We used several conventions of the Ska genre in our production. Location was an important aspect to our music video and using Norwich’s urban locations proves a strong link between how our location reflects the genre (Ska) of our music video production for the artists ‘Smaller Than You.
We set our piece in different locations within Norwich. ‘Anglia square’, a rundown urban area of Norwich. ‘The Lanes’ an area of independent retailing in Norwich and then places of interest to the band in Norwich for example St Benedict’s street, which includes ‘The Arts Centre’, a favourite gig location of ‘Smaller Than You and Sound clash A record shop selling bands music that has greatly influenced smaller Than You’s music.
Anglia square proved to be a great location for skateboarding tricks and the high rise buildings and car parks reflected those in the video ‘Ghost Town’ by The Specials creating a mis-en-scene of entrapment.
Skating around Norwich and through ‘The Lanes’ offered some eye catching mis-en-scene and skating on a sunny day helped reflect the laid back style of skating we were after such as in a Nike advert by P-Rod in which he is skating along a Los Angeles boulevard into the sunset .
Our target audience is based around young males between 16 and 23. Our band members and their social groups are reflected in our music video. The laid back lifestyle we have represented in our video in one that the band follow themselves. Ska audiences can relate to this laidback image of youth strengthening the appeal of Smaller Than You to our target audience, as expressed with ‘Gunther Kress’ theory that audiences feel comfortable and at home when visiting a favoured generic text.
My music video represents youth in a neutral light. Although my video does not represent teenagers as particularly inspirational like the kids making a town eco friendly in the Eric Prydz video Pink Floyd/Another brick in the wall. It does not show teenagers as unruly drug abusers such as in TV series Skins but shows a youthful culture surrounding fun and music; all these aspects help to represent British ness and the British youth culture in my music video.
We used costumes and props to portray Ska throughout our video. Clothing was made up of the cast own garments. In all these videos and research into target audience it was easy to get an idea for skating brands and the types of clothes our cast should be wearing, luckily a lot of cast members already skated and owned stereo typical brands such and ‘Vans’ and ‘Nikes’ from this we asked our cast to dress casually, with a few members wearing band t-shirts such as band drummer Jake wearing an Island Records t-shirt and skater Ross wearing a Guns ‘n’ Roses t-shirt.
The casual dress of the skateboarders also represent the Ska uniform of a laidback youth. As most of our cast members are reflective fans of the Ska genre they already owned the kind of chequered shirts and baggy jeans that we needed for our video along with all our cast members owning a skateboard ment after little research we knew we had all the props and costume we would need for shooting.
Our video holds a quick paced narrative as this is reflective to our young sporty audience that would get bored of a slow paced video. Slapstick humour also engaged the audience along with our two styles of performance, musical performance and acting based performance, acting as a narrative engaging device
2) How effective is the combination of your main product with ancillary texts?
Digipack
Andrew Goodwin is a media theorist, he states that “recurring motifs” that develop with the brand style many artists make allow audiences to be part of a developing fan base they can recognise.
This is why I decided to keep the same images on my magazine advert and digipack cover, as well as keeping bright colours and skateboards as a theme throughout all of my final production. I had originally designed a recurring motif from a ‘Vans’ label but thought it didn’t fit with my graphics.
The bright colours of picks and blues in my Digipack reflect the covers of other artists such as ‘Less Than Jake’ and ‘The Specials’ The Beetles inspired mugshots also got good reviews from my target audience. When designing my print production I made sure to involve a skating theme to help emphasise the Ska genre, as skateboarding is not seen on cd covers of other genres. For my middle slips and my back cover I decided to use images of a skateboard wheel with ‘Who Knew’ written on it, influenced by the writing on skateboard wheel rims when they are new.
For my back cover I decided to use a skateboarder mid jump, influenced by a skateboard mid air on the cover of an ‘INXS’ album ‘KICKS’.
I got this image from my music video as I think it was a beautiful shot that showed the skateboard mid air and strongly related my music cd to the music video. I screen shot this image, pasted it into Photoshop, posterised it and added a lens glare until I thought it looked edgy and worn like the some of the album covers I had researched for example ‘Land Of The Rising Ska’.
I think the over all colour themes and edgy look of my digi pack reflect bands of a similar genre like ‘Less Than Jake’ and ‘Rolando Al’ and the photos of my band reflect mug shots of the beetles, a famous British band and a convention that I wanted to positively reflect into my Ska album designs for my band ‘Smaller Than You’
Magazine advert
My magazine would appear in magazines such as ‘Outline magazine’ representing local and larger bands and magazines such as ‘Q’ or ‘Kerrang’ who spend a lot of time focusing on underground music genres such as Ska. The layout of my posters title and reviews are like many in magazines such as ‘NME’ and the layout is also similar to designs featured in this magazine from artists such as ‘Delphic’ and even female artists such as Kate Nash or Lily Allen feature a lot of bright colours in their advertisements.
