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

The first time we thought about using the concept from ‘They Live’ and searched for ‘Quad Damage’s’ song with lyrics that would fit this idea perfectly which ‘Dead Side’ appeared to be, we realised it is going to work very well together so the image will be an ideal reflection of text and the other way round. The music video is rather amplifying the lyrics and as it goes, it keeps adding news layers of meaning to the song. We have presented some examples in our research on video theme where, for example we talked about the first two lines ‘Lucid Premonitions have come to me, All that I can see is industry’ which describe the awareness of a capitalist society surrounding the individual.

We also tried our best to keep the music video in a heavy metal genre style. The performance shots were recorded during the night, additionally to that we pulled the blinds down so it could appear really dark. Obviously, for our audience to be able to actually see something we used three subtle lights all placed down on the floor so the shadows of guitarist and drummer could emphasize their moves and enhance the disturbing atmosphere of the video. The long shot of the band which appears there first and is the most used performance shot does not even allow the viewer to see the band members’ faces clearly. We thought of it as an enigmatic introduction of the band which are rather the messengers of a sad but still somewhat hidden reality than a bunch of pretty faces which appear there to ‘sell’ the video mostly just by their appearance. They remain quite unexposed till 1:43 of the video when the pre-chorus is sang for the first time and Daniel is screaming out the miserable truth ‘They're taking away my soul, Our lives are bought and sold, Apocalypse worldwide, They come from the Dead Side’ about the capitalist society that we are living in and exposes himself with the explicit message he has got for the world.

The intertextuality of ‘They Live’ scene within our music video is fairly thorough. At first we wanted to re-create the conceptual part literally shot after shot but as we wanted it to have more of our own influence we have mixed it with our own ideas. The basic bond is the concept of sunglasses which reveal the world to be seen as it really is for the one who is wearing them. Also, the black and white vision and zombie-like appearance of the aliens when having them on

are obvious connections. Therefore I think we have applied the most important ideas, the foundations of the entire film’s plot. We have added a few new notions which I do not think are that significant for an average ‘They Live’ fan to actually not realise about the resemblance between this music video and the film so I think the intertextuality works there clearly.

Long shot of the band fading into medium shot of Daniel, all kept in a dark, mysterious atmosphere.

1:43 - pre-chorus starts

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

The genre of music made by Quad Damage – doom metal required us to create indeed a doomy, disquieting atmosphere around the band by the use of all our products. What was hard to add was some necessary commerce into the whole campaign as this particular music genre has mostly got a niche audience which usually demand either not standing out too much from the conventions of their favourite genre or doing completely opposite – being extremely original. We have chosen the former – holding onto conventions and therefore we really wanted to be careful with ‘selling’ our product – the band. The result of it was the star ratings on the magazine advert being the only ‘mainstream’ suggestion in the marketing of our band.

Quad Damage, since it was created, made black and red its colours of recognition and the band was always trying to be associated with these colours. Such tones are working very well with a heavy metal band’s branding as they have connotations to darkness, mystery, anger and even blood so we did not even think about changing it. We have made some research into black and red cd covers of

any heavier rock bands so we could develop our ideas. The german band KMFDM has used this mixture a lot (albums: Symbols, Adios, Hau Ruck) and we also looked at Mothership by Led Zeppelin. They are all kept in sort of a comic book style and this time we wanted to make something different, something that will attract attention by its distinctivness as we are still new on the market. Then, we found an interesting artwork on DeviantART website and asked the artist for a permission to use it which he replied positively about. Its inspiration was based on Super Nintendo game ‘Earthbound’,in which the final boss is a warped image of a fetus surrounded in darkness and luckily,

it was black and red.

For the album cover we just made the artwork look like a vortex but as we edited it we wanted one of the ghoul faces to be way bigger than the rest and so we did. Inside the case, you can see the artwork just as it appeared initially. Last page of the inlay booklet has the other version of that artwork printed on it which looks like a pastel work and has got some yellow used. Inside the booklet there are lyrics for all six tracks in Times New Roman font written in red with black background behind it. The old-style fonts work well with such genre as they emphisize the mystery behind it and bring up the ideas of some ancient cults, paganism etc. The mystery is kept inside the case but the outside font looks quite digitalized, although I think its shape fits together with the whole CD package. The headline font on the magazine advert was I think a very good choice to catch the eye of a random viewer as it is very radical and thick. Finally, image of the band caught all in movement enhances the power brought with their music and its warm and dark atmosphere fits with recognition colours of Quad Damage – black and red which with a little bit of white are

The star ratings on the magazine advert

Led Zeppelin - Mothership

Inlay booklet of the digipak

something that connects the entire digipak together. The darkness and demonic atmosphere is also a common feature of each part of the digipak.

Our video is based on anti-consumerism and anti-elitism ideas and in a lot of aspects could be compared to video for System of a Down’s song ‘B.Y.O.B.’. Big chunk of heavy metal music is driven with the notion to release from chains on which system limits us and censors so this idea of riot is also very important in the branding and representation of Quad Damage. The plot of our video presents such approach clearly.

