Mart's Evaluation - Question Two

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

We have maintained a clear image and theme throughout our campaign by keeping everything very similar. For example, our Digipak and Webpage photo shoot was taken when we were filming so we didn’t have to organise another date to meet up for a shoot and that the actors were all in their costumes and would be ‘in the zone’ when it came to acting as our artists Jenny and Johnny.


Our digipak and webpage uses images that appear in the music video and vice versa. This pulls all the different pieces of work together and makes it into one grouped piece instead of feeling like separate work. By interrelating the webpage, Digipak and video it creates a consistent image of the band and that is good for continuity so the audience know what to expect and Jenny and Johnny will be able to use those relations to good effect as it may become a sort of catchphrase or image for them.

A shot without any effects that is used for the album cover

Jenny and Johnny use a shot from their video 'Big Wave' on the album cover

The main purpose of the webpage is for communication to occur between the artists and their fans. This is crucial as the fans want to feel connected and appreciated for the money that they spend on the band. If there is no communication then the fan base would start to become disloyal as the fans need to feel part of the group not just fans on the outside. By placing Twitter and Facebook feeds onto the webpage makes the communication very easy for both Jenny and Jonny to advertise tours and new singles/albums and for the fans to ask questions and communicate between themselves.

The Digipak has to be attractive to the eye as it needs to stand out on the shelf to sell records. In my opinion our Digipak is very eye catching and is appropriate to the song and the artists. It is also very noticeable for the fans to see when buying Jenny and Johnny related merchandise and some of the artwork on the Digipak could be used for merchandise such as posters or clothing designs.

Jenny and Johnny use a image from their music video to advertise their shop

Synergy, which can be defined as two things working together to gain a result that couldn't happen independently is very much a key factor when deciding on aspects of the music video, webpage and Digipak. The synergy between them all has to be there as without it, none of them would be individually successful. This is because the the music video may only get made if the song is popular and for the song to be popular the band has to have a good media image. This is where the website plays into the cycler flow of media where one media product interwebs into other media products to achieve the best results.

As mentioned in the planning and research stages of the production, I found out that the best webpage’s are those that are simple and design and heavily feature the artists images in prominent positions so they are all recognisable. By featuring the band images so much this shows the audience exactly who are in the band and what the feel of the artists is. Another example of synergy is keeping appearance looks similar. If Gene Simmons came onto stage without any makeup on or was pictured without makeup the audience wouldn’t know how to react or they might not even know that it is Gene Simmons due to the change of image.

Gene Simmons with and without make up. Recognisable consistent styling is needed.

Our Digipak and webpage compared well to the Digipak’s and webpages of similar artists. Our Digipak and webpage are very simple in their design but are very effective as they show off the artists in the best possible way and they tie in all of the different products. 

Question 1

Our music video= Jenny and Johnny 'Switchblade'

-See music video in a diferent blog post

Our Artist Offical music video= Jenny and Johnny 'Big Wave'

Jenny and Johnny 'Big Wave' Video link

Rivalry artist= Best Coast 'Boyfriend'

When looking at these indie folk music videos the conventions we expect to find in these music videos are performance base, natural locations, for a relax/unique image from the artist, a quirky twist and maybe narrative. Our music video shows similar characteristics of both of these music video through our genre style of music. Another convention inside alternative indie videos are references to sex, drugs and alcohol to show an exciting life style.

 

Showing these conventions of the alcohol in our music video.

One of the first things I recognized between the music video was the location and lighting of the mise en scene. Even though in ‘Boyfriend’ and ‘Big Wave’ music video, are shot in America and you can see this through the is different climate and objects (like the cars), compared to our music video shot in the UK. But they all had a similar atmosphere between them all, showing outdoors natural places in natural light like you would see in an indie folk music video.

