Evaluation question 4

Evaluation question 4

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

Throughout our entire process of creating our products, including the research, planning and evaluation, we have used new media technologies in order to improve and aide our tasks. Within the research area of our task, we used many different forms, one such example is an online questionnaire, which helped in discovering our target audiences needs and desires. This was very important information when creating our piece, as it helped us decided what was appropriate to include and excude.

Another technology we utilized is the film renting service ‘LoveFilm’ which have an online service allowing you to view films online, we used this in order to research examples of short films and other products falling under a similar genre and employing similar themes. This helped us in finding influence for our piece. For the planning stage of our production, we needed to make sure we had an accurate plan of what to film and when, this involved producing a storyboard and shooting script. These two items may not be ‘new technologies’, however we proceeded to digitize them through scanning the items and then created multiple copies for us al to work from and annotate.

The construction stage of the process is potentially the most technologically rich stage, as it involves filming and editing the production. To film the piece we utilized the HD camera which we have in school which records onto DV tape, we much prefer this style of recording to SD cards, as we feel it gives a greater freedom during the filming process as it does not pre-cut and separate your clips in a digital format. The editing software we used is ‘Final Cut’, a well-known and professional piece of software. This allowed us to successfully produce the work we wanted to with very little issues and confinement.

Once we had produced the work, we decided to evaluate what we had done and discover how the audience felt toward it. In order to do this we uploaded the finished product to Youtube, in a sense creating new media (or media 2.0) , and then created a link to our friends on the popular social networking service ‘Facebook’. Though this we were able to gather comments and feedback through both Youtube and Facebook and judge how the audience felt toward the piece and use these responses to improve our future efforts. The responses we gathered were not particularly helpful, as most were positive, therefore we did not feel the need to apply them to our work. We also produced a questionnaire at this stage also and gathered results from this.

In regards to the ancillary tasks, most of the construction was done through Adobe Photoshop CS4. This is an impressive piece of software with a huge variety of capabilities and it really helped us to produce the desired effects we wanted. The images we used were not totally totally ‘original’, with the Pink Floyd logo and the prism image being incorporated within the poster and digipak, however the majority of the image was original and taken ourselves.

Evaluation question 3

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Once we finished our piece, we underwent some audience research to discover how they felt towards the piece, how they feel the ancillary tasks and main piece work together and what they think could be improved. We tried to ask a range of ages and a range of ages through personal interviews which we recorded with a transcription, these are the results:

Joe (18) : I really enjoyed the music video, it had some really cool shots and had a great sense of emotion. I really felt that kaleidoscope effects helped to give it a heightened intensity, adding to the emotion. The sequence with his girlfriend coupled with the anger gave a clear impression toward the intended emotional ideas of grief and depression. Over all I feel like that narrative suited the emotion of the song perfectly, even with its lack of lyrics. 

Jacob (18): After watching the music video, it was not what I was expecting. Not having heard much of Pink Floyd's music, I was not expecting to find such emotional power. My expectancies were to find meaningless references to drug culture, something which is synonymous with the psychedelic genre, however, the underlying tones of grief and depression really shone through, as it played on my preconceptions. 

Steve (16) : I really felt that the combination of your video and your CD artwork worked extremely well. They make great reference to each other, and both the poster and the CD are aesthetically pleasing, so I would definitely pick this off a shelf. Despite not having a huge knowledge of Pink Floyd, I instantly recognised the prism logo, and believed this worked extremely well coupled with the dilapidated house. This gave me a great interest of what was likely to appear within the video.

Judging from these two responses we can see that the matching of the emotion in the song with the visual pace and intensity worked effectively. We can also see that the audience did not have trouble understanding the narrative of the piece either, showing that it came across effectively. Steve’s response is interesting as he judged the ancillary tasks primarily. Taking his age into account and his lack of familiarity with Pink Floyd, it shows how the prism has such an intense level of iconicity that it is largely recognizable across most age groups. His comments also show how the ancillary tasks would motivate a consumer to purchase our product, something which is very important when considering the institutional desires.

