A2 MEDIA POP PROMO

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

When we first started looking into some typical pop promos I noticed that the majority of them were very stylised and featured skilled low key lighting as well as intriguing unusual cinematography but editing transitions that weren't out of the ordinary. Promos from bands such as Massive Attack (who employed the highly regarded promo director Walter Stern) tried to be different but in a very intelligent sophisticated way. They used artificial lighting and slow motion as well as casting actual actors to star in them. Meanwhile other bands like ACDC would heavily rely on performance and the kinetic energy of a live crowd. In contrast, the Noah and the Whale promos were 'quirky' featuring very high key lighting, very colourful costumes as well as unusual cuts such as swipes and 'star shapes.' Our finished promo is meant to be a combination of style and quiet sophistication – there is a storyline that is about heartbreak which very closely follows genre conventions of other Noah and the Whale promos given that songs such as Love of an Orchestra and Blue Skies also deal with the end of a relationship. The fact that we told the story with super 8 film meant that we felt we had given it a home movie type of feel with occasionally chaotic camera work thus fulfilling our 'quirky' responsibility. It was essentially our 'something different' and helped to create a unique identity for our promo. However we decided not to fully mimic our band's style so we avoided tacky over the top edit transitions even avoiding rapid cuts, until the very end, which is somewhat of a genre convention in pop promos as directors often feel that they want to pack in as much visual flair as they can in such a short space of time. By slowing down the pace we were able to concentrate on telling a simple moving sotry showing off our mise-en-scene - keeping the costumes dark so as to portray the characters' sombre moods. I felt that we achieved a good balance between stylish and quirky heartbreak whilst creating verisimilitude by using natural lighting and believable locations. The super 8 effect is used to highlight the differences in mood between the two time scales – super 8 is playful and sunny and upbeat whilst the footage with just our main character makes use of a cold day to show his loneliness after the relationship has ended. In addition we also employed close ups of his expression to further show the audience that he is experiencing feelings of sadness in this time frame whilst also using long shots from high angles to show his sulking despondent demeanour.

Our use of locations was vital to creating the right tone – parks are usually associated with families, couples and children so these connotations made it an ideal location

to set our 'happy' section. By setting some of the action in the tennis courts there was also created a playfulness to the dynamic of the relationship and the caged barren nature of the tennis courts when the character was alone helped to inflate the aura of isolation. Meanwhile, docks with the crisp cool water often create connotations, along with the bobbing ships, as feeling almost ghostly and a place of reflection (film and TV characters often go on their boats when growing tired or afraid of the rest of the world) so this equally seemed ideal to set as the location where our main character is in mourning. Despite this though we were able to show a happier side to the location, with our female character, by using the excelling number of restaurants and the almost idealic nature of the boats creating an exotic feel. The boats are a passage to anywhere.

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

In the end, for our package and print advert, we decided on a still image from our film as the motif. We considered using an animated image as it would have tied in with the band's indie image but couldn't come up with an idea particularly original or appealing. I thought that the image of the two characters together would look heart warming but on reflection our use of natural light, which worked well in the film, simply made the image look rather naive and amateurish. In the package as a whole we tried to play more on the 'happy' side of the relationship as we thought this would play better to the market and to the band's image. We showed them as effectively a mirror image, with the two shot, showing that they were ideally suited to each other. In addition the youthful age of the characters would hopefully appeal to the target market for this package which is teenagers and people in their twenties. We hoped that by showcasing the super 8 effect on our inside cover we could further demonstrate its uniqueness and stand out to consumers as an attribute unseen in most other pop promos and DIGI Packs. We were also careful to use very similar type faces and fonts in both texts to continue our links and not to confuse the audience by disaligning the products. In our research there were bands such as Muse whose pop promos differed rather in tone from their album covers (they had a dark rebeelious promo but a kaleidoscopic cover) but we decided to go more along the lines of artists such as Mika whose package contained almost complete visual symmetry. An advantage of a difference is the opportunity to appeal to a wider demographic but given that our preliminary research showed our promo to be aimed at a generally specific audience this argument was unsatisfactory to us. Finally, our ideology of the package is simple 'love' and that people are on the whole happier together than alone.

