This is the final post of my Media blog - I hope you have enjoyed reading it.
Media Music Video, finshed product.
Owl city - Hot air balloon
Here is a link to Fletchers YouTube channel with our Music Video on, in addition to the hard copy -- http://www.youtube.com/user/enjoiflea
Ancillary Text One - The Unofficial Owl city Website
www.wix.com/enjoi_flea/owlcityowlcityowlcity
Ancillary Text Two - NME Cover and Advertisment
In the research stage of my media music video, the very first new technology I used to help me was the internet, and more specifically internet search stations such as Google. By using these we managed to find loads of information on music videos, the conventions
within them, the diversification they hold and techniques that are useful to employ when creating one. Another new technology that stemmed from search engines is the use of online magazine achieves, such as that of Q magazine which we used to look at their ‘Best music videos of all time’ article.
ences, PEN story, Raconteurs – Salute your solution, The White Stripes – Blue Orchid), read what people thought of them on the comments below and evaluate them ourselves. It also enabled us to pick up on loads of ideas and inspirational techniques used by other directors and producers. Finally YouTube enabled us to watch several Pop up Videos and learn about certain music videos, techniques used within them, the budgets they had and other trivial information about them and the artist. 
elf, we used a Canon EOS 1000D, it is in Canon’s DSLR profession range, it has many functions that helped us to create our music video, for example ‘sport’ or ‘burst’ mode, where the camera will take loads of frames per second, making it a lot easier to capture movement within the shot, however as the frames have to be captured so quickly you sometimes sacrifice quality if there isn’t enough light, so we had to make sure there was enough light either by photographing at certain times in the day, using artificial light or using the flash on the camera. It would have not made any sense to use a Sony Handycam like we did last time as everything we needed to do involved completely still images as although the Handycam can take still images, it is not specialized in doing that, whereas the Canon is extremely specialized in taking still images. 
is the editing software, for our media piece as mentioned in planning, we used Sony Vegas, we used Vegas because it allowed us to do everything we needed and it was simple to use. We used it on our AS media project so we knew our way around it as a package, however, we did still download trial programs for other software just to check to see what they were like. Vegas allowed us to upload our photos quickly by letting us drag them in, shorten the time length they remained on the screen for, change the colours of them, change the intensity or the opacity of them, use filters, effects or blurs and it also let us cut our music down so that we could cut out the last chorus in order to increase repeatability and decrease monotony, what was especially helpful was that Vegas allowed us to make certain parts of the song e.g. the vocals or synthesizer quieter, which made it a lot easier to fit the song together. 
The third new media technology we used in the construction of the media music video was the Kodak 24 hour printing service; this enabled us to put all of our photos onto memory stick, give it to the person in the kiosk and then picked all the printed photos 24 hours later. This was a great service as it saved us a huge amount of time and money compared to how much it would cost us in both time and money to print them out ourselves. Plus by using Kodak it guaranteed a good quality of print and on good quality paper. For 800 prints it cost our group £40 which is highly cost effective; this price is as we had so many prints as the more prints you have the cheaper it becomes. 
oads of feedback from social networking site ‘Facebook’, all of it was positive and very supportive this was good as it minored and reinforced the views expressed by teachers but it was feedback from an age group closer to the target audience for music video, especially of this genre. Within a few days we had received over 40 comments and more than 50 people had ‘liked’ it. 
This pie chart shows the marks that we were awarded by the students, in the blue is the proportion of students who gave us 9/10 and in the red is the proportion of students that gave us 10/10. The class we showed it to was a class of 16 and the actual number were, 13 gave us 10/10 and 3 gave us 9/10; so as is clearly evident the video was a great success!Another positive aspect of this form of feedback is that the feedback was gained of students who make up a very large part of the target market for music videos, proving that our video appealed greatly to its target market, once again confirming its success. 
people who are bang on the same age group as the target audience for music video. Here are just some of the 44 comments we received:
and then being placed back into an envelope from the bed, this was not initially how our video ended, however, we decided that upon hearing a few comments from people within our target audience expressing the view that they thought the ending could ‘Be better, and not end in such as abrupt way, perhaps having more of a conclusion’ we decided to re-shoot this scene and feature the balloons and envelope again. I think it worked perfectly as the photos going back into the envelope refers back to the start and them coming out of the envelope and the balloons add a new and exciting idea into the blog. The initial people we received the constructive criticism off felt that ‘The ending has much more of a conclusion now, it wraps it up perfectly’ which once more shows that we have pleased and satisfied our target audience.
Firstly we created the ‘unofficial owl city’ website, this website had to ‘sell’ the artist to their target audience and look professional and not out of place compared to other websites so we researched other websites first, we looked at: 
The headings for our website had to be as realistic and professional as possible in order to make the whole website realistic and believable so we used headings that many other official band websites used, allowing our target audience members easy access to information on him. The use of a quite artistic yet interesting and happy background keeps in running with the rest of Owl city’s image and does not look out of place when put together with other media’s he employs such as obviously music, music video, magazine covers and social networking pages such as MySpace. 
Our second ancillary text was a magazine cover / advertisement using the popular music magazine NME (New musical express); we chose this media form as it is highly successful in marketing and advertising bands and videos to the public and is a hugely recognized image / brand.
accompanies it. Before we had the idea for what the advert would look like we looked through loads of magazines such as NME, Q, Kerrang in order to take inspiration from other adverts and see what kind of things were included in them.
not just one (such as the website) so the fact Owl city are in there makes a big statement about how good they must be musically as magazines would focus purely on his music and videos rather than his life and background. 
th our video, which I believe we achieved. I think using the idea of stop motion and disjuncture in conjunction with each other was a very good idea as for disjuncture to work, the video needs to be aesthetically pleasing and interesting, or simply. It must look cool; which stop motion does, so it combined perfectly to create an interesting and unique visual experience. And all of this was because we challenged the idea of using the lyrics to build up a loose narrative by just coming up with a loose narrative that used the idea of disjuncture instead of the lyrics as its base. 
its so that they reflect the songs structure, as normally they cut from live footage to perhaps a close up of the singers face, or a loose narrative, however we maintained the loose narrative all the way through apart from at the chorus where we animated the lyrics on a piece of card (relating to synaesthesia) , we intentionally maintained our loose narrative all the way through so that we didn’t not over complicate the video and make it confusing or cluttered. We also did it to deliberately attempt to challenge this particular convention and see if it would work maintaining the narrative the whole way through the song. I feel that it worked brilliantly and it keeps the video simple but still visually interesting and repeatable due to the stop motion aspect of it. 
ce recognize the artist and the song, enabling them to find it at a later date if they wish so. So it is actually a marketing or advertising technique really, first adopted by MTV but has now become an important convention of music video simply because of the need for recognition. So we as a group felt that we should include the artist and song name because it makes it look more professional and likely to be on television such as MTV and secondly out of respect to the artist, as we would not want to take any undue credit for the song itself as none of us helped to write it. 
it looks fantastic!) This idea is represented by the phrase ‘MTV foregrounds the signifier over the signified’ – John Friske. 
