Finale

"If music be the food of love, play on." - William Shakespeare

As a whole I feel the process went really well for us as a group, we ended with a great main product and some ancillary texts that complement the main video really well. We were optimistic in choosing a song not mainstream and on top of this it had no lyrics. Not having lyrics meant we had to impose a narrative, because there were no lyrics to base a story on, but in the end I feel this worked out better for us, because lip syncing can only work so well, instead we landed ourselves with a real DJ who knew the track well, so he knew exactly what he was doing. In terms of the narrative, in retrospect, I would probably change location, to a more urban area to increase the dystopian effect that our narrative imposes.

The colour grading process was crucial to our pop video working. I never realised that this was so important. In media texts for the screen, every frame may be graded to make sure the colour is correct and fits the message intended. We used the colour grading software on Final Cut Pro to desaturate our colours somewhat, to make them seem a little cold and almost hostile. In this way we were stressing the message of our pop video that the world is aggressive and in a state of dystopia, which I take to mean a society that is in constant breakdown.

In such a greedy, tempestuous society, it is hard for any organic music act to break through; off hand I can name a lot of musicians and bands that are more talented than many mainstream ‘musicians’. The industry is a money hungry giant, that would continue to function even without people going in and out of it on a regular basis, and pop music fans are quick to forget what they were into last year. Our pop video intended fans to be drawn into the music, and sell the artist. However our pop video contradicts the music industry as an entity, portraying youth as your own, and not syndicated as the major labels intend it to be. Overall our originality as individuals really shone through, and this collectively combined to form a great group. And we are delighted with the finished product, and although it was lengthy and painful process, it was thoroughly enjoyable and rewarding.

Director's Commentary

The Directors Commentary, done by myself and Leo Faulks, was an aural aid designed to assist the audience in understanding the narrative, in it we detail several parts of the narrative, use some comparison to theorists and explain why we used specific shots. In terms of Hall, it may sway audiences more towards the preferred meaning. With the insight we have into the making of the pop video understandably makes the pop video better off as it may come of more to the conventions we had originally set. It gives the audience some background to the narrative, for instance the differences between the two gangs, the gang signs and the fact that the ending is actually a take on real life, and how no conflicts of that nature seem to end. We chose Leo and I to record it because we were the ones who had been most actively involved in shooting and editing.

Blog Task Three: What I learned from my Audience Feedback

Having collected a variety of feedback for our pop video and ancillary products from members of the target audience and from other members of the audience demographic. (Via YouTube, a Focus Group and other sources).

Our target audience was 16-25 year old males from JICTAR groups C, D and E. Generally speaking, groups C, D and E are less sophisticated people from poorer socio-economic backgrounds, but these social categories are big spenders on pop music and related commodities. C is people who are skilled but not academically educated, such as builders and electricians. D is families and people who labor and E are the unemployed. This applies to these JICTAR groups because of the people and the content of the video; the video features people of a poorer socio-economic background and the video details needless violence and vandalism.



The video was posted on Vimeo, YouTube and Facebook, from the three only YouTube and Facebook received comments, and all of these comments were positive. The comments included;

From YouTube
− “This is amazing” – bonesbilly545
− “Yesssss this video is ill” – skeme14
− “Amazing video” – kreitylowTheNINJA

From Facebook – On the Facebook liking system, 17 people like this.
− “Amazing. X” – Natalya Holley
− “Sik Video” – Kaleem Khan



The Focus Group contained of seven students, four male and three female. We gave a questionnaire containing ten questions to the group. We wanted the group to watch the video once before answering the questions, this would allow time for the group to think and come up with sensible answers before answering them. The idea was to simply find out if they enjoyed it, and to see if they understood what had happened and perhaps if they had gained any other meaning from the video or even the song. After they had answered the questions, we had a discussion as a group, in which we discussed questions, and their responses, and we attempt to usher them to elaborate on their statements. The supplementary discussion was actually more useful than the questionnaire itself; the verbal response seemed more emotional. One male student, Will Edgely, an 18 year old from Dorking said the video was “to a great song, and the emotion of the song, despite the lack of lyrics, really fitted the video”
The questionnaire was as follows:

1) Did you enjoy it? Why?
2) What did you get out of it?
3) What did you think the message of the story was?
4) Did you think the brand was established? How?
5) Do you think it is sexist/bias in any way?
6) Did you identify with any of the characters? How? Who?
7) Did it tell you anything about relationships?
8) Did it give you any information about the world today?
9) What is the official image that you received?
10) How do you think it can be improved?

