Evaluation of Main task and Preliminary Tasks

In the research and planning stages, I was very motivated in creating a strict plan so that I would get all the work done by the deadlines provided. I had made a plan of my time for all 3 tasks set, bearing in mind that I could not use pinnacle at home, because I don’t have it on our home computer. I made lots of plans regarding filming the scenes, because I thought that the actresses I used had been good enough to give me their time, I must use it wisely. The plans of time definitely stood me in good stead, as on the plan for the music video, I established all what would be needed for the highest grade possible. This way I could keep focus and on track of the task set. The research I conducted in all 3 tasks was I thought the maximum; I did loads so that I was prepared to produce 3 products that would fit in with contemporary music artists and help me identify some of the conventions that I would develop. The research then was evaluated into notes which I then made use of by saying how it has or hasn’t influenced me. For example the videos by Pink and Alexandra Burke influenced me how I would express sadness in a music video - using conventions such as candles, and scenes in black and white. Hallelujah by Alexandra Burke especially influenced me because the format of the video was very much past and present - with flashbacks often in black and white. I therefore followed a similar format when creating my music video - as the studio singing scene narrated the flashback scenes.

Below is a link to the Hallelujah musi video sung by Alexandra Burke

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb-K2tXWK4w

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real products?
I think that for all three of my final products, they all fit in with contemporary society. They follow existing trends and are nowhere near revolutionary, a band like the one I am promoting will be in business terms a “cash cow”, this is because they are reliable and audiences will take to them, they wouldn’t become global superstars like Madonna or Michael Jackson and make multi-billions of pounds. I think that the Music Video especially targets all audiences and in some ways does challenge existing media, as much of today’s song lyrics are about relationships and love, some even of a sexual nature. I have used conventions from the music video from Alexandra Burke, when there is the use of candles on the floor when she is singing. However, I couldn't afford the amount of candles that is used in her video - and it would also take a long time to light them all! I did develop this convention - by using a large candle, melting down as a metaphor for 'Lucy' the actress who dies of cancer in the video. The a link to the Hallelujah is embedded above.

How effective is the combination of your main product and anillary trexts?
I think that all 3 of my products combine very well. Reasons for this include the colour schemes, the band image and the story. The colour schemes used are predominantly black, yellow and pink; this is in both the webpage and the CD cover, mainly used to show girlyness (pink) but quality (gold) and grief (black). In similarity, the music video is set in a black studio; this represents grief, as the story is about memories of someone who has died. The beginning of the video shows a white background with black text, I was going to make this yellow and pink – but thought those colours were to fun and would put the audience in a confused mind set – as they are reading about cancer, but seeing fun colours, that is why I used white and black, so that the white would resemble peace, and the black would resemble the grief that is still there. The band image is the same throughout all the 3 products. They are shown as fun loving, and just normal girls. The image of the group on the CD cover and webpage shows them “glamorous”, yet covered up! This is supposed to be the group’s unique selling point, as they are “good girls” and not jezebels. Finally the story is interviewed throughout all the 3 products, the music video bases heavily on an interpretivist’s level, as it is about an individual story. However the CD and Webpage include more personal messages to include the audiences –“have you been affected by cancer?” This makes the audience intertwined into the cancer story, if I were promoting the girl band in real life, then I would expect a mini moral panic to be created to gain as much publicity as possible to get everyone talking about the cancer issue.

What have you learned from Audience Feedback?
I did use lots of audience feedback, as I initially did a survey and asked 6 relevant questionnaires to a sample of school students and teachers in my school. I though that the sample size was good, and the people were of the expected target audience 12-18, although the older participants gave better advice to me. I found that the younger participants gave false answers – just because they had copied their friends. This helped me to appreciate the importance of reliable data. I then correlated the results into graphs which I then analysed. I found that most of the

results questionnaires were helpful, but the most impact was from my friends who don’t do media studies and saw my progress and gave me hints and tips in order to improve. 3 of my friends do A level art, so I found this useful when I was creating my CD package and Webpage.
I have learnt the importance of researching and constantly reviewing the needs of a target audience. Also, the suggestions on acting on their constructive criticism so that the end products meet their needs and will be a success.

How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
Media technology I used included Pinnacle, Dream weaver and Photoshop, along with Movie Maker and a Camcorder. I used dream weaver to create my webpage, I was able to create a page with little or no HTML scripting skills. I used cascading style sheets, each of them linked to the webpage. I had to ensure that all my images were the size that I wanted them to be on the webpage before saving them in one folder which also contained any sound or video files I wanted embedding into my front page. Once my front page was complete, I uploaded my WebPages to an ISP along with any image, video or music files that I had included on the pages. When I viewed my page on line, at first I discovered that there was a red cross in some boxes, this is because I had not put the images in the correct folder, I then uploaded the missing images and put them in my “images” folder, where they could then be uploaded.

