Friday 15 May 2015

Final Cut - Lady Gaga's Bad Romance

Here is our final cut


Final Digipak

Within this I have made some very minor tweaks such as
  • moving the title
  • moving the artist name  




This is the final front cover of our lyric booklet












Magazine Ads

This is our first teaser ad. however we think we will prefer to have the QR code in the hair instead of the bum because it looks a little out of place.


We have now decided to place the QR code within the hair to still keep the same look that is happening with the newspaper. We will be asking our instagram followers which they think is best.


We chose this image as a teaser Ad that could possibly feature in Attitude Magazine which is aimed at a predominantly homosexual audience specifically the Pink Pound. This is very relative to Lady Gaga as she started her career in gay clubs.


We thought this would look better as a teaser ad in a magazine such as Q as it is very minimal but doesn't shout female due to colours been kept similar. The direct gaze as well links to goodwins theory of the 6 stages in a music video and one of them being 'looking'. This is another tie in within the music video

We thought this teaser ad would be good in Q magazine, as it is dark and myseterious as well as being unusual and edgy


We think this magazine ad would work better in Cosmopolitan due to the bright colours, this image integrates many of our texts which provides a theme and consistancy

We think this would work for the target of cosmopolitan although it is bright many people seemed to like the brightness



We thought this would be a good image to use to target our audience in Q magazine. As it provides a certain amount of detail with the hair, but is kept simple and sophisticated and therefore is morelikely to attract an older audience, therefore targeting our secondary target audience. We chose a simple colour as well as using black and white in the QR code to keep the design minimalistic and stylish. The featured text has been coloured the various shades from the exact colours within the hair, using the eye dropper tool.



This is the 2nd draft of the main ad


We hope to provide 2 alternative final main magazine ads. As from audience feedback many people when asked to choose between them gave very mixed responses depending on age and gender.

We think this magazine would look best in Heat Magazine as this is targeting our primary female audience and from audience feedback they seem to like this image more than the plain one


All Our Videos

Bad Romance - #GlobalGaga


Art Students - Costume Brief


Judas - Recreation Challenge


Bad Romance - Studio Edit


Bad Romance - Final Cut

Thursday 14 May 2015

Evaluation Q4

Q4: How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Evaluation Q3

Q3: What have you learned from your audience feedback?


Throughout our time creating our music package, we have involved the audience. By utilising the audience, we were able to define our target audience and get their approval on sections of our video.

Audience Research
We felt pretty certain about who was a fan of lady gaga.
We placed the Primary Audience as being:
Females/Gay Male
Ages 15-24.
But we also took into consideration a secondary audience:
All Genders/Sexualities
Tween and 24-44

We wanted to ensure we have the right regions before creating anything, so we put together a video to play to people and get feedback on.

We went to where we felt we would find our audience, A Y11 class (16Yrs) and a Y12 class (17Yrs), we also looked for our secondary audience of 24+

Y11
We found the Y11 class surprising, as when we asked them to name Lady Gaga based on a few pictures, it was the Heterosexual Males who were most willing to identify the video, and yet they also stated that they disliked her and/or her music. Clearly showing that they are willing to watch her videos but perhaps not listen or follow her.


Y12
When we went to Y12, we noted that the females all stood up and correctly identified all of Lady Gaga's videos, which secured the fact that they would be our target audience. There was one male who stood for the question 'have you listened to her song in the past week', This reenforced that the Male was clearly a secondary audience. We asked him if he owned any of her songs, but he replied that he had seen it on youtube and decided to listen. To me, this suggests that he enjoys her music, in a sense that he would listen to it if it came up on youtube, but perhaps not actively seek it out to listen to.


16-17
We asked 2 girls and 1 boy within the lower bracket of our primary audience to watch the video, when it came for them to identify the songs, the girls instantly knew the songs, and as we went further it became clear that one was certainly a fan, being able to name her albums off the top of her head! It was incredibly comforting for us to see this, as it showed the clear fans that Gaga has within the 15-24 female bracket. In the video it was clear to see that, while the male did not call himself a fan, he was not showing the same dislike as some of the Year 11s, in fact he had even seen 'Maybe Gaga', A Lady Gaga tribute act. This showed us that the Secondary audience incorporating males was a wise choice.


Teachers
We showed a few of our teachers the video, to see if we were right in our placement of the upper bound to the audience.

Both of the first teachers identified Lady Gaga. Both identified the first video and showed some recognition to the second track, with one even able to identify the name of a collaborating artist. However, when it came to the third track, neither knew it, showing that they were not the people Gaga targets with her music. Despite this, both showed familiarity to Tony Bennett, perhaps showing Gaga's attempts to broaden her appeal by collaborating with him. They would not call her a fan, but said they appreciated her music.
This put us in a dilemma, the teachers seemed like they would be target-able by Gaga, but weren't an ideal secondary audience.


