I feel we effectively combined our main and ancillary texts, through recurring themes used throughout in order to create a really strong and identifiable brand identity. The website, album cover and music video all clearly link together through repeated imagery, constant font and logo styling, a consistent colour scheme and an overall sense of band identity.
We knew from the start that synergy was key in making All That Glitters into a brand, as we needed to keep constant links between our main and ancillary texts. This is something which is done by artists in the industry, especially when introducing a new artist. A key example of this is a girl band who have been released within the last few years; Stooshe. They have the similar pop sound to their music, and heavily promote all three band members as individuals, who each have cheeky and loud personalities. Another example includes Little Mix, who are another new edition to the pop music scene, and are promoted in a similar way.
Here I have analysed our media products alongside real media products, from Little Mix. I looked at synergy between album cover, music videos and website.
Ways We Used Synergy:
Logo- always the same font and style, and shown in either black or white depending on the background colour
The order of the three band members was consistently the same- with myself in the centre, Olivia on the right and Alicia on the left.
The same images from a photo shoot are used continuously throughout through use of the test screen image in the music video, and on the website as a single promotion shot.
The album title 'Good as Gold' is always seen in the same italic font, and is always white.
As part of Group 3, along with Olivia Downes and Alicia Powell, I created the artist and brand for 'All That Glitters' which includes the band's official website page, the cover of the album 'Good as Gold', and the debut music video 'No Sleep Tonight'.
Our website is very conventional of pop girl band websites, as has a clear clean cut look and feel to it, with many photos of the girls themselves to create strong band identity. A consistent logo, font and colour scheme is used throughout, and also links with the other media texts created. The album used similar colours and fonts, and featured many different images of the girls from three different shoots with a variety of different costume and make up looks. Finally our debut music video for the single 'No Sleep Tonight' centered around a broken TV. It was a concept music video, created from five different performance shoots. We opened with the band in their true pop identity, dressed in gold, silver and black outfits with glitter make up on their faces, the 'TV' then switches channels to 'MTV Folk' where we see the same band dressed up as country artists and playing instruments typically associated with country artists. This happens a further three more times introducing a rock band in a dark grungy setting, a rap group and a boy band (played by the same three girls).
We were aiming to parody these genres, satirising and producing a comedic music video, which is something not usually associated with females in the music industry. We wanted our girls to be perceived as fun, relatable girls, who any member of our audience could be friends with, and so we decided that creating a comedic and entertaining debut video would create a band with a unique selling point. We also noticed that recently there has been far more 'funny females' gaining popularity through sites such as Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr and Instagram, for example Cara Delevigne and Jennifer Lawrence.
We hence created a mainstream artist and brand, and so drew upon forms and conventions already recognisable for female mainstream pop artists, however we challenged these in relating to gender roles, and female roles in comedy. We thought there was a gap in the market for a rock-pop style girl group, and so this would be our USP in the industry. The lyrics of our chosen song reflected teenage culture, as it was about boys and pursuing relationships, hence would definitely appeal to our teenage female audiences. Due to the flirty nature of our song and the cheekiness in delivering the lines, we aimed to also appeal to teenage males.
Aiming to target teenage girls, we researched groups such as The Saturdays, Stooshe and Little Mix. These groups all make it into the mainstream, and play on their relatability as down-to-earth girls, the close relationship between them, and their attractiveness, also shown within their fashionable attire.
As we were showing multiple genres across our video, we had to research and reference videos from all five of our genres. Prior to filming, we created a video detailing the genre conventions and video references we wanted to incorporate.
GENRE CONVENTIONS:
Aly & AJ- Potential Break-Up Song
Acting/lipsynching style and movements
Attitude
Costume style
Lighting
Use of plain and simple sets with just the girls and their instruments and microphones
Little Mix- Wings
Split screen
Camera movement style
Bright sets and backdrops
Big glamorous hair and make up
Attitude
Actions responding to lyrics (SHH)
Taylor Swift- Mean
Jolly, happy acting
Costume stylings
Instruments
Set- countryside style props
Wavy 'girl-next-door' hair and subtle make up
Overenthusiastic instrument playing
Lily Allen- Not Fair
Set- animals, hay, trees
Countryside sunset-y orange backdrop
Line dancing
Microphone interaction
23- Wiz Khalifa
Use of red and blue light
Hazy screen cutting- connotes drugs and being high
Direct camera address and lots of pointing
Becky G- Play It Again
Styling- snapbacks, jewellery and sportswear
Actions- lots of hand movement, addressing the camera
We tried to use a vast range of varied examples of new media technologies across all stages of our coursework projects, as it allowed us to enhance the media texts we created.
