My Evaluation Questions

I decided that in order to expand my use of technologies I would present my evaluation questions through Wix website creator, specifically made by me for the 4 evaluation questions.

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Final Music Video

Final Music Magazine Advert

Final Digipak

Here is my final draft for my digipak. As you can see, I decided to keep with a theme of the bokeh light effect (and included this in my front over also). I did this because I realised for my images that their colouring was all quite different, with contrast of blues, reds and greens. This was a problem for me, as I knew from researching into existing digipak's that they often follow the same colour scheme throughout the entire thing. Adding this light effect means that the digipak has a certain house theme and colour that ended up pulling everything in together quite well. Also, as you can see, I decided to produce a four-panel digipak as opposed to a six panel one. My reason for doing this was because 'OCR Media Student A Level' website (http://ocrmediastudies.weebly.com/) has new examples of A2 blogs - all of the music video blogs has a digipak with only four panels. I believe that they scored highly here because they had more time to put effort into each image, rather than trying to get four individual images completed in a short space of time - bigger does not equal better. Producing four panels meant that I was able to put more time and effort into each image. I am very pleased with this product as all images are my own which were all taken from screen grabs of my music video or from unused clips for my video. I thought that doing this would be better than producing posed images as the video is the highlight point of the digipak and the poster, so orientating every image around the video would mean that if it was a real product, it would be more easily recognised by audiences if they had seen the music video.    

Music Video First Draft

Here is my first draft for my music video. 

After getting my media teacher and technician to watch the outcome, they gave me some constructive feedback, all of which all I agreed with as they are things I feel uncertain with too. At seconds 0:38, writing appears with a message that enforces the ideology behind the video and the message it carries - "it's impossible to hide who you are....especially from yourself". Both my media teacher and technician said that the quote was good, but the font doesn't tie in well with the video - it looks too basic and standard and does not look one with the video. I was aware of this during the editing process of my video, and It simply remained standard due to the fact that I wanted to see what the fonts on my ancillary tasks were going to be so that I could apply a smiler style/.the same font in order to tie the products together. I will be changing this for my second draft.

Also, my teacher and media technician commented on the clip from seconds 0:44-0:48 - it is edited to cut in time with the music to give a jump clip effect. However, they said that the black lags for too long and doesn't look as though it should be there - they said that the idea is clear and they think it would work well with a different approach. They also recommended replacing the black for white and shortening the length of space between the cuts in the clip or making a jump cut without the blank screen between. I will try both of these things to see which one works the best.

Lastly, they noticed that while I was recently editing, I must have knocked all of the clips out of sync by a fraction of a second as the lip syncing isn;t as in time as it was when I was edition it previously. This isn a mistake I knew I would encounter, but not too complicated to solve if done correctly. I have dealt with this issue a few times while editing, so it is now something i find quite easy to do in comparison to how I found handling it before.

Digipak Draft 1

Due to the fact that I want my magazine advert and digipak to link in regards to imagery, and my magazine advert design has changed due to the fact that my initial draft idea  did not end up working well when I started putting all of the pieces together, Ii now need to apply this to my digipak front cover I am glad that I decided to do one ancillary at a time as I knew they could always be subject to changes over time, and mine took a complete change of design all together, so if I had been creating my digipak front cover at the same time as my advert, both would have had to be re-done and that would have inevitably wasted even more time. 

This is the starting point of my digipak - I took a section of my music magazine advert and transferred it into another Photoshop canvas to adapt upon and add to. Here, I created a gradient around the entire image to soften up the image and keep continuity between it and the magazine advert. I also included the "Breathe" text from the magazine advert for the name of the album.

In the previous image, there is a baby blue boarder around the main image of the digipak because the gradient around the edges looked good with a sharp edge of colour to contrast - the baby blue is the same blue as the text for continuity in the image. However, the blue boarder make the image look a little plain, so i looked at it with a black one instead. The black boarder also looked a little plain, so I tried layering it with text from the hit song on the digipak (the song I used in m y music video) but that the made the entire image look very cluttered so I scrapped it and deiced to keep the baby blue. Many of my peers agreed with this change.

At this point, I decided to go for something different - to the right is a picture of a book that I had seen recently that I had got some inspiration from in regards to extra imagery in the cover of my digipak. I felt that the digipak cover before this point looked very bare and empty, and I didn't just want to bombard it with text, so I decided to add images that can be tied in with elements of the 3 products. In the book cover, there are stars hanging behind the writing, and I thought that I could try this and see how it looked alongside and slightly behind the frame of the cover, as there is no harm in taking inspiration from eternal mediums if they will work well. In the image above, I decided to make an image of lungs and crossed over male and female gender symbols as these reflect the "breathe" title of the digipak and the message of the music video which is acceptance of gender regardless of what you were born with.  Sp far I really like this front cover. I will be getting audience feedback on how to refine
this imagery and make it look as good as it possibly can for my audience.

