Evaluation

Pendulum Greatest Hits

Digi PackBy Jack Burton

Question 1 : Video

Our research into Pendulums music videos showed us that Pendulum were not like many other Drum andBass artists in the industry and have formed their own sub genre. In their videos we could see that they use dark colours and light colours to represent good and bad, which we used in our music video with what the characters where wearing.There are also lots of close ups of the main vocalist which we used camerawork for, using medium close ups to close ups so we could follow the same technique they use in their videos. We used ideas from lotsof Pendulum videos we incorporated them into our videos into our storyboards.

We followed a narrative in our music video. Most pendulum videos have a narrative based around them and from our research analysis our audience wanted the performer to be in the actual video as well as the performing band shots. This worked out well as Pendulum videos have shots of the band in the video, sometimes the shots are to do with the narrative story but others change to a cut away of another shot. I incorporated this into the story board and the video so we had the main vocalist walking in the narrative story, trying to help the Protagonist and was also playing the band shots.

The colour scheme is black and this is incorporated into the background as it isa plain colour. The colour schemes werethought out from watching all of the pendulum videos. Lots of colours have been used in the clothing and how I used a bit of colour correction in some of the band shots.

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

Question 1 : Video

You could say that I have developed how pendulum have originally done there videos as I have used lots of there ideas and put them in my video and developed the ideas. Pendulums song crush was a big inspiration in the making of the my music video along with the island Part 1. In Crush a man kills a women who he thought was his girlfriend but he was just in love with her, and anywhere he saw her she would be with him, further into the video you see that she was with another man and the protagonist had psychological problems. This is like our video our protagonist thought he was being followed by a stranger, but he finds out at the end it is himself. This shows that his bad side has caught up with him and this is what we wanted to portray. This is also shown in the main colour of the digi pack as the green is the good colour inside you and the brow/burgundy is the evil that can catch up with you. I wanted the Protagonist to wear light clothes to show how he changed and is now good but still has the same trousers as the Antagonists as it shows that his sins have not yet been cleansed which is an idea took from another video which is very much based on sci fi which is called Propane nightmares. At the end of this a black cloud takes all the sins away, white is a pure colour that is why none of our characters wear full white.

Bright colour shows the good inside.

Darker outer shell shows the badness that still is portrayed by him.

Question 1 : Digi PackThis is the final product for the digi pack this follows conventions of lots of the work for pendulum. It uses lots of the colour schemes and font that they use in their own albums. I learnt a lot from making the digi pack, about how much work goes in to it and the amount of detail you need to go into. At the end of the process I like the look of the digi pack, I think it gives a new look to Pendulum's original album artwork and it was good to incorporate lots ofthe skills I learnt in AS and some at A2. The digi pack research help me understand how I wanted the layout of the digi pack to look and working in a team we worked out what we where going to do with just little catch up sessions about 2 minutes long just to update each other who was doing which part of the designs. Something I learnt this year as I did last is team skills and getting on with work so the work gets done. I think the digi pack follows conventions of a standard Pendulum album artwork as we wanted to follow the structure they do, but as we where working with a pendulum product there aren't set boundaries.

You can see in the pictures that we use forms and conventions of pendulums album art covers. It has a track list and the brand who owns it which is warner music. It also gives ideas into what the song is about. Sci fi, electronically made music correlates with the electrically made digi pack and also psychological.

Question 1 : Digi Pack

This is the centre of the digi pack this is where the DVD and CD are going. The reason for the plain design is that the CD and DVD that goes into them are colourful.It also make it easier for the audience to distinguish the CD and DVD without further text to read and other contrasting colours.

The CD and DVD where designed to stand out and even though they look outlandish they are really eye grabbing as I decided to ask people if they thought it looked good and they said it grabbed their attention. This means our audience research was right as I asked teenagers. This taught me that audience research is necessary as it really does sell your product.

Question 1 : Magazine/ Poster

This is the Poster/magazine article that we produced it follows lots of the posters from Pendulum events and lots of different magazine articles they have been in. It stands out because of the colours and as it is a greatest hit album it would appeal even more to the audience as it is all of the greatest songs they have produced. The text cleverly uses words from the music video and uses them to sell the product. The text tries and fits into normal pendulum text it looks bold and metallic so gives extra detail so it is aesthetically pleasing. Helping do the poster helped me how to analyse posters and break them down so I could make this poster with the help from my group mates. This poster follows forms andConventions of real media products as it lookslike a normal poster for Pendulum.