CONSTRUCTION, RESEARCH AND PLANNING:
To find our track and research already existing artist identities, we used sites such as iTunes, Amazon, Spotify, Soundcloud, Wikipedia and YouTube. We primarily researched similar tracks and artists through YouTube and Spotify, as these sites clearly exhibited similar artists or songs, and this was very beneficial to us in discovering aspects we did not know about already, or had not yet thought of.
We used Wikipedia to search full discographies, including lesser known songs and collaboration work.
Group communication was very important in discussing aspects such as make up, costume, sets, locations and shoot scheduling. Conveniently we all have access to social media sites through laptops, tablets and smartphones, and so we set up a Facebook group where we could have discussions and post images.
We also used internet clothing sites such as boohoo.com and missguided.com to purchase items of costume, and originally planned to purchase glitter from ebay.com, until we realised we could buy it much cheaper from Poundland, but with a lesser variety of colours (we only wanted gold, silver and red).
PRODUCTION:
CAMERRRRAAAAA
To light the set we used ARRI Redhead Lights, which were controlled from the lighting desk above the studio. This was quite hard to do, requiring multiple practise sessions, as we had completely different lighting set ups for each genre section of shooting. For our main band shoot, we originally shot onto a projection screen of a glitter background. In watching this footage back we found we did not like this set up, as the lighting facing us was far too bright (as had to light our faces) to be used with a projection screen, and as a result looked very dull and washed out on video. For the re-shoot we decided on a much simpler plain pink backdrop, which worked out very well in the end.
To create this we used the Redhead Lights projected onto a white curtain, and set to a bright pink colour filter.
For our country shoot we used a mixture of red, orange and yellow lighting to create a sunset style backdrop, as associated with these constructed countryside settings.
For rap, we used a black background, and only used red and blue coloured lights to light us and the set.
A black backdrop was also used for our grunge shoot, and plain unfiltered spotlights were used to light our faces.
Once again a black backdrop was used during our boy band set up, with unfiltered lights lighting our faces. We also had four floor lights situated at the back of the studio, creating a spotlit lighting effect coming from the back of the studio.
We edited our footage using Adobe Premiere Pro.
Here we used a feature called ProCamp to grade our video, and here I have used Camtasia screen capture to show how I used ProCamp to grade. Once applied to a video clip you are able to alter brightness, contrast, hue and saturation, and here I demonstrate these tools by sliding the effects to each extreme of the spectrum before applying the desired effect to my video clip. I then switch between the graded and ungraded shot (by hiding the effects of ProCamp), to show how the grading of the footage impacts the look of the music video.
For the pop genre, we made it brighter, lighter and more contrasted to enhance the pink and emphasize facial features.
For country we darkened the footage and raised contrast levels to give more depth to the orange background and stop our faces from looking washed out.
In the rap section we did not have to do much grading as the red and blue lighting effects already enhanced footage enough without need to brighten or add contrast.
The grunge section was darkened to make the black seem heavier and more infinite, and to also hide any lighter areas which showed it to be a curtain. We lowered saturation and raised contrast as this is typical of the grunge music video style, as it gave it a far more moody and angry feel.
Finally, for the boyband section we darkened and raised the contrast, as well as entirely reducing the saturation to leave the video in black and white.
We applied an effect called 'Three-D' to some of the pop section clips. This layered two shots over each other, altering the images playing into two different colours. We used shots of Olivia and Alicia together to unite them, while using images of myself, with other images of myself as I was established as the lead singer, the central driver of the band.
To enhance the TV theme I created a Sky or Virgin styled channel box, which displayed as we flicked between the different TV channels. This showed the time, date, channel name, programme schedule and option buttons.
