Question 3: What have you learned from your audience feedback?

There are a number of things that appeared in my audience feedback that I would like to talk about, some of these points are of things I felt I have done better, some along with the audience could have been improved.

Dan Biddle 02 March at 16:03
The setting is appropriate for a music video of this genre, the performers really put a lot of effort in.

This is some feedback a friend gave me, I believe the first half of the sentence can be interpreted to mean, that I achieved a preferred reading of my video. I intended for it to fit the rock/ metal genre and here is confirmation that I have managed this. The second part suggests that the performance was very good and that because of the effort put in by the individuals it made the video convincing. If they had just strummed the guitar, stood still and looked at the camera with blank expression, then yes they would have been playing the song, but it wouldn't have given me the desired effect or performance I wanted.

However another criticism was :
"the shots with the girl in the white dress in are hard to follow and difficult to understand i couldn't pick up on why she was there, other than to look hot"


This suggests that the reasons for her being in the video were unclear, they could have been established better at the begging. However it does also show that the audience did not establish the link between the songs lyrics and the girl. She was representing an aborted child as the song is about an abortion machine. This statement does state that they enjoyed the clips of the girl even with the lack of understanding as to why she was there. I would say from this criticism I have learned that even though it may not be clear why she is there it hasn't subtracted anything value from the video. As 'the male gaze', suggested by Laura Mulvey, makes up for the lack of understanding.




If we continue to look at the use of the girl in the music video, here we can see phoebe saying she found the use appropriate and that it fitted in the conventions of our genre. She also says that having this section of narrative improved the video.

However, Phoebe also gave some constructive criticism for improvement. As you can see from the screen shot, she suggested that I could have used more close ups of the band, and use of different angles. These are valid points and things that I should have thought about much more, especially as close ups are much more prevalent in my animated storyboard. This suggests that my organisation and planning of filming days including shot lists were not as well planned as I had thought.
I can see the need also for use of a more diverse range of angles, however potentially I think there could be a danger of using too many angled shots. Having said that, at moments in the video such as 22 seconds in, there could have been better use of angles.

In terms of feedback about my digi pak and magazine advert, everyone has said that they look professional and suit the genre really well. However a few have said they lack coherence, as the magazine advert is black and white, but the digi pak has dull, faded colours. This suggests to me that the initial research I did into my audience was correct as what I have produced fits the genre and looks professional, however I should have considered the importance of house style more.

Question 2: How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

Coursework question 2

View more presentations from joshuagill

Question 1: In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

The music video had a degree of redundancy so that the target audience could relate to it and meant I was just using conventions that were already prominent within the industry. However to keep it original I had degrees of entropy within it as well, which were challenging the conventions many are used to. The main way in which I achieved this was through the performance of the girl. The song being about an abortion machine, she is portraying an aborted baby. The link however is not easy to establish so it gives off this entropic vibe throughout the video, it also achieves a certain amount of originality as I have not tried to make the link obvious but very subtle.

Steve Neale - talks of repetition and difference. I aimed to make a video that was very stereotypical of the genre. This involved lots of shots of the band performing. This is merely repeating what has been done by many bands before.
The difference came with the effects I used, in attempting to be original I reversed shots of the guitarist jumping from his amplifier. Then in the narrative section with the girl, this wasn't different as a lot of videos have performance narratives, it was how I filmed her. I rarely showed her at a straight angle, it was almost always at a canted or high/low angle. I also used fast pace editing, when there is a shot of her, the clip is very shot. However I do in places show a Clip of her every other cut, so there was some sort of narrative progression.

Magazines such as Kerrang! and Metal Hammer were constantly giving me new inspiration as to what I could achieve. In my video and print work. These are obviously aimed at the genre (rock/metal) I have aimed my coursework towards. They influenced me in terms of the props and colour schemes that I used. For instance the Top hat, playing card and cigarette in my magazine advert. I got the idea to use this as an advert from reading an article in Kerrang! where they interviewed Slash. Using this intertextuality I managed to create something original.


This is an advert that helped me to develop the music video I took a lot of inspiration from it as it has conventions that relate well to our genre. The advert having a strong horror theme, which is illustrated by the low lighting, location, pan shots, extreme close ups to name a few. It gave me inspiration on how to portray the girl in our film how to video her, and what she should be dressed in. It also inspired our shots of the natural environment, as the trees in this advert are shown very dark and eerie. The location was going to be very similar but had to be changed at the last minute.

Inspiration came from watching other music videos within the genre we were involved with. Seeing what the mise en scene of the video was, the locations they used and themes of the videos. We also tried listening to the song and using synaesthesia to devise a concept, by placing ideas into moodboards. This meant Auteur theory was prevalent in our work and that we weren't only re-arranging other people’s ideas to make them seem fresh and original.






These are a few of the bands that I modelled the bands image on. You can see that the style of clothing and contrast of the actual image are quiet similar. If we compare this to the photos I used of the band we can see repetition and difference as Steve Neale suggests.
In all the photos the whole band are shown, which is the same in mine. They all have edgy stance/ attitude and in my photo I have replicated this. The lighting in all of the photos is photoshoped. I felt that I also needed to alter the contrast of my photograph as it made the photo powerful with the colour effect and made the band appear more aesthetic. I believe that I took most influence from the first two images as the badns are looking anger, powerful, demanding. However I believe I was challenging the bottom image as in the photo the band look very emotional the front three members are not looking at the camera but seem to be expressing sadness, and the music that AlterVertigo play goes against this convention even thought they are in the same genre.




However this can be seen in the promotional package as well as the music. In the magazine advert there are connotations of death, coldness, bleakness. These are achieve by the black and white filter, and the frosted grass. There are also connotation of pure rock and roll, achieved by the traditional top hat cigarette and playing card. However there is also amidst the connotations of death etc a hope in the ace of spades positioned in the top hat, traditionally associated with good luck and a winning card.

In the digi pak all the members look very serious, the images are dull, there is no striking colour. There is a sombre image of a dead tree with a frosted over lake that connotes death, coldness and bleakness once again. The connotations in both axillary tasks are very similar.

Question 4 How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Josh Gill - College Work from Ben Burnett on Vimeo.

This is a video of me answering the evaluation question. I also used an iPhone 4 to film and edit this video, and so a media technology I didn't mention that helped assist me in my evaluation stages was the iPhone 4 as it let me easily film, edit and upload to the internet a video presentation.