Evaluation - Callum

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

The song we chose was called “The B.P.C.” by a punk-ska band called The Filaments. When researching into the song and artist it was clear to understand that their genre features heavily on the idea of rebellion, the lyrics of the song were based upon the band’s lives growing up in a gang called “The B.P.C.” where the lyrics talk about partying hard, drinking and getting into fights. The rebellious attitude of the song helped inspire us with different ideas about how the video should look, one side of our ideas was to stick with the punk attitude and style that the band had already created, the other side was to challenge the convention by adding a humorous side to the video, this humorous side was not intended to be completely removed from the punk genre but to show rebellion in a more fun way that could help establish the video into a larger audience. By thinking up ideas such as running through the town wearing man thongs we were indirectly proving a point of rebellion that the band also make with these lyrics from the song “have a laugh that’s what it’s all about.” We wanted to show in our video that we could have fun without caring what anyone else thought, a lot like the band.
Our video carried many characteristics of a conventional music video used in Goodwin’s theory. Attaching music to visuals came about when first listening through the song, we found a large part of the song was instrumental, we noticed for this part we would have to create video that amplified the instrumental, we did this by using visuals such as smashing windows for beats in the trumpet breakdown of the song. The fast pace and energy of the song also meant our video had to match that by making lots of different shots that lasted for a small amount of time.
The lyrics and genre of the song inspired us with many ideas that we embedded into our video, many quotes such as “Nothing could be better than when I'm drinking with my friends.” Can be visualized were some of members in the video carry beers whilst performing, other ideas for our location came from lyrics such as “Hanging out on street corners” this helped us choose our locations for shots, which were very urban run down areas found on the council estates. We chose these as we thought they fitted in with “the B.P.C.” gang and they were the sort of places where they might hang out.
When “selling the artist” from Goodwin’s analysis, I believe our video did this very well. There are many close up shots of the performers individually and as a group. As the song was based upon the band in a gang it was easy to recreate this sense of brotherhood and friendship in many of our shots where we’re having fun, this type of perception for the audience can be seen in many artist groups such as “Blink 182” where they are seen laughing and having fun as friends.







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

When producing ideas for the ancillary texts we wanted them to reflect the genre characteristics from our music video, continuing our main themes of humor and punk rebellion. We decided to do photography based products that could easily convert our existing genre onto the ancillary texts.
Our main idea for the magazine advert was to create an intertextual reference to the famous “rolling stone” magazine cover that featured John Lennon curled up in the nude against his girlfriend Yoko Ono, making reference to our video by using the distinctive man thong and gold mask props. By doing this imitation we wanted to create the same unconventional, shock factor that made the original so famous. The way we are exposed in the magazine cover shows a way of rebellion by the fact that we don’t really care what people think, following the idea from the song.
Our DVD digipak cover followed a grittier punk feel. The front cover features a picture of hands holding up a camera phone and taking a photo of the two band members in the gold mask and thong outfits who are posing. We got this idea from the people we saw when we were filming who got out their phones and took photos to memorize the unique occasion, for me this shows our product is interesting and entertains. On the back of the DVD there is a fair amount of screens from our video, made into Polaroid type photos and scattered onto a dirty cement floor, the floor was to show the raw grittiness of the streets and the feel that we were trying to convey for the digipak.
Overall the DVD digipak shows a street, punk side that represents the song and band, the magazine cover shows a humorous individual side that represents our own input on challenging the convention and when combining these two sides it fits in with the of our final music video characteristics.

3.What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

Our first audience feedback came from our rough cut, originally we had many good shots but not enough to keep up with the tempo of the music, this issue came across strongly from the audience and we were already thinking of new ideas and locations to help create a faster pace to match the energy of the song. After this feedback we identified the weaker points of our video and made plans to change them with something more exciting and effective to what our genre is. The performance side of our video was mainly in need of re-shooting as some parts that had bad lip-syncing degraded the feel of the video by making it look like we weren’t the actual artists. We used a wider variety of locations afterwards to help keep the video interesting throughout. What people liked about our rough-cut was the amount of funny, random shots we had, a problem with this though is while some shots worked well, others where seen as too random and didn’t embed well with the rest of the video. We gathered more unplanned footage by filming in between intentional shots, from this we could use small clips from the unplanned footage to cover gaps in the video, we also used them to work with the loud beats in the instrumental and parts of the chorus. The random footage that we got worked extremely well with the image of the band we tried to create, as it shows them in a genuine form of messing around and having fun.
Positive feedback from the audience also helped us re create more of what people liked about it, people liked the fact that we dared to do some of the things they wouldn’t such as running through town in man thongs using this feedback it helped us create our ancillary texts, which in both feature the man thong outfits. The feedback that was given helped us to look at the weaker sides and positive sides and overall improve the video by a large amount for the final product.

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

We relied on many media technologies throughout the creation our music video.
During the planning we used a variety of different web pages to learn about the genre of ska punk and the band we had chosen, the learning of the genre was the primary stage in which we built our ideas and themes on. Our ideas proceeded with humour and rebellion in which we used YouTube.com to draw inspiration from home made jack ass stunts and the character MC Devvo along with other funny things that we could re create within our music video. Using YouTube.com we could also analyse other punk bands music videos, this is where we found the Blink 182 video “What’s my age again?” which features them running through town naked causing havoc, the image the band portrayed themselves as was a key point in our inspiration and the feel we tried to give to our video.
When researching for our ancillary texts we first started by using web pages and like amazon.com to look at professional level media products, which is how we came across key aspects of our inspiration such as the John Lennon and Yoko Ono photo, we also looked at various other artist’s music DVD’s to learn what kind of promotions and special features that are put to use on the DVD covers, when doing so we were able to create a convincing expert level cover. Another use for the internet was our planning blog that we kept to record all sorts of information that was relevant to our video through the planning stages, this helped us kept track of our ideas and control all our focus into one area. The Internet played a key role in the inspiration and planning throughout our objective, which I believe had the biggest effect out of all new media technologies on our music video.
For editing our footage we used the software Final Cut Express, this program offers the usability and depth that was perfect for creating our music video all the way from the raw footage to the final product, for this reason I can see why Final Cut Express is used at a professional industry level. The organisation method of the software is my favourite aspect; with the two video displays and timeline we found it an extremely efficient way of editing.
Our ancillary products were created using Adobe Photoshop, although a deep and time consuming product to master we found it was worth the effort to create our professional looking products, particularly the range of fonts and texts helped us to create a great looking format that really reflected the unique look we were going for. By using these technologies I believe we have accomplished what we set out to do and I am pleased with the final products.