In terms of Blumler and Katz’s theory of uses and gratifications, we tried to fulfill two of the specified areas as defined by them; we also aimed to apply their theory to our audience response. Blumler and Katz say that watching TV fulfills four basic needs. These are; Diversion (a form of escape from everyday mundanity), Personal Relationships (companionship via TV personalities and characters), Personal Identity (the comparison’s drawn between the characters and your own life) and Surveillance (a supply of information concerning the welfare of the world). In terms of our pop video, diversion occurs, when the audience watches and empathizes with the activities of the gang, or feels envious of the nonchalance in their daily activities, but because they are bound to the confines of their life, they cannot do these random acts, instead the relate with the video because it forms an escape for them. Surveillance occurs because the video shows the world in a state of disarray, where amongst a dystopian society, the broken lives appear to be the ones that shine, and the activities of young people are needlessly violent because there is simply nothing else in their lives.



Stuart Hall suggests a theory that producers encode a preferred message that the audience proceeds to decode in any one of three ways. These ways are either the audience accepting the preferred meaning, or they become oppositional readers, rejecting the preferred message, or negotiated readers, wherein they decipher their own meaning. The pop video has a preferred meaning, wherein the DJ is edgy rebellious and controversial. The meaning of the narrative is that the world is potentially violent and dangerous. The males in the focus group read the preferred meaning of both, but the females in the group rejected the second meaning, not believing the video was an accurate representation of a state of affairs in modern gang culture, instead arguing that the video “glorified needless aggression”. However, the Internet comments received were positive from both genders, so we cannot draw the conclusion that women reject the second meaning.



Aristotle, the Greek philosopher, not by any means a media theorist, introduced his ideas of Ethos, Pathos and Logos, arguing that the goal of argumentative writing was to persuade the audience that your ideas are valid, or more so than someone else’s. Ethos or simply credibility was the convincing of the characters and narrative by means of the author, meaning that we tend to believe people who we respect. Pathos or the emotional is the persuading by means of appealing to the reader or watcher’s emotion. Logos or words, was the persuading by mode of words, or in the case of pop videos, lyrics. With regards to our pop video, only Ethos and Pathos apply, as our video features no lyrics. Ethos applies because the DJ, the author, imposes the narrative and the DJ is a respectable character, his musical prowess demands respect from all ages, giving him the deserved credibility. Pathos applies because the video details emotions at their highest peaks, the viewing of the destruction of modern artifacts, and at their most suppressed, the gang members themselves who look like they have had it hard all their life.



I think that overall the performance element of the pop video worked beyond expectations; maybe if we were to reshoot we may have changed location to bring him closer to the narrative and emphasize the dystopian society. The narrative did work, but I felt we tried to hard to blur the lines between the gangs, and that they appeared too similar in appearance, we did try to achieve a certain similarity between them, but this could have been achieved through camerawork and editing, and if we were to reshoot I would the gangs wearing noticeably different clothing, with different modes of destruction, and perhaps alternative semiology that showed their unison as a gang.

Task Two: A Powerpoint Presentation to Explore How Effective the Combination of My Main Product and Ancillary Texts are.

TBlog Task 2

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I answer this question with a powerpoint slideshow exploring the theories of;

• CARLSSON
• RICHARD DYER
• CLAUDE LEVI-STRAUSS

And how they can be applied to stress the way my pop video, magazine advert and digipak covers used their theories to sell my artist, and his song.

Magazine Promotion

Most pop groups and singers in the modern digital world make their money more from touring than from CD sales. So when a new song is issued a campaign is mounted through the pop video and the digipack to drive punters to the concerts, where the main money is made. This is argued by Negus and Fiske in their various books. The magazine advert has to play off and use the same images as the pop video and the digipack if a ground swell of interest and support is to be created in the potential audience.

Our magazine advert is dark, suggesting a bleak view of the world, yet D'Artagnan, the name of our artist, connotes fighting for freedom and justice with its links to The Four Musketeers and All For One and One For All. The very word plays on the idea of a good gang. The advert also follows the rule of thirds and suggests through its black and white colouring that we are in a world of art.

Digipack

Creation of the Digipack

The digipack is a crucial tool in selling the artist and his brand or image. It has to work with and play off my pop video and my magazine advert to create a constant image in all of them.

A digipack is essentially what comes in a CD, the booklet of the inside, the front cover, the back cover and background for where the CD lies. It contains the track list for the album on the back cover, it will detail the production information for each song, and sometimes the lyrics for the songs. The digipack is what sells the CD to the public, it has to be eye catching, and informative. The font we used on our both our digipack and our magazine advert was a digital looking font, reflecting the nature of the music of the artist which is all electronic. The insider left cover details a picture of the DJ being photographed, coupled by a quote from Marianne Williamson about the ability of human beings, and that mediocrity for the sake of others is a sufferance to oneself. The inside right cover, where the CD sits in front, is an image from one the DJ live shows, wherein the lights obscure the DJ's image, and the only thing left is the crowd clearly enjoying the show. The front cover needed to be edgy and rebellious, similar to the artist's image, so we chose to make the image black and white, showing only one half the outline to his face in white, and his head phones highlighted in red, this is coupled with artist's name, d'artagnan, and the eponymous single of the album "We Are From Venice". The back cover shows the DJ's decks, again with the headphones highlighted in red, the back cover also shows the publication company (Downtown Publishing) and the record label (Fool's Gold Records). There is also the necessary copyright details, the track listing and a barcode.