I used Adobe Photoshop for my CD cover, inside and back, this enabled me to produce a higher quality CD cover – as I could do much more to the images, such as cropping them down and drawing around them. I found this relatively easy to use, as the plans I had drawn up were not overly difficult, and I had used it last year in my AS media coursework, and have used it to make posters for the schools production play last July.

I used Pinnacle to upload and edit my music video, I filmed the scenes, and because my planning was sufficient, I knew exactly how long each scene needed to be. I therefore was able to create the music video in adequate time. My main problem with Pinnacle was that when I came to “make movie” there were errors with some of my scenes. This completely disrupted my timetable. The schools IT technician was trying to find out all sorts of ways to solve the problem, but in the end I simply had to recapture the scenes from my Camera, then edit the back into the film. One of the hardest parts of creating the movie was matching the song to actresses lip movements so that they were synchronised. Pinnacle allowed me to do this well but in odd places it is out of sync. I used movie maker to create the anamatic, which was relatively easy and didn’t take me long.

Overall I feel that I have created a set of products that relate to an interested audience and that I have progressed significantly in my use of ICT and my understanding of the elements / features of different forums of media.

Music Video

Evaluation of Webpage

Webpage Evaluation

I think that my webpage, does not develop existing media forms. I have been influenced by the webpages from Girls Aloud and The Saturdays, I think that because both these girl bands have been hugely successful, then there could be clearly a gap in the market for another one.
I did the same amount of audience feedback as I did for my CD project, I followed the same plan. I carried out a questionnaire before and a questionnaire after, the before one was to see what audiences would expect to be on a webpage from their point of view, and the after one was to see what audiences thought about the webpage, and if any amendments needed doing.
From all the media technologies I have used throughout this coursework, I found Dream Weaver, which we used for the webpage extremely frustrating. Everything was just that much more complicated and took me more time than I had expected. Using my plan, when things were going great and I was ahead of schedule – I seemed to slack of – so that I would be back on schedule, instead of keeping working ahead of pace, so that I would have spare time if I were to come across anything that would take me more time than I thought. Therefore, I should have kept working at an even pace, instead of slacking off, so that when it came to produce the actual webpage, I could have had plenty of time to do it. I think that the 3 products all link, the webpage does this especially well. This is because on the webpage there is the CD front cover and the music video all together, linking them all.

Webpage

Webpage

Please click the link below to go onto my Webpage;

My Website Pages


Storyboards

I have done 3 composition plans, and have developed each one as I have gone on from the previous.
The first composition I drew up was very straightforward and didn’t have much extra detail on. For example, the picture of the band is too big, this is good that there is a picture of the band on but I think because it was so big, it took attention away from other items on the page which were more important – such as the music video. I was happy with the navigation bar at the top of the page; it contained links to all pages that would be necessary on a website. A further criticism of this webpage is that the colours are only yellow and black, on the CD front and back cover, there is also pink text. Therefore in order for the 3 media pieces to fit together, they must follow the same pattern of colours. This webpage has been hugely inspired by the one I looked at by Girls Aloud, this is maybe too much so, as I have not looked at other webpages in the same detail. I found that the first composition did not include anything overly exciting, it was simply boring and pictures took up the majority of the space. I did like the navigation bar at the top of the page, lots of other webpages have this at the very top, and I thought it was functional to do the same. This and the name of the band at the top of the page has been the same throughout all compositions. I have a picture of the band at the top, but in the early compositions it was rather large, and when I had created this on the computer, it contributed to a whole screen space – and therefore was no indication for audiences to scroll down for more info. That is why I have made the image smaller, and brought up the rest of the content further up. I have also decided that because the band are new, there needs to be some information about them as a group, and individuals somewhere on the page – so that audiences can get to know the group. As the music video is an emotional story about cancer, there needs to be a link on the webpage so that audiences can understand more about why the band have chosen to do a song about that issue, and have profits go to charity. I will also need some copyright of some sort to send to Cancer Research UK as I am intending on using the logo on the page. Also on the page are the music video, and the CD front cover, this webpage links the 3 together. Also on the final composition is an idea taken from most other music artist webpages, I see it as a “space filler” and also gets to see the band in a more personal level. It is a news box, which lets audiences find out stories about the band – I would aim to update this regularly if it were real. I have written some articles about 2 band members, and intend to get another picture of them. The colours used are matching to the CD cover and back – Black, Gold and Pink. I think that this is a good combination because the Gold emphasises quality, Pink emphasises “girliness” and the Black is a solid background colour which girl group Girls Aloud have used on their webpage.

