Evaluation of our MediaProduct

(Punk Rock)

George Bramhall

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

• Whilst we were in the research stage of our coursework, our key goals were to find suitable examples that expressed our genre and the conventions that they used. There were many aspects to look over including clothing, editing, positioning, representation

An example of a convention I noticed during my research stage was, the main costume colouring used in punk rock videos consisted of dark/black and red clothing. (“21 guns green day” and “The kill, 30 seconds to mars”)

It was clear that dark clothing was a typical convention of the punk rock genre, and so we needed to include this in our video.

YouTube

• We used “YouTube” to find and analyse music videos in our genre. This allowed me to watch any video I wanted as many times as necessary in order to analyse it effectively. Using this research tool, this enabled me to easily find the key conventions and ideology that I can incorporate into my coursework.

Facebook• We used “Facebook” to arrange when

and where we were going to film our product, this aided our organisation as it meant everyone in the group could contact each other at any time.

• It was also useful for arranging people together for filming the concert scene, which consisted of a large amount of people, Facebook provided an outlet that was free and commercially used by all of the people we intended to incorporate in our coursework.

Digital Camera

• The digital camera was the main component of our music video, it allowed us to capture the camera shots and movements we wanted in order to create the desired conventions that we had previously decided upon to conform or challenge the ideologies of our genre. The digital camera provided the outlet to which or entire music video relied on. It aloud us to use different camera shots and angles, which provided anchorage to our particular genre, they would then be edited in post-production.

UnsignedActs.com• When deciding upon our band, we used the

website Unsigned.com to help us find our artist, and it contained many different artist of our genre, so it made looking for the right band a lot easier.

Blogger/ Google• Blogger allowed us to keep all of our

research and production stages and work, on a place, that could be updated anytime from any location. Blogger aloud us to store relevant information and keep a back log on all the work, research, audience feedback and audience research that would prove most helpful in our pre/post production

• Another helpful resource for our research was Google images, which allowed us to find examples of album covers and posters, which then could be embedded to our blogs. Google also provided a much needed information outlet on dominant ideologies for the punk rock genre.

Imovie (software)• Imovie was completely crucial to our entire media coursework without it we would

have had no way to edit our music video. The program allowed us to put the clips together, but also to overlay it with the background music, and make sure everything was in time with the song. We could also use different transactions between the shots such as fade out to portray a memory being shown, this was used when the lead singer says "I remember the words I was told as soon as I spoke of her". The shot fades to white to emphasise the fact it's a memory, and changes to the girl love interest to make it clear who he is talking about.

Imovie also aloud us to use different edits and transactions between shots, the most memorable ones were the fade in from performance to the memory

of the narrative and, this was played along side the lead singer singing "I remember the words I was told as soon as I spoke of her“ the shot fades to

white to emphasise the fact it's in the past and the girl is centre frame to show she is the love interest

Fade in used to show a memory

Fade out to end the song

• We used typical forms conventions of the punk rock genre, we did this to enable the audience to identify the genre as punk rock, we then later attempted to base our products are the stereotypes their dominant ideologies.

• The main aspect of our media product is the switch between a performance scene and a narrative and our research showed that many other punk rock artists used the same technique.

• Examples of which are, “All American rejects, gives you hell” and “Avril Lavigne, Girlfriend”

In what ways do your media products use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Audience feedback was the most important thing to consider when we were creating our product. We sent out a questionnaire with all the important variables we needed to consider. It also allowed a more broad horizon of opinions of what people expected to see in a punk rock genre. The final conclusion was most of the audience preferred a constant link between performance and narrative, and as the questionnaire went out to the same target audience as our music video, we could finally conclude that our music video would be sectioned with intertwining scene of narrative and performance.

The idea behind out music video was a scene in which the band performed to a crowd of people, in which the band were seen in a sense of authority among the audience and a narrative that followed the tribulations of the lead singer who is in love with a girl and she doesn’t notice him, this is a polar opposite of the performance as the lead singer is seen to be normal and less important, this allowed the audience to empathise with the lead singer whilst still seeing him in a position of dominance..

• The general convention for punk rock is that the cover of the albums didn't show the artist/band’s image, but more something that represents something that important or significant towards their album. In my research the following albums showed this “Green Day, 21st century breakdown, “Sum 41, does this look infected” and “Pink Floyd, a momentary lapse of reason.”

• Showing the artist on the cover of an album allows the audience to relate the artists whereas having an image means they can relate to what they stand for which is the main concept of punk rock.

• Although our research suggested that having the artist on the cover would be counter productive in our genre, we decided to challenge the dominant ideologies and both our poster and digipack consisted of images of the band

Digi-Pak

• The majority of the album covers and posters we researched all seemed to have the same colour schemes, the dominant colours being black, white and red, the reason for this is it allows the artists to express their thoughts and feelings through colour and not just their music, as the colours black and red, strongly connote anger or isolation from society, the white seemed to only be there as a contrast to heighten the emotion, or to signify the rebellion against society.