3) What have you learnt from your audience feedback?
I gave out questionnaires to my classmates to get feedback on my music video to compare with the (possibly biased) opinions of my group. The demographic was a sixthform yr13 with roughly equal numbers of boys and girls.
This questionnaire showed the significant differences between what our female and male audiences look for in the promotion of new band, in particular our music video, and how young males proved to be the main listeners and viewers of our genre.
This range shows a part of our target audience so our class was an appropriate audience to get a range of feedback from.
A positive audience’s response is our main target when trying to promote a band and make a digipack, and using feedpack helps us to strengthen and develop our ideas.
Our questionnaires included qualitative questions as we needed peoples opiions to help develop our ideas, this helped create a varied questionnaire that enabled people to non biasdly give us effective feedback.
Questionnaire: This is what my questionnaire looked like
Questionnaire Results:
Males seemed to prefer our video over females giving us an average rating of 5/5, as our target audience was males we were pleased with this result although knew we still had to attract females to our video. No one found any part of our video offensive or confusing.
Our score from the females was high as well, although the males mainly rated 5/5 for the standard of mis en scene, overall enjoyment and quality of our video, females voted much more harshly but constructively.
The females answered higher than the males in the standard of the edit, mis en scene and enjoyment of the video, but we had many comments concentrating on aspects such as editing and music synchronisation a lot of females commented on the slightly out of sync drumming towards the end of video, this was a strong area for improvement in our production, showing that our female audience was also a fan of the Ska genre, and if not Ska still appreciate the production and continuity and content included in the narrative.
These females results however could have differed if Alice wasn’t featured in the video as girls are not usually included into the Ska genre.
This could have led to comments about the offensive gesture at the lack of femininity in the video ‘Who Knew’ for the male dominated band ‘Smaller Than You’ and the masculine genre of Ska.
Although we had a few answers of ‘don’t know’ referring to the length of our music video the overall answer was ‘correct length’ for this reason we kept our video this length as we had originally thought our video was too long at 3.39 as our researched average music videos as just 3 minutes long.The majority of male participants said they would like to watch it again, this was a successful outcome as it was a niche male audience we were targeting
It was the females that found the significance of the drum sticks in the narrative confusing, which was one of the most important parts in the engagement of our video. We then shot some more footage to try and make this aspect less confusing, this helps engage our audience and the males seemed to appreciate slap-stick humour in our narrative plot.
Both females and males commented on how they enjoyed the skateboarding and skateboarding skills of the skateboarders (our male audience proved to be very interested in skateboarding which added to their enjoyment in our video and identify the similarities between our band and our audience ~ mirror stage (Jacque Lecan theory) Our audience, both females and males commented on how our music video successfully reflected the style of music. This was an aspect we had spent a lot of time concentrating on, using props to develop the genre for our target audience.
Both genders said that our video successfully promoted ‘Smaller Than You’. This was a successful outcome as we were trying to introduce the audience to Smaller Than You and this video enables the audience to identify and relate with them and there role in the Ska genre
Print productions:
I decided to use the band, featured in the music video, as the inspiration for my digi pack cover and magazine advert. This helped identify the audience with the music and artists at the same time. The beetles had a single which included mug shots on the cover; I took this inspiration for my digi pack and put the bands photos over a picture I had taken of the bottom of a skateboard. One male student commented on how my cover reminded him of a Beetles record. Showing how my inspiration had effectively been reflected into my own work.
For my digi pack and magazine advert feedback I asked 10 classmates, 5 females and 5 males (who fell into my target audience demographic) for their opinion of my print productions.
Both females and males shared the same positive opinions on my digipack
Finding it bright and cheerful, reflecting the laid back view of the ska genre, although one male said he thought my cover looked ‘like an American layout’ other females liked the ‘britishness of my cover’ and commented on how the pictures and backgrounds of my digi pack covers reflected the images and action sequence in my music video with a positive effect.
My audience loved the bright colours of my magazine advert and digipack and several people thought my digi pack reflected the upbeat style of ‘Smaller Than You’ and the Ska genre.
Males preferred my print productions and rated my digi pack higher than females in my group, but I didn’t feel that this was at all negative as my target audience for my product was initially young men.
At first my font had negative reviews, as it was ‘hard to read’ and ‘illegible’ but after adding extra font and changing my titles my writing was clear, with black font on a white background my font got much better reviews.