Linda (52) : Having grown up in the 70s, I'm well associated with Pink Floyd's music. I felt that the way the video understands the emotion of the song is extremely successful  and does not simply utilize the stereotypes of 70s drug and hippy culture. This really shows an in-depth understanding  of what this decade was really about and what Pink Floyd really meant with the song, rather than what modern culture simply expects.

Ginny (45) : I enjoyed the music video. However, I believe that it could've utilized the video effects - such as the hallucinatory  visuals more. It may have been successful to even include the character within these visuals. However, despite this, I suppose it is understanding considering that there is no drug taking within the piece. 

James (48) : I thought the video was really entertaining, one scene which really stuck out to me was the anger sequence, where the fast pace and the impressive  performance really shone through. I especially liked the cuts of his girlfriend within the sequence, which added emotional depth and helped to explain a motive prior to the final explanation. 

This age group would be expected to be well associated with Pink Floyd’s music and therefore would have a richer contextual knowledge. From their responses, we can tell that our understanding of Pink Floyd’s stylistic choices are reflected well within our piece. One element we could have improved upon would have been further hallucinatory effects, something which they would expect if we were attempting to mimic the stereotypical 70’s music video. On the other hand, we were not trying to mimic the style completely and it is a fairly modern interpretation in terms of the video.

Karen (22) : One thing that really stuck out to me about the video was the great use of location. I really felt that this emphasised the isolation and depression that the character portrayed. The dilapidated house really matched the song's emotion, and this coupled with the roughly dressed character, and the surroundings of filth were excellent combinations and helped to contribute to the overall narrative.

Mary (25) : I thought the cd cover and poster looked really good! Definitely could have passed as genuine commercial work, and knowing Pink Floyd’s work quite well, reflected their style. I can see how they link to an extent, however, they could have used a bit more visual reference, as the image of the house does not appear much within the video.

This age group is relatively similar to the eighteen year olds, in the sense that they will not have much of a contextual understanding of Pink Floyd and what the band stood for, therefore their opinions will vary from those that have this. From their feedback it is clear that we should have potentially made more of an obvious link between the images on the digipak and poster and the video, as the dilapidated house only appears briefly and is not an images which is particularly prominent, however, this did not come between the intended purpose they surved.

Over all, if we were to undertake a similar project or change this one, we would ensure that context knowledge surrounding our chosen topic is well understood and that we take into account separate meanings that we may not fully understand due to lack of said contextual knowledge. We also would make sure that we understand the target audience’s desires, in terms of visual presentation, in particular the digipak and ensuring that it is visually pleasing.

Evaluation question 2

How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary tasks

The ancillary tasks and main product both adhere to Pink Floyd’s genre and style. Pink Floyd intended for the song ‘Great Gig in the Sky’ to be a statement toward death and the emotions surrounding this, with the vocalist’s ‘wailing’ voice fitting as a statement of pain and distress. The song was called ‘The Mortality Sequence’ in production, which we discovered in our research, again reinforcing the idea of which themes they intended to include. The song fits into the psychedelic genre at times, as does the entire ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ album, with fluctuation between intensity and mellow styles happening often. The psychedelic genre was dominating the music scene at the time of its production in 1973.

            We felt that we should extend the creative voice of Pink Floyd with our music video and use their themes, which they brought in through the music; this would strengthen the visual elements. We also utilized a similar technique with our ancillary tasks, stylizing them on Pink Floyd’s already established and recognizable appearance. We did this through using the iconic image of Storm Thorgerson’s Prism from the Dark Side of the Moon album cover and working it into our original image. We also reinforced the psychedelic genre within the ancillary tasks through altering the colour of the sky in some images to adhere to the forms and conventions which the genre entail, those being of illusions and visual effects mimicking the effects of narcotics.

