Final Video

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Throughout the process of making the product we have have been provided with ongoing feedback from our teachers involved in our Media classes, this was important as they have professional ideas on how to make and create a media product like our project. We tended to ask advice on shot angles and how to improve some charecteristics of the video to make it seem more of a real media. This was especially apparent when we shot the singing at the memorial scene, one of our teachers felt that the artist should actually sing the lines of the song to make it more realistic and for the lip syncing to be perfect we therefore re shot this scene three times to make the feedback from teachers better.


We got feedback from students in our media class, who also fitted in with our teenage target audience, they picked up on more minor details of the video such as different positions we could use and picked up on some shooting mistakes such as how the video didn’t run smoothly with costumes by changing the artist costume so we therefore kept this the same throughout the video. These people being around us as well meant they acted as second eyes, we found ourselves getting frustrated and therefore there opinions helped us to re thinks some shots and helped us overcome some major points that didn’t look good.

We then wanted some more in depth feedback before the final alterations to the video we therefore created a questionnaire and handed it out to a broader audience of other teenagers that didn’t take Media as an A level

After collecting the results we received generally quite positive feedback. When asking the more general question as to if they enjoyed the video the consensus was a general yes. When asked to if so what they liked; we got a lot of comments on the varied locations. People felt that where some people were in front of statues and others in front of scaffolding during the board scenes it showed a real general contrast. On the other hand though we now understand that our audience thought the storyline too complicated. We are able to see where they are coming from because so much is happening in one 3-minute video. Someone claimed it to be “like a movie to music”. Someone else suggested they would need to have watched it a couple of times in order to understand in completely. In some way this could work meaning people may want to rewatch it because of this. The majority felt that the lyrics did match the music though; they knew that the song was about crime thus the video like it too.

Overall we are happy with our feedback as the artist was created and people understood what style we were aiming to get with her. This was also emphasized by the music video settings that we chose and we were given very good feedback about all our different location choices.

I am very happy with the final video after taking in to consideration these comments as we felt that although some points of the feedback were negative we had enough time to correct these slight obscurities and make a video that fit the genre well and the target audience could relate to in some way which was out initial idea. The feedback showed us that not everyone may enjoy the video, but every eventually understood and recommended some changes to improvement.

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


The song is taken from Aly and Aj’s first album and is titled I am one of them, from the lyrics and hidden meanings behind the song we created our artist Eden Summers. The song is based around crime, being aware of it and trying to prevent it. The general target audience is teenagers. We wanted to highlight the message of the song throughout all aspects of the project, we included themes such as nature and unity to create a narrative and include other teenagers in the video. We wanted to base the project not solely around the artist but more on her impact to prevent crime and her message.

We included various settings that were around nature and outside environments, such as the tree performance shots and the end scene of her walking through the forest. We continued this theme through to our myspace and album cover as we shot her situated under a tree and with a background of leaves. We then joint these shots in with the narrative perspective which told the story behind the lyrics, which included scenes such as the mugging. We wanted to set the artist aside from the narrative and therefore kept her out of the story line and included her in performance based shots with close ups to establish the artists image.

We had a farely complicated narrative with the two lives of the characters running parallel to eachother, but with the end result being teenage unity and friendship like the lyrics of the song. This was reflected also through the board signs held up spelling the lyric ‘I am one of them’. We felt that this was especially important part of the video and therefore used the shots to our advantage when creating the digipak. The intertextual link with the boards and album cover worked well keeping the theme of unity amongst the ancillary task as we are implying that all teenagers no matter what race or ethnicity are included.

The album cover was made to look natural and to show how the artist is in touch with nature, showing her hippy side. The use of the signature and title in bold made her stand out and gives a personal touch.

The house colours and writing we kept the same throughout the myspace which were light blue, pink and green. This kept the project running continuously matching throughout. The colours were taken from the tights Eden Summers wears in the Album cover. Black was used to keep some aspects simple without over colouring.

The back cover featured a list of songs, including I am one of them, all the songs had meaningful names such as Stop the world they all connotated nature and love aspects which portrayed her hippy side.

The inside cover we again didn’t want to feature just the artist, so we decided to insert a quote that was meaningful and had a picture of the artist walking through trees which again followed the nature theme.

The myspace, we kept the house colours that we had used for the album to keep the theme running through. The back block we took a shot of the artists tights that she wears on the album cover. This is also the background for the Youtube and Twitter pages

The signature we created ran through various aspects of the project, we wanted to make it look personal so that fans can relate it with the artist, we put this signature on all areas even the merchandise, myspace and album.

Overall I feel that our main task and the ancillary tasks are effective as they work well together and run with a continuous theme throughout each task. The message of teenage unity works well in the video and album cover as conventions such as the board holding which has run through shows how it’s not just about the artist.

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


This coursework, especially through the design and planning stages of the project we have used many different media technologies. Some we had experienced due to previous projects in media, others we gradually learned to get used to through the course. Without this technology we would have found our production very hard and wouldn’t have created the same quality of work.

