How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
What have you learned from your audience feedback?
In what ways does your media product use, challenge or develop forms and conventions of real media products? (My answer following Goodwins 6 principles)
-- To start with I would say the orientation of our music video does follow the common codes and conventions of an indie / rock genre. We have chosen to show quite a few shots of the band, when researching other indie rock genres we found that this was a common convention. Although these shots do follow the conventions I would say that the rest of the storyline may challenge some conventions of real media products. For instance, when researching a few other videos by bands such as 'The Maccabees' and 'Oasis' the storyline of love was a bit more subtle. In our video we use transitions to show flashbacks of a romantic relationship. By doing this we thought it would be easier to reach our target audience of 16 - 21, and this is why we tried to make our narrative as clear as possible.
-- A common convention that our music video followed and challenged was the relationship between the lyrics and the visuals. The storyline of our video creates a contrast between summer i.e. nature and urban i.e. the streets and industrial areas. Considering the lyrics of our song are about summer and it coming back I would say to an extent there is a relationship. However to create this contrast we use some very dark shots to create a binary opposite to the light shots of nature. Therefore this is why I would say that most of the shots relate to the title / lyrics (summer) but some do not.
-- Another convention we followed was the idea of 'superiority of the artist'. Most artists like to be in the foreground of everything and to be focused on. We used the zoom feature to focus on the artist. Although in most music videos it is common to have voyeuristic treatment of the woman's body in our video we chose not to. We mainly focused on the band which arguably could challenge a common code or convention.
-- Lastly we tried to use intertextuality but on a more broad scale. Instead of referring directly to another text we chose to use the conventions of facial expressions and actions. For instance in some shots we would use a sad facial expression and looking downwards to represent a dull mood. In another shot we would use a happy expression whilst strolling along to present a happy and hopeful mood.
-- All in all I think our product does follow the common conventions, but it also challenges them. This could be very useful in creating a new brand / identity for our product.
How did you use new media technologies in the construction research and
planning stages?
One advantage of using new media technologies was the time and speed it would take to process things. Instead of having to print out four sheets for our group to get information we could simply give out our blog adress and use the grab tool. This could allow us to copy pictures for the location research and ideas about the research and planning of our products.
New media technologies also helped us to create surveys like this one that can give us quantitive data to analyse.
New media technologies also allowed us to gain feedback as an updated source. Rough cuts of our products could be regulary uploaded to our blogs and viewed by other. This would allow us to improve ideas that we had put forward.