So we turned to a second set of teachers. On our first image, they recognized Gaga from her controversial Meat Dress. They had a familiarity with Gaga, but neither were showing the same knowledge that some of the younger groups showed. One, the male, was able to recall a section of the telephone video, which, once again shows that the heterosexual male is a clear sudience for Gaga to target, affirming for us that it would be foolish to rule them out. He identified his cause as being a result of his 11 and 9 year old children, this showed perfectly for us the need to cater for the Tween audience.



Thanks to this research, we are confident to say that our audience was what we thought it was, and so we moved on to producing the video.


After creating some rough examples of products, we went and received feedback on these.

Audience Feedback
We made use of View sync while receiving audience feedback.

I asked my friend, after exporting two versions of the catwalk section to tell me what she thought of it. Her feedback was very useful for us, and we decided not waste anymore time on working at that section.
We recognised that more feedback is better and so we continued getting more feedback.
This time we asked about the andy warhol section, we had just completed it and wanted to see peoples opinions on it, this is what they said


These pieces of audience feedback showed us that this section is exactly how it needs to be.

Some more audience feedback, on our Magazine Ads, can be found here:






We paid close attention to what people said, many of them were largely positive about our products, and each piece of critism was considered, for example, when we showed a collection of Year 12s our music video, we got this feedback:


this feedback was useful, but we felt that going round and asking what people thought was a better way to get feedback.
When we went around this class, we ran into one of the AS Media students, who we felt would be able to give us a far more analytical view of our video, this is what she said:


Her comments were helpful for us, but she stated that she felt that the two Gagas at the end were a bit odd in terms of size.
We opted to ignore this feedback, as the look we wanted for this section was to seem like Gaga was observing herself and her performance.

We felt that analysing this feedback and reviewing what people said was more important than blindly following it, while we do care what the audience thought, we felt that the most important aspect to our video was the verisimilitude, sometimes people would look at our video more as a students work and not hold it to a professional standard, as they would a real video.

Another important aspect to our feedback was our Instagram account, when we asked them what they thought of our Andy Warhol image, we received the following feedback:
our Instagram post


Some of our followers responded, one said she would love to see it without the wig, however, this is something we aren't able to do, owing to verisimilitude reasons. Another commented on how Gaga they looked, and felt it seemed like it fit the ARTPOP theme. We were overjoyed at this comment, as we had not realised the ARTPOP connection (owing to our focus on Pop Art). However once it was revealed to us, we immediately knew how we could use this and adjusted the images to better suit the clear lines shown in Lady Gaga's ARTPOP, by switching the yellow and red Gagas around, which also improved our advert as a whole.

Facebook

We also turned to facebook for audience feedback, looking to hear some improvements we could make, in some cases it appeared people had noting but praise for our videos


Which filled us with joy, as we knew we were on the right tracks

However, some posts were less successful.

All in all, I feel that Facebook was certainly the weakest of the audience feedbacks.


Conclusion
I think that our feedback was very helpful in guiding us when we were stuck, however I fear that many people were too supportive, where we would have preferred them to be more critical!

Evaluation Q2

This is my 2nd Evaluation Question.



I recommend viewing this in full screen, you can use your arrow keys to move forward/backward.

Evaluation Q1

This is my answer to Q1:
 In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?



Script



Music Videos - General

In my Research i have noticed that music videos commonly contain diegetic intros and outros. One example of this is Bring Me To Life, by Evanescence. I noticed that this featured the intro of flying through a city scene and to the lead singer's bedroom and the outro, the reverse. And also I noticed in the chemical brothers electrobank had a diegetic intro and something of a diegetic outro, the intro being the main character in the narrative getting ready to perform and the outro being a zoom out from a trophy cabinet. We also featured a partially diegetic intro, with the music that would be in the normal intro playing as if it were through Lady Gaga's Headphones, and you can hear the sound of the city/town going on in the background and also the footsteps both of which were added in post production, as opposed to being actual sound effects which meant that we could control our diegetic intro better.

I have also noticed that often the closing shot fades out, I noticed this in 7 out of 10 of my general research videos. However, this was one convention that we decided to challenge, we felt our video looked much better with the door slam and the snap to black.

I have also noticed that in music videos where the narrative and the performance are linked or music videos that are concept and performance that the focus is very much on the singer or the artist who made the song the video is about. That's why we made it so that the focus all throughout our video is always on Lady Gaga. This links to Richard Dyer's Star Theory, which states the the viewers enjoyment of a film is heavily influenced by the perception of it's stars.

Frequently the video cuts to the beat of the music. And so similarly there are parts in our video where we cut to the beat or an effect happens on the beat, particularly noticable in the Andy Warhol section, where the center Gagas change with each new bar and the outside Gagas pass along a colour with each beat. I have also noticed that often a change in the music would mean a change in the editing style. This links with what Carol Vernallis says in such that a music video derives from the song. The music comes first, the song is produced before the video, and the video follows the song. Also linked to vernallis' point when the music videos feature a narrative, the music has come first and so the director finds it hard to follow Narrative theory, like todorov's narrative structure. it's rare that you will see an equilibrium, disequilibrium and reenstatement of the equilibrium, often we might join or leave in a dis equilibrium. However, one example where this is not the case is evanescence's Bring Me To Life, we join in something of an equilibrium, where she is dreaming and we leave her in somewhat the same state, it becomes slightly cyclical in how the video is set up. An example of not following the narrative theory, is in I Don't Want to Miss A Thing, Areosmith, we leave in Disequilibrium, with the video feed of the lead singer being cut off.

