We were given briefs on different artists to develop, solo male, solo female, girl band and boy band. In our group, we chose the option of the boy band because it was something we thought would entertain us whilst doing as well as entertain the audience with our finished product. The next step we had to take was to choose the song to use for our boy band. We were torn between N'SYNC's 'Its gonna be me' and FIVE's 'We will rock you'. We decided on the FIVE song due to its hip\hop feel and the way we wanted our boy band represented as edgy with excitement added as well.
We then started to research other artists with the same genre and found boy bands: THE WANTED and BACKSTREET BOYS. These were similar artists due to their hip/hop music feel and edgy look. We have decided to use THE WANTED's music video as the example of what our one would look like, with just one location, which was basically abandoned, and the band just doing what they wanted there. This ended up not being what we did because of us using a peaceful but not abandoned place instead.
We then encountered a problem with our actress in the video coming down with an illness and are actors not being available all at the same time. This made us have to rethink our idea, so we decided on a solo male artist singing 'We will rock you' on his own. As well, we took a different approach and looked at our video being a light-hearted version, mocking the norms of the edgy boy band which we were going to do before.
Our video, with the artist called SMOOTH CRIMINAL, instead of SMOOTH CRIMINALS like it was before, ended up taking place at a peaceful setting in which the artist would come along and cause some trouble. He did this by harassing the women in the video throughout and being deviant by kicking signs, not obeying signs and scaring kids.
2. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
For my Digipack, I took an inspiration from one of MICHAEL JACKSON's digipack where he just had capital letters of MJ on it. I did this with SC and also used a picture of SMOOTH CRIMINAL on one of the sides which is on the poster as well. I tried to go for a dark urban look although as we know through the video, its slightly like that SMOOTH CRIMINAL is not taking himself serious.
My poster shows SMOOTH CRIMINAL, in front of a brick wall. This is trying to get at that SMOOTH CRIMINAL is 'hard' and with the look he is giving in the picture is one of no smile. But again we know that in our final video this is shown to be wrong as he isn't taken serious enough.
The poster is used for advertisement purposes for SMOOTH CRIMINAL's digipack, I added big bold headings and a graffiti sign of his initials to attract the younger audiences especially because it has a slight coolness to it. The graffiti culture is mainly exhibited by young people so this is the reason behind this.
I think my artist is portrayed in a way that makes him look cooler and more 'hip' than he really is. Although this could be seen as giving the audience the wrong impression or leading them to believe something its not, i think they would see the funnier side to it when they see the video, and the fact he doesnt take himself seriously.
3. What Have You Learn't From The Audience Feedback?
Through the audience feedback, we found that we could improve on what we had already done by posting the different drafts of work we done on Facebook or Youtube. The comments we received were mostly of positive criticism which helped us find out what the audience did or didnt like. This in turn helped us finish our final video with the new and improved added bits in. For example, one comment that we found most helpful was one about adding more performance of our artist in the sequence. This was to enable more exposure of artist and for the audience to see what he was really like. Overall I think that the audience feedback helped and encourage us massively in producing the best quality and entertaining video we could do.
4. How Did You Use New Media Technologies In The Construction And Research, Planning And Evaluation Stages?
Many technologies helped me throughout this project. When researching on other artists we found the internet the main source of information to look at. Using websites like Youtube and Facebook helped us on audience feedback and we found out how to improve our video. We also used Prezzie.com to make presentations for our audience profile and artist profile, which enabled us to show what its all about. When we was creating the video we used imovie for the main process although we did change to final cut pro for some added effects and polished touches. We retrieved our song from Youtube and used Youtube converter to change it to an mp3.
For the digipack and poster, we had to have basic knowledge of Photoshop programme, which gave it special effects and allowed me to experiment with different tools.
