The Final Post

The post to end all posts.

The above are the two crucial products I have produced over the past year whilst studying A level media studies, my Digipak and my Magazine Advertisement. Below is my Final Music Video and my four Evaluation Questions.

 

Evaluation Question Four

Here is the final edition to our four evaluation questions, this one is in the form of important clips, with Elisha and I doing a voice over to detail the significance of both our production and our individual digipaks.
 

Self Evaluation

Over the past year, I feel my skills and techniques, when regarding editing, producing and filming, have improved greatly as a result of taking A2 media studies. When filming, I have successfully been able to film for our music video, creating shots of a unique nature, and pushing myself to go the extra mile to obtain such shots. 

One of my favourite shots, that look a lot of effort to get, is when the girl is standing on the water.

This took a lot of effort and I feel that we have managed to achieve a really iconic shot, that not only stuns our audience, but also still manages to shock us.

It also put emphasis on the fact that our video is of an indie/alternative styling, with this obscure shot we are able to highlight our genre and strange choice of narrative. As well as filming, My editing skills have improved drastically, as I am now able to edit on an entirely different piece of editing software. Using final cut express enabled me to not only learn how to use another piece of editing software, but it also allowed us to create a really professional production. By using Final Cut Express, not only did it give us a must wider variety of editing techniques to apply to our music video, it also enabled me to teach myself how to use such complicating editing software, which further developed my understanding of the software as a whole. 

Evaluation Question Three

Here is the third of our Evaluation Questions, with this one we thought we would film ourselves presenting our thoughts on how we have used digital technology. In doing this we are able to show how much we know about our production, with out the need of a script.

HTML link

To show that I am able to show a wide range of understandings of different technologies, therefore I have added a html link that will direct you straight to Elisha's blog. As the two of us worked together for the majority of the two year course on all the productions produced, I thought it would be a useful link to make to my blog.

Evaluation Preparation for Question Four

With the question :"How effective was the combination of your Digipak and Music video", we decided to focus on the images of both of our products and our joint music video production. This way we enable the viewer to see the exact articles that we are discussing and emphasises the actually technology at hand, as oppose to putting the focus soely on us.Here is a photo of the two of us practicing the voice over that we will be putting over the images and clips for our fourth evaluation presentation.

Evaluation Outtakes

As we have filmed all of our Evaluation Questions, we decided to create a little video of the outtakes from filming, enjoy.
 

Evaluation Preparation Question Three

For our third evaluation question of "How did you use media technology in the construction, research and planning stages of making your production"we chose to film the entire thing in one take and then insert images of the things we discuss when it comes to the editing stages. We have already filmed the two of us discussing the previous question, now all we need to do is insert the images and moving clips.

Showcase Evening

I feel that the evening went really well, the comments were all of a positive nature, which really boosts my overall confidence in our music video. We put together a short video of the evening, with our little speech and feedback from those who attended the evening.
 

Evaluation Question Two

This is the second of our completed Evaluation Questions. This one is in a very different style to the first, with the first being a presentation, we thought we would directly include our targeted audience in the second. This is therefore why we used an interview styled format.

Evaluation Question One

Here is the first of our completed Evaluation Questions. We did it in the form of a Prezi, with the inclusion of various inspirational music videos and vlogs that we ourselves have created.

 

Show case evening

On the 25th of April we will be hosting a show case evening of all the AS and A2 productions of 2013. The evening will include each group doing a short speech, introducing their video, then the video will be shown. The following is the speech I have written for myself and Elisha, I wanted to include what we wanted to convey in the music video, as well as the editing techniques we used.

Digipak and Magazine Advertisement

I created a short vlog with the hard copies of both my completed Digipak and completed Magazine Advertisement. The vlog provides an outline of how they have followed the forms and conventions of real media products as well as denoting the limitations of each product and how I might improve such limitations if I were to redo this task.

Audience Interview

For one of our Evaluation questions, we decided to an interview styled question, In which we asked a pannel of our target audience to watch our music video and feedback on certain aspects of it. We have already filmed the interview as well as a short vlog, by the two of us, which details our thoughts on what we have learnt from our audience feedback. The following are images of the editing process and how I converted the raw footage into a suitable presentation. 