We used Adobe Photoshop to create our album cover.
We used www.wix.com to create the website for our band. We really likes this program as it allowed us to include a great deal of interactivity on our website, and gave us a lot of freedom in terms of layout, fonts, colours and content. We wanted our marketing strategy to be multi-platform, reaching our target audience on many different levels, so we linked social media sites, and included QR codes which can be scanned to learn more information.
Social Media Marketing:
We created a Facebook and Twitter page for our band, on which we posted official photos and promoted our band. We also posted teaser photos taken during production to gain interest and raise suspense in the run up to our debut single release.
Evaluation:
We used our own social media accounts to create an event to screen all of our year groups music videos, which we all had host access to. After the shoot we used our accounts to post links to our video and survey, hoping that some of our Facebook friends would take the survey. We used our already established online presence to try and gain as many results as possible to analyse for our audience feedback. However, as the survey is anonymous we did receive a few silly results.
We used surveymonkey.com to create an online survey which was accessible to anyone, and could be accessed by clicking on a shared link. On here we received over 40 responses, which allowed us to build up a quite large and varied picture of our audience responses.
We know that a majority of those surveying were from our school, and so were part of the teenage age group we targeted. We specifically invited others to respond, such as the pre-teen groups, and parent groups, as we wanted to analyse a response from a variety of different ages and sexes.
To create the evaluation posts I used the following programmes:
And of course, www.blogger.com to create this blog where I have followed the coursework task from research stages, through to production, and finally in evaluating.
From our audience feedback we recived an overhwelmingly positive result, with many people saying they enjoyed the video, would watch it again and even purchase the single. General cirticisms included the instrument playing being unrealistic, the glitter not being obvious enough and some initial comfusion at the TV concept. After a second viewing many viewers said the TV concept became far more clear and said it was very entertaining. Audiences were generally divided in their opinions of the final section, with some saying it was too flickery and confusing, while others said they would have liked it to have been even more crazy.
I feel our target audience has responded very well to our music video, especially as we received an average rating of 9. In hindsight, a more professional look and feel could have been attained by more fore-planning and more rehearsals to perfect performance.
Our primary audience would be teenage and pre-teen girls, with our secondary being boys of the same age. The tertiary audience would be their parents, more likely their mothers, as they take an interest in what their children are listening to, and we feel we provide a suitable role model for them.
To recieve feedback we created an online survey using www.surveymonkey.com, which we then shared on Facebook and Twitter, asking friends and followers to view our music video, and then help us out by answering a few questions. The questions we asked were:
What did you like or dislike about the music video?
What genre is it?
What would you rate our video out of 10?
Who is the target audience?
Would you watch the video again?
Based on the music video, would you buy the single?
Do you see the band members as role models for young girls?
Did you find our music video funny or entertaining?
For you, what was the message we were trying to convey in the video?
In sharing this link, we directly targeted our expected target audience as they would be users of both of these social media platforms. In approaching audiences in this way I think we accurately were able to survey the appropriate demographic of our target audience, with some older and younger participants being asked individually.
Overall, the genre of our music video was correctly determined as 'Pop' by nearly 90% of those surveyed.
We received an average rating of 9.06, which is exceptionally high and a result that I am delighted with. This poll showed that we have received a very positive response to our music video, and therefore can be deemed as somewhat successful.
Apart from a few (we assume) silly answers of 65+, we generally received results of the expected demographic, with teenagers being largely identified as our target audience.
87.5% of those who answered our survey said that they would watch our video again, which is brilliant, as we aimed to create a music video which would be desirable for repeated viewing.
Largely successful results, with over 60% of people saying they would buy our single, and over 30% saying they know someone who would. Obviously music sales are key to artist success and as debut artists we have been responded well to by our surveyed audience.
Do you see the band members as role models for young girls?
Did you find the video funny or entertaining?
What is the message we were trying to convey in the video?
Here are a few combined comments we received in response to this question, summarising the general consensus view, as responses to this question were either very similar, or not at all.
A short interview we recorded of male and female teenagers responding to all three media products.