Firstly, before we were put into our coursework groups, research for our bands and albums was taking place individually. Therefore the internet was a key factor in researching. The main website I used was Youtube, a video sharing site. This allowed me to search throughout the website for videos and research into ongoing conventions and themes of music videos out there. We then analysed these in Microsoft word, which acted as a basis for all my written work as it was easy to access and supplied word count and spell check that aided my work.

When planning the video we wanted to be as well prepared as possible so looked into using different programs like Microsoft Excel to present the shooting schedule, risk assessment and notes on each others numbers and email but stuck with Word because we were more comfortable with this. We then used social sites to keep in contact and set out shooting times/dates/locations like facebook and hotmail as well as through texting and calling each other. We felt it important to maintain a constant communication level throughout without this the majority of our plans would have failed. An example of this is us texting someone in our group of where we left the camera and to pick it up after school. Without this reminder we may have lost the camera

After printing the lyrics off from a lyrics site we wrote over them with our annotations and ideas. We then wanted to put these on to the computer, we did so by scanning them then editing the image in Paint. We did the same with our storyboard. After capturing the pictures from the storyboard we wanted to make it into a video so did so using the video editing software Adobe Premiere. This gave us a great amount of practise because we had never used this program before therefore were able to get familiar with it. This was one of the main media technologies we used. It allowed us to play around with the video and experiment especially with transitions and learn the importance of cutting. We shot the actual video with a Sony camcorder though had troubles with ours. Capturing did not work and certain features of it did not work therefore after sending it back and swapping it with an extra we found the equipment easy to use, plus it was easy to carry around. To capture the Sony DV tapes we used a fire wire cable that simply plugged into the computer and connected us straight away to Premiere.

Printscreen of editing in adobe

For the ancillary tasks we wanted to create a band page and digi-pack. For the digi-pack we found through research that the trending theme was an air-brushed “perfect” image. And after taking the pictures on a Nikon camera in the woods whilst it was raining we used Adobe Photoshop CS4 and CS2 to manipulate and edit them to get this “perfect” pretty image. Taking the pictures on this kind of camera allowed us to get good quality images that would not be lost through transforming, cropping, liquefying etc. When it came to the artist’s name, Eden Summers, we wanted a more personal touch therefore used a Tablet that linked with Photoshop to allow us to sign her name as if it were her signature

I presented all of my work throughout this project on the website Blogger/Blogspot. This was easy to use to present my work as I could easily insert text, video and pictures.

Media technologies have ensured my work throughout this project to be at a good standard, without the help of this the quality would have decreased a great amount. Although the technologies have helped us as a whole, we did incounter various problems with some technology. For example, blogs could take a while to upload which caused a strain on keeping work organised. We also had the problem of adobe crashing and some of our work being deleted from the system when we were editing. But overall we were happy with all the new technologies we were introduced to.

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


Starting with the planning and research stages of this project, as a group and individually we were able to take typical conventions from other music videos and were able to notice stereotypes from different genres. From our own personal research of different genre of music videos and individual analyses of each we were able to then join as a group and recognise certain characteristics that we would like to use and develop through our own music video for example we took some conventions from Destiny’s Child video to Emotions which showed a split screen shot following the characters around their surroundings which we developed for our music video. Other factors, such as close up of the artist and establishing shots were also used to in turn make our video more recognisable and to establish our artist in a certain way.

One convention that was important through our video was the narrative. We felt that most of the teen pop/indie videos that we analysed such as Taylor Swifts song you belong with me, all told a story that followed the lyrics. Our song had a hidden meaning behind its lyrics, therefore we decided that we wanted the visuals to put across the message of the song. We tried to make the visuals and lyrics work parallel to each other, so what you were hearing you could see in the video. This was hard to do as some parts of the song was instrumental or would throw the message off track so therefore we added in some performance aspects to the video. Lines such as ‘I get in the car’ were literally portrayed with the rich girl getting in the car. As we couldn’t match all the lyrics to a perfect visual, we ran a story that involved a rich girls day and a poorer girls day that was surrounded by crime and teenage suffering but was being ignored by both girls. This ended with a robbery and the rich girl being sad, but comforted by the poorer girl. This challenges the usual conventions of a music video as you usually see a very happy ending. We tried to stick to some pop conventions by at the end bringing all the characters together for the last verse and walking together showing teenage unity and friendship amongst each other by also including the artist.

Another convention we tried to challenge was the camerawork of the video, we decided to play round with different movements, transitions and angles. This enabled us to give the video a more in depth story and keeps the audience more interested. We opened the video with a close up shot of the artist to establish her profile, this was followed by three news reports that we created in our classroom that we tried to keep as authentic as possible and therefore we studied backdrops from different news shows to create a typical convention of them. This was then followed by the artist looking straight into the camera which focused all attention onto the artist to let the audience establish character. We decided to do this to use the convention from pop videos that the artist is always the main attraction, even though or song had narrative and a hidden meaning we knew that to make a successful video this had to be included. We added lots of performance shots of the artist from all different angles, one of which we had the artist sitting up a tree singing into the camera from a low angle, which was more to promote her image. In other scenes we used quick shots, from a range of different angles such as the mugging scene. We decided to do this as conventions of music videos tend to use fast paced cutting to build up a climax in the narrative, and through the tracking of the character it lets the audience experience the narrative.