Evaluation

For the first question of our evaluation, "In what ways does your music video and digipak use, challenge and develop the forms and conventions of real media products?", we have decided to create prezi for this particular question, with vlogs on our personal views on certain aspects of the completed products. This way we are combining several different forms of technology into one evaluative question response. Here are a couple snap shot of the current state of our first evaluative presentation, to the left, we have me working on the prezi, and below, is the current appearance of the presentation.

Adding Credits

We have now added credits to our music video to say the name of the song and the name of the band. As this is a compulsory part of the course, we wanted to follow the conventions of a real music video, so we placed the credits at the beginning on a plain black screen, this way we are not detracting the attention of the audience away form our actual music video.

 

Examination Preparation

 
 Recently in lessons we have been planning our essays for our exam in June, this consists of essay feedback, analysis work and also personal progression in each field of study within the essay. The more detail added to the essay's the better, therefore I have been going through my past productions and adding little notes as to how I can comment on certain techniques in each production and how this can be applied to my essay writing.











Here is my completed AS production technique example help, that gives me examples of my own work, the inspiration gained for the technique used from other films, as well as how this may effect the audience.

Planning Ideas

Elisha and I have been putting our ideas together about how we are going to present each of the evaluation questions. We created a mind map of all our ideas for each of the four questions, we also decided that each question is going to be answered in a different format.

For instance one is answered in the form of a filmed presentation, and another is in an interviewed style, in which we interview a group of our target audience, about feedback from our complete music video.

Final Magazine Advert

Since creating the draft of my music magazine advertisement, a few changes have been made to make the advertisement a much more manageable project. The pictures have still been included in one draft, however they were not placed as I first wanted. Putting the images into the two diamonds proved impossible with the software available, therefore I altered my design and came up with the following advertisement:


You can click on the image to enhance your view.




I am choosing this draft as my final piece as I feel it is the more professional of the two. I also like the use of images and the way that it jumps out to the reader when flicking through a magazine. Although the font may appear illegible, I think the curly style, adds further mystery to the advertisement, and will hopefully make readers want to find out more about the band. It follows the conventions of real media products as it has an appropriate styling, incorporates our bands name and album title, as well as our logo and the release date of the album.
I am very happy with my overall product, and although if I had better software I would have followed my original designs, I am still extremely happy with the final product.

The Text at the bottom of the magazine advert reads "The Album of the Year"-Fearne Cotton "Immense"- Tom Godfrey "Immaculate"- Reggie Yates "A beautiful album"- Hew Stevens.

I added this text at the bottom of the advertisement as I thought that it would follow the real conventions of a published magazine advert. It also promotes the band, as audiences will be able to see that people high up in the business have acknowledged the album and really appreciate it.

Evaluation and Magazine Update

We have started looking at how we will be presenting our final evaluation. Elisha and I will be working together for all, but one, of the responses to the questions that are part of the evaluation. We are adamant that we will be doing a different form of response to each evaulative question. I have done a quick vlog into what methods we have discussed.

 

 As well as looking at the Evaluation questions, I have completed my two drafts for my magazine advertisement. The two follow the conventions of a real advertisement that you would find in a magazine as they both have the band's name, the album title, reviews and the release date. I have also incorporated the band's symbol of two overlapping diamonds, which causes the advertisements to further stand out.

Magazine Drafts

Sketching for Magazine Advertisement

I have done a little sketch of how I am aiming my Magazine advert to look. I am aiming to incorporate several factors into my magazine advertisement, these being the triangular logo, the blacked out background and still shots taken from my final music video. Here is a sketch of what I am aiming to be creating:

Survey Results

I created a Prezi to show my result of the questionnaire I recently conducted on Survey Monkey.

Survey Monkey

As part of the audience feedback for my finalised music video, I created a survey on Survey Monkey, which enabled me gain opinions on the completed video. I had to create an account with the site, before I was able to create the survey.

Here is the completed survey, I have sent it to several peers that have watched my video, and am awaiting the feedback so that i can then publish my results and evaluate the positives and negatives of the finalised music video. 

