Task 1 - Andrew Goodwin

Andrew Goodwin is a media theorist who identifies five key features of music videos that an 
audience is drawn to. They are;
Thought beats - seeing the sound - firstly the audience must be able to visualize the sound in their head by taking into account the structure of the song such as the verse/chorus. Secondly, the audience must hear the sound of the artists voice. This should be unique and can encourage a trademark sound, making the artist stand out to the audience. Barthes theory of the grain of the voice can be applied to this as he puts forward the notion of the singing voice as an expressive instrument and therefore, able to make associations of its own. Goodwin highlights the artists mode of address. Describing the artist and audience in a reciprocal stream of narrative between storyteller and story. This analogy can be translated to the music video, which is an extension of this story telling.
Narrative and Performance - According to Goodwin the audience only tend to get the gist of a song, the true meaning ambiguous. Goodwin suggests that music video should tell an unrelated tale with their role of advertising taking centre stage. Music videos should have a coherent repeatability. Narrative and performance should reflect one another in a coherent way so the audience can watch it over and over without loosing interest. The artist fulfilling both roles of narrator and participant helps to increase the authenticity. However, lip-synching and mimed actions must remain at the heart of a music video as the audience need to believe this is real life. 
The Star Image - The star is a vital feature of a music video. The meta narrative describes the development of a star over time and should be incorporated in some way into the production of the music video. As presumably die hard fans appreciate the reference to before the artist was big, which only other fans can identify. 
Relations to Visuals of the Song - Illustrate - Music videos should incorporate an array of images to illustrate the meaning of the lyrics and associate it to the genre - Amplify - This is similar to repeatability, meanings and effects are manipulated to constantly shown through out the video and burned into our memory - Disjuncture - The meaning of the song is ignored. The audience stays in the dark as to its meaning.
Technical aspects of music video - technical aspects cement the music video together through the use of camera, angle, mise en scene and editing. When editing the music video should be cut to the beat as it makes it more entertaining. 
All of Goodwin's theories can be applied to OK Go's 'Upside Down & Inside Out'
Is the song cut to the beat? YES
Is it used to advertise? YES, OK Go recieved many contacts and many impressive reviews,
Is there lip synching? YES
Is the meaning of the song clear? NO  they are just playing around in synch in the plane.
Is here star image clear? NO
Can you watch it over and over without loosing interest? YES

Task 1 - Codes and Conventions in media texts

'The predictable and familiar forms and techniques used by the media to communicate certain ideas or to convey a desired impression'.

Codes are merely a system of signs used to convey a meaning. They are divided into three categories; technical, symbolic and written.

Technical includes camera angles, sound and lighting, framing, juxtaposition and composition, lighting and depth of field.

Symbolic includes the clothing, colour, body language, dress and actions of the characters. This may also include the setting.

Written includes headlines, captions, style font choice, graphic design etc.

To understand how codes are applied we must first understand the sign systems and their conventions or rules, making the reading of signs essential in analysis. This method of interpreting signs is called semiotics and is applied to the reading of visual images. These signs offer denotations and connotations to the audience. When a social agreement is reached upon signs used a shared understanding is generated by the audience of the fixed reading signs and a language between audience and producer is established. Codes are effectively a language, which when shared operate by means of conventions.

Conventions are generally the ways of doing something. They are infrequently written down, but unspoken ruled that we learnt to accept and identify. Conventions become so familiar and natural that they become the expected, for example an isolated location is expected in a horror film. Conventions can be used, supported and reiterated, but frequently individuals deliberately subvert these conventions and this is how media texts change and evolve. Conventions can be applied in different media concepts such as narrative and genre.

Codes and conventions are essentially a mutually agreed system of signs on which director and audience have agreed upon meaning and use to communicate. This makes it easy to create a product with a specific genre as you need only repeat the conventions of the genre. This is useful for producers as they can instantly target their audience with fool proof plans and the audience can stroll into HMW or scroll onto Amazon and immediately identify products in their preferred genre. This is useful in production, but boring and if everyone sticks to the conventions of production the media texts never expand. It may be safer to stick to conventions but its more exciting to subvert and create something new.

Task 1 - Evaluating Digipak

Within our digipak we adhered to the generic conventions associated with the alternative rock genre; a combination of rebelliousness and youthfulness. This is important as we specifically want our digipak to appeal to the right audience who enjoy this genre of music.





Composition: We positioned our band stretched out to take half of the cover in which we chose the rest of the space for the title. It generally creates a more aesthetically pleasing image as each individual member is represented as a different person which subverts the synthetic covers which are completely synchronized. We shared out the content equally as it is of equal importance, Dean, Adam, Joe and James providing the alternative and the plain dirty wall bring the alternative aspect. A majority of albums choose a similar layout such as 'Ramones'.

