A2 Media Studies - Guidence for writing your Evaluation Question 2

2. How effective is the combination of your main product (video) and ancillary texts (digipak and advertisement)?

First of all we need to answer how well does my ancillary products (digipak and the advertisement) make clear visual links between it and my music video. Firstly the same artist is in my music video as well as the digipak and advertisement. So there is no confusion on who the artist actually is.

Here is a screen shot showing this.

This is the face of the artist in the music video. and below is the face of the same artist in the ancillary products.

Secondly the colour in certain parts of the music video is dark  in which we used low-key lighting and this specific part i have in mind goes well with the digipak cover and advertisement as it is a kind of darkish red/brown colour that goes exactly well with the front cover of the digipak and the advertisement.

another screen shot that goes well with the digipak however, this time the inside cover to give the whole package a sense of consistency is this specific part of the video.

this is because the whole idea of it being dark goes well with the inside cover as it is also dark and gloomy. Also as you can see above the first half of the inside cover is the artist sitting on a rock with water behind her streaming upwards. Well that is taken directly from our music video so once again it carries the same ideas as the music video.

So how can our audience recognise them as linked products? Well its simple really they will see the consistency between the two. For example they will recognise the artist immediately having seen her on the music video and ancillary products. In addition they will recognise the colour scheme going on between the two. It does not change from red,blue,green etc... it is set on it either being dark or light which is a lot more simpler. Also the fact that the music video is set in a fairly organised brightness routine as you may recall the video starts out bright goes dark in the middle and ends bright again. Simplicity is the key to all of this as it keeps it organised and stable not all over the place. This makes the audience keep in time and understand what is actually going on.

How successful do i think my main and ancillary texts are?
My texts in the ancillary products are big and bold as you can clearly see this is because, it will grab the audience attention straight away and it is very hard to miss. One thing that is important to remember is that if we are to promote the artist the first time she will need to be clearly seen and the text will need to be obvious so that they will give a good first impression. For example lets say the text was small but the artist was big that would not really help as you would hardly get to read who the artist actually is from a distance. Same thing applies the other way round.

Here is a picture of the fonts sticking out while using photobucket.

My target audience will be attracted to this because it is the type of song they will like which is a dubstep with some dark elements involved. 

Evaluation Question 1

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

When making our music video I wanted to use real media conventions on doing that we took inspirations from diffrent music videos. I have taken inpiration from artist like Nero, Pixie Lott, Rihanna and Chase and Status who I have blogged about in my past post. As I took inspiration from real media products I am going to explain how I used, developed and challenged the forms of convention. When researching on the media conventions on exsisting videos I made sure to concentrate on the mis en scene, camera work and editing. 

The first video I used for influence was the orginal video Nero's Guilt, as it has the conventions of what a dub-step video should compose of. One of theorist Andrew Goodwin's points on conventional music video's is that music video's are either Illustration,Amplification, or a Disjuncture. From Looking at our music video you can see that it has little to no connection to the lyrics nor does it contradict the lyrics.What I liked most about the visuals of the video was the the camera work used especially the diffrent angles of the female vocals face.

These angles really signified the singer's presense and was a great way to introduce her to the audience as an artist. I adapted this into our music video by have three base tracks of close up shot's of Stephanie lip-syncing. From looking at the slideshow above just like in the guilt video we had shot's of her from different angles. Another convention we used was the use of Video Layering, a inspiration we got fro Pixie Lott's "All About Tonight" video. In the pixie lott video her face is emergaged and layerd ontop of an establishing shot of a city landscape, I used this technique in our video in the begging where I layerd the face of our artist with our locations. This can be through out our video and is fetured in many exsisting music video today. It was important to have Stephanie looking into the camera as this is one of Andrew Goodwin's theory of conventional music video's. Goodwin believed that pop video's use the singer as narrator's and characters and they look directly at the camera to try and get the viewers at home involved. 

(Video)

While watching the video for guilt I was impressed even more by the location selected for the clip. The guilt video started with a shot of the camera panning above a city scape with night lightes glitering. I infused this into my video near the end where I had shot's of picadilly circus at night, I then edited this shot and added a slow motion effect to stylise the shot and make it more effect then It already was .

A shot of my Video along side shot's from Guilt And All About Tonight

We was also impressed by the editing and how the video featured some of the points of Carol Vernallis. Carol studied editing and camera work closely in music video's here are some of the point's from her observation.

