Answers to questions Darren

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Our music video shows convention of indie rock groups with the clothes and live band footage but also reflects the bands punk side with the smashing of a television at the end which is quite a punk thing to do. We also include plenty of close ups and shots of the lead singer as this fits convention also. We included some surreal elements to the video such as the screen within a screen technique which is quite a rare occurrence in most music videos so it is challenging the traditional form of the straight forward music video, we also used the dancing people to go into the TV set and end up in the same room as the band playing, which is quite strange. These surreal elements are a common convention to quite a lot of indie music videos.
We do challenge forms of convention with the way we marketed our product though, from the smashed TV advert which doesn’t feature any of the band members, and the digipack which is rare for bands to make. We did this to add a sense of mystery to the product and to offer something that not many other artists do, with extra features included for those really interested with the band.
How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
The combination of my main product and ancillary texts is very effective in the way we have combined them to be simultaneous with the magazine advert reflecting the smashed TV from the music video and the digipack featuring shots from the music video as well as photographs of the band which aren’t lifted directly from the music video but do feature the same band members which is effectively coherent having the same people throughout.
What have you learnt from your audience feedback?
Our feedback was extremely helpful and we learned a lot from it because our peers were very clear in what they liked
-The lip syncing
-The way we made the screen within a screen technique to fit the message of the song
-Good variety of shots, including close ups
-Frequent notion of looking
The feedback also expressed what people didn’t like about the video such as
-No real relationship between music and visuals (which I disagree with to a point)
-More variety needed in settings


The audience feedback was helpful in backing up our own personal thoughts that there should have been more variety but camera constraints and problems actually getting the group together caused this. We tried to combat the fact that we only had access to one room by color correcting the section with the people dancing to try hiding this.

How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
In planning, new media technologies were invaluable in these stages. I used Google and YouTube frequently for researching my band and watching their music video to see how it differed from our interpretation. In the planning stages of our video, once again Google was a great help, as well as some image hosting sites which allowed us to get good photos of televisions for our blog to get our concept across. When actually putting our music video together we used final cut express to cut our images together, and Photoshop was used in conjunction with images from final cut to make both the magazine advert and the digipack. At evaluation stage, we used YouTube to upload our final video.