real media products?
our project this year was to to plan, design, and create a music video for an artist of our chose. We decided on the artist Ed Sheeran, and have decided to use his popular single "The A Team" it was our job to create not only a music video but to design and structure an intirely new image for them. By recreating their image, we would be able to make this artist appeal to a whole new demographic. In order to change the out going image of Ed Sheeran to how we wanted it we would have to use, and challenge common motifs found within the music videos of today.
When doing research for the creating of our music video, one way that we used common motifs, found in the music videos of today, is that instead of simply showing a narrative, we took on the challenge of lip syncing. This is used in many music videos to create a sense of comfort when watching, for the audience. It creates the illusion of live singing, witch adds to the idea that this is real life. It also puts a face to a voice, witch creates a personal connection between the singer and the audience by allowing the audience to see the singers facial expressions and emotions towards the song, rather then just having the singer as a 2 dimensional character that no one can relate to, as they do within the original music video. lip syncing is also used to create the illusion of story telling, witch instantly makes the meaning of the song lyrics more meaningful and personal.
One way in witch we challenge common motifs within music videos of today, is our use of setting. We were planing to recreate Ed Sheeran's image for a very specific demographic, witch was teenagers between the ages of 16 and 21. We kept this in mind throughout the creation of our music video. We decided to set our video in both a teenager's bedroom and a local park. This was done to make the feel of the videos very familiar and relatable, seeing these familiar environments would instantly set the audience in a sense of comfort, again creating a personal relationship between the audience and the singer.
One way in witch we developed common motifs, is through the use of special effects as a vital part of the narrative. The form of special effects that we used was "green screen" technology. We collected some footage of our actress standing in front of green screen and was able to create the image of fast motion traffic in the background. This was done to show the pass of time, but mainly to show how our leading lady has recently become under the influence of class A drugs. The Green screen is often used to create another reality, a type of dream world where someone feels that anything is possible. And it is this escape from reality that often attracts the common person.2) How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
our intinal aim when re-creating this single was to re-create Ed Sheeran's image as a inde rock star, and inorder for this to be the case we tryed to create a similar feel and style throughout all ancillary texts, which in this case is the album cover, the webpage and of course the music video itself. Here you can see the album cover i designed to fit the new image we wanted to create for Ed sheeran, which was a rebelious post-teen rockstar who refused to follow any rules or pattons. as you can see the way every aspect has a different patton and style. It creates a very rebellious imagery, the way the text is written in a graffiti style or how the picture of Taylor is only slightly off the middle, or how the "A Team" text is not straight or uniform. It's as if this album cover doesn't follow any particular rules. This can make the entire image relate to our target audience that are modern day teenagers who naturally rebel against the generation before them, this is the exact idea and style we wanted for the webpage.
This is the webpage i designed to represent the new recreated image of our artist, much like the album cover, it was designed in every way to appeal to our specific target audience. As you can see we used a very specific style, that is to show a very familiar and reconisable to the other products we have created . The image of a Careless, rough, shown in an orderless, pattonless opening page. This webpage is aimed at the target audience age 16-21 year olds that are the most popular demographic for the music genre that we have chosen (indie rock). Moreover 16-21 year olds is seen to the public as the rebellious age, seen as scruffy careless and unorganised. As you can see, both the webpage and album cover portray the same style and imagery that we tried to create within our music video.
Posting all our recordings on a public, online blog, we could always go back to the blog and analyse any comments on all our work had done. all of our aspects, for example, the artist, the genre of music, the art work style, etc, were all designed by us to appeal to our specific demographic, that we have chosen as our target audience, and by having every step we have taken, on the online to the public it allows it to be available to the target audience and its our overall aim to analyse what our target audience thinks and would like to see.
The blog also gave us as a group a way of reaching many agreements and ending many arguments between the four of, about who is doing what, and spreading out the work equally between four people. For example, our group member George, created an online survey not only for our blog but also to spread across many different social websites (youtube, Facebook etc) giving our target audience the option of taking the online survey, would give us the information we need to find out what teenagers are attracted to within our music video.