Task One : In What Ways Do Your Media Productions Use, Develop, or Challenge Forms and Conventions Used by Real Media Products?

When we initially began the research stage of the production of our pop video, we looked at real pop videos, to try and get an idea, or an inspiration to form the basis of our pop video. After looking at "Declaration of War" by Hadouken! and "Stress" by Justice, we decided that we liked the extended use of documentary style filming, and we liked the gritty and seedy realism that it promoted through the use of handheld camera shots, almost as if to put the audience in the midst of the chaos. The main story arc conveyed a group of teenagers, no older than myself, wreaking havoc around the city they lived in, somewhere in Paris. The gang were menacing, and as a member of the audience I felt repulsed and dragooned by them. We knew from that moment that we wanted to create the same fear and repulsion as Romain Gavras (The Director) had done, this coupled with the sense of nothingness and disequilibrium we felt was the foundation for a good pop video. It was at this point we knew that we had to subvert all, or at least some, of the main conventions set out by Negus. We also knew that we had to work in plaisir, the thrill the audience expects from a pop video, but we felt more drawn towards Barthes' terms of jouissance, the unexpected.

One example from this in our video, may be the ending, where instead of the video coming to a definitive end, the video merely fades out, leaving the ensuing conflict unresolved, this in itself is a reflection on modern society wherein most conflicts of a similar nature are left unresolved, such as knife crime and the progression of gang warfare in London. In order to gain the ability to use these conventions well, we had to understand the main conventions of pop videos, and learn them in order to insert them effectively into the narrative. As Negus explains, the main conventions of a pop video are; the explicit and unashamed promotion of the artist’s “image” as a specific product with a brand identity, ready for mass consumption; the featuring of the artist; a wide and extensive use of shot types, camera angles and movement; repetition of reoccurring thematic elements and generically specific iconography; a possible narrative structure; a possible performance element; the flexibility to disregard realism; shots cut tightly to the beat of the track; use of special effects; a carefully constructed Mise en Scene appropriate to the content and tone of the track; high impact instantly. We had initially chosen a quite difficult song to invent a video for, as the song we had chosen had no lyrics, so the message of the song, is personal and individual to every viewer. For us, we saw a liberationist agenda, and to a certain extent a post apocalyptic era. In many ways the video is hugely stereotypical, as all the gang members look dangerous, and it seems their sole motif in society is to cause disruption and disregard the rules. Our personal agenda probably was a little temperamental, and we know that not all members of gangs are this way inclined, and we know that if we had not followed this stereotype, we would not have gained the same vivacity we achieved in the final product.
The lack of lyrics in the piece made things seem distorted, which inadvertently worked in our favour, as this was exactly what we were trying to achieve. We had no intention of showing a band or main leader, because this was not how we wanted to portray our artist, we in fact actively tried to obscure his identity, we wanted to subvert the convention of "shameless" promotion of a star, and we wanted it to coincide with the recurring theme of the enigmatic in our piece. A large part of our mentality was to let audiences make up their own mind about the artist as they watch the video, we didn't try to make him a hero, more a kind of ethereal middle ground between two extremes.

The narrative in which we see the DJ, imitates a number of Negus’ conventions; the featuring of the artist, repetition of reoccurring thematic elements and generically specific iconography and shows that it is cut tightly to the beat of the track. The scene subverts the rule of thirds, as the DJ was intentionally positioned in the middle, subverting the conventions of composition, to create a rebellious attitude, not just in his performance, but also in the filming.
One of our final scenes, was the scene detailing a rusted old burning car, that clearly integral to one of the bands daily activities. In this instance we challenged the normal conventions of pop videos, by leaving the audience on a cliff hanger, and instead or telling them what happens, we leave it to individual interpretation. However we do conform to Negus' convention of "high impact instantly". Everything in the gang scenes that we shot was decided on location. Filming as quickly and with as much improvisation as we did, it is hard to remember the sheer number of shots individually, but we were definitely trying to reflect the pace of the song through the pace of our work and ultimately the pace of our finished product. We did however have to carefully plan out two scenes, as we only had one chance at these, the scene wherein the fridge was smashed, and the final scene depicting the flares, so for these two shots we imitate the main conventions of constructing a pop video.
With regards to camera movement, we in essence were wholly spontaneous, naturally the DJ shots took a lot of planning and preproduction, but everything, other than the two previously mentioned shots, that we shot on location was improvisational, as we chose to use ideas that we conceived on the day. To obtain the handheld, documentary style that we highly sought after, we had to forget about the conventions and do some very avant-garde filming. In terms of Negus, we did imitate his convention of "the flexibility to disregard realism", because had we been realistic in shooting the gang scenes, the final product would have looked more like a news-piece than a music video.