In our product, we followed many of these conventions, our narrative was slightly different to how Todorov layed out his narrative structure, in the fact that although there is somewhat of equlibrium set at the end, it is a bit ambiguous as to whether the boyfriend character is walking into the house with his girlfriend or with Gaga.


Music Videos - Genre

Whole looking at some more general video conventions for female solo pop artist, we noticed that frequently the lead singers, the female pop artist, was objectified, in the videos.
One increadably notable example of the ojectification of women in music videos would be Jennifer Lopez and Iggy Azalea's Booty video, easily half, if not more, of the video is made up of Iggy and Jennifer's booties shaking! This is what Laura Mulvey describes as Male Gaze, a woman is included in a video or media text for the enjoyment of male viewers. We also see this in Bang Bang, where Nikki Minaj's leg and booty are featured more than her face. However, this video was directed by female director, Hannah Lux Davies, perhaps an example of post feminism, which would state that the involvement of such classical objectification shots would simply be the artist owning their image, and their sexuality. In our project and video, we decided not to objectify our lead performer, the objectification we did use was in the very start of our project, where Gaga is coming off the train and walking through the town we have a lot of focus upon her legs and some on her bottom but again, because we were consious of the Tween audience we didn't want to overdo it. However, we did incorporate some male gaze, in the shots where gaga looks at the camera, direct address. because we were aware of this tween audience we decided to feature male gaze only in such as we had direct address.

In love you so, by Delilah, she is seenin her performance shots singing against a plain background, we also noticed this in jennifer lopez and Iggy Azalea's Booty where Iggy performs in front of a plain background. While this wasn't a convention we saw constantly, we did think it was of note and it was easy for us to achieve verisimilar looking shots in our product. And so we did, during the dancing sequence, gaga is performing against a relatively plain black background. This was easy to achieve verisimilatude, which is something we were consious of while we were filming it, the studio we were filmning in featured a lightling rig, which meant we could achive the same high key lighting that we also seen in these videos. Another somewhat plain background is during the Andy Warhol section, the background it constant and unchanging, even if the performance and the effects that are happening are not.

as part of our research, we also researched some of Lady Gaga's videos, we wanted to pay attention to what in our audience research had come up as one of the most important aspects of a Gaga video, the costumes! we noticed that within the videos lady gaga often wore numerous costumes, our average was 9 costumes and so in our music video, we featured exactly 9 costumes. some times in her music videos, Lady Gaga went as low as 6, this is why we chose to hit the average bang on, because that meant that we provided as verisimilar product as we can, without going overboard.

We also noticed that within lady gaga's videos there is almost certainly a dancing section, this is why in our video we included dancing as a whole chorus of it, the secind chorus, and also the third chorus features dancing, but this time with the andy warhol effects on top of it. this was incrreadbly important for us to involve as it added in an element of audience interaction. If the dance was easy and simple to learn, the audience, Lady Gaga's fans, could go away and perform the dance themselves and share it with their friends in a video online, thus furthering the reach of Lady Gaga. this links into Web 2.0, where people aren't just consumers but they are also producing their own content and so, if we managed to make a dance that is easily replicated and fun to perform, it would incourage people to do that and get involved with this web 2.0 notion of also producing as well as consuming. and it would spread Lady Gaga as a brand.


DigiPak

While researching for ideas and conventions from digipaks, we made a list of various conventions we spotted within these digipaks, we noticed photos, which often have a link to the band, we also noticed that frequently there are lyric booklets included. on the back of the digipak, we saw that there was frequently a track listing, track lengtha nd the number of the track in the playing sequence. We decided to feature all three of these within our digipak. We placed photos on every panel in our digipak, the lyric booklet also included photos between each song's lyric and the track song length and number on the CD are all feautred on the back.

We also included copyright information as this was what we felt was a very important convention within the digipak and was increadably important to include this in order to achieve a verisimilar product.

Speaking of versimilatude, also to achieve a verisimilar product, we needed to include the record company logo. We noticed that this was often on the bottom, close to the billing block and also on the spine. On the spine there would also be the name of the album and the artists name and as well as the record companies catalouge number, theres also a barcode on the back as well as a billing block, which we needed to include for verisimilitude.

We also noticed that theres frequently a link between the front and the back covers. in terms of our digipak, we wanted in include a bonus DVD, often music videos are sold separately on a DVD to maximise revenue. But where the DVD were included with the digipak, they often include the word exclusive footage, this was normally put on a sticker to highlight and emphasis the fact this is a special edition and the DVD logo features on the back.

From Gaga specifically, we noticed that there is an increadably clear colour scheme that features across her three albums, aside from Cheek to Cheek and ARTPOP, this was a very big colour scheme of black, white and Red. And so, for our cover, we decided to follow this colour scheme.