My audience thought that my digi pack successfully promoted the product of my music video and single and that the occurring images on my magazine advert and cd cover successfully promoted the album by Smaller Than You and the Ska genre.
All ten participants rated me highly with six participants giving me a scoring of 4/5, with 3 participants giving me 5/5 and one participate giving me 3/5. Everybody thought that my advert and cd cover was bright with clear graphics and would ‘grab the attention of the audience’ and would suitably fit in in magazines like ‘Kerrang’ ‘Q’ and ‘Outline magazine’
4) How did you use media technologies in the construction and research,planning and evaluation stages?
Media technologies proved to be both positive and negative in the construction, research and planning of my production.
Blogs proved to helpful to many students but I personally didn’t feel that a blog was the right thing to use as I had a lot of technical issues surrounding uploads and the layout of my blog and felt my work would be much more creatively presented in a folder. However my blog did prevent me carrying round a folder and allowed for quick comments and advice from my tutors and allowed other blog users to evaluate my ideas.
My blog is open to comments, audience feedback has proved helpful with creating my magazine advert designs, I had originally used a text that was hard to read on my magazine advert, using the comments and suggestions from blog followers I changed this to an easier to read font.
Using a blog has helped me develop my forms and conventions for my music video and print production for the ska band ‘Smaller Than You’. Using a blog allowed me to group together my research, and analyse the ska genre in an organised and helpful way for people to follow my progress. While producing my digi pack I have been able to upload pictures of my progression which has helped me to get feedback and comments on which ideas are working and which need more work.
Using a blog means I can easily compare my own work to others. As I started to film my music video I researched the ska genre. I was then able to upload videos and artwork from bands of a similar genre onto my blog (for example The Specials and Less Than Jake) I can then appropriately compare to these bands versions of the ska genre into my own work, showing other people the inspiration for my art.
Cameras such as my stills camera, a canon IXUS proved to be effective when shooting location and cast and costume shots, having a small camera meant it was easy to carry around and was quick to upload the pictures onto my computer.
To create my digi pack I used my canon camera to take a wide range of pictures, I then uploaded all these pictures to Photoshop and layered them on top of each other to create the transparent look of my band members. I then added effects such and changing contrasts, posterisers and lens glares to my images to give them a professional finish.
Being able to upload my print production and music video onto my blog has allowed me to compare them to each other, making sure my video is reflecting the style of my digi pack and visa versa
Our fuji camcorder was light and compact allowing us to film easily in many tricky spots. It was easy to use when moving with a skateboard although proved to not pick up much on a very close zoom in, which proved a problem when we wanted to shoot form an interesting angle far away such as in the urban area of Anglia Square.
Our footage was also erased from this tape however we were able to recover some of our filming due to new technologies.
Using a video camera enabled us to review our footage and make quick decisions as to whether we needed to re film something allowing us to make progress when filming.
New technologies with editing on a computer allowed us to edit quickly and effectively, it also allowed us to add special effects and quickly review if they looked good or not.
Adobe premier elements was the programme I used to edit my video, this was easy to work and allowed me to add black outs and cross fades to my video making the overall outlook a lot more professional.
Using a computer and programmes such as Photoshop allowed me to create a professional looking magazine advert and on Photoshop I was able to try out a lot of different effects and easily remove them if I thought they were not appropriate for my digipack.
Media technology proved very useful when researching into similar texts. Music and audiences. Although I did not find my unsigned band Smaller Than You on YouTube or MySpace they did have music on both these sites allowing me to research there musical history, with their MySpace offering some musical information and background information I found useful to promoting the band and making my final product.
YouTube allowed me immediate access to artists’ music videos which proved extreamly helpful. Google and MySpace helped me to find band that reflect the Ska genre, I then used ideas from designs of their records and videos for inspiration for my print production.
Social network sites such as Myspace were helpful for music investigations and facebook had a very popular fan page dedicated to Smaller Than You.
Music channels such as MTVbase and Viva were helpful in finding out what was popular for videos in each type of musical genre, although many videos provided an action story line not many videos were from bands from a quiet genre like Ska, however the ones that were did all have upbeat tempos and quick moving plotlines.
Technologies, overall, have greatly assisted the planning, making and evaluating of my music video and print production. Technologies have allowed me to embed and insert videos and stills onto my blog. Having these photos on my blog help me easily compare them to my own ideas. Using a computer allows me to easily insert pictures of my production onto my evaluation aswell allowing the reader to get a finer grasp of the overall look of my final production promoting Smaller Than You.
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