Media technologies and their use in the stages of my productions.

Adobe InDesign

I used quite a few techniques and effects in the construction of my DVD cover and DVD advert. Obviously my cover took more time to construct than my advert, I used a few similar techniques though.

Isolate Blending - This makes titles that I made from 'Dafont.com' lose their backgrounds so they can look like they are part of a picture.

Send Backwards - I used this to layer my images. If a new image was placed onto the dashboard I would have to 'arrange' it so it was covering up a flaw in a picture or where I wanted it to be placed.

Fit content to frame - This very handy when trying to fit content to the size you dragged an image. For example the picture with the band members on was originally over 1200 pixels by 800 in size so that has to be made smaller to be practical. When the border is dragged smaller, the image size stays the same, so I used this technique to make the image the same size as the frame.

Of course I used text boxes and titles aswell, but they are not as complex as those other three.

What I Have Learned From My Audience Feedback

Not only did I put my video online but I also showed my minor tasks to members of my targeted audience. (See finalising and audience feedback)

What I learnt was that my minor tasks appealed to the audience and worked well with the music I was promoting. My explosive themed DVD cover emphasised the explosive nature of rock music. My advert shared conventions with the genre aswell. Becuase artists rarely ever publish live tours on DVD, it was hard for me to see what they looked like as i've said. I had to do it by just judging on my own. The audience members I asked said that I had captured it all well.

Main and Ancillary Effectiveness

I believe my products have a sense of brand identity in them. All my products use the same font for the names and stick to the same layout. My DVD advert and DVD cover especially. This is why i was required to resubmit originally, becuase my DVD cover and my DVD advert were pretty much identical, just one black, one white.

I took this to heart when working on my resubmission. My DVD advert was kept the same as I believed it to be very effective, as you would see a DVD advert in a magazine.

Even though it looks very plain I think of it as a teaser trailer for a film, only showing what you need to see. I wasn't sure if I should put down some tour dates but then I thought that this would only be the announcement. Then the viewers would look out for updates on the band wesite on myspace.

Keeping Media Conventions

To look back on my project and criticise it. I would say that the regular conventions of a music video are kept, with a video playing and the audio track layered above it. One convention I may have not kept the same is the way there is no band playing in the video, it is purely one subject.

These conventions make these media products very successful. I used fast pace action to go on with a fast paced music track and I kept the trend of rock videos not always having a solid plot.

The aimed audience is not only for people who would view the video, but for people who would listen to the music. So I aimed it at early teens through to mid 20's. I did this by playing safe and not actually giving any characters personality, that way the characters are only objects emphasising the music.

If televisions were to show the video, it would be played on MTV rocks or Kerrang! because those are the channels that show this kind of music. I attracted this audience by making the video very easy to follow and having easy listening mainstream rock music with no overly technical musical aspects.

Finalising and Audience Feedback

After spending 4 hours putting together my final piece, I went over it again just to work out some of the dodgy bits. After the final piece was done I watched over and I was pleased with the results. I showed it to my parents and they said some of the scenes were a bit long. So i added more cuts in, I see what they meant as then it kept the flow of the video a lot better. Some people said my minor tasks were a bit plain, but I then told them my minimalistic philosophy and they understood.

I also posted my video on youtube for the public to view and comment, this is a great way for my video to be seen, through web 2.0 and the peer to peer viewing sites. I also thought of uploading my video to facebook, but my feedback may be biased as only my friends could comment on it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UL1ZHGmVR40

Some Fiddly Bits

I have redone my chase scene. I've decided to do a group shoot at the school and play my track over the top. I've decided to re-edit the track to cut about 20 seconds off of the end to fit in with the timing of some of the cuts. It took me so long to try and get the final 30 seconds of the video to look good, I used a bit of slow motion when the solo started in the song, because that is my favourite bit of the song so I tried to do something different with the video style.

Background Experiments.

The minor tasks are fine now. The reason I chose not to include pictures of band members in them was because I wanted the sense of mystery about them, the way a teaser trailer would tease a movie. The reason I chose the name 'The Pen and The Sword' tour was becuase that was the name of another song we were writing at the same time we recorded Pickslides and Feedback. I thought I might aswell use it.

The reason I had all the names and fonts is because when we were a band and played together a lot more, we sat down and thought rather comprehensively about all this material. I think we fancied ourselves putting together a concept album, nothing ever came out of it, except for me being able to use the material now.


In my re submissions I wanted to keep the advert void of band members but I want to change my DVD cover to have the band members on it, this would give it a more personal feel. This can be seen below.



Another thing I wanted to put in my final DVD cover was a textured background image. The one I settled for was a picture of sparks flying from a angle grinder outside a house. This gave the DVD cover a deeper feel and allowed me to layer more images on top. I did go through quite a few background pictures however.

This one I looked at first because it was relatively simple and kept the same feel of my original plain white background. One problem with it however was that the black image would be covered up by my pen and sword image and my band photo. The image wasn't wild enough for me either.

This one was one I chose because it was pretty much fully black. It gave me the same problem that the main image was covered mostly by my images already on my piece. It was a step in the right direction though, as more of the image sprawled across the pages.

After the failure of the last two images I started searching for 'shattered' images because of its relation to the band name. This one immediately caught my eye, but it was not very practical to use as it was very large, was not composed correctly and did not really fit in with the concept of the tour album.

The most obvious 'shattered' image for me to search. The only problem with this was that it was too small and ended up pixelated on my InDesign document. The colour also did not match my band photo.


This was my first real success. The colours all matched and the image looked great and was hectic enough for what I wanted. The problem was though, that because of the layout of Indesign and the size of my document, the image would be stretched as it was bigger than the page size. What I wanted to do, was on my left page, to have the image on the left and on my right page, have the image on the right. This would give it a uniform feel and I thought it looked very appealing. But alas, the image was too large and not the right shape.

Because the colour of the previous image was perfect, I started looking along the lines of fire. And along the lines of 'shattered' images, one thing just as wild was exploding. So i started searching 'exploding stars' as I have an interest in astrology of sorts. I found several images, this one looked good but again was not the right shape.

Again, another cosmos image, this one was ok, just too small.



This, is my final background. It did not occur to me that I could have one large image that sprawled across both pages. Obviously i'd leave the spine blank for the title. This image was perfect as it was the correct size to format to fit the page. It is very hectic, which is what I wanted and has no single image to be shadowed out by the pictures. I am very pleased that i found this image and believe my final piece looks very good.