Music Magazine Advert Re-do Draft 1

After deciding to re-start my music magazine advert because the last one was not up to the standards of a real advert, I decided to get some advice from my teacher to avoid making any mistakes in the photo taking stages. She suggested taking an image that was within an image, such as having a music magazine avert of a bus stop advert with a bus and such in he background. This seemed like a really good idea to me because my issue with the other advert was composition and content rather than editing, so making a good start with the imagery itself would make for a better end product.

I started by taking photos of frames in numerous places on numerous backgrounds - I wanted to use a photo frame (that would then be filled in with an image during editing) because it has a personal feeling to it such as my music video, and I then wanted to give it a rustic background in order to link some meaning ti the photo frame and the image inside of it. I decided on this brick wall background as they have many connotations of being, being in your way, resulting in you having to go the long way round to get what you want. These kind of things all reflect the identity of the character in my music video because they feel trapped within their own identity, and the only way to get round that is to take the long way round - finding and accepting your identity is much easier when you know you are the gender you are assigned at birth as it is the 'norm', and people tend to dislike anything outside of the 'norm'. This is ultimately all down to current hegemony - dominant ideas in society that women are suppose to have beautiful hour glass figures and men should be built like a machine. Not only are these ideologies unrealistic when you are identifying with the body you were assigned with at birth, but it is near impossible for trans* people wanting to pass as the opposite sex to apply these ideologies and physical expectations on themselves without the aid of hormone therapy and surgery, and this simply isn't an option in most cases. 

I ended up deciding on this image of the frame in front of a wall because it has plenty of space at the top and bottom to allow for text to be used. After choosing this photo, I then needed to elongate the frame to be more rectangular than square by using a few different editing methods in Photoshop (mainly the patch tool and the smudge tool to refine any imperfect edges). Once I had perfected the base photo to accommodate the image that needed to go in the frame, I then inserted said image into the photo and adjusted anything that needed adjusting such as the internal edge of the frame which needed to be neatened up. The image in the frame is a still from my music video - I really liked it for this advert because it tied in well with the message of the wall in relation to the expression on his face - he is dressed as a woman, which is who he wanted to be and yet he is still not happy - there is a wall in his way (hegemony) stopping him from perusing and accepting his identity.

When I got to the stage of the previous image, I thought that the walls were a little empty around the edges, so I created a colour burn gradient on the top and bottom of the image to give the subtle implication of the darkness of the wall engulfing the image in the frame. This not only enforced the message that the poster is trying to portray, but it also added some colour and a little more dimension to the advert. 

My next step was to include some text - after looking at more music magazine adverts (online as well as in my existing product analysis on the blog) it seemed to be that they mainly include the artist/band name, the name of the album (digipak) that is being advertised, a hit song from the album and it's release date. 

I ended up making the album name and hit song name in blue to tie in with the blue hues in the image in the frame of the advert - this also helps it stand out and contrasts the red of the wall so that it lifts up from the page. I also decided to call my digipak "Breathe" because after looking at the conventions of more serious albums from my digipak analysis and the 'how to title my digipak' post I did not long ago on the blog, I decided to go for something simple yet meaningful to tie in well with the video. The word 'breathe' has connotations of being a statement - someone telling another person to breathe if they are struggling to breathe. This can be linked in with my video due to the distress that the character is going through, it shows that the entire album could have these kind of connotations and meanings, therefore portraying the entire album as serious, which it is.

 I left the artist name in white (I changed the name of the artist to avoid copywriter issues, but also to something that I felt fit the style of all 3 products better - I asked my peers for their opinion on the name and they all thought that ti fit well). This is because if it was blue then too much blue text would be on the page and it wouldn't be as noticeable. Also, the artist name is the only bit of text at the top of the advert, so the white helps lift it from the dark gradient, and looking back at what my audience had said previously, colours often used for text in music magazines are white, black and red, and white fit the best with this particular colour schemed imagery. 

I named my artist Cassidy Blake as I wanted a name as interesting as Mac DeMarco, so I looked at where the use of 'De' before a last name came from. After searching online for a while, I discovered it came from irish roots, so I looked through some Irish last names as well as first names. For the first name I wasn't too concerned with how interesting it sounded as Mac isn't exactly extravagant, I was more interested in the last name. I simply saw Cassidy in a list of irish first names and Really liked it.

When I came to searching for a second name, I couldn't find one I liked to much in irish translation - I liked the sound of DeBlaca the most, but it didn't seem to fit with the theme of the video and the advert, and then I noticed it was translated from the name Blake, an I thought that Cassidy and Blake did sound good interesting together as though it could be the name of an artist, so I stuck with that.