3) What have you learned from audience feedback?
With the target audience in mind we deciding on the artist and song we are doing, we needed to find out whether our song would suit the audience not only finding out demographics related to our project but to find out what people of our target audience like to see.
After analysing our results, of our online surveys, before creating our music videos it seemed to strengthen the idea that our artist is very popular, and the genre he represents is very widely accessed. Also we now have hard evidence that using a strong narrative will not only make the video have a much better feel but will make the audience be more interested. we initially chose Ed Sheeran as he was a very recognisable artist for our target audience. Ed Sheeran's popularity has sky rocketed in the last year and was, at one point, the most downloaded artist in the UK with his popular single 'the A Team'. Ed Sheeran's popularity only seems to be growing as this relatively new artist has all ready got a massive amount of loyal fans.
We have learned, rather predictably that our target audience of teenagers aged 16-21, responded to our video with great amount of positivity. One of the aspects that audience respond well to was the narratives used. There was a strong understanding there and, if you watch the audience reactions, you would see that there was a strong personal and feeling of sympathy towards both characters within the story as struggling love, drug and alcohol abuse where all relatable or understandable issues to the common teenager.
Fortunately, another aspect that responded strongly to the audience was the setting, witch had been planed sense the beginning. However not only did the audience respond to the setting as it was relatable and familiar, reaching the audience on a personal level but the audience also recognised how the outer city setting as a relation to the alcohol and drug abuse that also featured in the video. While the initial planning for still responded to by using a familiar teenager's bedroom full of destruction and lacked any order as well as the loneliness and emptiness of the local park that we used.
Finally, the strongest response from our target audience was for the several uses of special effects. Mixed in with the familiarity of the setting and the relatable situation of the music video narrative, we included three different simple forms of special effects, (green screen, disappearing man and cloning). All three were designed to allow the audience escape from the harsh reality of the song and may create a slight idea that nothing is real and so there is always hope, this aspect often attracts audiences, and they seemed to watch it with joy and amazement.
4) How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
While creating, constructing and planning our project this year we use a strong variety of different programmes. The first program that we used, during the planning and organising process was the "Celtx" program that allowed us to not only plan ahead, with the use of a calendar organiser, to plan future filming and editing days, but it also has a "storyboard" system, allowing us to build a stronger structure for the music video. By using this program we were able to plan each day of filming as well as what shot we would shoot on those days, with the use of the storyboard that showed us the music video shot by shot.
When we moved onto the actual construction of the several aspects of our project we used a number of different programs from Adobe. The first was the program "adobe Photoshop" that we used to create the four sides of our album cover, and this allowed us to see cut, paste, edit and add texts and effects to any pictures we could up load. The second, and perhaps the most essential program that we used was "Adobe Premiere", this was the most important because it was the video editing software that we used create the music video. Premiere gave us the abilities of cutting and editing together all the footage that we got as well as using a huge variety of transitions for each clip, this software also allowed us create two of the special effects clips within our music video, we were able to dissolve to different clips together to show a disappearing man, and the cloning process.
The last Adobe program that we used was "adobe after effects", this was the program that our group member, George used to learn how to create separate special effects for video that we used. The most vital special effect within our music video was created within after effects, witch was the green screen clip that we used, the program allowed us the cut and paste different backgrounds around motion with the clip. we were able to do this by removing colours for images and videos.
We used YouTube during all stages of our production. we used it for all the stages of our project, it was vital for all the videos we made, (interviews, vlog post, music video etc) because it was the only way to make all our stages to our target audience, as well as being able to post all our videos on our blog through youtube. We posted various videos on Youtube including our lip sync test, audience interviews and finshed product. From YouTube we could then embed the clips into various other sites including our blog and Facebook.
Charlie Quirke
