Evaluation Question Three - What have you learnt from audience feedback?

Our audience demographic

• 16 - 25 years old
• Male
• Hetrosexual 

Likes: 

In order to find our target audience and what their demographic is I research different subcultures on www.uktribes.com
From this I discovered that our target audience would be leading edge, indie scenesters. They are lightly to be between the ages of 16 and 25, would be creative, enjoy music and live concerts and use a lot of social media. We therefore considered these things when creating our three products.

Audience Feedback

Audience feedback we collected during the production process:

Approximately half way through our production process we collected a variety of different types of feedback for our rough cuts. From this feedback we could make improvements to our products to allow them to be as successful as possible. We decided to get feedback from placing surveys for them to complete on our social media pages as well as asking our teachers for feedback.

In our group we took one product each and gathered the feedback for it. I had the digipak, Anouska had the video and Lauren had the website. Here is the feedback we gathered from our teacher when reflecting on our rough cut work:



As well as this we gathered feedback from our target audience. Due to this we decided to:

• change some of the images on our digipak so that they look more professional and de-saturating the images so that they all look the same. 
• giving each member of the band an individual profile on the website 
• make the logo of the band stand out more rather than allowing it to blend into the products
• use social networking more and make it easier to access from the website 
• make sure that the indie rock genre is clear and presented well throughout all three products 
• the lip-syncing in the video was in time and that the pace matched the audio 

Evaluation Question Two - How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

The three products that we created were a music video for the song 'Creepin' up the backstairs' by The Wired, a digipak for the album and a website for the band. The themes that we were aiming for were:

• The Video - an indie rock music video with manly performance based footage and random cut aways of the band. We wanted to video to be fairly upbeat and energetic and to attract the target audience of 16 - 25 year olds. 
•  The Website - a attention grabbing website that promoted the band and their products. We wanted it to be clear that it was part of the indie rock genre and its main aim was to make the products more widely available to the public as well as allowing the 'fans' to get to know the band better.
• The Digipak - the aim of this was to make the album as attractive as possible to the target audience as well as linking it to the website. We wanted the digipak to have a slightly more serious tone than the video and to represent the band as a whole. We also wanted it to replicate a professional digipak. 

Looking at professional texts and our findings?

How did we incorporate our findings into our products?

Synergy and how we have used it:

Synergy is when two or more  companies work together to create a product that will have more sucess than their own single products.

Synergy is important in the marketing campaign as it helps companies or products to promote each other as well s themselves. For example when an artists realses a new song their website will be adjusted in order to promote the song, and the acompanying digipak, as soon as you enter the website. It may allow you to stream the song for free from the website, buy the song in a physical copy / digipak or download the song straight from the website. The digipak can then promote the website and music video through using similar imagery, the digipak often includes the website address on the back cover, and often artist off exclusive content to fans who have bought the digipak. Therefore each product or media text they release are promoting the others in order to gain as much followng as possible and subsequentely improving the artists success.

We have used synergy in our products by having the music video on the front page as soon as you enter the website. We also had a merchandise page on the website allowing you to buy the bands merch directly from their website. This is a form of synergy as the music and digipak may encourage the viewer to visit the website which could consequently lead them to purchasing some merchandise. Furthermore the merchandise would make the bands name more publicised and could increase views on the music video.

Another example of how we have used synergy is through placing the soundcloud box on the front page, allowing the audience to listen to the song while browsing the website. This is synergy with another company (soundcloud) as having their soundcloud box on our website allows us to promote our song through the soundcloud website as well as us promoting soundcloud on our site, improving their views and popularity as well.

The use of social media

Evaluation Question One - In what ways do your media products use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

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

Genre's form and conventions and comparison. 

Andrew Goodwin theory.

Representation:

In our video we tried to represent our band as young males who were care free, enjoyed their music and had very little cares. We tried to achieve this through their body language, their actions and the way they performed. We also tried to represent them as indie with rock influences through their costume choice. We chose for them to wear jeans, with vans or trainers and leather jackets. This is because we decided this would mainly connote the indie genre but the leather jacket would hint at the rock influence. We also wanted to represent them as quite quirky and not the 'perfect boy band' that is more associated with the pop genre. In our cut aways we had them 'messing around' in different locations and almost teasing each other which connoted their youth and casual personalities. The location also helped with their representation as we filmed them in an urban area suggesting they are from a city/ town which is often linked to indie/rock genres as many artist will do the pub circuit and busk. Furthermore less urban and more rural locations are usually associated with country and folk music, so we wanted to stay away from this.

Representation through costume:

Black skinny jeans, vans and trainers that are often linked to 'indie' fashion

Leather jackets almost aways associated with rock and roll genres 

Leather jackets, beanies and a t-shirt with an influential artist in associated musical genres.

Dark costume and colours as bright costume and mise - en - scene is more associated with the pop genre.

Some issues of representation that we encountered were; we didn't want the band to seem reckless as these kind of associations are made with the pure rock genre - we wanted them to seem more cheeky than reckless, we also had the issue of making them seem older than they are but still youthful, the bands target audience would be around late teens early twenties so we wanted them to seem mature but good fun as well. This was particularly useful when creating the digipak and website as we wanted them to seem serious about the music, but laid back and quirky in personality.