Handheld documentary filming meant that we could take the audience into the middle of the action, giving them a very intimate feel for what was going on and the characters involved. We were also not afraid to let the shots run very short or very long, nor to be out of focus at times or to have odd angles. This all gave the piece a feeling of fly on the wall observational documentary, as explained by Michael Rabiger in his book 'Directing the Documentary'.

The Bloody Beetroots - We Are From Venice

Task Four: A Director's Commentary on How I Used New Media Technologies in the Construction, Research, Planning and Evaluation Stages

New Media Technology is digital technology based around digital storage and communication of data, using binary code to compress the data into tiny packets, which give greater speed, quality and huge amounts more of storage space for data. This is far better than the analogue system of communication and data storage that preceded digital. Digital technology underpins computers, mobile phones, modern video and still cameras, editing, the Internet, MP3 and iPhones, modern radios, modern movie projectors most technological equipment ranging from in hospitals to schools and transport. Digital technology means that media productions are of higher quality, with proliferation, interactivity and convergence as advantages for the viewer. For the producer of media products the advantages are speed, lower costs, higher quality and ease of productions. These are especially crucial in producing, distributing and creating films for television and my pop video.

We used digital technology extensively during all stages of production. We used the Internet to research our song and videos that influenced our video, we used mobile phones to plan and communicate, and we used digital HD cameras that recorded directly onto SD Card. We used Final Cut Pro to edit the shot product, and our group used Pro Tools LE to edit and shorten our song. We also used the Internet in the distribution and evaluation stage through screening the music video on sites such as Vimeo and YouTube, and we evaluated the product through the online service Blogger.

In the research and development stage, we used the internet to a great extent to research the song and artist, The Bloody Beetroots, and the kind of record label artists like them were signed to, also we changed the song twice, it was originally a remix of Killing in the Name by Rage Against the Machine, then we changed it Black Gloves by Goose, then we changed it finally to We Are From Venice by the Bloody Beetroots. We also used new camera technology to screen test our eventual actors. We took digital stills of the location and the actors in order to procure a sense of preparation for the digipak we will eventual construct. The Internet was an invaluable resource at the end of the day, because the trouble we went through to find a location was all on the internet. We needed a place that we could basically destroy without people caring at all, but both of the locations we found on the internet were owned, and we needed forms filling out and an ambulance on call and the list goes on.

On the shoot day itself, we used two JVC HD Cameras, and lighting that was all digitally wired into one desk, and imparticular the movers which shifted and changed colour.The camera itself allowed us to change shutter speeds, ratio, lighting and ISO with real ease. In post-production we used Final Cut Pro to edit the song and cut together the video. We didn’t need to use After Effects at all, which was a planned decision because we thought as a whole After Effects at our level looked particularly tacky. We also got the idea that the gangs needed authenticity, so we decided to make gang signs, and we used the internet for this to come up with a two hybrids of already known gang signs.

The post production element of production was the most technologically dependant. We needed the aforementioned Final Cut Pro editing package, and the Pro Tools LE package which other groups didn't need, because their songs were an already appropriate length. But we had to finely cut ours down, so that there was no noticeable cut in the song. We did this by using a collection of waveform information and we chose where the song had lost its peak. Final Cut Pro was the tipping point of our production, had it not been for Final Cut, we would not have had the professional, glossy music video that we now have.

In terms of Distribution and Evaluation, we distributed the video through YouTube and Vimeo, and I have also posted the video on Facebook to try and draw attention from the social network. All the sites have had nothing but positive feedback. If we were marketing the song as a whole, we might go about purchasing adspace on popular websites such as Google, Facebook, YouTube and Amazon. The Internet is the key to our distribution.

The links to two of the relevant sites are below.

http://www.vimeo.com/17954809

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpnR1uOxC-M

The strength of the internet for distribution is clear, you can reach potentially millions of people, as they have to be persuaded to visit.

In terms of evaluation, the comments on YouTube are very valuble, we thought about putting a questionnaire online, but we decided that a focus group had more strengths as we were able to see that people took it seriously, and ask them supplementary questions. Where as a questionnaire can be filled in without people being serious about it.