THE ASSIST PERSONAL EVALUATION

Hannah Owen

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

In my group’s music video we attempted to converge contemporary editing and filmmaking techniques with dated but timeless techniques of band representation. For example, we’ve been heavily influenced by Richard Lester’s representation of ‘The Beatles’ in his work on the brilliant music video for the album ‘A Hard Days Night’. On the other hand, we’ve decided not to follow the convention of a fictional narrative that drives many contemporary music videos in the indie genre. With regards to the representation of our band, we have taken inspiration from the likes of classic bands such as ‘Madness’, ‘The Monkees’ and ‘The Specials’. The music videos for these bands would rarely feature a narrative, but would instead provide the audience with a true and identifiable representation of the band. These bands are represented as familiar and ‘down to earth’ characters; laid back and very friendly. We realized this during preparation, and constructed a band that carries a very family friendly character. During the filming of the music video we made it as easy as possible for the band to feel comfortable on set. This was down to our extensive preparation. We made sure the filming process was flawless and smooth, allowing for the cast and ourselves to experiment with shots and editing techniques that try to experiment with testing the boundaries of contemporary music video conventions. For example, we edited the cuts to closely follow the pace of the song. We found this to be an uncommon editing process in the bands we took inspiration from in our contemporary indie genre.

Our digipak follows the same upbeat atmosphere we see in the music video. We took inspiration from albums such as ‘Blur best of’ that features a primary colour palette and use of split screen. We generally did not sway from advertising and representative conventions during the development of the digipak. Although it could be considered that due to our original, unconventional construct of the band’s character, we had created an unconventional representation of an unconventional band in the indie genre. We decided to oppose Dyer’s ‘Star Theory’ by portraying the band members to combat the idea of being ‘manicured’ by the music industry. The costumes and images used in the music video, digipak and website photos were straightforward and relatively simple to support this.

We closely followed marketing and promotion techniques of other bands in our genre and followed simple conventions when creating our website. We again created synergy with the other media formats by linking colour and atmosphere. We also promoted the band’s tour dates and included ‘News’ that exudes a sense of ambition and confidence. This promotion is filled with the cheeky, confident attitude that the song and music video are built on.

Our main product and our ancillary texts stemmed from and linked through the main themes of our initial mind-maps and lyrics analysis; the struggle and climb to success in the music industry, self-promotion and self-confidence, as well as the theme of young fun and cheekiness. Through visuals, as well as text, we tried to connect the two products in a clear and effective way. Our website was mainly used as a promotional tool for the band. Due to the fact that we worked very hard to represent both the struggle that the band are feeling throughout the song, as well as the fun and free nature of their personality, the music video worked very well at giving viewers a well-rounded and truthful representation of The Assist. This meant that our website did not have the heavy task of portraying the ‘real’ band as the video and lyrics to the song are already very raw and exposing. Most commonly, a website is a place to do extended research on the individual band members, as well as giving the viewer an opportunity to feel more connected to the artist. Our music video was successful in making each band member prominent and note-worthy, meaning that our website was an immediate and natural way for the viewer to become even more connected. We had a minimal layout for our website as we wanted it to be clear and easily accessible for our audience. We took inspiration from bands such as The Arctic Monkeys and The Specials when researching into our ancillary products. The concentration on the colour black, as well as bold and big text fonts was taken from our research as many similar bands used these traits throughout their own websites. These aspects helped to make our website more clear and easily accessible, working in collaboration with the clear and transparent representation that we see during the video.