Question 2How Effective is the combination of your main product and the ancillary texts ?

The digi pack so far has followed forms and conventions as all the products interlink. They do so by colour. The colour scheme throughout has been thought out, the front cover of the cd pack gives you an insight into the depth of detail we put into the colour scheme.

The poster and all other ancillary texts are working together after feedback from class mates they said that everything fits together. The electronically made texts and picture goes along side the sort of electronic music which makes it stand out more. They are similarbecause it follows the conventions of pendulums ancillary texts.

The use of all the colours from the different album and videos is good as it is a greatest hits album you take things from each album to create a great one, which is what we have achieved here.

The colour in the centre is green which is the colour of the top of the good protagonist. This shows that you are good on the inside. The maroon/purple colour is one of the outer shells which is the colour of the bad antagonist. All this was thought out and subconsciously the audience might pick up onto this fact.

Question 2 Having a DVD on the album is great ancillary text as many people like to watch the video while watching the music. The song which is one of the best know has its video on the DVD which is Witchcraft. The text on the Poster references the song to promote the ingle bysaying “Hold your colours against the wall and immerse yourself in Pendulums greatest hits.” This references one of the albums and a song which helps sell the product. The audience also like music videos due to our research so the fan base is there to buy the products.

The video has lots of mysteries it lets the audience interpret what is happening and what it could mean. This is also seen in the digi pack for the colour scheme.

The three products re working as on to create a product that can sell well together. The black and white contrast with the CD and DVD. If the products where sold separately they wouldn't sell as well.

The psychedelic look about the interior of the digi pack correlates with the video to the psychological theories in the videos. This also shows the sci fi feel to pendulums videos therefore follows the forms and conventions.

Question 3● I got audience feedback from my questionnaire which firstly was to find our target audience. This helped a lot as it

helped me find the audience that I wanted to aim the product to. Initially the feedback helped decide what we wanted

to put into the music video but after speaking to people we figured out what we wanted to put into the digi pack. I used

Facebook and YouTube to gain further knowledge into our audience. We filmed a couple of our target audience and it

helped us define our search into what to make the digi pack and video look like. Using Facebook helped me gain a

larger audience and that made the audience findings larger. I found that the audience helped in finding different

aspects of what our audience wanted to see to make the video better, having this feedback made us have some

critical changes but these changes where for the good of the video as the finished product looked good.

● Every lesson after I had edited more of the sections I would screen the bits that I did to my group and some of my

class mates. The feedback I gained was great as they would describe what I could change and tiny tweaks.

● Some audience preferences was when it was in the band shots they thought it would be better to have darker lighting

and in the hiding shots. We used this information and changed the story board to fit this in. The audience liked to see

the band in the video we incorporated this into a cameo where the Protagonist is asking for help. This shot was

important as I hoped that the audience might think it was a real thing that happened to the band member so they

wrote a song about it.

● There is lots of underlying secrets in this video and after watching them we hoped the audience would understand as

when we where informing our class on our pitch we got feedback to use some more ideas from the pendulum videos.

I listened to this and we had a brain storm about new ideas. The pitch was great for receiving feedback as we told

everyone about our video the feedback as well as new ideas helped me cut some things out like the flips and some of

the jumping over things shot in the storyboard as it wouldn’t fit into the drum and bass genre.

Question 3The video gained most feedback overall as we asked more people and posted it more places than the finished digi pack and poster. YouTube was the best feedback source we posted the video as a link from Facebook to YouTube this gave use two places to get the feedback we needed. We also showed all the class and teachers and I showed another class with my friend was in and all the feedback was positive. A Piece of feedback I got from a class mate was, “the idea is simple yet great, its clever and makes you think which I like about it, it’s not just a video you watch and listen to which is getting more popular now, the lighting does need changing in some shots though apart from that it’s awesome man.” from Ethan in year 2 Diploma in media. This feedback helped me change how the lighting changes from shot to shot using colour correction. This made the work more professional.

For the digi pack I didn’t get as much feedback as it was on lots of separate pieces that needed to be put together. We showed our class and it the feedback we gained about the final product was mostly all good. Some of the negative was just about how the CD’s looked but when we described what it looked like they understood why.

The advert was liked by everyone they said it looked professional and it looked good. Some understood the quote about selling the product so that was liked by them. Some people said they could see the links between all three products which was good. And this is what we where aiming for.

