EVALUATION

Final Music Video

Final inside cover of digipak

We have now put the final few images onto the inside of our digipak and it is complete. We used a series of pictures of knives which are used in the self-harming scene in our music video. We used the knives in the same way as we used arms in the website and on the front of the CD cover by repeating the image to emphasise the danger and darkness of it. This highlights how we have kept the same theme throughout.
This is now finished.

Safina and Siobhan :)

Advanced Portfolio Critical Evaluation.

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

        Screamo music derives from post hard core music, so it has a heavy sound but also has emotional lyrics. For our music video we did quite a lot a research into similar bands that were similar to ours. For example bands like Enter Shikari, A Day to Remember, My Bloody Valentine, Alexisofire and Paramore. We have challenged the genre by adding elements not normally associated with it but also work with the storyline appropriately. In screamo videos, you wouldn’t normally think of a one scenes being set in a park. We used this as it works well with storyline and one of the main scenes take part in this location. We also used the theme of isolation, which is sometimes used in this genre. The stalker girl is appears on her own in most of the scenes, so this highlights it. One of the phrases from the song is ‘No remorse’ is used throughout the song. We took this as a starting point to form different ideas. Our main idea was to create an obsessed stalker, who eventually kills the lead singer. To our audience it will show them the effect the band has on the stalker and how the things that she does, tells us more about her obsession, such as her tribute wall of them in her bedroom. We also wanted the audience to wonder what’s going to happen next and why has this girl got such an obsession with the band. As screamo music is known for its dark lyrics accompanied with deep and heavy sounds, we thought we should use scenes that would capture this. A really prominent scene is when the stalker girl cuts her arm in the shape of the bands’ name. We did this because it highlights the seriousness of the song and creates a stronger visual element.

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

        The main theme and image that we have kept throughout our project is dark and mystic. We have the clear image of an obsessed stalker and they are constantly there within our products. In the video we see the girl self-harming on her arm with a knife. From this we had the idea of using lots of arms to make up the headings on our website and the background is made up of the lyrics of the song repeated to show the possession and protectiveness the girl feels over the band. The lyrics being in red also represent the blood from the girls arm. The crying eyes of the girl at the end of the video are used on the back of the digipak design and also on the actual CD design. On the inside are the blades of the knife that she used to cut herself with. The same fonts, Imprint MT Shadow and Baskerville Old Face are both used in the website and on the CD cover in either red or white. All of the images on our digipak design and those integrated into our website are all relevant to the video as they all make an appearance in it at least once. Our target audience are teenagers and people in the early twenties who are from the emo/scene cliché, mainly males. The red, black and white colours are what they would usually wear and it suits the tone and mood of the song. The website, CD cover and video will be instantly aesthetically pleasing to them.

How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts (CD cover & Webpage)?

        In both our website and CD cover we have kept them both the same by using a consistent font style and the same images. On our website we have used images of ‘arms’ to highlight the girl cutting hers in the video. This is also used as the front for our CD cover, so audience can identify the website with this. Another element we used on the CD came from the video, which is a close up of the stalker girls’ eyes. On our website we have featured the logo of the band which represents them and their style, and so that people will instantly recognise them. Also we have used new media technology like Facebook and twitter, so the audience can easily access the bands on these websites. We did this by making sure that these were visible across our homepage. Also to promote the bands’ single, we posted a sneak peak of the artwork on our site. Our CD cover and website were both created with dark colours like blood red and black. To contrast this we used white writing and gothic style fonts to highlight the difference between them. This is also featured throughout both of these to keep the theme flowing. Another thing is that our background shows the bands lyrics over and over. We did this because we think that it was a nice touch to the website and the something that the audience can further associate the band with. We chose these colours because they appear often in our music video. The blood red idea came from the girl cutting her arm. This colour is used as a font for the lyrics featured on the homepage. We also used black with this red font to create and under layer background which makes the writing visible and interesting.

How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evalutation stages?

        For the construction of our music video, we used iMovie. This allowed us to import our footage, cut it down and put it in a suitable order. We could edit to the beat as we were able to import our MP3 version of the song onto the program. iMovie also allowed us to add effects onto our shots. We added a black and white grainy effect onto the shots of the band performing and also cropped these down so as to get rid of any unnecessary or unwanted space around them. We then used a lighting tool to edit some of the outside storyline shots as some of these ended up being quite. As we’d both used it previously, iMovie was easy and simple to use. We used Photoshop on the digipak design which was rather difficult to use at first but once we got the hang out it we found it particularly easy to use. Neither of us really liked iWeb, we didn’t feel it had many good resources and we felt very limited in what we could do. Even though we are happy with the way our website turned out in the end, we would have preferred it to look a lot more professional than it does. In research and planning we used YouTube a lot so as to see similar bands videos and to apply some of their elements to our unsigned band’s video. We can now distribute our video through YouTube and our blog. The band will also help with this by posting it on their Facebook and Myspace pages.

Safina and Siobhan :)

First lesson back after Christmas!

This is our first lesson back after Christmas- the edited video deadline is on Tuesday and the website, digipak and evaluation is in for next Thursday.

Today we have been adding editing touches to our video. It is completed in the sense that there are no more shots to be cut or added and the whole song is filled with video. However, now we are editing shots by adding special effects to them. Some of the outside shots are quite dark so we have made them lighter,  we have changed the shots of the band performing to a grainy black and white effect as we thought it gave a better feel to the song. We have then cropped some of the band performance shots to get rid of any pointless and unwanted space around them.

We have also been working on our website. We were told by our teacher that only a homepage was needed when all along we had been working on 3/4 pages. We have now cut this down now though to one  page and we think we have all the basics and essentials on it that is needed.
Here is a print screen of our finished website.

Safina and Siobhan :)

Digipak design.

Today we started our digipak design. We kept the theme of hands from the website and we used a close-up of a pair of eyes to resemble the stalker girl's eyes in our video. We also kept the colour scheme the same with red and black to coincide with our original theme that is within the website. We kept the same fonts as the website.
Here is a print screen of what we have done so far.

Safina and Siobhan :)

Website design.

Our headings for our website are to appear on the arms of a person.

This is what we have done so far in Photoshop. The top arm will have the name of the band on it and the bottom one will have links to Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. The other three will present either gig dates, influences or the music video we have produced. I will next paste this image onto iWeb to take up the whole page.

We chose to have arms as a theme as in our video the stalker girl cuts into her arms in the intro.

Siobhan :)