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

A similar colour scheme of blues and oranges/reds, taken from the music video backdrops, is used throughout the website for The Assist. These colours were used on banners, buttons and throughout various photos to help create a clear theme for the band’s representation and to make that connection between our various products. The connotations of the colour blue often directly link to a sense of trust, loyalty, intelligence and dignity. We wanted to highlight this colour as a way to emphasize the band’s trust in themselves as they embark into breaking into the music industry. The colour red struck us as having a relationship with the sense of adventure. Throughout both products, we wanted to convey The Assist’s personality through their outgoing and adventurous nature. By using this colour we were able to carry this trait through both products. Finally orange carries the important connotation of warmth, energy, and excitement. These could perhaps be seen as the most important traits that are echoed throughout both the website and music video. It was important to us when thinking about representation that these traits were fully formed and noticeable throughout our products. We used promotional images of the band, most of which were taken directly from the music video. By taking screen shots of the video meant that we had a very effective, direct and clear tie between these two products. We promoted the band through our store page on the website. We designed various different logos which appeared on t-shirts, mugs, and iPhone cases, one of which appears at the end of the music video. This managed to effectively tie together the music video, the website, and also the band’s identity.

We used hyperlinks to social media sites such as twitter, Facebook, and instagram to direct our potential audience to a more personal level with the band. The main inspiration for our digipack was our music video, creating synergy throughout our main task and ancillary. All of the panels for our 6-side digipak were based on stills taken directly from the music video. We used the video as a promotional tool, allowing us space to tie over themes, photos and images for the digipak. Again, through photos and panels, we decided to stick to our familiar colour scheme of blues and oranges/reds. This not only effectively linked the album digipak to the website, but also directly hints towards the music video, creating a wider use of synergy. Inspired by Goodwin’s theory on the important link between lyrics and visuals, we incorporated the lyrics of the assist on the panels. We continued the idea of projection into our digipak with one of the panels. One of the main performance shots that we used was the sequence where the lyrics to the song were projected onto the main singer. We carried on this layering effect and decided to paste the transparent document of lyrics over one of the panel pictures. Although it is not a shot taken directly from the music video, a sense of familiarity and continuity is effectively presented in the digipak. We tried our best to continue the same atmosphere and tone throughout our main product and ancillary texts.

During the editing phase of our music video, we carried out various audience feedback sessions with several focus groups consisting of a wide range of people who had never seen the video before. This helped in giving us immediate feedback during the editing process, allowing us to always be tailoring our decisions towards the target demographic. Through research into other commendable indie-rock artists as well as researching more into our concept, we decided very early on that our target audience would preferably be ages 12 through to 25. We began the feedback process by interviewing a selected group of 16-18 year olds, giving us a direct source of feedback and suggestions from those who are positioned in the centre of our target audience bracket. Some of the first feedback we received was very positive. Many people liked the song and loved the video, highlighting words such as “happy”, “exciting”, and “enjoyable” we were confident that our video was beginning to have the right and desired affect on the audience. Words that became prominent such as “cute”, “likeable” and “fun” also highly re-enforced our trust in the decision to start our target audience at a younger age of 12 instead of the initial idea of 15+. Our younger feedback members emphasised a connection and comparison to younger and more ‘pop’ bands such as McFly and Busted, who rely as equally on their outgoing personalities and ‘TV friendly’ nature as they do on their music. We wanted our video to strongly portray The Assist band members as a charismatic group of boys who have no problem with exposing their personalities on camera, so this was a reassuring piece of information as well.

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

We learned many things from this younger focus group. For example, the younger ages seemed to really like the quick cuts and the more energetic parts of the video towards the end. This made us think a lot about the pace and whether we wanted to develop this popular convention of fast editing or whether we wanted to include more of ebb and flow as we had already begun to do. As well as this, many of them highlighted lyrics such as “mixed dance abilities”, urging us to think more about the importance of this lyric in our preparation and how we could visually portray it in the video. In terms of the digipak and website, we asked how well these products tied in with the music and the younger feedback groups seemed to want more colour. The bright, primary colours seemed to strongly link with this idea of youthful play, and according to the audience feedback, they would like to see more colours travelling throughout the different products. In addition to the younger audience feedback group, we held feedback sessions with two secondary focus groups. One of these was a group consisting of various older adults aged around 20-35. We hoped that by exploring the opinions of the older audience members, we could see whether they felt the same way about our initial feedback. Luckily, this age group was very captivated by the video so far. However, one of the main concerns that was highlighted was the fact that the nature of ‘mucking around’ and being silly was slightly too prominent in the second half of the video. From an older perspective, our choice to split this long song into two sections did not have the intended impact. However, to solve this slight confusion we were suggested to maybe start introducing the more wild and colourful sequences earlier on in the music video. After making these changes, we found that the older focus group reacted in a much more positive way. This particular focus group also highlighted a sense of nostalgia that they felt when listening to the song and particular music features that is carries. The song and representation of the band echoes many music legends, which is something that we wanted to be strong throughout the video. Due to the amazing positivity that we received about this age bracket making connections between songs from the 70s and 80s, we decided to widen the target audience age bracket. We realised that this song and video has a wider appeal that we initially thought so we decided to push the target age from 12 through to 30-40 years old.

