Evaluation; Question 2.

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

After choosing our song, we decided that it would be best to not only create an artist trying to promote something, rather than just another artist. So when we started making our music video for the song ‘I am One of Them’ we decided to base it around a serious topic, and eventually settled for crime. We thought this would be a good choice, especially as our target audience is teenagers.

Our target audience is evident from both our main product and our ancillary texts, we created a MySpace, Twitter and YouTube page which makes our artist very accessible to all teenagers. As we were promoting a new artist it was important that there were a large amount of both intertextuality and cross referencing. Our artists ‘house style’ was green, pink and black. The green backed up the hippy style image we wanted to create whilst the pink created a sense of femininity for her. Once we had decided on these three colours it was important they were involved in both the main product and the ancillary texts.



The pink top Eden wore in the music video was also worn in the shot for the banner along the top of the MySpace page; her surroundings in the banner are also similar to those in the music video. This creates a link between the two as soon as you visit the page. Pink also features heavily on the digipack – with the artists name ‘Eden Summers’ in pink and also with the tights in the photo shoot for the albums front cover. The tights Eden is wearing is also the MySpace, YouTube and Twitter page background creating a sense of realism, as real artists also have their house style matching on all their websites. It is also on the inside of our digipack where the CD would be placed.





The green we chose was the colour of one of Eden’s bracelets she was wearing in her photo shoot, this is the one chosen as our album cover. The colour is also the writing of the album name, in big bold writing sure to stand out to people who see it. We felt green would be a good choice as we wanted our artist to seem ‘at one with nature’ and this is shown in many of the photos on the MySpace profile.

The storyline of our music video is fairly complicated, following the lives of two teenage girls who live very different lives, but are bought together at the end with the poorer girl comforting the richer girl. Eden features in the video but is not part of the storyline until towards the end when she is standing next to the two girls the video focuses on. Also in our music video we have teenagers holding up the lyrics ‘I am one of them’ on pieces of cardboard in numerous locations, we thought this added to the idea of unity and thought it was one of the most memorable parts of the video. Because of this we placed them all as the background of our digipack, behind the list of other songs on Eden Summers album. We called the album the same as the single, ‘I am One of Them’ because Eden is a new artist and this would have been her most well known single – this is what a lot of new artists do to try and get people to buy their albums. It also adds to the message Eden is trying to promote.



As our music video didn’t focus too much on Eden we made sure other areas did, as we were trying to promote a new artist so it is important she is recognisable. There are many pictures of her on the MySpace page and there is also one on the inside of the digipack, next to her thank you message.





It was important that we tried as hard as possible to make Eden seem like a real artist, by doing little things such as making merchandise links and videos of her shooting both her music video and during her photo shoot. This was all viewable on her MySpace page.

CD/Digipack

Evaluation; Question 4.

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

During our coursework production we had to use a variety of different media technologies, many of which we had little experience of using before. Without all the hardware and software available to us our final media product would have been to a much lower quality.

During the research stage a lot of time was spent looking into real artists and the things they produce. Whilst watching and analysing music videos the key website I used was YouTube, a site which holds millions of videos and nearly every professional music video created. Thanks to this it was simple to watch numerous different genres music videos and see if there were similarities between them, and most importantly what the differences were. Not only have we used YouTube to analyse other music videos, we have uploaded our one there and also our planned story board, helping us to show how the final video would look., another similar website we used was Vimeo – this is because when uploading our music videos to YouTube the sound was removed due to copyright restrictions. YouTube also allows you to create an account, we created one for our artist Eden Summers to upload videos of her shooting on set etc.



To record the storyboard, and later our music video, we used a Sony handheld camcorder and Sony DV tapes. It was simple to get the footage from the tape onto the computer and we used a program called Adobe Premier Pro to do this, this program allows you to edit the footage, place transitions in and change the pace of the shots, as well as many other things. Using this program with our storyboard was the first time as a group we used the program, and it was important during this time to learn how to use it properly – the only previous experience we had was at the beginning of the school year when we were all put in other groups to shoot a few seconds of a Britney Spears video.





A lot of planning was needed before we made our music video, with things such as risk assessment and shooting schedules needing to be made. We decided to do this on Microsoft Word as it was a simple program that we were all comfortable using. To upload our written work onto the computer we used a scanner and cleared the images up by using photo editing software.

To keep in touch with each other whilst not at school we used the social network site Facebook, but also used Hotmail as well as texting and phoning each other. Hotmail enabled us to send each other work. We also used the social networking website, MySpace, to create a webpage for our artist, Eden Summers. Many artists have grown a fan base using MySpace and we felt it would be a very useful thing for us to create one and help make Eden Summers seem more real. We edited the page to make it look similar to those of real musicians and bands; we also uploaded the videos we had placed on YouTube onto Eden’s MySpace profile, both of Eden shooting the video and of the final video itself.





All of my work during the coursework production has been uploaded onto my blog, this includes the research and planning and work prior to the actual video itself.



