This blog is now closed.
Frank Tan - Student No. 3795
Friday, 16 December 2011
Closing Post
Posted by Latymer Media 2010 at 03:53 0 comments
Note to the Moderator
First of all, thank you for taking the time to look at my blog. I've spent a lot of time trying to finish it and I hope I've done well. I'm definitely pleased with what I've accomplished and I hope you have as well.
My blog is linked to the group blog, as well as everyone in my group's and the class blog (Latymer Music Video). The links are on the side bar at the right, with the link to the group blog at the top.
Contained on my individual blog is all my personal research, initial ideas and planning prior to our decision on which idea to continue on with. Also included is the album cover, link to the website and answers to the evaluation.
The group blog contains evidence of group research, planning and production, showing development of our initial idea to our final idea and the inspirations that influenced our work. Our final music video is at the top of the blog.
I do hope that you find it relatively easy to navigate my personal blog, and that it isn't too boring for a subject as creative as Media. My blog is organised in reverse order, so the most recent work (December 2011) is at the top while the oldest (June 2011) is at the bottom, however, evaluation questions run from 1-4 down the page. All the posts have been labelled for easy identification, whether it be research, planning, production or evaluation. These same labels are applied to the group blog. My individual contributions are labelled as such on the group blog.
Posted by Latymer Media 2010 at 03:01 0 comments
Wednesday, 7 December 2011
Evaluation Question 1 - In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
The designs I came up with for the band was more stereotypical for a rock band/rebellious look. When drawing them, each person had a distinct personality. The drummer was supposed to be the cool, suave one, the lead guitarist was supposed to be the handsome, sexy one and the bassist was supposed to be the macho one. The black tied them in with each other and with the singer, as they all wore black, but they all had a colour to differentiate them from each other, for example, the drummer had silver and the guitarist had gold. Due to actor concerns, two out of our three male band members had to be replaced. The bassist was replaced by myself and the drummer was replaced by a friend (Ming) who was willing to help.
Thus, as you have seen, my media product uses, develops and occasionally challenges forms and conventions of real media products.
Posted by Latymer Media 2010 at 01:00 0 comments
Labels: evaluation
Evaluation Question 2 - How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
Our music video (main product), album cover and website all (ancillary) tie into each other effectively, creating a suitable band identity. We have used a multitude of techniques to help brand the band, for example, themes, colours, costumes, logos, etc. Through this, we have created synergy between our products.
The theme of our products is rock and this is reflected in the music genre, which is rock, bordering on punk. Our music video follows many rock video conventions, such as extended focus on instruments and spotlighted high contrast lighting. Our album cover follows the conventions by having our song list grouped together in a block, as well as having a high contrast black and white front cover. Finally, our website ties it all together with a grungy, dirty brick wall background and a handwritten font for the adverts etc.
Further cementing the band identity are the colours. The overarching colour for the whole band is a deep, rich shade of purple, not too girly, but pretty strong and individual in its own right. The colour purple is presented in the album cover and website, mostly with the skull logo.
Our website also helps to tie together all the products as well. The website has institutional and branding, for example, the Burning Car Records logo and theDropouts logo as well, as well as theDropouts skull on every page. There are also adverts for the album on almost every page and a large banner at the top of the page.
I decided to use Monster because it was less popular than something like Coca-Cola and more likely to be drunk by our target audience. It was incredibly unlikely that we would be able to get a partnership with Coca-Cola for a competition, even for an imaginary band, which is why Monster was my choice of beverage.
In the music video, the skull logo is taped to the bass drum, though it is only visible in a few shots. On the website, it is on the top left of every page, while the record label is on the bottom left and a link to the record website on the top banner.
Our band costumes also play a strong part in creating synergy between our products. The band members wear the same costume on the back cover of the album as they do in the music video, as well as in the photoshoot, which is shown on the gallery of the website. Their similar, yet unique outfits both group them together and set them apart, creating an identity that is both branded and individual.
Posted by Latymer Media 2010 at 00:59 0 comments
Labels: evaluation
Evaluation Question 3 - What have you learned from your audience feedback?
Posted by Latymer Media 2010 at 00:59 0 comments
Labels: evaluation
Evaluation Question 4 - How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
Here is the finished website. We created this website with WIX, a free Flash website creator. Initially, using this website was somewhat challenging, due to the nature of master pages and trying to place pictures so that they didn't show up on every page. Eventually, I mastered the interface and was editing the website with ease, adding twitter feeds and galleries. We have linked to most of the popular social networking sites, such as Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr. With the prevalence of smartphones in modern society, we have also created a mobile website.
On the topic of galleries, every shot in our gallery was edited in Adobe Photoshop CS5. Since we were shooting on a black background, and our actors were also wearing black, it caused us no end of trouble attempting to isolate them from the black. We managed to cut them out using the polygonal lasso and fix it up with the eraser. One of the more recent additions to Photoshop is the ContentAware function, which takes information from the image to fix a spot with the spot healing tool, for example, a blemish or something that needs to be fixed. It was essential to the quality of our edited photos and is very useful.
When editing our video, we used Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 to do so. This was an upgrade from my AS project, with which we used CS3. CS5 has a new additional features to CS3, but is overall the same. Despite this, it seems to run faster and has the option to stream HD video while capturing, which was nice, as we got to review our footage before we started editing it, meaning that we had some time to plan how it was going to come together. This is notable as HD video isn't usually viewable while capturing.
James our cameraman! |
Our music video was filmed entirely on a Sony HVR V1E HD camera. When filming, there was a manual focus instead of an automatic focus (this was an option, but we decided to use the manual for focus pulls). When I was filming the circling seance shot, I had trouble keeping the camera focused and stable, especially when I started changing levels, from high to low. Despite this, quite a few of the seance shots were used in the final video, because they were quite energetic compared to shots from the same session.
Also used was the increasingly popular Twitter website, on which I posted the link to the music video and the online survey above. The trending nature of Twitter will allow for a viral transmission of our music video around the internet, leading to a huge amount of word of mouth and thus, succeeding in a viral marketing campaign.
Posted by Latymer Media 2010 at 00:59 0 comments
Labels: evaluation
Thursday, 13 October 2011
Potential Logo Design
That vector better have been worth the effort.
Posted by Latymer Media 2010 at 12:00 0 comments
Labels: production, research + planning