This feedback was taken from a group of 30 year 9 students. Age 16+ which is the border age of our target audience. We thought this would be a good age group to aim the questions at as we gaged weather it was OK for 16 year olds, as they seemed to like it and appreciate the adult nature, we believe we made the right decision about this.
As you can see from these audience feedback questionnaires, what is being said is very good. The students who watched it believed the footage looked like a real girl band, and as you can see 'did not expect it to be so good'. This was very relieving for us to find out that what we had worked so hard on was appreciated. There were 30 other pages, therefor we only picked a few f the best ones, as you can see they believed we stuck to the conventions of a real girl band music video, and they believed it was similar to Lady Gagas footage.
This is our finished website, and when we decided on this site we wanted to conform to the conventions of solos singers and also girl band sites. We looked into sites such as Beyonce's and Pussycat Dolls sites. We saw that all the sites we viewed had a focus point, an image at the top of the band, for the audience to establish who the website is representing. We conformed to this and had another of our photo shoot images at the top of the image. We also used similar colours that are on our Rap Magazine Cover, to make it all fit together well. We used similar colours to The Pussycat Dolls, blacks and pinks, and also used similar images, as they have an image of themselves on a pole, which we emulated. We also used the image of us all in black, looking similar, to show a united front as a real girlband, this is common in the sites we viewed. I also found that the websites of other bands were done in the third person, talking about the band, and had tour dates, other celebrities, and release dates. We also used this to make our site look real, using links at the top of the page to take you to other pages. We did not challenge any of the conventions for this website, we embraced them to create a realistic band site. Once again, the three of our tasks together look very realistic, and the use of similar colours all the way through create a theme, and make our band look real, and as shows the thought we put in to all aspects of the band creation. The use of the photo shoot images on the two smaller tasks keeps the consistency and authenticity, as they may not be the same, but they have the same styling and background.
We again had audience feedback for the website. However we had verbal communication with the audience rather than written. The audience was aged 16+, and all liked the site. They said it was good how they colours and ideas were similar throughout all of our tasks, and said that it was very professional how we had links to other pages and had spoken in the third person.The audience said that the only change they would make is more images of the band as other pages do have a lot of images of themselves. This is something we are going to take into account and make sure that next time we do a similar task we will ask the audience for feedback before the finished product is made.
We used media technologies all the way through the process of making the website. When I researched into the website, i used google to find the sites of other celebrities, prints screens of whichcan be found earlier on my blog. I used print screens on my blog to upload images when researching into this site. The research and planning was interlocked with this task as the planning came after looking at other websites to see what I had to do. I also used links to other sites to make sure I knew what we were doing. When planning, we had already used the photo shoot to get the images we needed to put on the site, so the camera was again used. When actually creating the site Emily used Iweb on the Macbook to do so. It was the best programme to use we thought, as we could access it easily on the macbook, and also it had to technology we needed to add links to other pages and upload the images in the correct place.
As you can see this is our magazine cover. When making this magazine cover, we had already challenged a convention of girl band magazines. We decided to use a Rap Magazine. We did this because we wanted to stand out as a girl band and be controversial. Also, the conventions we were using with our video fitted more with the Rap genre of magazine, as there are females who dominate in the rap genre, and also are the focus point of the magazine, as apposed to being in the background of the men. This shows in my research into our magazine. We did however, conform to the conventions of the rap genre, using the bold colours, and keeping the text the same all the way through. Also, we wore string vests, converse and Adidas, very commonly seen in rap magazines, as apposed to our earlier look of shorts and little tops, which we did on purpose to show our different personalities. As I have already mentioned, I think that this mixed with our other tasks is very realistic and professional, and the fact that we had a photo shoot for the images makes our magazine look very professional.
When receiving the audience feedback from our filming, we also asked for the same from our magazine cover, however this was more informal, as we asked for spoken feedback. The majority of the people that viewed it, age 16+, seemed to like the cover. They said it followed the conventions of real magazine covers, and they liked how the image was different from that of the music video, as although it was still sexy and seductive, we looked a little more comfortable in leggings and Adidas, and showed a different more relaxed side to us.
When researching into this magazine cover, again I used the internet, looking at RAP It UP magazine, and many different magazines like this, as you can see on my research post. I looked into Rap from the start as I knew this is the image we wanted to create. We also looked at real magazines in the shops to look for the images used and the text on the pages. When planning this magazine covers, I looked at paint to add the image and then put colour and text around it, as this is an easy way to add and remove colour. I did this simply to see what colours worked with the background and the image and finally decided upon pink and black, as it matched well with the image. When actually constructing the Magazine cover, we used word, as it was very easy, however, we used a professional 23 megapixel camera to take the images of us for the magazine. This was a very good quality camera and as you can see from the image it is very crisp and clear, making the cover look professional. When evaluating this cover, I uploaded the image onto my blog, and am currently using Blogger to create this evaluation.