• The usual riles of 'continuity' editing are broken in order to draw attention to what is on the screen.
• Edits may be really obvious to draw attention to themselves. Wipes and special effects are added.
• Jump cuts are often added.
• A master shot or base track is frequently used to give the video a structure.
• The camera may move in time with the music.

 I made sure to pay much attention to some of her point's, you can really see how we adapted her point's into our music video as we used lot's of jump cuts from locations in the video into shot's of Stephanie's face. We used fades and slowed things down she also made clips rewind and move backwards which really drew our audiences attention and I tried to make the camera move to the beat and also have a structure in our video by using base tracks of Stephanie lip-syncing to the song.

(Our Music Video)

The Outside Of My Digipak

Creating our digipak is very important as this will be one of the things that helps sale our artist to it's target audience. I done this by looking at past and present digipak's and analysing there features and structure, I also learnt about the things that I should not include or do with my digipak e.g Written on the artist face, making the artist name to small to see. I made sure I followed the convention of using Three Colours based on my font image and background also Maximum Of Two Font's. It was also important for me to have a clear link between all my ancillary products so that the audience I'm trying to target will know that they are all apart of one promotional package.

This is a collage of My Digipak Cover and Three other Conventional
Cover's That I took Inspiration from.

Following the convention codes of Albums such as Beyonce's I Am,,Sasha Firce, Rihanna's LOUD and Nero's Welcome To Reality I think I was able to create a vert effect digipak as I think It ticked all the boxes and I was consist throughout my work. I took inspiration from Nero as I liked the way he used the font in his promotional packages as they are very striking and are recognisable as them without having to second guess who it is. I did challenge some of the convention in my genre. When doing our research we took notice that most dubstep artist and groups did not use their faces in their digipaks or advertisements. At first I was also going to take that approach then I decided not too as I thought it was odd and I would want my artist to be recognisable and also to sell her as an artist people would have to see who she is and what she looks like. I done that buy rearching on Pop singer's such as Beyonce, Rihanna and Pixie Lott as they followed the conventions of female artist in the industry what I took from the was that most of their ablums cover's where close ups of their faces. So I made sure that my Digipak cover was of my artist face. All of my panels had a recurring colour scheme of purple, I choose purple as it stood out and was eye catching but without taking attention away from the images and information given.

Final Digipak And Advertisment

Making Advertisment

Making Of Digipak

Digipack images

A2 Media Studies - Guidance for writing your Evaluation

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

What you should cover?

First of all to answer this question we have to cover which videos influenced me and why. One of the many videos that was a influence to our music video was Pixie Lott all about tonight music video.

There are many aspects of the video that influenced us in our music video. First of all the main one was the editing used to show the artists face as it grabbed our attention by blending with the city which the camera shot shows in a high angle shot. This is key as it introduces the artist and and location at the start of the video. 


here are examples of this.

Now here is an example of our music video using this kind of effect.

The visual style of the artist are of many also but we mainly got this influence from the music video Guilt. 

one example would be the side of Stephanie's face as it shows her singing.

In addition the eye of the artist as a visual. 

Also the camera works of getting the shots of the locations. we got the city influence from guilt and the pixie lott video. 


this screenshot is from Nero- Guilt. 

This one is from Pixie lott's video all about tonight.

And finally here is our video to show the comparison. 

Furthermore we got some of our influences from Mohombi's video coconut tree just one part we found interesting. The part where Prince is near the trees/grass as if its a forest or jungle. This is to create a sense of the video being 'weired' and 'awkward'. Since most dubstep music videos tend to be like that we thought of it as well as we had to keep in touch with the dubstep roots. 


Here is the picture to what i exactly mean.

And this is our music video.

Digipaks and advertisements that have influenced me.

As you can see it is similar in the way as the layout is most likely the same. Their is an image behind the two advertisements. Also the artist font is bigger for the name of the artist.


Now examples of cd covers for my digipak and how i got some inspiration from them.

Here is two different covers for nero and ill show you the one i have made below them.

As you can see my one shows the picture of the artist. She is portrayed to be elegant and classy just as the pictures above it. Also you can see the fact that it is mainly simple and neat to maintain its soft and classy look which is also ironic since Dubstep is looked to be rough.

Here is an example of another cover this time with no face of the artist however it still caries that simple theme to it. You may be thinking that it is actually quite not simple at all as it shows the graphics of the city. However it is just the title of Artist name and the song title with background of cities as it is simple and also effective at the same time.