A2 Media Blog : 2016

Tuesday, 11 October 2016

Friday, 7 October 2016

Contemporary Music Video Analysis

Controversial Music Video Analysis

Tuesday, 27 September 2016

Research: Genre In Music Videos

Tuesday, 20 September 2016

Magazine adverts are used to promote either the artist and the album or the single being sold. Which is why the advert needs to be eye catching so that it can appeal to the audience.
All magazine adverts are usually in portrait form however there have been a few that are landscape.

Conventions of a magazine advert:

· Artist name

· Album/song name

· Image of the artist

· Release date

· Where you can purchase it

· Brief information on album

· Record label name/ logo

· Reviews on the album/ single

· Social media links

· Tour dates

· Font, font style and colour all link and consistent

Magazine advertisement advantages and disadvantages

Advantages:

· Specifically targeted: specific magazine titles appeal to specific target groups more so than a newspaper advert.

· Long Life: magazines have a longer “life” than newspapers; they sit about in doctor’s waiting rooms, magazine racks and with collectors.

· Pass-on readership – people may pass magazines on to their friends and family which will increase exposure of your advert

· Status – some magazine titles are well respected in their field, so an advertisement in these will increase your product/service’s prestige by association.

Disadvantages:

· Deadlines months in advance – magazines often require the adverts to be submitted weeks or months in advance. This means you have to ensure your marketing strategy is in place well in advance. It also means that testing adverts can be a lengthy process!

· Cost of testing – colour artwork can be more expensive, so small tests are often uneconomical

· Regional testing – can’t often be done as magazines area often national

· Graveyard – your advert runs the risk of being shovelled into the graveyard of adverts in the back of the magazine unless you pay for premium positioning.

Background History on Magazines:

The one of the first magazines was Erbauliche Monaths Unterredungen, a literary and philosophy magazine, which was launched in Germany.

The Gentleman’s magazine, first published in 1731, in London was the first general-interest magazine.

Edward Cave who edited The Gentleman’s Magazine under the pen name “Sylvanus Urban” was the first to use the term “magazine”, on the analogy of a military storehouse.

Digipak Analysis

Digipak is a style packaging which is often used for CD singles or special editions of CD albums.

Digipaks typically have a gatefold (book style) paperboard or card stock outer blinding, with one or more plastic trays capable of holding a CD or DVD attached to the inside the generic digipak.

Digipaks are used as a marketing tool to offer the buyer an incentive for purchasing the hard copy from a high street or online retailer rather than downloading/streaming the music.

Typically the front of the digipak will have either the artist on it or some aspect of what the artist represents and what their genre is. Digipaks benefit the artist and their music as its promotional aspect of the music industry which helps bring awareness to the artist and thus selling the artist and encouraging costumers to buy and listen to their music. Also for some fans of the artists owning a digipak establishes their loyalty to that specific artist.

The incentives are extras added to the CD/DVD in addition to the actual disk and its case with front and back covers. It will include: front, back, spine
and at least four additional panels.

The additional panels will be on one of or some of the following:
Membership postcard/ flier
Lyric section
Disk impression
Brand info section/ booklet
Free image/ poster / set of posters

Information on digipaks:
• They normally have a gatefold like a book
• The outer packaging is made of card/paper and the inner packaging is made of plastic
• They are normally used on special editions and albums
• More vulnerable and likely to wear than average cases
• They became popular with artists and record labels in the early 2000s

Monday, 27 June 2016

Technical Post: Camera Dolly

During this technical experiment we attempted as a whole group to utilise the dolly to make Kyle go off into the distance. In this instance it sort of worked as he was retreating backwards but it didn't work because the background wasn't moving too.

However, this could be fixed by making Kyle walk towards the Dolly as opposed to having it simply move away from him. This would make it look as though he is exiting his setting and entering the Media room. In addition to this, the Dolly moved so far that it exited the Green Screen and if we were using it for a Music Video we would not have allowed it to exit the setting as it would break the illusion that their surroundings are real.

Technical Post: Green screen

When using the Green Screen we experimented with very different techniques that each gave a different effect- some of which were desired and others that were not. One thing we found that didn't work at all was flashing lights while using the Green Screen as it created different gammas and contrasts which meant that keying didn't work efficiently.

None of us had ever experimented with using a Green Screen and so we found it hard to implement at first but after following the instructions we were able to do it, even though it wasn't to the best of our abilities. One thing we found hard was to remove the background correctly without leaving random segments that made the video look awkward- however, we were able to rectify this by using a background that wasn't affected by the change in colour- one that matched it.

We have looked at the different backgrounds we could have used and understand how each one would be implemented and how through keying you can duplicate images to make the final effect more tech-savvy and visually appealing. This allowed us to create a very simple, but effective, final product in our example as seen above.

Saturday, 25 June 2016

The Research and Planning processes

Research and Planning

Various amounts of research went into how we would get our thriller opening to reflect other real thriller films. One of the researches we did was looking into the conventions of a thriller film. For example low key lighting, quick cuts, mystery and suspense. Another piece of research which we did was primarily about the type of audience that attend thriller films typically. This is why we used a free online questionnaire making website in order to make our questionnaire the reason why we did our questionnaire on the website is so that it could be accessed publicly and we wouldn’t have to waste time going around asking for the answers in person. From the questionnaires we found out the age range of though who typically watch thriller films also found out what they expect from a thriller in order to make sure that we added the right components so that our film would appeal to the audience’s expectations. This later helped with our planning as we planned out our target audiences using the results we found out from our questionnaire. More importantly another piece of important research which we did was looking at the age restrictions which helped us confirm our target audiences after deciding on everything that we would include. For example we wanted to include blood in our thriller opening we were only able to do this with a 15 age restriction anything lower mean that we would not be able to have blood in our thriller opening. This is why this research on the age restrictions in terms of what you can or not can include was very important because in real thriller openings they would have to abide by the rules of the age restriction. Also the shape of a thriller opening whilst researching this we got to view examples of thriller with a certain type of opening which follow an order of both titles and credits first along with the title or just the title of the film with the credits at the end. For our preliminary task we didn’t have enough time for research or planning at all so we just improvised more than we planned.

One of our best planning posts were our story boards this is because we had made our storyboards by hand during the pre-production stage of our thriller opening, and the blog itself as a shared resource helped to plan because we were able to look at previous work to find inspiration or ideas that we could develop on. In addition upload our own so that it could be automatically saved and available to share. Additionally, the location of our thriller opening was very important as I had to fit in with the event that would be taking place. And this helped to plan the thriller opening by giving us a target of what to look for. For example for our thriller opening we needed and inside bathroom the reason for this is that both our character would need to have a conversation in a bathroom and this location gave up a plan for production day as we had to travel to the house that we were going to shoot in. The animatic plan helped to plan by getting our shots in order so that we can know what comes first and what we would have to shoot. But also our sot list did this also by clearly giving us direction as of what to shoot this helped planning because we were clear of the shots and how we would take them.