My media product uses the conventions of real media products as I found through my research what I must include in every aspect of the creation of these media products to ensure they are as realistic and valid as possible. I believe my final pieces represent how real products that you would see in the music industry should look so that they fit in by following the format that are evident in mainstream media where you would come across these products.
As a group, we wanted the style of our band to be quite unique and not like the generic bands you see on the shelves of music shops. We did base our style of the band on Alphabeat but I feel that we have sucessfully created our own persona for the band that is completely different to Alphabeats but still can relate to it in some way. It became clear to us that it would be an easy genre to base ourselves on as they are just an easy going band that sing about whatever they want in a fun way. I believe we managed to sustain an image throughout the project and planned it well so that the continuity carried over from each of the media pieces we produced.
The music video could be seen as challenging the regular conventions of a music video, as not many are made the way ours is which is without the lip syncing to the song lyrics. We did this because we wanted to create an image for the band that says we aren't the norm, we do what we want to do and the way we have filmed the footage is our message to the audience that we are just normal people and we want to show them our personalities, quirks and what we are like as individuals.
How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary (digipak + advert) texts?
I believe the combination of the music video and ancillary texts - which are the Digipak and magazine advert - are very effective. In my opinion, I think that if this were a real band who were producing these forms of media it would give a great variation of ways for the band to promote themselves. I believe I have carried out the task well and took my time for each of the singular pieces of the task.
I think that the ancillary texts work really well as a whole with the along with the main product and I think we have captured the effect of continuity extremely well. By using the same colours, font and costume themes for each section of the project I believe that the gel together well and all look like they were produced from the same band. By crossing over the same image from the CD cover to the magazine advertisment. We did this to create an almost statement image for the band - something we wanted to be remembered by.
By taking the photos and filming the video both on the beach, this works well at keeping the continuity of the three separate promotional tasks and joins the three products together as one whole unit. When choosing the outfits for our music video and photographs, we altered it slightly from the photos to vary it a tiny bit but still kept the style and the occurring colour of pink throughout just to keep the continuity maintained. We also decided to keep the same persona for the band which was to make us come across as fun, happy and individual and I believe we carried this over between each part of the project.
Overall, I am very pleased with the high quality and attention to detial in our products and I think that they combine together as one promotional package perfectly.
What have you learnt from your audience feedback?
I think that the products that we created have been sucessful in meeting the feedback we gained from our questionnaires in the research stages and we took these results in to full consideration throughout the project.
A lot of effort and careful consideration was put in to each product ensuring that they each looked as genuine and professionally designed as possible and not something that an inexperienced student would create using basic computer programmes would produce.
Using programmes such as photoshop to edit our photos gave our photos a professional feel better than any other programme such as Microsoft Publisher or Fireworks could've done as I know that professional products use this when eiditing their images. It gave us the chance to experiement with our design with different effects and colours and enabled us to alter the colouration and quality of the photos making them look a lot less amateur and like a lot of time and hard work had gone in to producing the best photos we could.
We also used resources from the internet such as dafont.com which offered us thousands of different possible fonts instead of using the generic and standard ones that are already installed on a computer. This enabled us to even use the font as a way to portray our bands image even further and gave us the tools we needed to express this.
Seperate questionnaires were created to help us with the specific requirements for each section of the project, ensuring that we met the audiences needs in each section. The audience feedback helped us immensely as the people we asked were our intended audience age group and they seemed to generally agree with our initial ideas.
I believe this was a very important element of the research part of the task as it is crucial to know how others view your work and not just rely on your own personal opinions when creating something designed for an audience. After getting opionions from others, you can take your ideas and mould them with the ideas from others to create an all round better final product. Even through the creation of each part we informally asked friends opionions on our work and thrived off the feedback that we got using their views to ehnance our products.
After finishing the project we asked peers to look through each of the sections and tell us what they thought of our final pieces. This meant we could put the finishing touches on the project and make it even better.
How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
As we did not want any of our products to look unprofessional we decided to use the programmes that would give us the best results and give us products with high standards. Instead of using a basic movie maker we used iMovie on one member of the groups Mac. I believe this supplied us with the tools to create very professional looking products which is what we wanted.
A lot of effort and careful consideration was put in to each product ensuring that they each looked as genuine and professionally designed as possible and not something that an inexperienced student would create using basic computer programmes would produce.
Using programmes such as Photoshop to edit our photos gave our photos a professional feel better than any other programme such as Microsoft Publisher or Fireworks could've done as I know that professional products use this when editing their images. It gave us the chance to experiment with our design with different effects and colours and enabled us to alter the colouration and quality of the photos making them look a lot less amateur and like a lot of time and hard work had gone in to producing the best photos we could.
We also used resources from the internet such as dafont.com which offered us thousands of different possible fonts instead of using the generic and standard ones that are already installed on a computer. This enabled us to even use the font as a way to portray our bands image even further and gave us the tools we needed to express this.
This is how the picture turned out after being edited on photoshop so the background was greyscaled and the contrast, saturation and sharpness were increased slightly to give a more crisp and professional effect. Now we needed to crop it to a square shape to fit perfectly onto the real life blank digipak and add the tracklisting etc. 
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