Magazine

Here are a few of my ideas for the magazine advertisement for our band. "Talk Big Thoughts". I thought I would do a rough mind map before planning my first draft, this way I can see all my ideas clearly and then pick the best ones from them.

Twitter Feedback

We recently tweeted Corin Hardy, the music video director that we met at the BFI, our finalised music video for some feedback. We were sceptical for a reply but he did reply to our tweet and had watched our music video. Here is the twitter conversation we shared with him and as you can see he has given us some useful positive feedback.

Audience Feedback

We asked a couple of the year below to have a look at our finished music video and give us some feedback on what they thought of the video as a whole. I was quite surprised to find that a couple of them thought that our protagonist within the video had committed suicide. They said it was because of the following shot:



This is not the representation we had in mind at the start but I am glad that our video has been able to be interpreted in different ways by our audience.

Evaulation

As we have finished our music video, we are now able to move on to the evaluation phase of the project. This involves answering the four following questions in interesting, yet different presentations, this can either be done in the form of a vlog, presentation, slideshow or a basic essay.
These are the four questions:
1) In what ways does your music video and digipak use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
2)How effective is the combination of your music video and your digipak?
3)How did you use media technology in the construction; and research and planning stages of your music video?
4)What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

Editing

We have now come to the end of editing our music video as we know it. We have uploaded a full version of the video up to youtube, which can be seen below. I, personally, am very happy with the end result, i feel that it has an overall professional feel to it and shows off the best of our ability.


 

Essay Planning

We have recently been working on our essay planning for the exam we have to take in order to pass the course. Here is a copy of a my plan and the marked essay for the question; "Describe and evaluate your skills development in digital technology from AS to A2"

Digital Technology Essay (marked) by

The following is only the plan of the second essay that we will be doing soon, this one has the title of "Describe and evaluate your skills development in research and planning from AS to A2"

Advertisement Analysis

I have been looking a little further into the Kerrang! advertisement I looked at in my lesson recently and have created a small analysis of one of the advertisements for The Blackout's latest album to be released.

Magazine Analysis by

Magazine

We have been looking at different music magazines that fit with the genre we are doing for our music video. As ours is alternative/indie we thought Kerrang! would be a good music magazine to look through, especially for adverts of other bands releasing their CD, for inspiration on our own advertisement.

I chose to look at The Blackout's advertisement as, although not strictly within our genre, they boarder the lines of the alternative style. Looking at this magazine advertisement, you can see that it has followed the basic conventions that an advertisement should. The release date has been included, as has the bands name, the album title and reviews of the album being sold.

When making my own advertisement for our album, i will stick to the conventions of a music video; in the information provided, however i will be aiming to create an advertisement that draws attention to its, as oppose to just flicking past it.

Editing

We have been editing all of our footage for our music video and have managed to edited around two minutes of our four minute song. As you can see from these images we have been using Final Cut Express when editing our footage, we are using this software as it offers much more than the previous software used, iMovie.

Here we are editing the colour of a certain clip to ensure it fits in with the rest of our footage. Altering the colour of certain clips is a precise job as if changed too drastically then the clip will look to fake, which we do not want.

Here is the third draft of our music video, before we have started to rewind the footage.

Twitter

We have now created a Twitter page for our band Talk Big Thoughts, in doing this we have widened our publicity and also enabled our selves to an easy access of audience feedback. In doing this we will be able to tweet our final video, or drafts of our music video and ask people to comment on said draft and give any positive or negative feedback in regards. As well as us having access to our audience and their opinion of certain aspects of our band, they are also able to keep updated with the latest things we have been up to.

Regarding Digipak

I have recently edited and finalised my Digipak design and from my first draft to the final draft, several things have been altered. I have altered the colouring of certain images to ensure that the words written on top of the image can be seen with a bit more ease. I have also added a spine as this was missed from my original design and is crucial to the general template of a Digipak. With my final Digipak I have decided not to have any writing on the front cover, this will, i hope, create a sense of curiosity for the buyer and improve its overall sales rates.