 For the bottom right corner of the advert I included the cover of my digipak because that is what the advert is advertising, The imagery of the digipak cover and the advert are similar because this means that if the public saw this advert in a magazine and took just a quick glance at it, they would have a good idea of hat to look for of they were attempting to seek out the digipak to buy it/give i a listen to. This is something that music magazine adverts do with pages adverting a CD release. 

Magazine Advert Draft 6 Feedback

This is my music magazine advert after removing all of the text from it. In order to avoid any further mistakes or include anything that won't work well with the print, I decided to gain more audience feedback and ask them if this base layer itself works well. I asked two males and two female (David, Thomas, Emily and Beth). All of them said that this base layer, despite looking good and tying in well with the singing elements of my music video, they said that It doesn't look like the base kater of a music video magazine and that adapting on it would be (as David put it) "trying to cover a burnt cake with icing, it looks okay but the full effect isn't there.

From this feedback, I decided to scrap what i have worked on so far, yet take away from it all of the feedback and advice I have ben given in order to recreate and re-craft a music magazine advert that will work well with my music video but will also LOOK like a music magazine advert as well.

Magazine Advert Draft 5 Feedback

This is my magazine advert after incorporating the feedback from my peers for draft 3. So far I feel that this is better than draft 3, but at the same time it still doest't look right.

However, after consulting my teacher, she suggested to remove the TTN at the top of the page due to the fact that a music magazine wouldn't necessarily have the name of the magazine on it, and that could have freed some space up for writing. She also said that the font does not look like it fits the image well and the the brown gradient and background don't have continuation with the main colour scheme and style of my music video so far. I am going to take this feedback into consideration and redraft this magazine advert in order to get it up to standards.

Magazine Advert Draft 4 Feedback

Before attempting the suggestions my peers made for my music magazine advert, I decided to try something out that I had seen in an Arctic Monkeys music magazine advert in my existing product analysis post. I wanted to incorporate similar colours of the image as that is what the Arctic Monkeys advert had done. However, it doesn't give off the same effect as that advert, it still feels as though it doesn't belong there, so I think that for my next draft I will attempt what my peers had suggested and see how that looks.

Magazine Advert Draft 2/3 Feedback

Here is the second draft of my music magazine advertisement. I feel despite taking my audience feedback on board, the image still doesn't look like it could be an advert in a magazine.

I decided to add orange streaks of light over the image to enhance the bokeh light effect as I thought that was some good feedback from my audience and made sense. I really like the look of the lighting effect over the image and think it will stay that way.

 However, I do not like the white writing over the image - it looked out of place simply on top of the image, so i attempted to put an translucent black box beneath it to make it look as though it belonged there but this effect doesn't seem to fit very well with this image. I again decided to get some audience feedback on what direction to go in next. 

Emily: "I think that the font needs to be different and that there needs to be a gradient from the bottom that is the same as the background because they've done it on some music magazine adverts that I have seen - they put the text over the gradient".

Beth: "Yes I agree with Emily, that will look better than the box and the font needs to be more standard and less fancy. Also, I think that the logo at the top needs to be a different colour because the red and grey look really out of place with the orange, maybe make it a similar colour scheme to the advert".

I think I will give this a try because I do not like how this image looks at the moment. 

Magazine Advert Draft 1 Feedback

I decided to begin producing my magazine advertisement due to the fact that I now feel I have enough narrative in my footage to begin my ancillary tasks. Below are the stages i went through in creating my music magazine advertisement:

This was the photograph I thought would work best for my magazine advertisement as it reflects a lot about the music video and the message that it ends out.

I then blacked out the background as it made the image look less professional so having  a plain background made it feel more like it was taken at professional photo shoot. I took the black background idea from examples in my magazine advert evaluation post - one of Coldplay's adverts had a black background and it rally helped bring the foreground into focus. I also thought creating my own magazine name and logo would enhance the fact that it belongs in a magazine. TTN stands for 'Top Tunes Now' however it wouldn't need to be mentioned anywhere on the advert as it would be irrelevant. Also, I wanted to create an orange glow over the image to mimic the bokeh light effect i have included over moving images in my music video. 

I wasn't sure where to go next, so I asked my class piers (who also happen to be in the age group of my target audience) what they thought would look good regrading the text for the advert. Here is what they said after looking at my existing product evaluation of music magazine adverts: 

Emily: "I think you should make the orange much brighter and make it look like the orange lights you have in your music video/"

I thought that this was some good feedback to take into account due to the fact that I want top create continuity between all of my products so that they all look as though they are linked and belong to the same artist. 

Beth: "The writing should be white because music magazines tend to have solid colours like b;lack white and red, and it would also contrasts the black background really well"

This was something i was also considering in regards to the text, so I took it on board for my next draft. 

David: "It might be an idea to put the writing over him because if you have it all on the black background it will look squashed and the guy in the image will look like he's taking up too much space when he doesn't need to"

This also seemed like a good idea as there sin't much black background to use for the writing, so putting the writing over the image can take up some unused space.