Getting some of the feedback was hard as you work hard and someone would say you can change this and that, but I could see where they where coming from so I learnt that feedback is important. I never received bad feedback or one letter answers unless I asked for it in the questionnaire. Some feedback was hard to change as it would be hard to change one bit of a video and fit it into another. This cropped up in the colour scheme as we had to change one colour but it didn’t look good next to the one we changed so we had to play around with this.

I learnt that audience feedback can be hard to process but it is worth it in the long run it gives the audience a chance to give input into a product and makes the overall outcome of the product look more professional so in this subject I learnt to listen to the consumer and my editing skills got better as I had to change a few things quite a lot and put different effects on.

Survey monkey was where we created the questionnaire and was open for any one to answer. This was prime research.

Question 4How did you use media technologies in the construction & research, planning &evaluation stages?

Technology has been used in a big way in this A2 portfolio. It helped in pre – production, filming and post – production. The technologies used where easy to use and lots of them you could access on your home computer to continue work at home.

Technologies and software used in research:• Internet Explorer• Newspapers• Blogger• YouTube• DSLR• Facebook• Google Maps• Survey Monkey

Using technology to keep hold of your work instead of a paper system was so much easier as your work was saved and you couldn’t lose it. Using Blogger to keep your work in one place was helpful you can see all the work you have done so you can see if you want to add any more research to the blog. Everything was presented onto this site.Using the Internet for research was one of the best ways how to find information on Pendulum and target audience and how to set things out. I found photos and used maps and pictures from maps to find locations this was easier than spending half a day walking around scouting locations.Using Newspapers and magazines was hard to find information on Pendulum but it helped in finding audiences and how posters should be set out for music albums.I used Facebook to find information on the band and also used Wikipedia even though it is not all trusted sources the information I needed was on there.The DSLR camera was used to film and find information about our target audience we also used Survey Monkey to make a questionnaire to find research.

I used YouTube to look at all of Pendulums videos and analyse them to get all the ideas to incorporate into my music video. I analysed everything I could think of and see similarities between the videos and these are where my ideas came from.

Technology and Software used in the Production stage:• MacBook Pro• Final Cut Pro 7.0.3• Canon 600D SLR Camera• Tripod• Photoshop CS6• YouTube• Facebook• Lighting

I used a canon 600D to Capture all the footage and pictures this equipment was easy to used and sometimes I had to set it up as the lighting was to light or dark so I would turn the ISO down or up and this solved the problem. Filming the shotsfor the band shots included using key lighting, which you can see in the photo down below to bring out a nice effect.I used Final Cut Pro to edit all the shots together. This was time consuming but I enjoy editing. I used lots of effects to make it look like there was a flash back happening. To transition shots together actually was a challenge because at first it didn’t look smooth after a while of changing settings I understood what was wrong and made the transitions clear. Colour correction was also hard to use as I wanted to make each shots lighting fit into each other as much as I could without distorting the shots. This skill came over time from practising. I couldn’t have done that if the software was not there so the access to new media technologies was great.Using a MacBook Pro gave me a great advantage as they are quick and have a lot of RAM to process heavy video editing. It was good the mac was portable giving the chance to do extra work to hit deadlines.Using social networks and video sharing sites played a big role in getting the video and digi pack seen by a greater audienceI wouldn't say I have got better at using social networks but I have got better at trying to get an audience and who to ask.Using Photoshop helped with the digi pack and the poster. From using it last year the software has bee upgraded to CS6 which means I had to get my head around the software again. It took a while to get started but when my group got into the flow of things we got on with everything. I learnt that group work is important and I learnt some new skills like the magic crop tool which helped me superimpose images onto one another.Overall in the production stage it all went to plan and time keeping went well the video took the longest to do as editing all the shots together and rendering was time consuming. Learning new skills was good and this course is good for learning on your own as well but there is always ask teacher to ask if you need any support. Time keeping is essential for this course and I learnt to keep up with deadlines.

Technology and software used in Evaluation:• Slide share• PowerPoint• Jpeg files• Blogger• Computer

For the evaluation stages I used technology to put my evaluation into a PowerPoint. I then uploaded it into slide share and then onto blogger. Doing an evaluation without technology would have been a harder task, so I used it to make it easier. The evaluation overall went well I found it hard to analyse what I had done and put it onto paper so using a computer helped me put all my notes and analysis in a PowerPoint. Technology allowed me to used slide share which put my PowerPoint into a neater format. This was then uploaded to Blogger which has all my media work on using this technology allows me to express what I want to say In a easier way. By using this technology I have been able to put everything I could think of into this project. Without technology I would have been very stuck, so I have learnt that I'm lucky to use this great technology.