Because of having these outdoor locations the costumes are very different, as ‘Jenny and Johnny’ and ‘Best coat’ they both have a vintage rock and roll style and have gone for costumes that are more summery in these videos. The girls are in dresses and wearing bright and colourful colours. As America is warmer and probably shot in summer time they could use that convention of wearing more colours. But as ours was shot in December it shows how the weather can control the costumes, as we had to ask our actors to wear warmer clothing. If we shot this in summer we would ask our actors to wear summer clothing. But I think our costume showed a nice twist of Jenny and Johnny characters being English.   

As our song is slow and more relaxed (not upbeat) the length of some of our shots were quite long to an averaged shot length of music videos. But this suited the music as it being mostly acoustic you don’t want the shot changing constantly between a long verse. Where as ‘Boyfriend’ have an average 2-4 second shots but because this is constant through it makes some of the shots look longer, which as the tempo of the song is a steady 4/4 count (not to fast) with a constant beat is a appropriate with there style of song. Where as in ‘Big Wave’ they’ve got shot that are less then a second as they’ve got so many different effect going off this has kept the viewer more interested by having shorter shots. 

The use of editing effects in these videos shows different styles and use of effects. As in ‘Boyfriend’ they don’t use any effects apart from a slight hazy filter effect in the shots to make it look more vintage. 

Where as in ‘Big wave’ there are so many different effects by having loads of different coloured filters and effects of pixelate and having slowed down shots. And they combined more then one effect together. This was effective as they made some shots more interesting by having a filter over the shot.

They also used some animation in there music video as the snake appears on the women’s back in a drawn on effect.

The use of our effects is completely different, as we’ve used green screen effect. Which I feel, we’ve challenged the conventions, as I haven’t seen many music video’s future this use of a photographic image moving and it shows unrealism. And especially of a photo being burnt as well, which works really, well as people in college asked us how it was done. We were going to use a filter over some of the past parts in our music video but we didn’t have time to experiment with the filters as we ran out of time.      

In our music video it was important that we showed a love story as we had that advantage of the artist being in a relationship (Jenny and Johnny), our actors had a strong connection to the role of Jenny and Johnny as they were in a relationship too. Shots had to include both of them in together showing their relationship.  

The difference between our music video is we had narrative of a love story as well as performance base of just of our actors, where as in ‘Big wave’ it was more performance base and showed them being in a relation (no narrative). But in ‘Boyfriend’ it had a loose narrative of someone getting married and the band performance overlapping each other as the band performing at the wedding. (Best coast had the same idea as  Paolo Nutini did in his music video ‘Candy’ which I did my textual analysis on).

Mart's Focus Group Feedback Wordle Art

I have used Wordle.net to create a 'word cloud' from the replies that we got from the focus group feedback questionaires. As it shows the most common recurring word was 'suitable' and 'good'. This shows that our music video was successful and the target audience likes our efforts.

Wordle says our music video is good and suitable!

Mart's Evaluation Question Four

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

Digipak – After planning ideas as a group as to how we wanted our Digipak to look like we settled on a picture of Jenny and Johnny together on a bench that showed their unity at that time and together as a group, seeing as their name is Jenny & Johnny we thought it would be strange to only show one member on the cover so all our ideas had to involve both of them on the cover.

Initially I created a picture to use as the front cover art that we have since used on the inside of the Digipak. This shows Jenny sat on a bed with her head in her hands looking visibly upset. Johnny is shown lying behind Jenny ‘flat out’ appearing to be sleeping after a heavy night out drinking which is referenced in the video. The picture had a variety of effects on to make it slightly unusual which is something that Jenny & Johnny are.

The text of the Jenny & Johnny on the Digipak isn’t a clip art text. After searching through various internet font websites, for example dafont.com we couldn’t decide on a suitable font as they were all either too formal for the fun characteristics of Jenny & Johnny or just inappropriate to use. We finally reached a decision and choose to create our own colourful font which I think works really well with the rest of the Digipak. The letters are all individual and were cut out of different magazines. They were then pieced together the different case of the letters, some upper and some lower show that the conventions of typing in all lower case or all upper case doesn’t have to be done.

