Saturday, 9 March 2013

Closing Statement

Over the course of this year I have learnt many great ideas and have developed a great understanding about Media Studies as a whole. The concept and advance stages of Media has helped me developed key skills that I can later on use in life. Over time I believe I have improve dramatically on my working skills in terms of theoretical and practical work as well. This has provided better organisational skills and clearer evidence to planning my work. This whole project has opened up a spectrum in my understandings to be able to work creatively and how working in a group helps perfect and develop ideas. 

I hope you have enjoyed my blog and my demonstration and understanding of how hard I have worked, and what I have presented over the past several months!
Thank you! 


Wednesday, 6 March 2013

Evaluation Question 1 :In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Over the time in our making of our music video and digipak for our group, my group and I had developed an understanding of what a good music video is. As a group, we all had roles to undertake in order to save time and each individual including myself contributed unique ideas to each of our tasks. We had to go through the work the tasks, creating drafts, and draft copies of our ideas, in order to conform to our generic convention of our primary focus into pop/punk genre of music. We had to find the connecting layouts, correct colour to suit the convention of pop/punk. In the music video we included a split screens affect to the video relating it to the 'Thats what you get' video by Paramore
With our team work we did a wide range of research that was conducted throughout the few months of the making of our music video. We explored a wide range of bands and artists to get an insight of what we needed to include for our music video. Fast cuts and shaky camera action was used thoroughly in many  examples of music videos we analyse. Such as 'Paramore - That's what you get', this is a band was our main example. The fast moving, energetic wave of the atmosphere in the music video was created to connect the audience/viewer to feel a deviant type of attitude to cause and become rebellious. 
Thoroughly observing our example band 'Paramore' we had base our music video around one of their biggest hits ' Misery Business'. We took some unique ideas from this music videos and put it in our own, for example the idea of a popular 'dream girl' in the 'Misery business' video, made us come up with a creative idea. This idea had escalated making us come up with the idea of two 'dream girls' in the music video. We fitted around comedic values to our music video so that it catches the audience eye, changing their prospective from a normal pop/punk music of expected adrenaline rage, to something funny including practical jokes and surprises for the audience to find funny. 


We also included the typical popular 'dream boy' where he was the main character where the two 'dream girls' really wanted him. This created a 'love triangle' between the 3 of them, and in referencing to 'Misery Business' it involved a lot of envious values, where the two girls in our music video would go against each other. The idea of using comedic values is to simultaneously include the rage of pop/punk music as well as creating a twist to it, so that it proves that there is a independent feel to the music video being our own and not like other pop/punk music video.

We noticed after analysing so many of their music videos, they base all their music videos around the album. For example their 'Riot' album, there was a fair use of the black and white in the colour schemes. The close up of live instruments were being presented on many pop/punk videos that we analysed for many other bands, electric guitar, drum kit, bass guitar, amps, microphone and possibly keyboard are frequently used in the music videos, as well as our own.
We particularly chose pop/punk because of the value it gives off to our everyday society, as it had branched out from heavy metal through pop music. Through lyrics artists have been able to voice out their opinions of society, as well as created the rebellion form through music, growing long, illegal substance abuse in drugs/alcohol creating a disobedient way of life. The way they dress also has an influence of everyday life, not wanting to look like anyone else, but creating a unique style of identification to themselves, for example Metallica one of the worlds biggest metal bands are known for their leather tight outfits and disobedient behaviour. 
Through the lyrics of many artists and bands they're really against society's beliefs, most lyrics are political and against society. But through the relationship between fans and artists of today, the the storyline with their lyrics tends to be everyday situations of teen relationships and revengeful thoughts of an artist in a band. 

The song we have chosen to work with in our music video is 'Deathwish' by Mimi Soya. The lyrics in this music video was implying that the girl had a deathwish, that she wanted to be with this guy, but she bring 'badness' or 'death' upon him. 
This song allowed us to contrast between our music video and following up with the lyrics itself. We used comedic values to the lyrics as we contrasted the music video to make it funny involving 2 girls pranking each other. 
The technical conventions of keeping dark lighting for the pop/punk style of video was not kept in our music video, we wanted to be different and change up the idea.