The main product itself worked in unison with the ancillary tasks in this sense, as it uses altered visuals in an attempt to mimic the conventions of the psychedelic genre, using kaleidoscopic effects and green screen altered visuals. The audience reception of Pink Floyd is already extremely well established, with massive global success with their music even to this day. Having used some of their recognizable styles and effects, the audience would be able to make visual links between the main product and Pink Floyd’s feature length video ‘The Wall’ through the violent sequence and composition of the set; having a man sitting in a chair in the centre of a room filled with rubbish, similar to Bob Geldof’s character in ‘The Wall’. Through making these links the audience should potentially be able to relate to the piece, similarly to the ancillary tasks, with the use of the Prism and the front cover of the album art, where the appearance of it suggests isolation, one of the primary themes of ‘The Wall’.

 

            The institution behind Pink Floyd is EMI. The company is globally significant and therefore will want to ensure that their productions adhere to their target audiences effectively. The video utilizes the themes of Pink Floyd, therefore creating a link between the product and Pink Floyd’s audience. Their audience are so huge, with Dark Side of the Moon being one of the best selling albums of all time, this would ensure that the video will sell, pleasing EMI.

Evaluation question 1

psychedelic idea

We have had the idea of using a Green Screen in order to employ the necessary visual 'trippy' effects that we desire. We are going to work this into our piece during the 'anger sequence' and it will hopefully and a greater sense of what the genre is really about. The green screen is said to be in working order but we will find out soon.

Psychedelic genre research - visuals

This video by the popular 60's band 'Jefferson Airplane' shows a really interesting use of visuals, closely associated with drug and hippy culture. Although our piece is not an entirely similar context, the techniques used and the visual appearance are very similar to what we want to achieve. This style of music was popularised during the wave of hippy culture, very close to the release of Dark Side of the Moon and therefore the link between the psychedelic appearance and the music must be strongly made.

Ancillary Task: Front Cover

Ancillary Task: Inset

Ancillary Task: Promotional Poster

Ancillary Task: Rear Cover

final filming update

We've finally finished our filming. Today we went to a location in Saffron Walden called 'Jubilee Gardens' and shot what we call 'The happy sequence' where the protagonist is seen with his girlfriend / wife, giving the entire piece its summary and explaining to the audience the protagonists motivation throughout the entire video. The shoot went well, however, observing the footage now it is clear that a speck of rain was on the lens, its not too visible though. Once we have edited this in at the end and spliced in the shots of her face in the anger sequence, we should be finished.

editing changes - adding pace

We have been given feedback about our piece so far and have decided that we need to add more pace to the anger sequence in which he destroys his belongings. In order to do so we felt we should speed up the cutting within the sequence and shoot more shots of his rage in order to give a stronger impression of his state of mind. Fitting into the genre is also very important of course, however, we need to make sure the pace of this sequence fits with the music's emotional tone, as this is the climactic point of the song with the strongest vocal elements. Another idea we have had is to include cuts of his girlfriend to add a deeper emotional depth to entire piece, while also adding pace. However, we do need to shoot these sections first, as these are the final part and have not been finished.

digipak idea sketches

 

These sketches are what we came up with when planning our digipak. We wanted to incorporate the Dark Side of the Moon Prism, as shown in the lower image, so we worked it into an image of the dilapidated house we found on our first location scout. We still need to take the pictures, but once that is done we will work in these images through photoshop.

We thought using the house we used as an establishing shot would help to link the ancillary tasks to the piece, also concreting the sense of isolation and depression which surrounds the piece, something we felt the house symbolized perfectly. We felt the front cover needed to symbolize the general attitude of the piece, ie. his isolation and grief. We thought having him huddled into a corner would suit this ideal well.

Final Piece

Our final piece with final touches all done and dusted.

