Evaluation Question 2: - How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

Our product needed to have a house style to establish a particular brand image. I feel that my product did achieve this, the house style was supposed to be Entropic make up and puppet costumes mixed with a wild, hedonistic party scenes which held an esscence of glamour and sheek. I feel that the video, digipack and advert created a coherant package. In this Prezi below, I explore how I achieved this...


My audience feedback shows that I have a coherant package because in this video below my audience member answers questions relating to the product as a full brand, for example: What type of music do you think it represents? She answers that it would be a mainstream with a bit of indie, which is what we were trying to achieve and therefore have succeeded in creating a brand image. It seems clear in this clip of audience feedback that even my first draft of print work and advert was clearly a full product.

Why is marketing the house style so important?

The quality of the house style and brand image also shows the quality of your product. If you market a rushed and incoherent piece then you will not receive a good turnover from the product.

A house style reflects the product and therefore must have matching colours, cast etc. If it does not then it will be in coherent and unrecognisable as your brand.

The house style reflects your branding technique and the morals of your brand, for example if you are marketing a music product you will base its 'morals' around the type of music it is for eg: a mainstream, hip-hop music product may be based around the morals of having fun and the objectification of women and parties.

See the photographs below for examples.

Laura Marlings' brand image for this advert, digipack and video reflects the house style of chilled, indie music with a folk style. The sepia tones teamed with the unique advert reflect the brand image and make it recognisable. The morals reflected in the brand image are ones which promote individuality and creativity which also reflect her music.

Lil Waynes' brand image reflects morals of gangsta rap, the objectification of beautiful women and guns. This is shown in the dark colours, the slow motion movement of the women in the video, the gold, the tattoo's etc. The baby in the suit posing as Lil Wayne on the cover with a big diamond ring reflects the idea that Lil Wayne has always been a 'gangsta.' It is a very recognisable brand image as Lil Waynes tattoos and marketing make it clear for him to be recognised.

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

Ideas
Our ideas came from looking at various styles of eccentric make up and videos where entropy is used to create a quirky and unique feel. On the flip side, we also wanted to create a mainstream party video which we got inspiration from many music videos and other texts. We explored the different ways in which we could combine the two contrasting styles through looking at various media texts.


Our idea for eccentric make up was based upon various photos we found on the internet and shots from video clips. We decided that the characters could be playing toys that have come to life. We felt this was an exciting and original concept and therefore needed to make sure the make up and costume looks believable.
This photo was our inspiration for the make up of Leah Cheung. We wanted to make her look like a harajuku girl with eccentric make up and bright colours. Therefore, our make up artist Carley did a very similar style to the photograph. We loved the ideas for the bright colours and mirrored this in Leah's character in the video. It also inspired us to make it look eccentric but also fashionable to give the style an edge.

This photograph inspired the style and make up for Sam and Em's make up. We really liked the idea of dolls, which evolved into the beginning part of our video (the doll waking up and turning on the Ipod.) This photo also inspired us to think about movement, that the dolls should move in a broken manner which would create a toy effect.

The texts that inspired us are as followed:

This video inspired us for both parts of the video. Firstly, we loved the eccentric and crazy costumes in the video teamed with a glamorous yet edgy style. Secondly, the snappy party shots caught our attention and inspired us to stage a 'out of control' party. We loved all the fast editing shots and the pans of people in various places around the house. This inspired us to create a hedonistic scene which we thought would work well with the weird, creepy toy scenes.

This video by Mike Posner inspired us for the party scenes, we loved the flashing lights with people dancing which can be seen in our video. We also really liked the way that the dancing was teamed well with the beat of the song, which we also tried to mirror in our video.

This video of the Skins advert was the biggest inspiration for the video. We loved the fast paced editing mixed with the dark lighting and entropic shots, such as the bear jumping on the bed. We wanted to create this sense of mainstream fun and entropy for our own video because we loved the way that there was also a darker, hardcore side to the advert alongside the fun party atmosphere. I felt that the video captured a hedonistic teenage vibe which is what we wanted to create.

We wanted to avoid video styles such as...


Although we enjoy their music and like the video, I felt as though the Indie style has been overused recently in music videos with many bands showing themselves playing with a similar style and quirkiness to other bands. We didn't like the slow pace of these videos and their similarity with many other videos of this genre. Instead, we wanted to combine the entropic quality of indie videos with the qualities of mainstream videos.

You can see how our inspiration from our research helped us create and mould our video in our 'Mood Board' shown below where we put together all our ideas for the style, creativity and originality for the product.

Audience feedback...
Our audience research helped direct our creativity. Here is a focus group based around our Audience Profile Mood Board which was on Prezi. We filmed it to get an idea about what our audience would think about our final product.

We were very pleased with our audience feedback, it helped show us that we were going in the right direction with the planning of the video and the audience research.

I also got our audience to do a focus group based around my print work. This really helped to direct changes for my print work.

I would say that our products are not much different to real media products. I feel that the print work and video looks effective and proffesional due to the costuming. However, obviously we do not have proffessional actors in our video which obviously sets us apart from real media products, although I do feel that our cast put in a lot of effort and really went for it when filming and when taking the photographs for the print work. Obviously there is the issue of budget and lack of technology, big media companies will have the latest forms of technology and the computers at my house and college were very slow. However, I feel that we did the best we could with the equipment we could and it looks quite proffesional.

Originality...
We tried to be as original as possible by using weird costumes, odd shots etc in the puppet scenes. However, I do feel we have in some aspects copied products such as Alice in Wonderland, which uses the same style of entropy. We have also used a lot of ideas taken from mainstream products. Here is a Prezi showing all the different products which are similar to mine.


Entropy...
The part of my video which uses entropy can be seen in the puppet scenes. There are many shots of girls with eccentric make up doing odd actions and dancing around. At the start of the video, there is a wind up doll shown in black and white grain to create an old cinema style effect. It is very entropic and sets up a weird feel for the video. The puppet shots are repeated throughout the video to create a dream-like atmosphere. The repetition also follows the Auteur Theory of Steve Neale who believed that audiences take pleasure from repition and difference. The difference can be seen in various amounts of three second shots which are only shown once and the repitition is shown

Redundant...
Some of the parts of the video are redundant. The scenes where Sam is putting on make up and the party shots. These type of shots can be seen in lots of other media products. It does not follow a narrative, although the Proppian heroin is Sam (the main girl who puts on make up.) However, there are lots of different characters in the video and it is for the audience to read who is their favourite.

Evaluation - Question 3

Final Music Video

Here is out uncensored video which will be shown to adults.



Here is our censored video.