Evaluation

Evaluation

1) In what ways does your music promotion package use, develop or challenge form and conventions of real music promotion packages?

Our music video followed most codes and conventions of a traditional promotional video. Inspiration was taken strongly from the Basshunter video, ‘Now You’re Gone’. We decided this was an appropriate storyline to base ours on because of the lyrics to the song. Both videos feature a break up and the girlfriend figure decides that in order to cheer herself up, she will go out on the town with her friends. The video then shows the preparation of her getting ready and also her out dancing. The way in which it challenges typical conventions is the ending, when the audience are expecting for them to end up together again, but in fact, the lead girl decides she is better off on her own, linking to the final lyric “’cos I’m all I need”.
When we were developing our ideas for the promotional packaging we connected ideas from our video to the promotional poster and album art. The album art images featured the screensaver used in the music video and incorporated the idea of flowers onto it, which links to the gift she receives from the boyfriend and throws back in his face – which can be seen as inspirational and empowering for girls. We felt that using the same images for the front cover of the album and the promotional poster would be effective because the audience would notice the connection, and become more familiarised with the bands image. We were inspired to do this by Kings of Leon’s most recent advertising campaign for the album Only by the Night, whereby the tour poster matches the album art.

digipak and matching poster example.




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

Our ancillary texts were all designed with consideration to the initial music video. We realised in order for the audience to identify with artist as a ‘brand’, the ancillary texts had to be recognisable to target audiences. To do this we ensured the dikigpak and poster clearly related to the music video – making the audience instantly able to draw links. In the long run, this should increase sales. When deciding upon a design for our CD cover and film poster, we opted to take inspiration from our music video. As we though that this was something the target audience would be able to identify with, possibly a visual reminder of the song. We decided upon using the idea of the shadowed profile used throughout the performance section of the song. To create this, a member of our group took a photograph of the ‘girlfriend’ character and made it into our artists CD cover, and the image was also used on the promotional poster.
The blue backdrop is seen throughout the promotional campaign, this is a simple but effective way to link in our different ways of advertising. The photo panels used in our digipak all related in some way to the initial music video. The flowers seen as a ‘weapon’ in the video are photographed in one digipak slide, alongside some of the lyrics to ‘Innocent’. The image seen to be the ‘girlfriends’ computer background is also used as a slide. This all helps to link the ancillary texts to the video.
In my opinion the ancillary texts compliment the video and artists image well because they all link with one another. This colour scheme and overall design of the ancillary texts reach out to the target audience successfully as the colour scheme of blue can appeal to both men and women, and both sexes can relate to the song’s lyrics.


examples of images relating to the music video.

3. What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

Our audience feedback showed us that our digipak, video and film poster were all successful, as our classmates all agreed they liked it when filling out our feedback questionnaires. This showed us that the way in which we designed our ancillary and initial texts was successful in regards to pleasing and attracting our target audience of teenagers. Some of the main points people mentioned when giving us feedback were: the colour scheme of the ancillary texts, the way the digipak and poster directly linked with the music video, and that the storyline and the ages of the actors were easy for our target audience to relate to. As we had assumed, the audience feedback showed that most people were able to relate to the female character, we were expecting this result because the whole video was based on the vulnerability of the female character after the male was unfaithful, which caused viewers to feel sympathetic. Towards the end though it is all about empowering women, and where audiences are usually used to seeing the man being taken back, she decides she's better off alone - which wont have been expected and is probably why the minority felt more able to relate to the male character.

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

When we were planning our idea for our own music video, we used youtube to find other music videos to inspire our own ideas. We also used the internet when filming our music video – the social networking site, facebook is used to demonstrate the actress changing her status from ‘In a Relationship’ to ‘Single’, without the progression of technology we wouldn’t of been able to include this section of the video – we included the reference to social networking because we knew our target audience could relate to it. Amongst younger people today, the altering of their status is a notable change which can mean a lot. This is something the audience will understand. The internet was also used when contacting our band. We found out about them through the social networking site, myspace. It was then up to us to contact them and ask for their permission for us to use their song on our own.



social networking examples.

Also during the planning phase, we used graphs and excel to illustrate our audience feedback results in chart form. From this information we were able to make decisions on our final video idea. When filming our video we were able to use facilities from college including a professional camera and a stedicam facility to stop it shaking. For some filming we also used a tripod to maintain clean cut shots. The lighting we used was also very specificly planned out, because we wanted to create the dramatic dark backdrop with the simple blue outlining. Some of the shots using this technique were done with normal white lighting to create variety, but audience research showed that the blue colour was prefferred, which is why in the end our digipak and poster followed the blue colour scheme instead.



this is how our lighting was created when filming.