1. A2 Media Evaluation – Michael Bull.

3. This is the permission letter received from the Black Kid’s management/record label, allowing us to use their song for our media project.

4. Research and planning We initially came up with the idea of making the video seem fairly comical. I believe that we did this through various different methods. Firstly, the use of the “Guitar Hero” peripherals (Drums, guitar and Decks) all aid the overall comedy feel. The audience would appreciate this and possibly find this comical, as it’s a something out of the ordinary. We gained inspiration from this video by Smosh.com. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_6ItxioUco

9. There are various different aspects of our video, which help to create this idea of comedy. Though we have our main shots, primarily band shots, Hassan’s performance and some location shots which follow the conventions of a music video, we decided to interject these shots with something unusual. Take for example the following screen shots taken from the video. These are some examples of the above point. We decided upon place this shot in to portray that the band are “up for a laugh”. This sense of being childish and enjoying yourself, in my opinion, would relate with the audience, especially if they have gone sledging. Note that James is again skateboarding, yet on a half a sledge. To me, this is one of the more humorous scenes of our project. I say this as we originally intended to use this as a serious shot, but Ben completely messed up the timing of everything, resulting in him blocking what James was doing in the background. Which hopefully the audience would pick up on. It was also with a sense of irony we decided upon this shot, seeing though it says “Hollywood Production” in the top left of the board. The audience could interpret this in their own way, but to me, it’s making fun of the quality of our video.

10. Though, this shot was a result of a slip up on my part, yet in the final project worked quite well. The shot before is of Hassan performing. Followed by this shot which looks like I’m laughing at Hassan’s performance. Notice the inclusion of the Guitar hero drum kit. I believe this shot to work quite well seeing though, I’m “performing” on a set of stairs outside. The aptly nick-named “headless dance scene”. Originally, this was Ben walking back up the icy path, to turn the camera off. Yet with the music behind it, it makes him look like he’s performing a “jig”. To our audience, his rigid almost robot-like movements along with the music would seem fairly comical.

12. As well as creating a video project, we were also required to create ancillary’s projects to accompany the video. This took the form of CD covers. Below are our completed covers. Carrying on with the colour scheme of the logo was, to us, quite important, as it continued the brand which he intended to create. The front cover itself is quite sporadic in it’s design. We intentionally created a juxtaposition of “organised chaos” for our cover. I mean this as though it looks like scribbles, if you look into the picture properly, you can see the sense of symmetry and pattern. Front Cover; The graffiti style of the font gives of the connotations of the bands youthfulness and energy. Though cluttered, I believe that it is visually appealing to our target audience. The logo was placed behind the font to draw the readers eye. It is also at a different angle to the actual writing, again, a statement of the bands individuality.

13. Back Cover; We actually decided upon using the Black Kid’s real record label on our back cover. This helped to create some authenticity to our project. Again, following a similar design as the front cover. Yet we striped the use of the green font as it would be visually overpowering for the consumer Seeing though that this is a CD cover, the inclusion of a bar code was imperative. Each of the band members are featured on the back page, yet in a “sketchy” image. This to me looks visually pleasing, and fits in with the style of the cover. The song titles are taken from the band’s actual album “Partie Traumatic” The inclusion of the recording/label information was also added to add authenticity

14. Inside cover; Behind cd; These images are meant to be displayed like this when the cd cover is open. Notice the repetition of the image. It is intended to symbolise that our band are here, and the “new kids on the block” The logo is prominent to reinforce this idea of our brand image. Instead of having a conventional band photo. We decided to do it a bit differently, hence the above image. Having this sketchy image gives the picture a bit of character as well as fitting in with the colour scheme. The text here is again to emphasise who the band are. It is placed directly across from the band photo for the same effect.

15. We were also tasked with creating a magazine article; As in our Cd covers, we have followed certain codes and conventions which we created for our brand. Evident here, is the use of the green and purple colour’s recognisable with our album cover. We have also reused the same image to create a sense of mystery. This will hopefully pose the question to the audience; “who are they?” Debut being a different colour attracts the audience’s eye. The emphasis on this almost slogan like sentence is hype. Placed in the sentence quite cleverly are the words “new, and scene”. This would instantly draw the readers eye due to the nature of these “buzzwords”. “Kids” reflects upon the youth of our band, something the younger audience would pick up on. By mentioning the single, we could attract the audience who have heard that song alone. Say for example those who have heard the song on the radio.

16. Something also to comment upon would be the use of the British flag in our video. This is something which also helps with the branding aspect. It gives the target audience an idea of who we are. Yet also, portrays our pride for our country, something not usually shown in music videos. This could alienate some viewers, yet I believe it could strengthen our potential fan base, due to the fact our nationality is adding to our brand identity. This image was edited to bright out the vibrancy of the flag. Due to the weather conditions, the flag was almost a musty grey. This is done to aid the above point.

17. Audience Feedback See further down the blog for this video. Luckily, the overall impression given from the group questioned were all positive. This shows myself and the group that our video and ancillary products firstly followed the codes and conventions of the music video, but also, those which we had set ourselves ( in respect to the comic aspect). It also gave us the impression of how effective the video could be if realised to the general public. The idea of the audience feedback though was to basically inform us whether or not we had completed our project effectively. Watching back the footage, I get the impression that we did well.

18. With the video, we also issued a questionnaire as a quick summary of what each individual thought of our video. This slide and the next feature two of those questionnaires, chosen at random.

20. Final Cut was a quite interesting editing software, it allowed us to do quite a lot with our work, but was also incredibly easy to use, once the main shortcuts were learnt. For example the cut tool – “b” button- allowed me to cut the timeline into sections so I could easily edit them. Stupidly, the two windows you see were filmed at two different times. Hence it was quite difficult to edit. Yet, it seems to have fit in perfectly. In order to create this, I had to place the second bit of footage, in this case the small window, on a separate timeline, just underneath the original. Then, by selecting the options in the viewer – top right of final cut, I could tamper with the size and position of this footage. I used this technique twice in the footage, just to create something different.