Colour: The muted colour palette reflects the organic and authentic image we are trying to portray. Again this is common with the alt.rock genre as they didn't show off bright ambient lights as it didn't reflect themselves or general life.

Font: We used the 'Floydian' font as it is a fairly simple but realistic font. There is no pretence of it being anything else, just fit for purpose, which is to embed in the wall showing a hint of rebelliousness. This is essentially the alt.rock attitude. Not only that but the genre attempts to relive the past with a definite attitude of the past as this is an old rock inspired font which is in keeping with the nostalgic mentality.

Tracklist-

Miss Alissa
What Went Down
Trouble
Jaded
Neon Brother
Nocturnal
Save Me
Rachet
Life After
Itch
Final Days
Walls

Some are in keeping with the genre such as 'Trouble' and 'What Went Down' others are less so. This can be seen as drifting away from the expected rock conventions which we have been trying to avoid. By avoiding generic rock conventions we can distance ourselves from the genre and be identified as alternative rock as they do not necessarily share an audience.

Task 1 - Website Conventions

Over the past month we began making websites for our artist. We made a final website when we got our feedback from our teacher from two other websites. The first two websites were completely improvised and were made before the shoot days of our video. This gave us little knowledge of how we wanted to present our band as we didn't start evaluating generic website conventions of alt.rock artists. Alex mainly focused on the websites and I didn't put in my input, this lead to very unprofessional looking pages with several irregularities and no similarities to any other rock artist. Alternative artists websites are always shown as being very simple and generic with only few features that make them stand out massively such as the logo or a taster video. Although they do not reject modern technologies, they do not pamper themselves like synthetic artists who have websites with bright colors and fancy animations. Secondly alternative rock artists who debut, are not financial giants so advertising is key, so its tradition to sell themselves on their website however big they are. This generally done through a shop or through selling tickets for an upcoming gig. Many alt.rock artists also give away freebies to avoid the audience going to competitors to consume their products. This has lead towards free streaming on websites and some artists let consumers listen to a song or two, to drive them to buy and album etc. These conventions drove us to making a final website that was based on other references to rock websites, in which we took inspiration from and didn't go ahead and improvise.

The Home Page - The original home page from the other websites featured a large wide shot photo of the band itself that took up half the page and was just the album cover photo in a different colour and different font placement. We decided to change the home page by not having the band's image but featuring the artists debut music video as a way of introducing us as a band, giving audiences a better insight into who The Walls are. The colour scheme chosen is very simple but professional as we look like an authentic band which connotes rebelliousness and nostalgia of the past rock music. We even added a video in the background to show how we are a committed band who like to give our audience regular updates of our music production. Not only does the video show us as being committed and organic but it also shows how we are in favor of modern technologies and that we like to mix up a bit of everything to reach a larger amount of customers. We also added a link to our new album on the newsfeed side as it gives viewers an opportunity to listen to the music and potentially generate revenue. As we are an organic band we also want to connect with our fans so we don't want to force updates onto fans but give them an opportunity to connect through social media links.

Band Members - As we are a band, we didn't want to write a long paragraph as a biography as it would just bore customers, so we decided to split us up and have small paragraphs on each band member so that fans get an insight in us as just normal people. We didn't do a photoshoot for the band as that would of shown them as having loads of money, so we just took in the moment shots that were from different times during the production. We decided to include a few instruments for the drummer and bass guitarist to show how we are organic and our star image within the performance element.

Streaming - We wanted to give fans an opportunity to listen to our song without the video as it is already up on YouTube free of charge, hopefully it will encourage them to click the orange '£9.99' button so that they pay to listen to more.

Merchandise - Originally we had no merchandise on the the other websites, but as we have now tried to adhere to generic alt.rock conventions we decided to place a few items to help gain an audience. Simple cotton wear such as t-shirts and jumpers were made on word and photoshop to make them look as real as possible.

Contact and Tour Dates - Our contact page has a different background which shows that it's the more serious side of the website to do with the admin and we thought that a brick wall would be the most original and authentic background as it acts ironic towards the band. We also setup an email text box so people can message us directly from the website in which they would hope replies would come in as soon as possible. This is very common for upcoming artists as they heavily depend on any feedback or any record label approaches. Therefore it is important for everyone to be able to contact the artist. We also added some gig dates in which we used the word 'gig' rather than 'tour' as we aren't financially able to play in big venues for a long period of time. However people may find that these venues are too big for an artist like us, however they are small rooms that these academies own so it gains a hype for the location as it involves big company names.