From the start of the planning, we had decided that our video was to challenge pop conventions and focus away from Eden’s star image, this would be a challenge against the usual pop stereotype. We knew we had to establish her as a new character at the start of the video, but we wanted to focus more on setting and other factors such as costume and narrative. We used a fair amount of performance shots but we still didn’t take the main focus away from the narrative. This was also portrayed in the creation of the ancillary task because we didn’t have the artist pasted all over the CD cover we used screen grabs to spell out ‘I am one of them’ which included other teenagers that weren’t famous just everyday teens. The MySpace we focussed around the singer as we used it for advertisement, so we included background information and links to other sources like YouTube. The MySpace defiantly followed conventions of real media products as you can see that with the banner and links, other young pop stars have similar conventions to ours.

Front and Back cover

Banner Comparison

The mise en scene of every shot is especially important. It can suggest different things and is quite a powerful visual tool. Our costumes consisted of the rich girl wearing the girlier outfit with a skirt and obvious examples that show more wealth. The poor girl wore ripped jeans and different layer as to suggest a messier look. This kind of gave us two extremes. We then put artist in a plainer outfit. This initially began in white but it did not look right in the shot. We chose to put her in a pink outfit because it was girlier. We still of course wanted to show a feminine side as well as it having a hippy vibe, the message of peace we wanted to show to the audience. Her outfit was mutual between the two extremes therefore she does not land on either side. We gave all of these the same outfit throughout because it was supposed to show a day continuously. The artist wore the same top in the myspace banner, to link the video to the advertisement.

There are three main actors, one of which is the artist herself. We felt it important to put the artist in it because she of course is the artist, which is a normal convention of a music video. The poor and rich girls are only used in this video and are not on the album or MySpace. We did not want to use them on anything else because it may suggest they are a part of the band because they already have a main role in the video. We felt it important to keep the audience in mind throughout. This led to an effective decision to use only teenagers in our video and no adults or children. The main message is aimed at teenagers therefore involving different ages may seem patronizing. This also creates a youthful image, a common want for real media products.

Choosing the setting was fairly fun to do but was a huge problem too. We felt that London especially could reflect both sides of poor meets rich. We therefore spent a lot of time filming there. Shots like the bench scene were shot at St Paul’s cathedral park. The establishing shots were also good to show a transition. We wanted to show that the girls went from there houses to the train into London therefore gathering loads of different landmarks allowed us to clearly show this. We began with the rich girl on a balcony and a poor girl walking down stairs of a flat. These were stereotypical setting. The walking and driving scenes also have slight emphasizes of status too. Scenes of artist were shot mostly around nature. This was to exaggerate her hippy personality as well as giving her a more mutual/medium take in this video. All in all we find that this is a common characteristic of a music video. Changed of location will be done to make the video more interesting and it brings it alive almost.

Album potential pictures and location

Potential Album Cover Pictures

For our album shoot, we decided to go to weald country park, we knew that we would be able to give uor pictures the natural look we wanted. We done a lot of costume changing, to find the perfect outfit for the hippy image, we used lots of poses and we ended up with over 200 photos at the end of the 2 hour shoot. We felt as a group that the photos we'd taken were exactly what we were looking for and we were really pleased with the outcome of the day.

Album Shoot Location

We chose to shoot our album in South Weald Country Park as we wanted to use natural props, such as trees. Also we wanted to use grass and mudd as a way to create a naturalistic and simple theme for the images. The only downside to our chosen location was the weather, it started to rain which did disadvantage the scene but we continued anyway. This did damage the light we got for the pictures and therefore we used photoshop to edit the pictures.

CD Cover

Final Digi-Pack/Album cover

This is the front cover of the album, we wanted to create a natural shoot that was set in a woodland setting. We wanted to portay a hippy like effect with her clothes and how she conforms with nature, we therefore used very little makeup with simplistic grey and white clothing which made the tights stand out the most. We needed to leave the top half plain as we wanted the title to ride across the front of the body and didnt want it to clash or look to overcrowded.

We wanted to interlink the song "I am one of them" with the album, we decided to name the album after that song and therefore we wanted to include some aspects of our music video into the album. We used the signs from the video as our backcover to show that not just the artist is the focus. Although the idea is simple, we felt this would work with the headings and would create a sense of belonging to the album as it includes people we asked in the street to hold up our signs.

Looking at other album covers, we noticed that a lot of artists like to talk to thier fans and leave them a message that shows some thanks for thier support. We decided to do this also as we wanted our artist to be represented as being close to her fans. We used this shot for the inside sleave so that the words are more in focus than the image of Eden Summers.

For the other side of the inside, we took the same colours as the tights Eden wears on the front cover, this carried on the theme and didnt make the inside loko to cluttered with colour or images. This is very simple but the artist is created to be a simple teenager enjoying life.