Thursday 28 February 2013

Apply Audience Theory to your Product

For my advanced portfolio I created a music video, this video was of a heavy rock genre and was aimed at young adult gig goers.  I wanted to pinpoint this target audience by making the music video fast and energetic, just like a live setting.  This meant I would need to use a small room that will allow the band members to seem packed in with lots of fast cuts from instrument to instrument.  We also wanted to include lots of movement from our band in our video, this is again very common in rock videos so will appeal to fans of the genre, our band moving about/jumping up and down/generally being aggressive will make our video more realistic and will make it stand out more to the target audience and fan base that are associated with the genre.
Using IMovie, I edited the footage to create fast cuts, this appeals to the audience as they want to be entertained quickly and they want the music they listen to to be energetic and quite crazy. This is also represented in the actors in the video, as the band is shown to be getting quite angry at the music in some parts but also in same looking like they are having fun and dancing etc. The lyrics used in the song also appeal to the target audience. The contents include being angry at the government and other things similar to that, this appeals to the chosen target audience as they are young and will feel good about the whole idea of rebelling against those in power as it makes them feel good about what they are doing.
For the draft music video, the feedback from our audience was moderately good, but there were comments about the slight lack of energy and the setting. We were aware of this and were determined to change the setting and alter the style of editing, and these comments we received helped us realise exactly what we needed to do to make our music video successful. The changes this had to our final product were very drastic and we saw a massive improvement. Firstly, the room was changed to a much smaller, cleaner one , this allowed us to gain a claustrophobic effect that is seen in many music videos of the same style, like ‘Kiss This’ by Hawk Eyes and ‘Ignorance’ by Paramore.
Overall I feel that my final product really appealed to my target audience, as it featured a young energetic band that they could relate to, playing fast music using real instruments. All of these conventions of the rock genre are in my video so make it appeal well to the target audience. Even the branding on the bass drum appeals to the target  audience as it is again a common feature of the rock genre and the audience will relate to is and will enjoy it being there representing the band, this could then further go into merchandise like t shirts that the target audience would buy and wear.

Thursday 21 February 2013

Tuesday 5 February 2013

Inglorious Basterds (2009)

Facts

Director: Quentin Tarintino

Starring: Brad Pitt
             Christoph Waltz
             Michael Fassbender
             Eli Roth
             Diane Kruger
Budget: $70 million
Box Office: $321,455

Essay Question

How did the conventions of real media texts inspire you to use new media technology to create the style of product you achieved?

When creating my music magazine for my foundation portfolio I extensively researched current music magazines before begginning the creation of my product. Looking at magazines with similar genres (KERRANG! RockSound etc) allowed me to get a good idea of the conventions. I did the same with my music video for my advanced portfolio, so researching real media texts allowed me to get the right idea on how to create a fast and energetic music video for my rock genre. My biggest inspiration for my magazine was KERRANG! magazine as I like this magazine and often buy it, it is easy to spot the conventions as they always use a big bold headline at the top, with the artist/s in the middle of the page. They also use quite distorted and energetic typefaces so i wanted to create this in my product. I also used a lot of band specific fonts to make the magazine look more detailed, this is a common feature of festival line up posters. An example of this is when I used the 'plastic beach' font from Dafont.com for 'Turbowolf'.
I also took real conventions when making the double page spread of my magazine, as I found that it was common to split the two pages exactly and have the article on one side with the image on the other side, however in my draft magazine I wanted to go against the convention, by making the image side over lap the middle. But, I found that it wasnt as effective as I wanted so with my final product I stook with the typical 50/50 method.

With my advanced portfolio music video, I also looked at many other music videos on the market. These allowed me to view the conventions I needed to re-inact to make my video effective, they also gave me ideas and inspiration. My video is in black and white, this was inspired by many other rock videos including 'Zzzonked' by Enter Shikari. This black and white effect makes the video look more realistic and gives it the dark feel that comes with heavy music. All of the videos we looked at include fast cuts, so we made this a vital part when editing as it conveys the energy well. Also, in rock music especially instruments are pretty vital for the actual sense of the music to be conveyed. This is why we had the band playing the instruments and actually singing the song, to make it as believable as possible. QUOTE ABOUT BEAUTY OF MUSIC BEING PLAYED. Examples of the instruments having a lot of effect is in 'Song 2' by Blur.

Friday 1 February 2013

Inglorious Basterds

Im going to either do a video through iMovie, maybe using the bamboo tablet to draw specific references I find most interesting.

Or I might draw a comic strip of some sort and upload to a computer and colour in.