Evaluation Question 4- How have I used digital technologies in the research, planning and creation of my products.

In the following video we discuss how we have used digital technologies in the research, planning and creation of our products. We discuss the website, the digipak and filming the music video:

We initially did some research online, on YouTube, into music videos and decided upon a style of artist we wanted to focus on. We also used our mobile phones to film audience feedback from our pre-production narrative. This was the ‘emo’ subculture which is associated with the Post-Hardcore genre. From this we decided to look online at different artists such as Pierce the Veil and Sleeping with Sirens to inspire the star image further. We noticed that a lot of the fans of these artists tend to be quite angry at the world, society and parents and are alienated and disaffected from society. Therefore we decided we needed to incorporate disaffection as a narrative strand in our music video as it seemed to be something that came across on many of the different websites and fan forums that we looked at during our research. We also noted the costume of many of the artists we researched. They were dressed in dark clothing symbolically representing their anger and animosity towards the society they felt wasn’t enabling them to get ahead and so they turned to music to rebel against society and parents. 

From this we decided to incorporate this in the narrative and performance elements of our music video and looked at locations. We researched online a fantastic location in Brighton called The Upper Beading Cement Works, which unfortunately they wouldn’t let us film in so therefore we researched other locations in London which were closer to home and easier for us to get to. We came across the Graffiti Tunnel in Waterloo, London, which fit the idea of anti-authoritarianism and rebelliousness due to the connotations and associations of graffiti. This is where we filmed the performance element of the video.

When we filmed our animatic we did it differently to AS where we just made a storyboard. But during A2 we cut it to the beat of the song, which helped us notice that we didn’t have enough shots. We decided from this to add a few more to make the video to extend our narrative strands and incorporate a love gone wrong element which we also felt would help target our audience.

I used a semi-professional prosumer camera. It was a Sony E X 5. Its portability was vitally important to us as we were transporting it around London. In addition we could put adaptable lens on it to create depth of field. This was vitally important for shots when we wanted to get the entire band in focus when they were standing a distance apart from each other so we could portray the anger on their faces.

For our music video we filmed it really creatively. We filmed it with lots of cutaways, close ups, wide shots and mid shots. We filmed it over a two-day period. This was far more developed than at AS. We went out for a third day of filming after we showed it as a test screening to our audience. The audience fed back to us and told us that the narrative didn’t quite hang together and it needed more close-ups of the lead singer showing his animation as during the performance filming day we filmed lots of shots of him flipping his hair and this looked really good on film and so we went out and filmed again. We wouldn’t have known this if we hadn’t gotten our feedback from our audience test screening.

We then edited it. We used a new updated Adobe Premier Pro unlike last year where we used a much older, out-dated version. The first time we edited our shot duration was too long but after gaining audience feedback from our test-screening, we concluded that our shots were too long and they need to be more fast paced as it didn’t match the genre of the music.

We also tried to create a theme through all three products. We wanted the digipak, music video and website to all link together through the theme of graffiti. We chose the image of graffiti as after some online research we discovered that the ‘emo’ subculture has stereotypes of anger, anti-authoritarian and rebellion around it and we discovered that graffiti also has these connotations. This image of graffiti also incorporated the organic feel. We used dark colours which matches the conventions of the Post-Hardcore genre as well as promoting the star image and appealing to the target audience

Wix was a new software to us and we learnt how to use it to create our website. We looked online and took inspiration from other artist’s website to fit into the Post-Hardcore genre. We used the digital technologies that wix afforded us in order to create our own digital promotion of the band.

We used photoshop to create the digipak. This was also a new software to us. We did some research into other similar artist’s digipaks and took inspiration from them. we manipulated image, distorted the size and included fonts and colours to reflect the genre and star image and from this we created the design of graffiti that is symbolic of our bands attitudes.

Through our research, we noticed that vinyl is coming back and becoming popular again and so we incorporated a vinyl in the merch section of the website as we noticed other bands such as Neck Deep and All Time Low had also been selling vinyl as well as CD’s and downloads on their websites. Without my online research into this I would have never known this was having such a resurgence. Vinyl is part of the organic process as it is only in more rocky bands.

I also made a Vinyl as we realised that this is what our target audience demands, Also, our competitors had also made a vinyl such as pierce the veil:

How i made progress when first using digital technology when making my digipak

From the photoshoot, I collected the individual photos of

 the band. I cropped them to get half their faces; having The Strokes as an inspiration. After cropping the picture, I edited the pictures so the background would all be black and white. I did this so their faces and image stood out so people can start to recognise who the band are as they enter a new market. 

After cropping the images, I was able to draw around the band members so the background would become a seperate image, and then I would click on image, and desaturate the picture, so the background would go from coloured to black and white.