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Judging from our research into our band's core audience it was obvious that the key demographic for this promo were teenagers and young adults with an interest in offbeat music and film (The Squid and the Whale, Eagle vs Shark etc.) so it was important to make a promo not in the style of a big profile band (like JLS or Girls Aloud) with lots of dissolve cuts to close ups of good looking people or costumes designed to be revealing and 'sexy.' This audience would also be fairly middle class with a decent amount of money to spend on DIGI Packs. On showing our promo to an audience that fulfilled some of those criteria there was a generally positive response. They told us that the narrative was easy to follow and they agreed with our choice of locations for the reasons I mentioned earlier. They particularly liked the super 8 footage as they believed it added a new dynamic and highlighted the sunniness of the characters at that time whilst also praising the fluidity of the camera during these sections with further approval of the authenticity created by the 'home movie' tone which was further enhanced by a strong performance by our female actress. There were of course complaints – they thought that the yellow titles up top looked cheap and tacky and not in keeping with the tone of the promo but simply an unnecessary distraction. They also would have liked to have had more close ups of the main character in mourning in order to showcase better the grief he was feeling, they also said that one shot (where we used a manual focus) wasn't executed very well with one suggestion being that we should have 'rolled' our finger down the manual focus button rather than twiddling which only caused a rather jumpy effect instead of the slow move into the mid shot we desired. Also, there was an element of confusion about the ending where I as editor used an effect to make the girl look ghostly thus producing ambiguity as to whether the girl had died or if the couple had just broken up. Ideally we wanted to create the feeling that either way the girl had become 'dead' to our male character for one reason or another. One brief negative point was the thought that that last shot should have used the super 8 effect because as it was absent, confusion was caused in terms of knowing at what point in the timeline that shot occured. But really the biggest complaint was the simple fact that the band wasn't in the promo – there was an argument that how could the film be promoting the band if they aren't even in it? This was a problem we knew we would face from the beginning so it came as no real surprise.

Moving on, there was unfortunately a bad response to our DIGI Pack. They agreed that the front cover (the still image) looked cheap looking as if the image had been stretched out of it's correct dimensions and that the three images lacked an overall concept. It was as if they were from different albums. The feeling towards the print advert was the same – it just didn't stand out and I myself have to agree that as a group we weren't clear enough on producing an eye catching motif or truly showing off the band's image of 'do it yourself art' and a breakaway from mainstream music.

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

To finish, it is important to note that we carried out most of our research on the internet using YouTube to view and then analyse pop promos from both our own band and others in order to better get a grip of the market. Fan forums and the way Google easily allowed us access to them was also key in working out the messages and values of the band and their fans. Blogger served as a quick and easy way to keep an online diary of our progress as it allowed us to write succinctly whilst also being easy to upload vital images and videos to help explain our thought processes meaning it was probably the most important technology. It was only rivalled by the abilities of FinalCutPro to really create our super 8 film effect which was vital in our tone. There was a lot of experiment on the programme under the 'bad film' and 'colour corrector' and it was only the time we were allowed on the programme that enabled our eventual success. Of course, the DV cameras hugely helped our filming capabilities given their easiness to transport from one location to another as well as their sturdy nature on a tripod to allowing us to add fluidity and realism to the camerawork when filming the flashbacks. Finally, Photoshop helped us to create our inside covers but looking back, we perhaps should have used it to create our front cover as well as it may have led to a more original indie set of artwork. It was alos my first time on Photoshop and given that I was chief editor, I didn't get a lot of time to perfect my skills so I feel guilty over having not contributed sufficiently to this aspect of the coursework which I think has been established as our weakest area. Chris managed to use software on his home laptop to create really interesting offbeat images which have better suited our album cover.