As you cannot see the name badges we prepared clearly due to the camera quality; Left to right - Emily Roberts, Christie Robbins (me), Kirsty Shakespeare
During this performance I believe i performed to the best of my ability, during the dancing, acting, singing, building the website, editing and also creating the magazine cover. When planning the music video, we decided not to stick to the conventions of 'girl band'/'pop group' at the begging of the planning stages, we were going to convey four different sides of Lady Gaga as I have earlier explained. However, due to the complications with the group, all our ideas were changed, and we decided to completely conform to the girl band genre. Commonly known as sexy, sassy and fierce. However, when planning, we did our story boards with 3 people, as we thought Emily would be involved in the filming, however, after the incident Emily could not perform, therefor we had to use the story boards but change the shots to suit 3 people. I believe that our music video developed the conventions of the real media products we used as inspiration; for example, usually in music videos, especially male rappers, the female is at the back dancing in dark colours, or sitting on the mens laps and giving them what they want. We decided to use our two actors as the main focus of the footage, and make them fierce, and turn the idea of men being more powerful on its head.This is how we developed and challenged one of the conventions of music videos. We then conformed and used some of the features to enhance our footage. We decided to use the 'strutting forward' shot that tends to be in all girl band videos. We used this with a wide shot with the focus directly on me and Kirsty, this made us look strong and powerful, and also looked realistic to the genre of girl band;
As you can see here we used the same sort of image as Girlicous, and many other girl bands use to look fierce and strong. We also used the shot of me and Kirsty separately on the floor singing, this was just a head shot. This is using the same conventions of many girlbands, and also Lady Gaga, who uses a similar shot in her music video. We used this because it is sexy and appeals to men, which is also conforming to the use of the theory of the Male Gaze, which we have researched. Being on the floor looking 'seductive' will appear to the male gaze, but keep us as the focus point looking strong, which will therefore also appeal to females. We also used the fake dallas, emulating Gagas original footage, and this made it look real and professional. This is using conventions of music videos to our advantage;
We also used a smoke machine, as this fits with the themes of girl bands, and also again Lady Gaga uses a smoke machine in Beautiful Dirty Rich. This was for effect when shooting, and also to make our film look more professional and high budget.;
As you can see at the bottom of the shot there is smoke entering the shot. This makes it look more professional and expensive, and also adds the effect of mystery and sexuality.
I believe the music video together with the two ancillary tasks is very effective, and creates a professional and realistic look. The thought we out into the colours and the shots creates realistic footage, and also the conforming to real girl bands helped us to create a band worthy of you tube. I think viewing all of the three articles together makes the band look very realistic and makes our band seem real.
When our finished footage was seen by our fellow class mates, and also a class of teenagers, we asked them to fill out questionnaires to get some audience feedback. From the feedback, which was 99% good, we found that the favoured part of the music video was the pink background with our pink clothes throwing money;
and also our first shot, of us standing on the podiums. They said they liked these shots as they gave them the general idea of the film, and also they liked the effects and the editing. We then found that the use of lighting, editing and mise en scene went down well, with many saying that they thought the use of props made us look like a real band. Most of the comments said they would not change anything about the video, however a few said they would not be as revealing as us, which we took well, but thought that this was a good reason to direct our footage at older teens rather than younger, as they did not appreciate the image we were trying to portray, whereas the older peers in our group said they liked the clothing and the ideas uses, as they went with the genre. We also asked if they thought our footage fitted with Lady Gaga, most replied with yes and said that the fast editing and the strange sharp shots (and 'weirdness') of the footage was much like Lady Gaga's unusual style. They also said we looked like a real girlband. From this we believe most people like our music video and we aimed it at the correct audience, (17+) (I have created a new post showing the actual audience feedback sheets and gone into more detail about this)
During our research, planning and evaluation stages, we used as much technology as possible. When planning our music video, we drew up our Story boards, scanned them and uploaded them onto our blogs. This is an easy way to access the pages, and makes sure we cannot loose them. I also created a Prezi, which is linked to my blog, to highlight our target audience, which helps clearly label and explain the reasons why we chose to do our footage for 17+. I did this to make sure we all understood who we were aiming at and to make sure our video was going to be suitable. During the research stages, we used Youtube mainly to find out about our chosen genre. We also used the T.V to look into different footage and music videos. This helped me as when I was editing I was able to edit for the right audience, understanding who it was meant to be aimed at. For instance, the sexy images used, and the use of the 'romantic' setting I used, would not have been appropriate for younger viewers. When evaluating, I have used print screens of images to upload onto my blog, I have also uploaded our music videos onto the page. We decided then to sit and record ourselves evaluating parts of the film. We then uploaded this as you can see above. We tried to use as much technology as possible when planning and making this music video, to make it look professional.
