SCRIPT FOR EVALUATION TWO

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

I wanted there to be clear similarities between my music video, digipak, and magazine advert. I did this in different ways including a link between the colour, fonts, shapes, images, and of course the album title, single title, and artist name. This meant that there will be a link between all three which will lead to them looking more professional as real marketing campaigns for music videos tend to all go together. For example, a band called "As It Is" released an album last year which had the whole marketing campaign revolving around the theme of the 50s. The music videos, album covers, and all of the promotional posters had a very clear theme throughout.

My music video starts off with a shot of the title and the artist name on a blue background. This immediately sets the tone for the theme. Originally, I wasn't sure if I wanted the main colour to be red or blue but after carrying out a survey on "SurveyMonkey", I found out that more people agreed that blue suited the album and song better. Because of this, the background is a pastel shade of blue, and to make sure that I had the exact same shade of blue for all of my pieces, I made sure to take note of the hexadecimal number, which is #5986BD. This allowed me to already have a theme because the colour is the first thing to stand out. I used this same colour in my magazine and digipak. Having a plain coloured background helps to make the writing throughout my products stand out more.

Furthermore, I also made sure to use the same fonts. For "Jorja Smith" I used a font called "Cavier Dreams" and for "Teenage Fantasy", I used a font called "Rock Salt". I also made sure to have both lines of text to end and begin at the same point and to do this, I had to change the spacing of the lettering. The fonts were also all capitalised to make them stand out more. I used these fonts for the music video, magazine advert, album cover, and all throughout the rest of my digipak.

I've even made sure to use these fonts and colours in my evaluations.

In addition to this, I was consistent with the shapes I used. This includes small pairs of rectangles and blue triangles scattered throughout my digipak as well as my magazine advert. With the triangles, I wanted to make sure that they were identical on all of my products so I made sure that the angle of the line was exactly 16° on all of them. This was quite easy to achieve on "Fotor" which was the editing website I used. I also used white lines around the image on the album cover and I decided to continue this theme by having more white lines around the other images on the digipak.

Another link between products, is the song "teenage fantasy" being the lead single. Usually, the first single from an album tends to have a music video to accompany it because the musician and the marketing team want that song to receive as much attention as possible. For example, "Puzzle Pieces" by Broadside was the first song from their album "Paradise" and they released the song with a music video. Throughout the rest of their promotional posters and adverts, they would often say that the album featured "Puzzle Pieces" as a single. They also included a photograph taken on the set of the music video as part of their album adverts. Having Teenage Fanatsy be a single released before the album helped to give more reason as to why the album cover was a screenshot from the music video. This also gave me more of a reason to include teenage fantasy in the magazine advert, as well as on the back of the digipack along with the rest of the tracklist.

There are various albums that have the cover either as a screenshot from a single's music video, or a photograph taken on the set. An example of this is Movement's album called "Feel Something" which has a photograph taken on the set of "daylily" which was the most popular single. This all meant that having Teenage Fantasy made perfect sense to be the lead single and since the music video was the first product I created, I took inspiration from that to create my ancillary tasks. First of all, I took a screenshot from the video to use as my album cover which ended up on the magazine advert too. I then also took several more screenshots and placed them on the inside of my digipak. This helped to further bring the products together as the three images placed on top of each other are clearly linked to the video of the single "Teenage Fantasy". Also, if a costumer saw the digipak first, they would be able to notice that the images used have been taken from a video which will hopefully lead them to watch the video if they haven't already.

Throughout my digipak and magazine advert, to make it as professional as possible, I included small details such as the artist's website "jorjasmith.com" (which I made up) and the record label "epic". When it comes to the record label, I also included the copyright details at the bottom of the back of the digipak. This includes phrases such as "Epic Records, 1953 Tokyo Japan. Owned by Sony Music", and "Unauthorised copying, lending, hiring, public performance, and broadcasting prohibited". This helps it look more professional as well as link the products together since you can tell that they're from the same singer and record label.

Furthermore, both of my ancillary tasks have quite a "minimalist" approach as although they include all the information necessary, I managed to not make it overwhelming with writing and information.

Overall, I think that my music video and ancillary tasks are extremely effective as I have used various ways to tie them all together, creating memorable final products.

SCRIPT FOR EVALUATION ONE

This (as well as the other scripts for my evaluations) are just roughly what I'm planning on saying but I might change it slightly when it comes to recording myself.

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

After choosing what song I would be making my music video for, the first thing I researched was the genres it fell into. To my surprise, "Teenage Fantasy" - Jorja Smith can be categorised as contemporary R&B, alternative R&B, dancehall, and pop music. This meant that I had a lot of options when it came to the conventions I wanted to research. However, I decided to stick mostly to the contemporary R&B genre as this was the style of music videos I enjoyed most. I then looked at different music videos from other artists from this genre. To find similar artists, I first looked at a few I already knew which includes Frank Ocean, Sabrina Claudio and Mura Masa. However, I then realised I don't listen to a lot of R&B so I looked at the "related artists" section on Spotify which helped my find other artists including Shy Girls and Willow. After knowing what the music videos typically consist of, I have deliberately chosen to use, develop and challenge the forms and conventions of real media products from this genre.