Inspirations - We were inspired by several websites such as Stereophonics, Radiohead and The Killers.  They are all alternative rock artists who started up the same way we did and sold themselves through the organic ways such as bar gigs. Here are their websites:

http://www.stereophonics.com/

http://www.radiohead.com/deadairspace

http://www.thekillersmusic.com/

They all include everything that we aimed to include within our website such as a contact page, a store, a media page etc. We tried to adhere to the most simplistic conventions that create the authentic feel from an organic artists website, without adding too much to make it stand out like a piece of cake.

Feedback

Here are our feedback videos...




This feedback shows the positive aspects of our video and what we did well such as smooth editing and quick cuts and that he thought there were no problems within. This interviewee understood all our conventions.




 This person likes the originality of our video which we aimed to achieve by not just focusing on a performance element but also by making it like a genuine video.

Editing Day(s)

I edited our footage on Adobe Premiere Pro using my own computer so I could spend time editing it during my holiday. I first attempted the television beginning in which I inserted a TV dating back to the 50's, however we did want footage of a TV being used in real life but it was too hard to find as the camera in the videos did not stay still. Therefore I added the picture and cropped the screen in which I added the zoomed out footage of the presenter.



In doing this I edited the color of all the footage by adding black and white and added a static grainy effect to make it like an old TV. However I had one problem with the TV shot, I found that it didn't look great in the TV and that zooming into the footage would be too hard and would take too long to do so. Therefore we replaced it with just ordinary static TV footage.



We managed to stitch all our footage together to follow the animatic and timeline which was good and made it better by making zooms on Premiere Pro that were missed out during filming. We managed to find different clips online of Beatlemania which looked perfect to insert into our music video. Also we added different texts into our video such as a retro title for the 'Ed Wood Show' and an MTV style text for the song title. We had one problem which was that the lighting of the theatre was too bright which made the faces hard to see and edit. However it can be said that it was purposely done as technology during those days didn't have the best tweaks in which brightness settings were not present on stage lights. Overall the editing process was very long but successful in achieving a music video that is different from any other media video.

Shoot Day Take 2

After deciding our location and finalizing our idea we decided to film it on a Friday after school in which we had time all of mid-day to late afternoon to set up and film. We didn't need to book or schedule far in advance as the school theatre would not be operational when all the students went home. Therefore all that was available were teachers, the film crew/actors and resources. We filmed our animatic a few days before in which we were able to get a certain idea of the shots we want to create but not necessarily include all of them. Also, as all the teachers were at school, we were able to use Mr Simon Wood as our presenter. We cleared all the chairs from the room and managed to reassemble the stage so it was in a formation that elevated the drum kit and had both guitarists on the sides with the singer at the front. Here is the formation we made the day before...

First off we got our teacher and filmed him by the curtain presenting our live performance for the Ed Wood show. As we were creating a parody he presented in several different accents such as Russian, Australian, English and American. We thought the filming went well and that our teacher had a great script in which he improvised some of it as he has had previous acting experience before. After this we set up the stage which took about twenty minutes as it required heavy lifting. The props were brought in as personal possessions however the drum kit, microphone and amplifiers were all taken from the music rooms but it was helpful that the equipment from the music department was directly opposite the theatre. Time wise we aimed to do it for 5 hours even though we had more to spare as we weren't in a completely time strict place. After collecting the equipment we set it up on stage and managed to get the song played through the theatre speakers via auxiliary. We started filming and managed to improvise all the moves with the playing of the instruments and luckily our lead singer is an experienced live performer and was able to perform some authentic rhythmic moves that worked well with the idea. As a group we worked well and managed to capture all our camera shots in which we filmed a few more shots. However in several shots the lead singer didn't know the lyrics to the specific part, therefore we knew that editing would not tolerate these mistakes. We also captured several shots of the musicians but added a few wideshot's of them singing the chorus to act as if they are part of the singing. We also had one person controlling the lights from the top kiosk for the flood and stage lights. He was very inexperienced with them so it took a while to get the right light to use at the beginning of the performance. Furthermore he wasn't able to change the brightness so we didn't know whether it was too much. We managed to complete several wide shots and extreme close-ups as we planned as we didn't want to film the video from one take, thus mixing in present day technology and mixing it with the past. Some areas we could of improved were the playing of the instruments which weren't always played to time and didn't look like the right chords necessary for the song. Our main concern was the water and the symbol shot because we weren't sure we would be able to capture it perfectly without damaging the lens, but we managed to zoom in on the instrument and successfully did it with no errors. This was due to myself not hitting the symbol as hard as we wanted to. Overall I think the shoot day went exceptionally well, we filmed every shot that we wanted to include and managed to easily access resources. However it may have been better to have rehearsed or learnt the lyrics especially as it is a hard song to sing and as well maybe learn the actual chords for the song making it more realistic. It was much more challenging than if we did a narrative based/slower paced song and we were willing to put ourselves to that test and see if we could film something unlike any other media music video. Here are some images and a video from the day.....