This is our finalised magazine cover As you can see, we have stuck to the conventions of the rap genre, using the bold image of us for the attention of the reader, using bright colours and font.
These are all images of rap magazines we looked at to get inspiration for ours. As you can see there are females as well as males on these magazines, and the females are centre of the image, looking strong and fierce, this is why we chose RAP genre for our magazine, as it continues our idea of strong females being the focus point. You can see from these images that the colours are bright and bold with the image being the strong focus point, which is what we wish to emulate in our cover, using a picture of the band from our photo shoot. There is also a bar code and date, along with the price in one of the corners of the magazine, which we will emulate. The image we are going to use for the magazine shows us in string vests, converse, and adidas, which sticks to the conventions of a rap music video better than any other magazine we believe. As you can see here the female is the main focus for the reader, followed by bold colours, with consistent text on the side. We will conform to this idea, using pinks and blacks, however, we will not have the amount of writing that is on this image, as I believe it is taking away from the image. Hopefully, using all of these techniques, and trying to emulate similar ideas, our magazine cover will look professional, and conform to the conventions of the rap genre.
When researching for this website, we decided it would be best too not only look at Lady Gaga's but also to look at other girl bands that we have taken inspiration from in the making of this video, for instance The Saturdays as we emulated their use of props, and they are the perfect example of what we were trying to portray.
This is Lady Gaga's website, as you can see she uses black and white images of herself, yet colour images of people who she features with. This is to make Gaga different, and also to give her a certain image. The background is black and the writing is white with splashes of red to give it colour. When discussing our website we decided to use black background as we are trying to emulate Lady Gaga's style. However, when we looked at the Saturdays Website, we found a massive difference in the styles: As you can see here, The Saturdays use a lot more colour in their webpage, as they wish to attract a different audience. Lady Gaga aims more towards the older population, and uses strange images to attract a wider audience, whereas the Saturdays wish to attract younger audience, and are more friendly and warm, the average 'pop band'. After looking into these two websites we decided on a colour scheme, black background with blue and pink writing. This is a mixture of both Lady Gag's website and the Saturdays, as we liked both ideas, however we wanted more colour than Lady Gaga, as although we are portraying her through our video, we also want to appeal to a younger audience. We then had to decide on the content for our website. We decided we needed a picture of us at the top of the site with our band name above. This is so everybody knows straight away what the site is about. It also draws the attention to us as a band. We then decided to have links to other artists bands and sites on our page, to promote friendly workings between us and other bands, and highlight to young children that working with other people and not always being in competition with them is sometimes a good life choice. We wanted to have a paragraph about our newly released single, Beautiful Dirty Rich, and for this to be the centre piece of the home page, with links to other pages, however we will not have to make these other pages as the task is to create just a home page. Now we have researched and decided on the website content, we can create the site.
Today we managed to finish all of the filming. However me and Kirsty had to both film and act as Emily wasnt able to attend the session, however we think this went well, we just added a few more shots of us singing so we could show lio syncing in our video, and also a few shots of shoes and walking just to add as flashing images. This went well, and as we were filming in our desired location, the school hall, we had acces to the pink backgrounds and also the Ballet bar, which we decided to use as it is a convention of many girl bands such as Pussy Cat Dolls. However, as I said before there was a lot of pink, and then black due to the different days of recording, however when editing we were able to change and enhance this adding different colours into the pieces where the colours were all the same. This is the ballet bar we used and the images of where we got the inspiration for it. We emulate this in our video
We also used the pole in our pictures, to give them a professional look,
We also decided that after the first bit of editing there was a block of black and a block of pink, which we did not want, so we decided to intergrate the colours more.
This is one of the two backgrounds me, Kirst and Emily painted to create the image we needed for out music vidoe. We wanted to stand out in the film, and we thought these bring colours helped us do that.We then decided to wear pink aswel on top of the backgrounds, this went down very well when we showed the footage to the rest of the group. They said the bright colorus on top of each other created a greatprofessional look.
