them usually be taken on the same shoot as each other. However the image on the magazine ad is different in some ways for example the image has been enhanced or only a proportion of the image is used of the same mage and it follows the same colour patterns of the album cover artwork. The largest text on the magazine ad will be the artists name and commonly the second largest text will be the albums name or title and usually features below the artists name on the page and usually the advert will have an 'includes' list somewhere on the image and there will be a popular track list on the advert too sometimes with a bonus track added in there too.  What is also very common in the way that some digipaks have the artists image or bands image on the front cover of the album as well as the inside of it, this is a good way of presenting the digipak and we feel that this idea does suit the style of our artist or genre.Our magazine ads would fit into the magazines listed above due to them all having relavent pages and sub sections within them for example they have sub sections split down into different genres and specifications.

Similarities: 

• We chose to use different images on both the magazine ad and the digipak. One is an image of a singular figure (The Old Man) sat on a Bench in a lonely a derelict area. This is not linked closely with magazine adverts 
• In all three texts we have used a light enhancer to ad more of an emphasis on the picture. We used this after looking at our research into the House genre and we found it wasnt a common convention but we thought it did look good. The colouring used helps highlight the vulnerability and lonelyness of the old man on screen. 
• Also, in all three texts we have used the idea of isolation and to make the audience feel that the ld man is on his own. This is achieved in the digipak by there only being one person in shot and looking into an empty space, he is also surrounded by nothing but a natural environment such as trees and sub urban areas showing he is on his own. The images on the back and front of the digipak link well with the video because it is about a singular person who is marginalised and isolated from society.
• Finally, we used a common theme of using black backgrounds for the magazine ads and digipaks. This is good due to it being a common code for the conventions of the house genre.

Differences:

• We used a person in the video and the digipak who were the same character to add more emphasis on that being the main feature. This meant the old man in the digipak match the one in the video. However, we thought this was good because it was more about trying to sell the magazine ads and digipak.
• We also used different editing techniques when using photoshop. For example part of the magazine advertisement is faded colour, this was down to a different layering effect used. Also we added images onto images and cross faded them so it looked like just 1 image.

Overall we are happy with the final progress and final cut of all three texts. We believed they worked well together and that the audience could make links with all three texts. We tried to stick closely to the common codes of our genre when making all three and we believe we achieved this. Because the artist is not a recognised artist this gave us a chance to explore and use more of our imaginations towards making the texts