This inspiration came from the CD packaging of alt-J's album An Awesome Wave;

They too have decided not to put any text on to their album cover, which again i find enticing and draws me personally to buy this particular album.

Digipak Final

Since making my presentation i have tweaked a few things about my final digipak design, such include adding a spine and using new dimensions for its production size.
Here is the final digipak design;

Final DigiPak by MeganSouthern

By looking at the dimensions of my final designs, it is obvious that they do not all match equally, and i have done this purposely. In creating these specific dimensions i am able to create a very individual and unique type of digipak. With these dimensions i am able to fold the packaging in a specific way allowing the next page to be seen as well as the current page (like this);

Digipak Presentation

I have created a small presentation within prezi, out linning all the qualities of my chosen digipak. The presentation also consists of a printed off version of the digipak as well as how the digipak would look folded. On looking at my design you may be wondering why i have not created a spine for my digipak, this is because of the type of digipak i am creating. Due to the 6 panels and fact that if it goes into production it will be made out of cardboard, or a similar material, and therefore there will be no need for a spine. In doing this i also enable myself to have more space for the front and back panels of the digipak.


 

Digital Technology

Digital technology consists of two major sections, the software and the hardware. The software consists of products such as the editing software and the sound programmes whereas the hardware is more to do with the products we use to film and create our music video.

Specifically within our video, we have used a variety of both software and hardware in the procution and making of our music video. Such hard ware includes our HD Panasonic cameras, on which all of our music video has been filmed on and also a flip camera, which we have used when filming behind the scenes of production and has proven very useful in documenting our progress whilst out on location. We have also used spot lights whilst filming, to create a more professional feel to specific parts of our video, such as the opening frame when the girl first steps off the breezeblock in the warehouse. We have used a couple different types of tripods, such as a gorilla tripod, to create extremly low cantered angle shots as well as a normal tripod for our basic yet effective still shots. We also had the oppourtunity to use a fish eye lense, but this proved inaffective with the style of music video we were to produce.

Moving on to the types of software we have used, most recently we have been using Final Cut Express for editing our music video, which is a much more advanced editing programme when compared to what we used last year,iMovie. Within Final Cut Express we are able to tamper with the speed of clips at a much more professional rate, allowing us to speed up slow transformations or slow down quick movements. We have already used the speed within our opening 45 seconds, when slowing slow water splashing up from a pond, this looks so much more effective when slowed down, in comparison to the clip being played a normal speed.We do have the option of using Garage BAnd to edit our song choice, however we decided on not dsoing so, purely due to the fact that we like the song at its full length and also, it would have been incredible difficult to cut a section out of this song without it being noticed. For editing photos and images that we are using the production of our digipaks, most poeple are using either paint or photoshop, I on the other hand used iPhoto to edit the image and then to create the layout that i wanted, i used microsoft word, mainly due to the fact that i am very familiar with this software and i would save time on production with using a familiar software as oppose to learning how another programme works.

Digipaks complete

I have completed my two digipaks and have chosen the preferred one out of the two that i will be using as my final piece. Both have their own pros and cons however i have weighed the two out and have decided that the second of the two shown in the document below is my preferred out of the two. There are several reasons as to why i have come to this decision, one is that this digipak has an overall more sophisticated and professional feel to it, it all also has our symbol, our album title, our bands name and our track list.

Digipak Complete by Megan Southern

Questionnaire Results

I have now carried out the questionnaire and here are my findings from doing said questionnaire.
I asked people from both my media class and my form class to fill out the questionnaire. A varied response was taken to the opening 30 seconds of the video, with the majority finding the genre to be that of an alternative/indie styling however one participant thought it was in the thriller genre. This was due to the fast pace and feel of disorientation given off in our video. A link between the lyrics and images shown was found to be quite clear, with my target audience making the link between the song title and the use of a breeze block, as well as the use of an obsessive love as a theme was detected by one member of my target audience. They made a link between the use of the lyric "I love you so" and the protagonists emotions within the video. All said that there was a clear relationship between the beat of the music and the editing, which most related to the fast paced editing technique we used. Unfortunately no one found a link to voyeurism within our music video, which is something that we can therefore include later on down the production line.

