A2 Media Evaluation

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? Prior to the filming of our music video Ambulance by The Empires we noticed the hybrid of narrative and performance from other rock bands and artists. The narrative would tend to illustrate the lyrics in the music video, a common theme in songs by Green Day and foo fighters etc, so we felt that we had to follow the codes and conventions of rock songs in that aspect by including a narrative that would illustrate the lyrics of the song in the music video. Although they still contained narrative they were mainly performance based so we spent a lot more time filming the performance by the band in comparison to the narrative however we did stress the narrative so that it matched the aggressive punky sound of the song. Another thing we realised during the research and planning of our video was that the typical rock music video would follow Goodwins theory that a music video should contain a close up of the members of the band, so we incorporated close up shots of the singer. The lyrics ultimately described an out of control girl who would eventually end up in an ambulance, along with a partner or boyfriend that she has had a bad influence on, so we made the lyrics fit around this and so we had to find the punkiest girl we possibly could, one who would fit the description and style that we were aiming for, heavy black eye make up and dark clothes etc. In contrast to this we made the boyfriend that she was having a bad influence on look like a relatively innocent, normal boy, just to contrast the two and highlight the influence she is having on him. When making the digipack, what we had in mind was to make the audience clearly aware that this was a rock album they were buying, and we done this by developing a logo for the band, mainly with dark colours which is a typical convention of a rock or metal digipack. We then painted this logo on a canvas backdrop at our filming location which the band then performed in front of. At first we were planning on making a photo of the band the cover, then we decided against this and took a photo of the backdrop, and edited and manipulated it using Photoshop. I believe the end product digipack reflects rock album digipacks on sale right now, and you can clearly tell what type of music you are listening to by looking at the digipack. The back of the digipack features common conventions like a tracklist and bar code, where as the front contains the band logo we created with some paint splashes, which follows the conventions of rock stars image of carelessness and not caring about presentation and going their own way. The photographs we took of the band for the other areas of the digipack were in a darkened run down room in a building in city centre, and we noticed a common convention in digipacks of bands such as green day and nirvana was that they would contain a few images of the band, and would all commonly wear similar clothing as the empires, so this too followed the conventions of a typical rock digipack. The website follows many codes and conventions of a typical rock bands website, but I feel our website also develops on common websites as we put a lot of time and effort into developing the website using html coding to create our own theme and background for the website, as well as the layout etc. It typically contains pages such as tour dates and advertising and we felt that we really needed to make the website more than just another feature of the band. We put time and effort into trying to make a genuinely interesting website and I feel that by doing this we develop on typical conventions of a rock bands website.

  How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
What have you learned from your target audience feedback?
http://prezi.com/z5_bsd8tmpub/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Digipack and Websites Research

To provide ourselves with inspiration on how to develop the digipack we looked at the bands which are similar to The Empires, such as Green Day, Foo Fighters etc and noticed a common theme of rock bands didipacks is that they tend to involve a few pictures of the band, the bands logo, and dark colours. We then decided that to fit the codes and conventions of a rock band we needed The Empires digipack to contain some dark images and colours, with the goal being to recognise that that the digipack is a rock album without being told. This My Chemical Romance digipack contains a dark sombre image that they have created themselves, and a picture of the band, so this has inspired us to do something similar, develop our own logo and use it as the front cover to the album. We will also need to organise a photoshoot with the band to provide us with some photos for the digipack. Whilst researching forms and conventions of rock bands websites, there were many common trends. Alike the digipacks, dark colours and images were a common theme. We feel we need to emulate this by making our website design consist mainly of dark colours and images, to successfully create a good rock bands website. On Linkin Parks website, there were the usual pages about tour dates, discography etc but also the dark theme and colours. Bands websites such as Green Day, My Chemical Romance and Nirvana all followed the same trend, they were quite similar websites with just different colours and themes, the content was mostly the same. However, we find them quite tedious and boring, so our plan will be to challenge codes and conventions of a typical rock bands website by making a more interesting website, as well as following the codes and conventions by using dark themes and colours.