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

After completing our video we needed to decide how we would like our media product to be distributed to its consumer. We produced a CD package and magazine poster. The ancillary task needed to conform to the genre of our video in order to attract the target market. It also needed to be clear what we where advertising or presenting and also needed to sell the product.

Our music video contained two key parts, the narrative and the band performance shots. We wanted to incorporate both of these within our CD package. The front cover was narrative based and featured the same actor who played the role of Ricky in our music video. We took a photograph of him spray painting the wall to show his rebellious side. The boy is also on his own to show his individuality which connotes individuality on the musics behalf. This is also a reflection of the Independence the character experiences during the narrative. This connotes rebellion to our audience and conforms to the metal genre. We also used quite dark colours such as the strong black shadows in order to incorporate the metal/rock music genre. By using photoshop to give the effect of Ricky being spray painted onto the wall this showed that there is a narrative element as he is not a real representation of a boy. This makes it easier for the audience to engage watch as they will not need to get too emotionally involved but instead can just enjoy the good music and storyline.

Our poster image consists of a close up of a spray can. This becomes an iconic image which is associated with rebellion which conforms to our genre and relates to our target audience. The poster is also the key place where we can incorporate our chosen institution with our product and our distribution platforms. The image includes small logo's to give our audience information. We chose the spray can because that too has space to be written on and we chose to put the institution and name of the song and artist. To keep a relationship between the poster and our video we photographed the image in front of a brick wall which reflected alot of the shots from our video. we also included a small incidental image featuring our CD front cover. Not only does this tie the two products together but it also shows a second representation of Ricky to its audience.

I think the ancillary task and media product work really well together. In both we used a similar selection of desaturated colour and selective colour to highlight certain aspects. We also used a vignette effect on the ancillary task images to reflect the darkness we filmed alot of our shots in.

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

Media Project: Evaluation 1 from Ollie Sandles on Vimeo.

In response to this question we have created a video.

Ancillary task

Here are our final ancillary task texts. We used photoshop to edit the images and add texts. The first image is four differerant images including the fron, back and two inside covers of our CD package. The second image is the magazine poster.

final Video

Skid Row/ 18 and Life - Music Video from Ollie Sandles on Vimeo.

Studio band shots.

We returned to the photography studio one more time to get some shots of the band members playing the instruments in more dramatic lighting. These shots have had a particulalry powerfull effect when placed during the instrumental parts of the music. They reflect the lonelyness that we see in Ricky, our protagonsit, and the shots referance the original music video which featured a similar thing.

 

Below is a lighting diagram which shows how we mapped out the studio. It was difficult at first to achieve the selective lighting we wanted which highlights parts of the guitar without lighting up the guitarist. We lowered the light and pointed it towards the back drop which gave a silhouette effect.

Re-do lyric shoot

After reflecting on the footage we got from our lyric shoot in the photography studio, we've decided to do it again. This time James (our singer) has learnt the lyrics properly.

Lyric shoot (Photography studio)

We booked out the photography studio after school and went and set up the studio lights. We used a black backdrop as it gave the shots a more serious and aggressive feeling. James stood in the centre of the backdrop and the camera was on a tripod opposite at chest height. We started off using one light on a dim setting to give strong shadows. We then varied the angle of the light to achieve different amounts of contrast on the subjects face. We also explored different camera angles, some with and some without the guitar in shot.