We tried to keep the same conventions of a pop/punk music video into our music video by using dark lighting in certain scenes, keeping some of the generic conventions in a typical pop/punk music video. Within the symbolic conventions with the band freqently using the live instruments we felt that was necessary, to prove that we are passionate about playing the music. The ideology behind a typical pop/punk music video is the setting of out going and rebellious areas. We set it in our college and used the symbolic conventions of  it being a rebellious type of environment.
We also had to create a website for our band to cover the understanding about our band itself, from our pictures of the band members, tour dates to when and where we're playing live. There is also information presented individually about the artist too. We based our band very closely to Paramore having the lead singer as a girl and the rest of the band as guys. We took many other generic genre conventions into context too. It was not just about pop/punk but we did research into other genres too such as hip hop and pop. We learnt throughout that they base it around one genre. But with pop/punk it is closely ranged around darkness and sometimes colour with the music video. We looked at hip hop examples of website such as artists like Kanye West and Jay-Z. We compared these artists to our reference band of Paramore. There band page was very based around their fans and a consistent update on their news. Paramore try build a connection between their fans and artists themselves. This creates a sense of closeness between the fans and the band artists. 

We made social networking a priority to our band page, we connected Facebook & Twitter to it. This related to the idea of constantly connection fans and bands together because social networking today has become very popular, keeping up to date with events and contacting friends.

Through the production on making our Digipak, our original idea was suppose to be 6 panels. We made two drafts trying to find the right way to present our idea. We took the generic convention idea of  rubiks cube. Towards the end we decided that it was much easier if we stuck to a 4panel digipak, having a panel of pictures of the band, the CD compartment, inside and outside cover. 

To conclude it all, the pop/punk genre isn't always stuck to one generic genre but can alter itself to a bigger understanding of not just dark and rock music, but it can be random and face different ideology. As a pop/punk group you did not have to stick and conform to the idea of dark clothing of the typical symbolic conventions of any other pop/punk band. But instead we contrasted the affects of darkness and put our own creative touch into it. 

Tuesday, 5 March 2013

Final Music Video

Final Website

http://gaarongary.wix.com/theformat

PLEASE DO NOT VIEW ON MACS' SINCE THIS DOES NOT WORK ON MACS.


Our final Digipak Design


Our final Digipak design we have kept the original idea of all vibrant colours. We've used 4 panels with the band inside picture,  CD holder, and kept the original idea of the the rubik's cube being on the  front cover. It also has a spine that is how you can tell the difference between the draft and new digipak. 

I have uploaded 2 images of the digipak . It shows one with a spine panel and one without, it also shows what it would look like with and without the CD. 

Saturday, 16 February 2013

The Digipak



This is one of the drafts we made for our Digipak, it shows us the inside CD case, the back of the CD with all the track names.

We use the idea of a rubiks cube as it has many different colours and it shows the uniqueness of each individual band member.
In the comparison to our draft this is much more colourful and lively.
It represents the band member colour individually as well as creating a nice vibrant vibe to our band.

The brainstorm

Colour schemes ideas

Band Logo

Sunday, 27 January 2013

DigiPak

This is the example fo our Digipak idea
it ahs the back and front cover and side analysis idea including all our songs.
The use of colour we have used on here are all dark colours that show the punk/pop/rock genre in our band.
We have sued cloudy smoke idea to our album covers to create a dark mystical effect.






Friday, 25 January 2013

Drawn/Draft version to our website

Here are images of the draft version of our website. It includes the home page, a tour date page, the band page, photo page and music page. 
Here is the drawn version of the homepage, it has the large logo of the band name itself, 'the format' with the band on the front page. It has a set of icon photos of the band individually. 








This is the music page, also having the band name in the front, with our album covers, the information and hyperlinks to our music videos
This is the photo page, where it has individual photos of the band members, and the band photos itself. We also have a tour page where it includes the tour dates of where we're playing next. 




The band page had information about the band members individually about us all. We have our own unique icon for information about the artists.