Magazine lettering created our font

The inspiration behind the artwork on the Digipak was a dinner plate with spaghetti on toast on the plate with a dinner cloth underneath the cloth. Initially the cloth and plate weren’t going to be included and by chance I took the pictures of the spaghetti on the plate with a striped table cloth underneath it. Even though there wasn’t an intention for the plate or cloth it worked really well and Bronwyn and Beth liked the shot. Bronwyn then added the knife and fork along with a different table cloth as it the original one didn’t fill out the shot/cover.

Inside of Digipak. Very homely approach it like the video.

The editing of the Digipak was really easy as we had Photoshop to use on a Mac. Photoshop has lots of different tools that make it really easy to create professional looking material which hopefully we have achieved. For our research we looked on Amazon for the other artists Digipak’s. This allowed us to browse through many Digipak’s with ease without going to a music shop and physically looking at the Digipak’s. Additionally if we had looked in shops we wouldn’t have been able to look inside the case as they all now have security plastic casings around them.

Webpage – The webpage was created on iWeb on the Mac’s in the Mac Suite where I am now. In our group for the song Switchblade by Jenny and Johnny it was decided that I had the lead role in designing and creating the webpage. For the initial research I looked Jenny and Johnny’s official webpage, which has a plain blog layout which is slightly boring. I then looked at other artists webpage’s such as Florence and the Machine, The Fratellis, The Futureheads and Wye Oak. These other artists webpage’s shown me that the webpage didn’t have to be ram packed with different things and that simple was the best but to tweak a boring set layout and have different things that make it stand out from the rest as the webpage is one of few things that the artist can show the consumer that will differ them for the competition if their music is similar to other artists. 

Wye Oak's webpage is simple and very effective in my opinion.

From this I designed the webpage to have lots of pictures of our artist as at the end of the day they are what essentially sell the records as it is all about them. The artists or in our case the actors appear to sit on different words on the webpage to give the webpage a fun feel, to stride away from a formal looking plain layout blog like Jenny and Johnny have presently as their webpage. We had a sort of two layer approach to our webpage, the base layer had the table cloth with the name of the song partially hidden and the artists name around the main layer of the webpage. The letters of the song name and the artists name are in the same style that was used on the Digipak to keep the same conventions and look of that.

Our webpage adds a fun factor which Jenny and Johnny portray in their own products

For our webpage I used Photoshop to make the different images of the artists and the main back images. This is because I can use Photoshop quite well and if I were to make it on iWeb it wouldn’t look as good as it does now. The different tools on Photoshop made it really easy to achieve the look and feel that we wanted to create.

Overall – The online media technology has enabled us to distribute our project to a wide audience by allowing us to have an online blog that made it easy for us as a group to keep and share ideas and work on the project when we weren’t in class time. This means that we have done lots of outside work that have been crucial in making our music video. We had a Facebook group that we used to share ideas and communicate on lots of different ideas. Below are two screenshots of that wall.

Mart's Evaluation - Question One

Question One: In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms of convention of real media products?

In our music video Switchblade by Jenny & Johnny, we have used the conventions of an indie music video. These conventions are the use of low key lighting which we used while filming the house scenes. By not having bright light on our actors it created a casual not in your face kind of image. Other conventions are the use straight cuts, by keeping straight cuts in our video the pace of the song was kept at a steady rate. If we had been using different transitions the video wouldn’t have flown to the mood we created.

We added subtle changes to other conventions of indie music as our song had a folk twist to it. In folk videos, the artists appear very comfortable in front of the camera; this is something that our actors had trouble with and was something that was picked up in the feedback (question 3). By filming sections without them knowing the camera was on meant we filmed some casual shots of them without looking nervous.

In our video we have included many different shots, for example there are close ups as a note, mid close ups, long shots in the park which work really nice when filmed down the covered walk way. These are all conventions of indie music videos, the idea of the audience watching a band practice or similar is something that is used a lot in indie music videos. The image of a big scale production is rarely used as that doesn’t go along with the casual image of indie music.