Composition 1


Composition 2

Composition 3

These are all just rough ideas for myself, so that i know what will go where - so i haven't gone into extreme detail on each of the plans.

Questionnairre to Target Audience

As I did for my CD cover and Music Video, I have created a questionairre into my target audience to see what current expectations are of websites. Below is a completed questionnaire;

QUESTIONNAIRE INSERT

Below are some graphs to show findings from the questionnairre's;

Questionnaire Evaluation

I carried out a Questionnaire to a sample of 50 people at my school. They were either staff or students of different ages. Although, as I feel that the music industry targets heavily on the youth, then I would proportion my sample to reflect this ratio. The age range with the largest number of participants was the group 15-18 – mainly because this group was the easiest to get hold of and secondly because I intend the music to target them especially. I asked the question “how often do you surf the internet” because those who would surf the internet most would be able to give fully justified opinions of WebPages. I then asked a more direct question - “How often have you visited WebPages of contemporary music artists?” The results from this question was what I would expect, around half of the participants visit these webpages now and again – and most likely the same ones. Therefore from this I can conclude that webpages are important as it is a base for a band or artist to supply information. I inserted a question that would give me qualitative data so that the participant could get across their own views, rather than ticking a box which is very closed and only gives correlational information. I liked to read Question 6 on this questionnaire so that I could get a general feel of what participants expect to be on a website. Many of the responses were similar, and thought that a website should have a music video from the band available, song lyrics, competitions and concert dates available so that they can buy tickets to see the band. This questionnaire has proved helpful in that I can now go on and design the webpage knowing what my target audience expects from it.

I looked at a variety of different artists webpages. This is so that when I come to making my own webpage I can have a justified opinion of what contemporary Music Artist webpages are like.

After evaluating these WebPages, it is clear that there are many similarities between the pages. All include the band/artists name – with all except Sugababes including a picture of the band/artist itself. All included a row of links to other pages at either the top or bottom of the page. Colour schemes are also important, because this page markets the band – it seems as though pink, black and gold are female colours, and grey blue and white are male colours. As my bands are females, it would make sense to follow this pattern and involve gold and pink colours. I will also use images of my band as that is what has been done in these pages. I like the girls aloud pictures of them all at the top of the page – I think this gives them a “Goddess” status and there hair and make up is perfect. Reoccurring things from the pages are; up to date news of the band, tour dates, images of the band and links to buy the albums and singles from the band.

Below is a plan of how I intend to use my time in order to get my Webpage done and finished.

I have done a plan so that once I have done a task, then I can tick it off in the "DONE" column.

Brainstorm of Wepsite Homepage

Breif

Webpage

As part of a promotion for a new music Band, I have already created a music video for a song – and will now make a Webpage as part of the promo pack. The band I am promoting is “Beca et al”.
I will look at what contemporary artists have done on their Webpage’s, and use bits of each webpage I like to create my own. I will then take images of the band, and then do some composition planning on several of my own ideas, using Macromedia dream weaver.

CD - Final Product

This is my CD Front Cover;
This first one has what will be on the packaging on the CD case as stickers

This Is the Back Cover;

This is the Inside of the CD (the pink will overlap into the side of the CD)

CD Evaluation

The final product; my CD package is based around contemporary girl band images; I have been very influenced by the likes of Girls Aloud and The Saturdays. I think that in hindsight, the image of my band on the CD cover is very similar to that of the two bands mentioned. I wanted to make the girls look powerful, from a feminist approach – however, this seems to be what all girl bands are doing nowadays. Although I think that because my Girl Band are promoting a video for cancer research, and profits go to charity – this develops conventional media products because most bands and artists rarely do this. Although, the two bands that come to mind who have recently done charity singles are Girls Aloud and The Saturdays, so therefore my Girl group doesn’t develop traditional conventions. I don’t really think that the band challenge existing media, as the band are quite mainstream. I think that it is quite risky for new artists to be “out there” at such early stages of their career, examples such as Lady GaGa show that she began her career as quite “normal” and didn’t challenge existing media forms until she had earned her celebrity status and popularity.
In the research stages I looked at CD covers of artists that I had in my iTunes library, I took them to pieces and found some similarities and some differences between them. In the construction stages, I took digital pictures using my camera, and then put them on Photoshop. Using the composition plans I had done, the production was a doddle, and I could quickly get what I wanted onto Photoshop. I have printed of the front, back and inside covers, and put them into a CD case. I think that overall this looks quite good; however, the quality is not as good as it ought to be.
Without audience feedback my final product would not have been the same, I relied on a wide opinion when forming my own, to keep myself on track and making sure that the final product fitted what I intended to do. I found questionnaires the easiest method, as I could produce a questionnaire and give it out to as many people as I liked, I did think about an informal interview with some people, but I thought there was no need, as me and my friends in the media class often had discussions about each others work which was sort of an even more informal, informal interview.
I am pleased with the combination of the main product and ancillary texts, I have followed a similar colour pattern, and kept the same theme of charity throughout all of the products – without (hopefully) being over the top and being too forceful with information.

