Evaluation

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions or real media products?
In the fast growing music industry, the need to have entertaining and dynamic music videos is a high priority if it hopes to achieve well: especially as a lot of sales are now made by through royalties from music channels which depend on the song having a video. I felt it important to stick to the main conventions of a music video (well lit, repeatability factor, continuity, good editing and most importantly that it fits within the genre) and to try to meet them in a professional way.

Dub step is fairly new on the scene and is still quite an underground scene. As a result of this there are not many videos out there commercially made. I had to give my video an upbeat yet urban feel. I filmed it in an urban area and utilised all of the surroundings. These included tower blocks, deserted garages and terraced housing add to the feel of the piece. I felt it necessary to try to meet as many of the conventions as I could to give it a professional feel. As well as keeping the audience entertained it’s important to have a narrative playing a long side the performance. I decided to have the main narrative playing with short clips of performance cut into it to act as an ellipsis of time in the narrative, but also to keep the audience entertained. I did this by using various close up of the DJ decks from different angles, sometime using a first person shot of the decks to help the audience feel included; or sometimes a close of the needle dropping onto the vinyl. Steve Archer wrote about the impact which narrative and performance have on a music video. He talks about how the narrative compliments the performance, but that it is the performance which is at the heart of the piece and gives a sense of reality to the band members.
As well as the storyline, it’s important to make sure the clarity of the footage and the lighting is of a good standard. I did this by filming in good day light; however I felt it was originally too light so I changed the lightness of the piece by tampering with the effect controls. The change was subtle, but definitely gave the piece a darker more sinister feel; this was further backed up by the nearly black and white shots of the performance.

The only other genre which is loosely connected is dance music and within their music videos they use fast editing. This inspired me to use lots of small clips and cut them together to give a fast and continuous feel.

As well as this, I decided playing the footage back then playing it in real time was a worthwhile effect that really gave the piece a really professional look. This was done on various shots. The first being when antagonist jumps over the wall to chase the protagonist, this is the start of the main narrative so I drew attention to this by rewinding it then playing it back. It gave it a more modern feel and definitely suited the genre highly. I used various short clips in quick succession to aid continuity and give it a quick and precise edge. I was mainly inspired to do this via Pete Fraser who said that having a montage of shots which on their own make little sense but together create a detailed plot and this is how you gain the attention of the audience and keep them entertained.

How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
My ancillary texts were formed by closely looking at other websites and albums of a similar genre. The predominant colour was black or dark blue; the dark representing the hard urban lifestyle and the blue which symbolises the police and the link between the two. I chose to have predominantly black and white on my website. I believe the two colours complement each other and also represent a “good” and a “bad” side to the urban underground scene.

Meeting the conventions were a priority and I felt that is must also be in conjunction with the genre. Like many other websites today, tour dates were an obvious part of my website. They clearly laid out when the dates were and were presented in an easy to find way. The use of graffiti and urban fonts gave it that extra edge which made it seem similar to the genre.
I felt it important to meet the criteria of the exam board but felt it increasingly difficult as many of the websites regarding this genre are rather minimalistic, so I had to strike a balance between the two. I did this by sticking the colour scheme of just black and white with only one other colour prominent (the green on the joker). This drew the attention of the audience to the centre of the screen, from which they would feel more intrigued to view the rest of the site.
I felt it important to have at least one image of Dub Fiend on the website and on the album cover. My main inspiration to do so was from Dyer who said “The incoherence of the star image ensures that audiences continually strive to ‘complete’ or to ‘make sense of’ of the image.” Having a picture of the artist really gives a sense of normality and reality to Dub Fiend, making him seem more accessible and personal. This can be linked heavily to the theory of Negus, who proposed that there are two types of artist: synthetic and organic. By having a photo of Dub Fiend, graffiti font and a small quote from him, it creates more of a rapport with the audience and rendering him as an organic artist.

The “scruffy” writing and the blurred roll over on many of the fonts on the website give an impression of normality and urban lifestyle which is known to be rough cut and hard. This font is also prominent in the album which shows the link in the production stage between the website and the album.

I use subtle advertising on my website. This came in the form of a flash made t-shirt which different Dub Fiend logos on, or the advertisement which encouraged people to try to “win tickets to our next set.” I felt this gave it a rather professional feel and made it look more realistic. As the music industry is slowly losing money by illegal downloads, it is ever more important to create an appealing music video which can be sent to the people like MTV, but equally to have a strong album and website to back it up.

What have you learned from your audience feed back?
My audience feedback helped me greatly to realise where I had gone wrong and also to know in the future how I can improve my camera, editing and photo composition. I obtained my feedback in class. I played the footage and showed them the album and website, I then documented the feedback. Many people commented that the filming had a good mix of performance and narrative and liked the transitions between the two to form a subtle ellipsis of time. However some people felt that ellipsis of time was too subtle and could confuse the audience as to the time line of the narrative. If I was to do this again, I would be sure to make the time scale of the narrative clearer to the audience. Another point was the wide use of shots which complimented the chase scene and acted as a third person view which the audience could observe the chase scene from various angles and perspectives. If I was to make another similar piece I would make sure I had more footage to work with, as towards the end of my editing process I found I had too little and as a consequence my piece was shorter than intended. However this pushed me to work on my editing ability to try to get more out of the footage I had. Another comment made was that despite the fact I had no lyrics, my piece managed to keep the audience well entertained. I tried to do this by having a constant narrative complimented by the performance element.