One of the ways in which I used conventions is through the colours of the music videos. I noticed that in these professional music videos from the same genre, there tends to be a large amount of highly saturated shots including the primary colours yellow, red, and blue. I specifically made sure that we were filming in locations with bright colours and told Lucy and Julia, who were the main characters throughout the narrative, to wear bright colours. However, I chose to contrast this slightly with some monochrome colours throughout too. Although bright colours are often used in R&B videos, it hugely contrasts with the colours of the original music video of Teenage Fantasy as it is all in black and white.

Another convention I noticed is that a lot of R&B videos are based on performance. For example, Oliver Baxxter - "So Slow", and Sabrina Claudio - "Unravel Me". I wanted to challenge this convention by having a video that's heavily concentrated on the narrative. However, I decided to develop it slightly by having the last shot be performance. During this shot, Lucy is also breaking the fourth wall which leads to her having more engagement with the audience even more. To create a narrative for our music video, we took most of our inspiration from the lyrics. After researching narrative videos, I found out that this is what videos tend to do from the indie music genre. For example Amber Run - "I Found". This research that I did out of my genre helped me expand my ideas and challenge the forms and conventions of real R&B media products meaning that I could combine the conventions from R&B videos as well as other genres.

A huge part of my music videos were the portrait shots I chose to include scattered throughout the video. This is often used in R&B videos as well as Indie videos. I did this so that the narrative can seem more "relatable" for the audience For example, Declan Mckenna - "The Kids Don't Want To Go Home", and Mura Masa - "What If I Go?"

Furthermore, after receiving class feedback, I found out that I had to include the song title and artist name. Originally, I didn't want to do this as I thought that not a lot of music videos did. However, it was part of the specification so I included it anyway and I thought I'd research and find some other music videos that also include it. I found that "So Slow" by Oliver Baxxter includes it at the beginning, as well as the original music video for teenage fantasy.

EVALUATION QUESTIONS

Each candidate will evaluate and reflect on the creative process and their experience of it.
The questions that must be addressed in the evaluation are:

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

2.How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary tasks?

3.What have you learned from your audience feedback?

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

FINAL MUSIC VIDEO

I previously posted a blogpost with a video that at the time I thought would be my final video. However, I realised that the titles at the beginning had a completely different artist name to the name that I used throughout my digipak and magazine advert. This would cause a lot of confusion to my audience so I redid the title. 

Since I had to change the title and reupload anyway, I took advantage and made sure the new title at the beginning was in the same fonts and colours as my digipak / magazine advert. This further helps to keep consistency throughout my products.

DIGIPAK: FINAL

After receiving some audience feedback, I changed certain things such as the position of a few shapes and images.

Somebody also pointed out that I accidentally wrote "Teenage Fantasy" on the spine instead of "Strangers". Although this is just two words different, it caused a lot of confusion since on the rest of the digipak the album it was titled differently to the spine, it didn't correlate.

Also, originally the top half of my digipak was upside down and this was because I saw an example of a real digipak which had the top like that so that when it's printed and folded, it would be in the correct position. However, to show the design on my blog it looks a lot neater when it's all the correct way up since it's easier to see and read.

Finally, part of the feedback I received was that I made a mistake in spelling "photograhy" as just "photograph" so I fixed this.

Here is my final digipak design:

DIGIPAK: PROGRESS

For the same reason as why I did it for my CD design, I decided to frequently save the progress of my digipak design. Below is the album cover and CD tray I have already designed and following that is the progress of my digipak design.

Finally, this is the draft that I'm going to send to people for audience feedback to find out on what I can improve.

DIGIPAK (CD): PROGRESS

After creating my magazine advert and album cover on "fotor", I realised that the website can freeze and crash a lot, making it very easy to lose all of my work. Because of this, I decided to save the image frequently in case if it did happen. Although there's only small changes, it still shows the progress and changes in ideas.

I then wanted to add the record label at the bottom of the CD. Originally, the "epic" record label logo I had downloaded was red but it only took me a split second to realise that a red logo on a digipak that only consisted of blue and white looked very odd. Because of this, I found another one that was white with a transparent background to fit my theme and colour scheme a lot better. 

This is the red logo I had originally and although I prefer the style and font of this one rather than the white, I couldn't find this in white so I went with the other logo.

I also then added another diagonal line in the background to match the magazine advert and the rest of the digipak that I will create soon. I also made sure that this diagonal line is at the exact same angle (16°) as the rest so that when it's all put next to each other, there's a very clear correlation and it all links up and matches.

I then decide to add another white circle around the CD to show that when the CD isn't in the packaging, there will be a plain white circle there rather than a blue background.

Here is the final CD along with the background of the CD tray. It's not the right size or shape at the moment but I will fix that once I create the full digipak as I will need it to be a size that correlates with the rest.

Although I made the album cover and the CD / CD tray separate, I think I'm going to make the other two sides all together with the four sides as I think that will be more efficient. Making all four sides separately will take a lot more time as I then have to put them all together and make sure that they're all the same size.