A nicely framed shot with perspective angles.

However my favourite shot of the video was as talked about in my 'mini review' was the hand held section in the house with the spaghetti that included a rather nice point of view shot. We used a few handheld shots that worked really well and fit in with the music. We thought about filming everything on a tripod but the effect of handheld shots gave the audience the thought that those shots were being filmed by the actors while having fun which was a element we wanted to create aswell as the love story mood.

Point of view shot

The mise en scene of our actors and locations were easily achieved as Jenny & Johnny appear to like filming in natural surroundings while looking natural themselves so there wasn't any need for snazzy locations or over the top costumes. This is because their music is that of a homely feel, this way putting on a big show wouldn't have been appropriate for this genre or song. The mise en scene of our actor’s figure expressions we thought about. While our actors we playing their guitars by having them lightly head banging and having a uncaring facial expression. This is because they know that what the song is leading to at the end. The overall appearance of our actors was created by wearing black, red and dark blue coloured clothes. By having them wearing boots instead of skater shoes the convention of indie music footwear was changed but as the band have a slight folk image to them the use of boots created that look. 

Our Digipak doesn’t conform to the conventions of a usual indie Digipak as our actors are seen on the front and back of the cover. We used our actors image on the cover to illustrate the relationship between them which wouldn’t have been noticeable had we used for example the inside covers of the Digipak. Initially the front cover was going to be the CD insert cover. This shows the image of the spaghetti reading “Jenny and Johnny” on the toast. This is a feature in our video during a house scene and plays with a lyric “dine out on a dollar”.

Our webpage shows the artists or in our case the actors appear to sit on different words on the webpage to give the webpage a fun feel, to stride away from a formal looking plain layout blog like Jenny and Johnny have presently as their webpage. We had a sort of two layer approach to our webpage, the base layer had the table cloth with the name of the song partially hidden and the artists name around the main layer of the webpage. The letters of the song name and the artists name are in the same style that was used on the Digipak to keep the same conventions and look of that.

Jenny and Johnny - Big Wave Music Video


In the video linked above the location sat in the street in front of the car is used quite regularly throughout the duration of the song. We used this idea by having our Johnny sat on a bench in the park and we came back to this shot throughout our video. In this song, Jenny is the one who is singing the most and she is seen in various costumes in multiple locations. This is something that we couldn't do due to logistics and other reasons. However the locations and  costumes that we used are similar to those that Jenny and Johnny use themselves. There a few similarities in the two videos. Jenny and Johnny are known for having a very good friendship and one that is intimate. This is shown in shots of them kissing and laying on the floor together. We were lucky that are actors were in a relationship so they were happy to do kissing scenes.

Our actor playing the chorus and looking away from the camera

Johnny looking away from the camera while mid chorus

In this shot Johnny is singing the chorus line and is looking away from the camera, we tried to replicate this shot and it works quite well. The overall effect of not looking into the camera is something that we wanted to emphasise on as Jenny and Johnny do not look down the camera very often so to have them doing it in our video wouldn't carry on their conventions.

Jenny singing to Johnny in a shot together

Johnny singing to Jenny in a shot together

For this shot we continued with using conventions that Jenny and Johnny use on a frequent basis in their music videos. As they are a duo they do a lot of shots together even if only one of them is singing. For our video we felt we had to include some shots of them together to carry on and maintain the couple image. Jenny and Johnny’s performance image is very biker like.

Biker image while performing

In our video we didn’t want to portray the biker image as we wanted a different tone to that for our song. The tone we wanted was the love image and this is often seen in a biker image as they are often seen to be big and scary. By having casual clothing with biker boots this used a small section of their biker image while with keeping with the indie love look. 
While creating the webpage using iWeb, I was unsure of how to add hyperlinks onto the page as we had imported a flat image from Photoshop as I found working in Photoshop easier. The only downside is that I had to create all the links in iWeb. I looked on Youtube for a tutorial and followed the following one and the hyperlinks worked.