Digipak Photos

I have chosen the 12 photos that i will be using for my two sample digipak mock ups. I have edited the photos below on iPhoto, and created a small collage of each of the two digipak samples.


Digipak Idea One

                                                             
Digipak Idea Two

I have chosen to edit the photos on iPhoto because it allows me to play with the colours, the composition, the focus and the orientation of the image. However to put all the photos together in the form of a digipak i will most probably be using microsoft word, as i can use text boxes and images to compose the exact digipak i want.

Audience Questionnaire

I have made the questionnaire that i will be asking a a group of willing friends and acquaintances to fill out in regards to our  music video opening. I have asked questions about the content of the video, how it relates to the genre of the video and the lyrics of the song. Here is the questionnaire that i will be asking a sample of people;

Questionnaire by Megan Southern

Digipak Mock Ups

I have created a short vlog detailing my ideas for my digipak. I have created two mock up versions of my digipak, by hand, that allow you to see what i hope my overall/final digipak will look like once completed. I have therefore, instead of posting images, have created a vlog in order to describe the two digipak mock ups:

 

Audience update

As we are to conduct an investigation into our audience it is crucial that we look at the different theorists that have also done research into this field of media. Such theorists include Andrew Goodwin and Stuart Hall. As i have previously done a presentation on Goodwin and his theories i thought now would be a good time to mention Hall.

 Hall created the idea of the three different readings and interpretations of certain perspectives, These three are:
The Dominant Reading - What the producers want you to see
The Oppositional Reading - The opposite of what the producers want you to see (rejected)
The negotiated Reading - Mid-way between, partly either one

Inspiration

Elisha showed us this video a while back in lesson, but looking back over it, some of the camera techniques are really effective. The fact that it is in black and white really appeals to me and is something that we have looked at doing within our own music video.

 

Digipak Progress

I have made some progress with my digipak research as i have now decided that as oppose to the common 4 pannel ones, i will be making mine into a 6 paneled one. This gives me more space to be creative with my designs and will also enable me to stand out from other digipaks that are and have been produced. The following image is the basic net that i will be basing my ideas and designs on:

Further edting

After our filming trip on sunday, we have managed to gain a lot more footage that we needed for our video. We have therefore been able to do even more editing on our final piece, its coming along well, but very slowly, with around 35 seconds successfully edited.


We will be placing these two shots one after the other within our music video, most specifically when the tempo of the track increases and we are presented with sudden loud beat noises. The frames will be very quick, to create the effective that the girl is jumping from place to place without actually moving.

Second Draft of Music Video

The end of Filming...Again

Today, we are hoping, will be the last day we go out filming. We did originally think we had all our filming done two weeks ago, however complications arose and we are now going out again today. The weather looks perfect, with the sun out and not a cloud in the sky. We hope to be getting the river scene again today swell as a lot of the filming within the forest. As last time we ran out of light, we are going out earlier today, in precisely 20 minutes, so hopefully we will return with all the footage we need. Here are a couple snap shots from the filming we obtained:

  We, rather unplanned, gained quite a few shots with the sun creating a sort mysterious casting to our main character. I really like this particular shot as the audience are unable to see the girls face, which is a common theme throughout our entire video, with her face always being hidden, to give the video an overall undertone of mystery to it.

 Again this shot shows how effective lighting can be when filming outside, in natural scenes. I particularly love the glares in which the sun causes on the camera, creating perfect diagonal lines to revert our attention to different sections within the frame.

Opening

We have just filmed a quick vlog containing a bit of information about our current progress with our music video. We have talked about some changes we are going to have to make, extra filming we have to do, and certain aspects of our music video in general:

 

Audience Research

In our most recent lesson, we have been looking at why we need to conduct our own audience research fro our music videos. We each created our own mind-map of ideas as to why this is a crucial step when developing a music video within A2 media studies.

Digipak Mindmap

Over the christmas holiday we will be further working on our own, individual, digipaks for our bands. In preparation I have created a mini mind-map of ideas, which will be included on the final product designed.