Our other secondary focus group consisted of a selected group of people who are very musical. We interviewed musicians to see whether the authenticity of The Assist was communicated successfully. We found one common thought that was stressed to us during the focus group feedback session; it was suggested that we show more shots of the musicians. As the video progresses we purposefully veered away from the performance shots and concentrated on the more colourful and playful shots of the band members. However, we were told by this focus group that in their opinion, as the music build to a climax and the music becomes more skilfully complex, it would be much more impactful for that demographic for there to be a larger focus on the instruments and the musicians playing them. It was highly useful for us to take these comments on board and to again expand our demographic to a wider range of people.

We’ve utilised countless technological techniques throughout every stage of the creation of our advanced portfolio. During preparation and planning for our video we were certain that communication would be essential for us to make quick and successful progress. We created a facebook ‘chat’ group, a google drive and a dropbox for us to easily transport ideas and plan times for meetings. Our progress was very transparent and every member of the group was able to utilise these social media formats to update on any new ideas. During construction we created an in depth story board that annotated specific camera movements and subject movement for our music video. We used FCPX for the editing of our lip-sync tests, green screen tests and music video. During filming for the music video we used a myriad of different tools and kit that enhanced the look of our video. We used a manfrotto tripod with dolly attachment so that we could get fluid tracking shots of the band members. The dolly also provided for quick transportation of the tripod during filming. We had a main camera, the Canon 70D, and a Canon 700D for extra footage. Both cameras proved to hold unique footage from varied perspectives, with the former following more traditional music video filming conventions, such as establishing shots and still camera, and the latter attempting to experiment with new angles and footage speed. Props were essential to our music video. We had an extensive checklist, consisting of cornstarch, food colouring, backdrops, confetti, paddling pool and much more. Again, our initial foundation of having very clear communication and planning allowed us to experiment with many different technological aspects during the production of our video. What stood out most was our greenscreen experiments; we were extremely impressed with what we had created by only using FCPX and a green screen cut-out of a guitar. We also used a variety of prime and zoom lenses during filming, which allowed us to experiment with wide-angle shots.

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

During the editing of the video we experimented with an endless range of animations. For example, we meticulously went through different options of ‘textures’ that could be used as a screen over the greenscreen cut out of the guitar. We also experimented with different transitions and speed ramps that were used to enhance the energetic feel of our film. For example, we created different speed versions of our audio track and asked the cast to mime to the song at different speeds. This then allowed us to either speed up or slow down the footage to fit the original track, creating a very interesting effect. Although, upon showing the audience feedback group we decided to remove this effect as it did not ‘match the rest of the video’. During editing we even established our own successful editing techniques that will be present in our future work for years to come. For example, we developed our own ‘bridge’ technique that followed three clips in a ‘full circle’ editing style. The production of our Digipak closely followed the rubric we had set for ourselves once we had finished the music video. We used photoshop to edit the pictures into the template and create the band logo. We used Wix for the production of our website and again followed the colour palette present in the music video to create a clear congruency between the different media formats. We originally attempted using the portfolio website, Format.com, but later decided on Wix due to its customizability. During the fine tuning, evaluation part of our work we constantly kept in contact with different audience feedback groups so that we could maintain an outside perspective on our work. For example, it was unanimously agreed that our original Digipak did not have the same energetic and carefree feel of its contemporaries. As a result, we changed our Digipack to the final result we have now.

By Hannah OwenCANDIDATE NUMBER: 2333