All of these technologies have been extremely useful and vital to the success of our production, but they haven’t been without their flaws. Whilst editing our video on Adobe Premier the program crashed randomly, this became a common theme during the final stages of our music video. Not only this, but our camcorder had to be sent back and replaced after it was unable to capture our footage onto the computer, but when using other peoples camcorders we were able to.

Final Song Choice Questions

1. Who will be your target audience?

We decided to aim our music video & song at female teenagers, the teenagers age will probably range from about 14-17 as we think any younger than 14 the girls will probably not understand the idea of the video and the song as it is about crime and we also think that the song is not something that 18+ girls would listen to, even though they would be able to understand the messages behind them.

2. What genre of music is your chosen track?
The genre of our music is pop, which is very popular with most people. It is easy to attract people to this type of music although there are some people that dislike the pop scene.


3. What conventions does this style of music use in its videos?
The fact that it is a pop song we had to add the usual conventions of then genre into our video. When you think of pop people who usually see 'cheesy' but we didn't want cheesy in our video so we missed out that convention. Every pop video usually has a singer performing the song and a narrative side to it, and i feel that our video shows both. We didn't want to throw the usual conventions into the video such as constant costume changing, we didn't add this element into the video as we wanted to show the audiece that these two girls where living their normal day lives and in a normal day you don't have constant costume changes.

4. What type of music video will you film?
This will be a narrative and performance based music video therefore a combination. Our biggest focus though will be on the narrative side. We have decided on this for many reasons. The first being the fact that the song itself has a faint storyline to it therefore we are aiming to show this to the audience. The theme being very dark, we felt that to do an abstract piece it would not work as well. The way that we are choosing to show the narrative side is through two different stories about two different girls, one rich and the other poor. Therefore this itself will use two different actors. We will include the performance aspect through the third actress performing in the background of the storylines. The storyline being our main concern we felt it more important to emphasize this as oppose to focusing solely on the singer.

5. Describe the characters in your music video.
There are 2 main characters in our music video, the singer, a mugger, and 3 news reporters. The 2 main characters are both females with very different lifestyles.


6. Where will you film your music video (use more than 1 location and NOT the school and woods)
To film our video we did not want to stay in our local homeplace (Brentwood), so we decided to shoot most of our video in different places in London, such as Marbal Arch, St Pauls Cathedral & Traffalgar Square. We also used quite a lot of places in Harold Wood, such as corridors in flats and alleyways in the street.


7. What type of media institution will show your video?

Although this is a sadder song it still has aspects of pop/rock in it therefore it would be shown on music channels like MTV, Smash Hits, TMF, The Box. These channels are what our target audiences are most likely to watch so this will allow us to address them directly. Other forms of media institutes that will show our video would be on websites online including the bands own website

8. How do media technologies affect the consumption of music videos?

Evaluation; Question 3.

What did you learn from your audience feedback?


Whilst making the video, we received a lot of feedback from both of our teachers, we felt this was important because they have had to help many students make their music video before us, so the advice they gave us we took on board. For example one of the final scenes where Hayley meets Jo, we had to completely change the location from by a large brick wall with Hayley leaning on it, to a more forestry area with Hayley sitting on a bench like log. They also suggested that Eden is introduced in the video earlier, as originally she wasn’t seen in the video until the 4th line of the song, and considering there is twenty seconds instrumental at the beginning this is quite a long time before we introduce our new artist. To change this we had two shots of Eden, before and after our news reports – This way she was introduced right at the beginning of the song.




But our teachers weren’t the only ones who gave us feedback and advice before we finished the video, other classmates also did and I feel this was useful because our target audience is teenagers and so this way we could get the opinion of our target audience before we completed the filming, so any advice they gave us we could easily make the changes if we agreed with what they said.


Our main audience feedback though was once we had completed making our video, we made a suitable questionnaire and then we asked other students to come and see our video during our lesson. Roughly 15 students turned up and each one was handed a questionnaire in which they would answer the ten questions whilst watching the video. We chose students because our target audience was teenagers so their opinion is what matters most to us.



The results were mostly positive, most of the people said they enjoyed watching the video and saw Eden Summers as we wanted to portray her, as a pop artist but with a meaningful message. Another positive was that when asked their favourite part of the video, the answers were varied with for example the mugging scene, the signs and at the beginning with the three different news reports being most common – which were the three we wanted to stand out most and originally thought would turn out the best. People also said the lyrics matched the music well, which was important for us because originally we planned for a lot of lyrics to match directly to the visuals. Despite all the positives, the main negative was that a few people found the storyline too difficult to understand and felt we tried to fit too much into a 3 minute music video and ended up overcomplicating it, suggesting they would have to watch it more than once to end up understanding the storyline fully – Everyone knew the song was about crime though and felt this point was emphasised by the video.


People felt the message was more evident than Eden as an artist, which is what we wanted but perhaps we could of put a little bit more focus on Eden especially as she is a new artist trying to make it big. We were happy with the audience feedback as most of it was what we expected, despite this it was still very useful to us in understanding how our target audience would feel about the video we made. Looking back on things I would probably of suggested we try and make our storylines more simple next time, as that may have been more effective.