My website took a lot of careful planning and thought. I tried to keep it within the genre whist meeting the criteria of the mark scheme. Many people commented that its minimalism was like that of its genre and fitted it well. Despite this, some people commented that it in the middle of the page, a few of the pictures and animations were too close together and gave it a clustered feel. This could be avoided in future by taking more time to learn how to use the programs better to allow me to get the desired effect. I spent a lot of time creating flash animations, one of which was a t-shirt, the other being a text animation used to advertise a gig. This was noted by the audience and commented that they liked it. I came to grips with using fireworks in order to create innovative texts and make them distort or blur when the cursor was moved on to them, this was noticed by the audience and was well liked. However in other instances, the text used to write the tour dates was deemed to be effortless and that I could’ve used a more modern text rather than “times new roman”. This would be changed if I was to do it again. The audience overall liked the set up of my website and felt it suited my song and the genre which I chose. I was happy with my efforts and have taken away constructive criticism to aid me in future construction of websites.

My album was considered to be very simplistic by those who viewed it. It incorporated one of the main symbols used on my website. People commented that the original image used on the front cover was slightly dull and needed to stand out more. If I was to do this again, finding a better original image would be a priority. The second point made was that of the album name “play time’s over”, which was actually spelt “play times over”. This was due to a problem with the font and if I had the time again I would rectify it. Positive comments were made about the fonts on the back cover used to display the song titles. This was accompanied by the picture of the joker which is prominent on the website, again showing the link between the two pieces. If I was to do this piece again I would try harder to gain a better original image and have planned better to allow me more to time to create a better front cover.

How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
Planning was an important stage to me, as I realised last year when making an opening to a film and all the extras that were needed with it that planning was essential. I set about by using Google to search all genres associated with dub step and garage. I further filtered my search by using Google to make search more specific to Dub Step, more importantly to find out if there were any people making this genre of music locally. With the advances in internet social networking I managed to hear of someone who is originally from Nottingham who makes his own dub step music who now goes to university. I got in touch with on Facebook and asked if it was okay to use some of his music to make my video with. He gladly accepted and I began to use YouTube to search for current videos from the genre.

As I trawled through page after page I slowly started to realise that it is because Dub Step is still not very commercial and as a consequence, not many videos have been made. I then looked to the closest other genre which would be garage or grime. This taught me that an urban setting would definitely be needed. Using Google maps I researched different areas of Nottingham and viewed them on “street map” so I could decided properly. This saved me a lot of time and meant I could easily save the pictures from the computer and add them straight onto my digital blog which was used to document my efforts during the planning stage.

When it came to constructing my piece I used Dreamweaver to create a number of boxes and columns. These allowed me to position and align all of my images (acquired from Google) and texts. Having heard that I could get innovative and urban-like fonts off of the internet, I began to browse Google. I eventually found “Dafonts.com” which allowed me to take fonts and use them on my website. However in their raw form I felt they were not adequate so I imported the images into Fireworks and used an invert colour effect and learnt how to use the roll over tool in order to make the image change when the cursor moves over it. I did a similar thing with my image of the joker which I played with the saturation and colour balance. This gave it a more dark and sinister feel which really went with my urban, dub step themed website.

Creating my music video required me to view other videos of a similar genre. As I stated before, there were limited videos of the genre due to it being new on the scene. I made a story board which I was able to scan and upload to my online blog. Having a blog really aided my organisation and made everything easily accessible. I set out to film on location using the camera equipment and tripod which I used my knowledge from last year to create different angled shots to give the desired effect.

Once the filming was finished I began to use Premierpro to capture my filming and begin to edit. I started by laying all my shots out in order and then using the razor tool to get rid of the of the stuff I didn’t need. The program is made it very easy to chop and change certain aspects of the filming. I continually used the colour editing to dim down the footage to give it a darker feel to go with the genre. This was done by adding on “colour HLS” and “colour balance” which aided my to gain the effect I needed. To make sure the video went with the music I sometimes slowed down the video or play it back then play it back in real time to give it a more “modern-urban feel”. The beauty of YouTube is it allows anyone and everyone to view your video for free and for extremely easily. Digital distribution aided me not only through allowing others to access my work on YouTube, but also in my organisation from my blog. This has aided many other film and music distributors and had brought the media industry a long way since the days of keeping film stored on tape.

This is a link to my YouTube video which I uploaded to that easy viewing was possible.

The evaluation stage was made a lot easier by the help of blogging. This not only helped me to acquire all of the necessary information needed to put into my evaluation, but it made it easier to put it all into the evaluation straight from the blog. The images and print screens you can see present within my evaluation are taken from my blog. Similarly to the distribution of the films in recent times, all our work is being sent off and examined digitally. This is far more efficient and reliable.