Research of Existing CD Covers

I have looked at other contemporary girl groups or artists to see how my CD case would fit in with theirs. I found some similarities and some differences between mine and theirs.










Research into the inside of CD cases


I simply got around 10 CD cases in my house, and looked at the insides of each one. I jotted down a brainstorm of my findings and the copied this neatly onto the computer. I found that there were many differences what were on the insides of CD cases. I didn’t even find any links between genres; all CD’s contained different insides – regardless of genre. From the Covers I have looked at, I think that the blank inside was pretty boring, although, I found one CD just to over the top, as it contained a big thank you speech, and lots of flowery drawings intertwined. I liked the marketing idea of having a link to downloading the song to your phone, with instructions inside the CD cover - very canny. I also liked the idea of having a promotion for the upcoming tour of the artist – very canny! Both these ideas show that the person who buys the CD will look inside and there will be more ways to support the artists – who they are obviously a fan. However, these CD’s I have are quite old, as since digital technology came about, I download all my music and don’t buy CD’s.

Questionairre for CD

CD Target Audience Findings

I carried out a questionnaire to see what an audience’s opinions were of my CD case, the front, the back and the inside. I used the same participants for this questionnaire as I did for the evaluation questionnaire for my Webpage and Music Video. Much of the responses were positive, most participants felt that the CD was of a good quality, and to my surprise a small number of the participants found the digipack boring, I was thinking that the CD front and back and inside was all too boring and simple – yet 94% of participants did not. One change I did make after the questionnaire was that I made some of the writing pink, and alternated the font colour, instead of having the band name in a block yellow, and the name of the song in a block pink.





Below is a Filled out questionnairre example;



Below is the results of what audiences thought about the quality of my CD digipack;

Composition Planning for CD Cover and Back Cover

Evaluation of Compositions

I have decided that my CD front cover will be of a low angle of the band – to endorse an authoritative figure. This is because there is a big push of “popular feminism” which proves popular with audience (especially female) because of female empowerment but is still popular with male audiences because of the girl groups attractiveness. Secondly I have decided that I want the colours to be yellow/gold and black, this is because the gold emphasises quality, and the black colour matches the gold – without taking away to much attention. The writing font will be “Georgia” and in italics and bold, this is because the font is readable, yet quite feminine – because I am promoting a female band. Unlike fonts such as ROCKWELL which are somewhat masculine.
The back of the CD cover is hugely inspired by the back of Rihanna’s album cover “good girl gone bad”. A close up shot of Rihanna on the back allocates a more personal side to the singer – this I have used and will take a close up picture of the band’s lead singer Becca. The same colours and fonts will be used as on the front. I will also include a bar code, a copyright symbol and the record label’s logo to make the CD look realistic.

Target Audience Research For CD Cover

Questionnaire Evaluation


I carried out a Questionnaire to a sample of 50 people at my school. They were either staff or students of different ages. Although, as I feel that the music industry targets heavily on the youth, then I would proportion my sample to reflect this ratio. The age range with the largest number of participants was the group 15-18 – mainly because this group was the easiest to get hold of and secondly because I intend the music to target them especially. I asked the question “how often do you buy music” because those who would buy music often will have a relatively good idea of what contemporary CD covers look like – and therefore I could rely on the rest of the information they would give me. Only 4% of the participants did not buy any music so I felt comfortable that the questionnaire would be high in validity. The main purpose of the questionnaire was to see how much attention is paid to the CD cover, and interestingly I found that 54% were not bothered in the slightest what the CD cover looked like. From this information it seems that less emphasis is paid on the CD cover than previous years, perhaps mainly because of downloading the music instead of buying it in the shop and being enticed visually to buy the CD. I think personally that the image/CD cover is only a visual aid to link to the song. Again, a vast majority, 86% expected that there would be certain things on a CD cover – such as “the name of the band”, “a picture of the band” and “the name of the song”. This questionnaire has proved relatively successful, as I can now go and design the CD bearing in mind that there are certain items that need to be included, and that the image of the band on the CD cover is not entirely important to promote the single.



Below is an example questionnaire that has been completed





Below are two graphs which show findings from the questionairre i carried out towards my tarket audience.

Plan For CD

This is the plan I have had in the front of my media folder, i have a personal deadline for when each task is to be done by. Once i have completed the task i tick the "done" box, and can see what is left to do.