• The album covers that showed these colour schemes included, “Sum 41, all killer no filler” and “21st Century Breakdown by Green Day”. Our research enabled us to design our digipack using the colour scheme suggested, red and black were both used through out, but I thought it would be a good idea to have the background in black and white as our band was primarily Caucasian so adding the black and white background eliminated all racial indifferences and allowed the music to connect with any ethnical audiences.

Social Animal Digipack

Poster

• In punk rock I found that the band usually had a significant image or design that worked with their music which they incorporated with their album covers and posters and thus repeated the image on both, artists that did this were “the rasmus, Led zeppelin and the white stripes.

• After this we thought it would be only wise to incorporate the same image on the poster as the digipack, it would not only allow the target audience to relate back to the album if they saw the poster but it also created a sense of unity with the image our band gave off, we didn't want to stray from the image, doing so meant the audience didn't get confused with the bands concepts and views, and punk rock the majority of their lyrics are about their views.

Social Animal Poster

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

• I believe overall that our products do justice to the artists, it creates a relatable vibe and contains all the codes and conventions that other punk rock bands include, so if someone were to see our band, they would be able to identify the genre. I am sure of this because we used similar costume, editing, colour scheme and album conventions as that of the artists we researched. “Social Animal is clearly represented with punk rock related conventions. Punk rock bands and artists tend to stick with relaxed but active body language stern expressions and their apparel usually consists of either darker clothes perhaps with ties or jackets or informal attire with ripped jeans and profanity. We needed to keep the main conventions the same in order to create a product that was typically and noticeably punk rock.

Social animal (our band)

Avril Lavigne

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

The number of people who chose “yes” for Do you expect a CD cover to feature the band/artist? Shows that the feedback from the target audience approved of our band appearing on the cd cover. The Life Matrix theory explains this as, consumers view the artists that are most similar to their tastes as how they view themselves, therefore in order to fully connect with the target audience we needed to incorporate the band onto the CD cover

We wanted to use Dennis Mcquails theory of uses and gratification, in which the highest ranking result from the question would be used to satisfy the audience demands. These were the 4 options that our questionnaire gave, yet it all seemed on too big of a scale so we decided to use the most chosen topic “freedom” as less of its literal meaning, and using it as a metaphor for being trapped in youth, therefore still conforming to the ideologies of punk rock.

Audience comments on music video

• Positive• Most of the comments we received on the music video were all to do with how

well it could be distinguished as punk rock, one person said , “Very obvious what the genre is”, another said something similar "The video follows a sense of genre quite well since the majority of it is performance based, which is what you associate with the punk rock genre” and a third person said “ Good identification of the band” all of the comments have the same sub tone of clarity on which genre the music video was portraying, which is why I am glad we followed the uses and gratifications theory we established from our audience research.

• Negative• The main cause of concern was the narrative, many of the viewers found it

confusing and not clear, one of the comments was; “The storyline just stops halfway, it doesn’t make sense”, now that we are aware of this, if we were to ever create a punk rock genre music video we would add more narrative into the story as, we focused too much on the performance side and neglected the narrative, as the research had shown us it was less important to the overall convention.

Audience comments on Digipack

• Positive• Like with the music video the positive comments were due to the clarity of the genre,

comments like; “good use of colours, match genre” and “the paw print is continued throughout your product” allows us to see that not only has the uses and gratification theory paid off but the continuity of the design logo was substantial enough to designate a response.

• Negative

• The main flaw with our digipack was the alteration between the flamboyant and wild writing of the title and the boring inner text. Which is why one of the comments was; “The font used for the track list is very simple which looks a bit odd compared to the unusual band name font “ which may have caused some confusion when the audience looked over our digipack.

Audience feedback on poster

• Positive• The most helpful comment that was provided was; “The poster shows the band to be representing youth

by the united front they are taking and the colours used give the impression that they are serious about their music” This means that the codes and conventions of punk rock and how the youth are portrayed has been noticed by the target audience. Another comment that allows us to speculate over how well we have achieved the representation of punk rock was; “use of the word 'unleashed' works well with the band name” Its good that the audience picked up on that as, throughout our product one of the main focuses was the animal ideology and how the significance of teenage rebellion and animal behaviour were linked, the purpose for the word “unleashed” was in order to emphasise the similarities between them

• Negative• Although all the good feedback there were some bad comments weakness we were told about our poster

was “looks like a film poster”, this allows us to know that in order for our poster to be more suitable and generally more successful in capturing our target audience, we should have included an indication to what we were advertising . To fix this i would suggest making the font that informs the consumers that it is an album more clear, by increasing the size or highlighting the background. Also we found another weakness was “the use of a paw print for the letter ‘A’ This meant our poster was somewhat unclear and the only solution to solve it would have been to make the paw prints more A shaped