This is a still from our filming, as you can see the bright colours look very effective. You can also see in this picture the fake dollas that we used. We printedt them off and stuck two sides together to try andmake them look authentic,as obviously we couldnt use real money.We chose to use dollas instead of pounds because we were sticking to the conventions of real music vidoes, and pounds are very rarley seen. Also in the real'Beautiful Dirty Rich' Lady Gaga uses dolla's, so again we are following the conventions of Lady gagas music video. We also hired a smoke machine for our film. We thought that this would add to the effect we were trying to create, as in Lady Gagas video she uses a smoke machine, also, a lot of other videos do the same.
This is the costume we decided to use for out black outfit, we planned to wear the same colour throughout as this is a conventions of usual music videos, we also thought these colours looked good on the camera.
This is another still from our filming. As you can see we again looked at the origonal film and decided to take the idea of money over the face, especially the eyes and mouth, as over the eyes highlights that some artist today only see the money and not the love for music, and over the mouth as some people's money speaks for them.
Our Target audience was the younger age group, teens are age around 18, as we thought they would be able to relate to the images in our film. We decided to stick to the conventions of getting females to admire us, so this worked well with the idea of creating strong indipendant females, this image will make females want to aspire to be strong. Also, the males will like the idea of 'sexy strong women' As like I have talked about before, the male gaze was very important in our filming, so we decided to use images that would attract the male audience being sexy and looking 'pretty'
Today we did some more filming for our music video,we finally got the hall for filming! We had already painted two pink back grounds for our performance so that me and Kirsty could have one each. We also hired a smoke machine to make our video more effective,and professional looking. We thought this would also help us to stick to the conventions of Lady Gagas music video as there is smoke present in hers. We filmed in different outfits and different colours to represent what we were trying to be. Emily filmed me and Kirsty dancing on the pink backgrounds wearing bright pink clothes to match, we danced a short hip-hop routine. The reason behind this was to portray our 'strong female' image, as usually, the women are seen dancing sexily and in the back of the video usually wearing black, so by performing a boisterous hip-hop routine wearing bright colours, we were challenging the conventions of typical male music videos and looking strong as females. This also challenges the idea of the 'male gaze'; as we are meant to be sexy for males to want to see us, and almost damsels in distress for them to be interested in buying our product, however,from audience feedback from other music videos, we found that the males liked how the females were in control and in dependant in the films. This is an example of how we used the audience feedback to help create of film. We then filmed me and Kirsty lying on the floor with money all over is, with the smoke covering us. We thought this was a very effective shot as it is commonly used in music videos,it looked to a professional standard and helped us to get the feel we needed for our film. We also did a lot of worms eye view shots to make me and Kirsty look bigger to the audience, as they will be looking up at us on the screen,again giving us a sense of authority. We believe everything that we filmed today was to a professional standard, and will help to create our music video the way we planned.
We the went back and I edited a lot of the footage on the macs. We did a lot of changes on the clips, for instance, the lighting, the colour of the clips, and in some cases we even reversed the clip for effect. We also sped clips up or slowed them down where necessary. This is an example of how we changed the lighting and style of the clip, the contrast of the colours, to make sure the footage flowed and looked as natural and realistic as possible.
This is an image of how we put the footage together, as you can see we have added the song into the correct place, and it fits with our lip syncing, this took a long time to make sure it fitted all the way through. You can also see a transition between the last few pieces of footage to make sure it flowed well. This is when i changed the lighting settings of some of the clips, however in this instance it was me flipping the clip to put Kirsty on the other side, simply to show our editing skills!
As you can see here, Kirsty is on the left, however, when watching the finished footage, you will notice Kirsty is on the other side of me. This was us testing out the different features on the Macs.
Up until this week we have not been able to do much more filming as we have not had a room. However, we did decide to film in our dance studio, there was a shock as one of the girls in the group could not attend the filming session as she had an accident. This was not a major issue as we decided to film a short dance sequence with the three of us and then solo pieces, and then later on when Charlotte comes back we can film parts with just two of us and change up the ideas we have. This worked well as we could easily make the choreography symmetrical with 3 of us. We managed to make the filming look proffesional as we used the lights in the studio, which have different filters on them to make the lighting different colours (blue white and green) We filmed a small Choreographed piece pictured in our storyboards. We also filmed the first piece of the chorus with me lip singing. The filming was easy, and looked proffesional as the lighting helped, and we could keep changing it throughout each shot. However, the editing was harder as I had to fit me singing and Kirsty singing in the right place. This took about 20 minutes of adding in pieces and taking away, and we had to go off track from the storyboards adding a few small hair flips in to make sure the timing fitted. This will shortly be finished and uploaded onto my blog.