Pink Floyd Dark Side of the Moon album

These shots of Pink Floyd's album 'Dark Side of the Moon' show how they construct a CD album and what images they used on the front, back and some of the insert. The images were produced by Storm Thorgerson and are incredibly iconic, with this album being one of the best selling, worldwide, of all time. This album may not be an original, yet it gives a strong impression of the appearance of the original vinyl releases and provide a good impression as to what kind of simplistic style they went for with the album. We feel working this image into part of our ancillary tasks would be a good idea, utilizing the pre-established iconicity of the prism and the connotations which it holds, adding a depth which the audience will be able to connect with through association.

Practice editing: the outcome

This is what we came up with from that short shoot and after editing it together. We realised as we started to edit that we didn't have any way near enough shots, but as it was a practice piece, decided to make do with what we had and used flipping among other things to sort it out. It has the basic premise of what we wanted to show with the editing techniques however was a lot more complicated as with the lack of shots we needed to included freeze frames which involved a lot of confusing timeline work.
This has helped us as we did not know how to do this before hand and it's a useful skill to have as positioning of various shots is common skill. The graduation technique showed at the end is also a useful skill to have, one which we were not totally familiar with and had only a basic comprehension of.

Practice editing

We've been told to undertake an exercise to practice some skills we witnessed on the OCR media blog, specifically the work by a group called 'The Vixens', where they use a four way screen split. We're going to go off and film this now and edited it once that's done. Hopefully this will help us gain a few more skills with the editing suite and also get us back into the swing with final cut as we haven't used it in a while. We could possibly incorporate it into our actual piece as well.

Questionnaire

In order to perform some research surrounding our ancillary tasks, we decided to undertake a short questionnaire, we asked 30 people and gathered our results here:

This graph here shows how the images on the digipak are extremely important, showing the importance of aesthetics and visual appeal. Having the images visually pleasing is obviously very important with a product such as this.

This graph shows how visual attractiveness leads to differences in the market, as with this graph it is clear that the majority of interviewee's felt that they would prefer to purchase a visually pleasing CD than downloading a piece of music.

 The necessity of lyrics is often seen as a bonus, as seen here, and not often as a necessity, so we feel that we will reflect these results in our own ancillary tasks.

 The link between the digipak and poster and the video, in terms of visual links, are clearly important issues, as it gives the porducts a deeper stylistic and intellectual depth.

Considering the band, we will obviously have to link to their pre-established conventions, in particular logos and other iconography. This is also reflected in the audience's opinions shown here.

psychedelic inspiration

A good example of how we have been influenced within the psychedelic genre is the music video for the song 'Killing Moon' by Echo and the Bunnymen.


the song presents interesting use of visual effects, all falling under the conventions of the psychedelic genre. This is done through the use of lighting and colours to promote ideas of surrealism and give the video a visual intensity. It is this intensity which is synonymous of the psychedelic genre as the intention is that it mimics the visuals of hallucinogenics. Visual symbolism is also presented to give a more artistic style to the video.
Another video which has been a huge influence is 'The Wall', the feature length video which accompanies the album 'The Wall' by Pink Floyd. Much of the animation within the video gives this idea of surreal hallucinations, however the motive is different within the context, as the protagonist is suffering from psychosis, rather than recreational drug usage. We've mimicked this rejection of typical motives for the visual effects through our protagonists suffering being spurred on through grief, giving the genre further emotional depth.

plans for what to add to video

We've had feedback on our current work for the final production of the music video and have been told that the video does not fit the genre appropriately. The psychdelic genre entails visual effects mimicking the effects of narcotics. Although our video is not supposed to entail drug abuse, as that would have inappropriate connotations toward our protagonists motivations, the style would still fit within our film, as his level of rage, verging on insanity would allow for these styles of visual alterations.
In order to perform these visual effects we are shooting some new footage using a green screen, and are going to use these to produce some interesting effetcs. The edit will probably be quite challenging but we've done something similar before so it should be ok.