Here are my finial finished Ancillary Tasks the changes I made to the inside of the Digi-Pac was in fact the image of the moon. I decided to change it to my own image which I had taken of my own eye. Another change I made was adding the photos I took of the roses and fake blood.
Front Cover of Digi Pac
The changes I made to the front cover was changing the sides in which they were on as if it were a real media text it wouold have printed out the wrong way. The final change I made was making the writing 'featuring the hit single feeling good' bolder as during my audience re-search the feedback I got was that it could stand out more.
Poster
And here is my final poster in which I made no final changes.
I posted my final project on YouTube which is another way for my target audience to view my work. Making me more of a prosumer. This enables them to leave comments, it also means that by using YouTube my work can be viewed by people from all over the world. Of course looking back at my initial ideas for the video certain aspects have changed during the course of filming. Such as filming near all the elements and actually shooting a performance.
“The presence of women is often solely for the purposes of
display and the purpose of this display is to facilitate a voyeuristic response
in the spectators, which presumes a male gaze, regardless of the actual gender of
the spectator i.e. a powerful and controlling gaze at the female, who is on
display and is, therefore, objectified and passive” – paraphrasing Laura Mulvey (1975)
My main product in fact rejects the male gaze as at the end
of the video, the protagonist turns a camera towards the audience and in fact
gazes upon them instead.
“Often, music videos will cut between a narrative and a
performance of the song by the band…Sometimes, the artist…will be a part of the
story, acting as a narrator and participant at the same time. But it is the
lip-synch close-up and the miming of playing instruments that remains at the
heart of music videos, as if to assure us that the band really can kick it.” (Steve Archer, 2004) My main product goes against this convention as there are
performance elements but the identity of the band is hidden so it links more
with the narrative. Therefore, the guitarist does not lip-synch either as there
face is hidden.
Throughout the course of my A2 project I have used numerous
technologies during the development of my project. The first technology used in
the course of the construction of my main product was an underwater camera.
This was an average camera with the ability to shoot moving image which came
with an exceptional case that enabled us to take the camera underwater to
shoot. For the other filming that took place for the rest of the footage for
our music video, we used an HD film camera. As the setting were already set to
the ones we required there wasn’t any need to change them. To enquire a stable
shot Rachel and I used a tripod to enable this.
As for the editing process we used Apple Mac computers which
had the programme iMovie on it. Considering Rachel had not been familiar with
this until the construction of our prep project we decided to take some more
time to get familiar with the tools and methods that were on offer to create
our final project. The transitions that were used in our final project the most
were the fade; we used this mostly to show a passage of time. Other tools we
used were the speed tool. This enabled us to slow shots down to show tension and
makes the chase scene in our music video more dramatic. For other adjustments
we made to our project we changed the lighting by using the brightness tool, we
did this after our audience re-search to make it clearer to our target audience
that there is a passage of time and the beginning of the video is the past and
the end of the video is the present time.
As for our ancillary tasks just like last year we used
Photoshop CS5. Hopefully this year with previous experience my work will appear
more advanced as I used a range of tools that I hadn’t during the course of my
AS project. As a few examples I used the magic wand tool to get rid of the
background quicker and more efficiently. An adjustment tool I used was
Brightness/contrast; I did this to make the images of my ancillary tasks more
vibrant which enabled them to stand out more to my target audience. However,
before I could do this I had to take the images first in which I used a digital
camera which allowed me to take still shots.
During the re-search stages I used YouTube and several
search engines to determine the conventions of typical music videos.YouTube permitted me to observe real media
texts to determine these conventions. Then later on use what I had learned to
make my video look as much like a real media text as I possibly could.
By using my blog this enabled me to become a prosumer. I
used this to display my work which enhanced my project to become more
multi-media.
Another programme I used to display my work was Slide
Share.This is a website that allows you
to post your presentations on the internet, therefore I was able to post mine
on the blog. However, before I could upload my presentations, I had to use
Microsoft PowerPoint to create my presentation first. This is another example of
the type of technology I used.
Another way of displaying the re-search and planning that I
had accomplished was Moviemaker.By
using this programme I could transfer my presentations into the programme and
add transitions, sound and so on to make it a more interesting way of
displaying the information I had recently discovered.
During the evaluation stages I used Slide Share again as it
is very simplistic, yet an easy way to communicate ideas and information to
people. I also used a HD Film camera again to do a face to camera piece as it
is a simple to consume and your audience isn’t continuously reading through
screeds and screeds of text. I then posted it on YouTube as a way to post the video onto the blog.
I am exploring the theory of McQuail, Blumler and Katz’
theory of Uses and Gratifications, the
theory notes that members of the audience are not passive but take an active
role in understanding and incorporating media into their own lives. The theory
also holds that audiences are responsible for choosing media to meet their
needs. As the main
protagonist of my music video is aged 18 the same age as most of my target
audience they will be able to identify with her. My main product features a
fictional reality (vampires) in which is highly popular in today’s culture and
links with the genre rock which is the genre of my music video. This gives my
target audience a reason to seek it out which gives them a sense of identity.
Genre Theory
David Chandler insists that conventional
definitions of genre have a tendency to to be based on the concept that they
constitute particular conventions of content such as themes or settings. These
aspects are shared by texts which are regarded as belonging to them.
Therefore, it is apparent when looking at my main
product it displays typical conventions of the genre of rock. The mise-en-scene
of my main product is dark, with high contrast levels which give the video an
edgy, supernatural feel, which is why my main product could be interpreted as a
supernatural/horror/thriller, which consequently, would make my main product
fall into what is called sub-genre.
In order to get a more specific idea of what my target audience liked and disliked from the video, interviewed one of them to hear specifically from them, what it was that made the video successful and unsuccessful.
Feedback plus questions from our target audience to inform them more about the video.
In order to make my music video more successful I created closed and open questionnaires to gain feedback off my target audience. This enables me to make the specific changes to the music video to make it more effective, appealing and more interesting for the audience to watch.
Here are the results and the changes I am going taking into account the feedback I recieved.