Finally, we decided to give up on our origional idea of the hall as it our efforts to secure a period in there were not paying off. We decided to use Pendefords dance studio. This wasnt too bad as we found 4 small stages we could use to begin our piece, as our first shot was of us all posing into the camera, we just positioned the stages so we could all be seen and did our poses here, and then our walk forward would be us coming off the small stages. This worked well and gave the video a proffesional look. We also found some tall lamps in the back room which we decided to use. These were just normal 60 watt white bulbs, however, we found when we turned the main lights off and just had these lights shining behind the camera and straight at us, it gave the film a more music video style, as it was bright, making the film look grainy and almost rough, this added affect to the film and when we uploaded it we liked the way the filming wasn't too bright. We then filmed ourselvs using a long - shot of holding 2 poses for 8 counts each. We then filmed us strutting towards the camera just like all the girl bands. This is all the filming we did that day as we wanted to change the room we were in after this. We then went back to the classroom and I began editing the footage with input from the other 3 girls. We messed around with the first bits of filming as they were very easy to edit as they were just stills. I changed the colours to make it flash to green red and blue on each word of the song. We then reviewed this footage and found that this colour change made the film look even more grainy, adding to the effect we were trying to create. We then looked at the footage of us walking forward and found that if we darkened it again and it fitted well with the idea we started to create, this looked very professional, such as Beyonces 'Love me' video.
Today we decided we needed to update our plans to fit with the new idea for the music video. We started again with the story boards, and had to look on the internet to refresh our memories about the average Girl Band music video, these are the new story boards:
We decided to have a shot of us walking forward as we decided with the first video, but then have some more real Choreography in the video and a lot of solo pieces and poses in to keep with the theme of 'sexy;. As you can see, there are a lot of singing bits now in the storyboards, again making the video look more like a real band music video.
Once again we went to the hall in the hope we could film, but the exams were ongoing, meaning we couldn't do anything for the film. We stayed in the hall however and decided to discuss our film. We had our original idea on paper, storyboarded, but decided that this idea may not be possible anymore, as we knew we were not going to be able to use the hall. We had decided at first to try to show 4 sides of Lady Gaga -Unique -Feminist -Non feminist -Pop-star Imagery
We were going to do this using different settings, lighting, clothing, and body image, however due to the lack of time recording in the hall we redirected our video. We decided to conform to the 'girl band' style music video of sexy and feminine. We decided to do this as it will mean not as much time will be needed to get everything just right, and also, for our last video we tried to appose the usual Gangster film image and use females as the drug addicts, we decided that we could conform in this video and then compare the two. We had been looking at LAURA MULVEY - The Male Gaze. This is the concept that there are different ways females are viewed by others. There are 3 ways in which women are looked at. By men, by themselves, and by other women. There are different aspects of filming that an change these views, for example lighting, or underwear over the females body exentuating the parts of the body men would like to see. The feminist point of view of a music video is that women are seen as objects, 'sex sells'. This is the idea that because of the image of a female men and women will be more likeley to buy something. For example, if there is a beautiful half naked female on the cover of a magazine, men and women will be more likely to buy it then a balding old man being pictured on the front. This idea highlights that some women like being viewed in this way, for instance models. However the gaze can change directions depending on the image, for instance body image. Therefor, in terms of our music video we decided to conform and use the Male Gaze theory. For example, dressing sexily and attractivly to attract both a male and female audience.
We have conformed to this image as it works for a lot of pop stars. However, we have found that a lot of the images have been edited immensley to appeal more to the male eye. We do not agree with this so have decided to use what we have to make this idea fit. For example, wearing nice fitting black clothes to look mystereous and sexy.
As I have not blogged since December, I have hand written diaries every time we have done some coursework. I will scan these diaries and upload them onto my blog. JANUARY: Today we went to the hall to record the first part of our film, however, there were exam desks everywhere, even though we had booked it! We decided to go to the computer room to begin making the website. We decided on a pink and black colour scheme as this theme means we are keeping with the theme and almost conforming to the 'girl band' style. For instance We also decided to use a lot of the pictures we had taken to decorate the website.
http://girliciousdaily.com/ This is an example of a girl bands fan site, they have used pink font and have lots of pictures of them to enhance the site.
We are going to put things such as tour dates, album releases and facts about each 'band member' on the website. We are also going to have a space for fan comments. These are the things we found on real celebrities sites such as Beyonce. We decided to use Piczo for the website, as we can out this online and make it look more real. We also like how it is easy to use as you can add text, images, and buttons to create a real webpage. When we have a foundation for this website I will upload images/screenshots of the making of the video. We decided that Emily is the best at building a website as she has got her A Level in ICT. I am the best at editing so I will be doing most of this, and Kirsty will be taking over the magazine cover as she is very good at design. Although we all have our own roles, we will all have input on the different things involved in the course work.
