Evaluation question 2

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

As well as producing a music video, we also produced a website and magazine cover and advert. These were two media texts that are essential in creating an effective brand, as the advert needs to attract people to the band and the video, so without advertising the song/video would never be seen to fully recognized.

"A good brand delivers the message/ genre/ ideology/ subculture clearly, and confirms your credibility as an artist" – I believe that through the combination of our website and magazine pages we achieved each of these different aspects.

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 layout of different websites / artistic or unique aspects

· Different sections that need to be included / information within those sections
· What colours / pictures / conventions are present within certain genres

We needed our website to look professional but at the same time fit with the message that owl city put across, which is a very happy, feel good message. This would ensure that it appealed to our target audience. The headings we used on our website provide a similar purpose to subtitles and the information each subtitle holds is good as it provides additional information on the artist which helps with the process of commodification as the video sells Adam’s or Owl city’s creative side, and the website provides information on him making him look cool or desirable.

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.
So overall the website works as a back-up tool for his music and videos, providing information and sometimes additional images behind the artist to reinforce their star image. I also feel that one of the most effective marketing tools on the website is the virtual iPod in the bottom corner as this would enable someone to hear or see the music video to ‘Hot air balloon’ go on his website, then listen to other songs by him, perhaps encouraging them to purchase some of his music.

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.
Our research involved looking at music magazines such as NME and Q to establish such factor as:
· The text / information included on the page
· The balance of imagery and text
· Short slogans or phrases that get the point across

Our front page cover design for NME was to advertise an interview within the magazine and to basically advertise Owl City as a brand or a commodity to the readers of NME. We looked at previous magazine covers and designed our own which works effectively with our video as it attracts audience attention towards the magazine and especially Owl city which will then direct them onto the music video itself, so the magazine is almost a catalyst to start a chain reaction ending in the viewing of our music video.

The advert we created was intended to be spread over an entire page or possibly half a page and it is purely to market the band, the song 'Hot air balloon' and the video that 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.
I believe that this advert is really effective as it is simple, effective and informative. It does not take the viewer a long time to comprehend and it gets the point across. Another good thing about it is that it encompasses the idea of the video itself, its a photo of a still image, but this time the still image is on an iPod touch instead of printed off.

The ancillary texts that we created in addition to our music video have helped turned Owl city into a desirable of commercially popular product or commodity. The logo we produced was simple and effective in that it got the name of the band across in a simple and stylish manor while creating a point of interest and inviting people to research ‘Owl city’ where they would find the website and possibly the magazine pages that would provide them with loads of information and images to further the commodification of Owl city. The simple contrast between black and white is striking to the audience and catches the readers eye. The magazine is especially good at advancing the idea of commodification as it features many world class artists 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.

The fact that we produced two different media texts; our magazine cover and advertisement and our website shows we have utilized synergy as a strategy. I feel that it worked brilliantly and that both of our ancillary media products worked well in promoting and advertising our main media product, furthermore it did it in a very professional and successful manor while still retaining artistic and visual merit.

Evaluation question 1

How does your video, use, develop, or challenge the forms and conventions of real music videos?

The first point that needs to be made is that it is almost impossible to tell how we have used or developed the conventions of music video as they are incredibly varied! However, one thing that is usually always considered a convention of music video is that the artist is almost always seen ‘performing’ usually ‘live’ or miming; in order to give the video a sense of believability. Although in our music video we did not feature anyone performing at all, completely challenging the convention just mentioned as we maintained the loose narrative throughout the whole video instead of cutting to anyone performing. I believe that it worked perfectly as it does not feel empty or lacking in any way and it flows smoothly with the music maintaining the rhythm and not disrupting the audiences viewing experience.

Secondly it is often considered a convention that the video explores the lyrics or meaning of the song in some way, however we didn’t explore the lyrics in any way, but by ignoring the lyrics or any possible meaning to the song; we actually followed two other conventions. These conventions being disjuncture and developing a loose narrative, disjuncture is incredibly common amongst music video as it enables some true artists and talented directors to develop very creative technically profound videos; this is what we tried to achieve with 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.

The last major convention that we challenged was the idea of cutting the edits 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.

In contrast though, there are some conventions that we did follow, for example displaying the name of the artist and song title at the beginning and end of the song, this is purely to do what it is intended to do and help the audience 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.

Secondly we did use fast cuts, which are popular amongst music video, but we adapted the fast cuts and used them within stop motion, so we cut from different scenes of stop motion and cut the photos so they ran quickly with very fast cuts between them.
The major aspect for any music video though is seen to be; if it looks ‘cool’ it will work, and in a sense we used this technique as one of the major factors for us in creating this video is we wanted it to look visually striking and smart. (Hence why we used stop motion, it looks fantastic!) This idea is represented by the phrase ‘MTV foregrounds the signifier over the signified’ – John Friske.

We followed other smaller conventions of music video through contemporary culture, these would be things such as the costume our main character was in, the hair style he had, the items in his room etc; all of these are present in youth culture and appear to make the main character or the ‘meat’ cool and combined with the music they can be a useful marketing tool in creating a ‘star image’. This is the effect we were trying to achieve by using these clothes, hair styles and objects as not only does it make the video more interesting, it also adds colour which was another crucial aspect that we needed to bring to the media product.

So overall I would say that we used enough conventions to make it clear that it was a music video and that it still worked as one, but we also developed some conventions in order to stand out and produce a more visually interesting and attractive video than the completely conventional music videos on channels such as MTV.