3. What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

The first influence the audience made on our media product was the play count on SoundCloud which showed that ‘Dead Side’ was the most favorouble track of Quad Damage’s listeners. The obvious assumption we have made was that the most likeable song can simply bring us the biggest success. Apart from that the lyrics totally fitted our idea for the music video so ‘Dead Side’ came out to be a perfect choice.

When we clarified our idea and decided specifically what we want our music video to be we made the Pitch - PowerPoint presentation based on the pre-production research that we have had up to date. After presenting it to the class we have received very positive reviews mainly describing our concept highly meaningful and original. At that moment we realised that a rebel soul lies in most of the people and definitely in each single member of the band’s primary audience because our classmates were truly enthusiastic about the idea of showing the real face of system that we are living in.

After we have recorded the majority of shots we started the montage stage in the editing suite. We invited two other project groups from our class to make the opinion on the work we did so far. First one noticed that few initial shots are a little too long for the video to be visually interesting. In response to that

we re-shot those sequences with aim to fit more action and energy in a shorter space of time and then cut few seconds of each shot in part of the video when main character is walking in and out of the alleyway. The second group suggested that we should make the storyline clearer for the audience so we have added hints like writing ‘open your eyes’ on the box in which the protagonist finds the truth-revealing sunglasses.

The result of such co-operation with our audience resulted in a great reception of our music video. After uploading our music video on various websites like Youtube and Facebook we have not received a single negative review. The

First feedback session

'Open your eyes' written on the box

local newspaper ‘Harrow Observer’ has shown interest in our work and wrote an article which was displayed both on print and the website. We have learned that a thorough audience research is one of the most significant factors when it comes to creating a succesful music video.

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

Internet was our main source of information when we were conducting the essential research for our music video. It helped us choose the record label (Rise Above Records) that would be fitting best the genre of music that we were creating video for and the way of marketing our band and its main product – audio-visual. Also, the artist/genre, marketing and music video researches were almost entirely founded on the internet research. The music videos searched on YouTube and promotional photos found on Google search were some of the basis for our analysis. The investigation into artists which were not really fitting our genre as well as the one that were, was mainly based on analysis of their websites which are probably the best expression of the way they are being branded and sold to their audience. The websites provided us with the palette of promotional photos taken during the whole time of i.e. System of a Down existence and helped us understand the distinction between branding/marketing of different music genres and the transition it experienced over the time of particular band’s activity. The thorough research that we have completed before recording our video helped me develop my analytical skills to a degree which now allows me to have much wider point of view and perspective when investigating a specific field of media.

Our audience research was based on two ways of collecting feedback. The first were the videos that we recorded with an iPhone during the edit of our music video. Opinions of our classmates were very useful when choosing which scene we

should reshoot, cut or which specific filter/effect we should change. The second were various questions, uploads and comments on Quad Damage’s Facebook, SoundCloud and YouTube channel. SoundCloud was a starting point for the choice of track because at the time when we were still not sure about it, ‘Dead Side’ was the most popular song on Quad Damage’s channel so it came out obvious that this will be the one fitting our audience’s taste best. Facebook provided us with a basic demographic profile of our band’s audience and more accurately told us that 86.3% of people listening to Quad Damage’s music are in the 13-24 age range what confirmed our initial assumptions that majority of our audience is very young. According to that bit of research we decided to add two rather mainstream factors to our video. First, we changed the main character’s image from almost

The website of Quad Damage's main inspiration - System of a Down

pure heavy-metal/rebel style to more fashionable look but still kept few parts of his clothing that would be connoted with the rock culture like marble jeans or black and white Converse trainers. Also, we put some effort into finding very stylish nowadays, Ray Ban sunglasses that we could borrow from someone.

The size of camera we used for creating our video was very handy and facilitated us with recording some of the more demanding scenes. We did not use the tripod too extensively as we preferred the anti-shake option in our camera because, again, it would not allow us to record most of our multi-angle shots. Despite the fact that I was playing the main character I did record one of the conceptual shots and a chunk of performance shots. This was quite new to me but I found it enjoyable and learned the basics of framing, lighting and camera movement when recording a piece of narrative. For editing our video we used the Apple software ‘Final Cut Pro’. Its sophistication and wide range of options did not make the editing process harder at all. Contrary, it helped us to cut and montage shots and apply the initial editing ideas in a fairly short amount of time so then we had more time to look at it all again, listen to our audience feedback and change particular scenes to our own, balanced liking. My group mates already had some experience in creating a disturbing, dark atmosphere for the media project from last year course work. My own ideas and interest in creating the audio-visual media product helped us all in the development of our music video and let me to expand the understanding of such product’s codes and conventions.

The digipak design was based on an artwork found on DeviantART – a creativity-sharing portal. When editing the front and back cover, inlay booklet, spine of our CD case and magazine advert we were using Microsoft Paint programme. We did not need either Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator because the only picture which appears on the magazine advert was edited two years ago and we realised that Paint has got all the options that we needed when creating the digipak. We downloaded the fonts we found would be fitting the band and simply applied them in Paint.

One of the final scenes with Ray Ban sunglasses and me in the background

The red design of back cover was drawn in MS Paint with the paintbrush tool.