Finished product. WATCH IT!!! thank you
Question 1: In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Our response to the brief was to create a fun and energetic music video that could be enjoyed by viewers of all ages. ‘No More’ by Roni Size is an extremely up-tempo song; therefore we wanted to creature visuals that had a correlation with an animated feeling of the song. By having a speedy and quick creative vision, we decided to make our music video extremely fast and moving. We wanted to tastefully find our stereotypical viewers. Defining our genre was quite difficult, as the artist is heavily influenced by many genres such as indie, drum and bass, and hip-hop. I think that the song ‘No More’ is the perfect fusion of all three genres.
Although it’s hard to pin-point the genre, I think that he has more of a drum and bass background. Looking back on my research, I found out that the main convention of many drum and bass videos, (such as Pendulum’s”Slam”) was to subtly construct a narrative. The story-telling came through the lyrics and was also incorporated in the visuals to set a basic mood and tone of the video. However, another convention of many d&b music videos is the use of performance. Many d&b videos have some sort of live performance in it, for example “Pendulum 'Watercolour'. Performance may be a key element, but it is not the most important thing. We wanted the performance to only be a small part of our music video and that’s why the performance part was never shown on its own on our music video and frequently it was overlay to the main narrative part.
Our perception of the song was about getting cured and how criminals deserve a second chance. We thought the use of mask on our actors can represent that even they don’t like the person they are and they hide it from public.
We wanted to include all the violent and aggressiveness of the criminals. From our research, we found out Roni Siz’es target audience is of an average of 16 – 25. However, we wanted to create a music video and widen the target audience so people from all age can understand the story behind it and the message we were trying to send. The generic conventions of a d&b music video are based highly on the narrative structure. I feel that many d&b music videos have an essence of the concept being the most important element of the video. There is always a message being subtly thrown in, whether it is through visuals or lyrics.
Our protagonist was to show that no matter how much of a bad person you are, you can still be touched by a small song and change. This was showed at the end of our music video when all three of them start smiling. Even though we wanted to make a serious video full of action, we also wanted to create a thought-provoking one too. Another convention of any music video is the use of mise-en-scene. We thoroughly planned out our filming location. A lot like TV programmes such as Channel 4’s ‘Skins’, we wanted to use locations that are instantly recognizable to fellow Bristolians and people from our college, such as st merry Redcliffe church yard and around the college area. It was an ode to The Hit-ups, as they are a famous Bristol based band.
Our opening shot is in a high angle from Redcliffe hill, we wanted to create a tranquil and peaceful setting, and then immediately create tensions and suspense with the stranger looming. I think that the opening of our music video is a lot like the opening to a film where the scene starts showing the city and make you familiar with where the film is taking place; a lot like ‘Easterners’. We also carefully selected our protagonists outfit for example in the police man’s rapping scene the outfit shows a under cover police officer so the criminals don’t escape when they see him.
We tried to think of the stereotypical criminal look for our characters, whilst still fitting the mood of the scene. For example the use of the hoodie and mask and the whole idea of them trying to hide them set up the characters to viewer as a terrible person without them doing anything wrong. Having three different scenarios was our plan to include a vast amount of violent because it is needed to be continuous in order to be effective. As a performance is a key element in many d&b videos, we wanted to include a small amount of performance in our video. I think that the visuals from the performance scenes in our video, sets the tone of a lively song.
We used many close-up shots to make an emphasis on the instruments and Julia ‘the singer’ to show that it was a live performance. We wanted to capture the boisterous activity that our protagonist was missing out on. For the album cover, we placed a mask on the sky and changed it to a ghost look so it’s not extremely noticeable but at the same time, it is there. Then we put the name of the song and artist on top right and put the logo of the artist at the bottom of the cover.
We didn’t use generic portrait shots of the artists or characters on front cover, as it would’ve diverted the attention from the music, to the importance of them. A lot like the Maroon 5 album cover, ‘Songs about Jane’, the album cover is abstract and trippy, and it reflects the mood of the album. We wanted to create a playful, black and white with eye-catching red title album cover to correlate with our serious music video. The use of the red colour for title and a ghost mask on the foreground encourages the CD buyer to think that we are insinuating that our album is “scary”, again it adds to the violence concept of our music video. We wanted the image of mask to be recognizable.
The CD advertisement came out exactly how we wanted it to. We wanted to create a blury and faded picture of one of our criminals with mask and black hoodie as the background and write the texts on top with the same font and colour. During an editing session in IMOVIE, we created still images from the video, unfortunately we discovered the quality of the still shots were very bad when we went to the CLC but when we scaled it up to fit the magazine advert, it looked just like how we wanted it; pixelated and blurry so it was perfect already.
The redness of our texts was the main thing which we focused on during the editing and we had the same effect added to all of our cd covers, inserts and magazine advert. In terms of developing and challenging the conventions of d&b music videos, we decided to poke fun at how serious the majority of d&b videos our by using the dancing at the end of the rapping scene. We wanted to create a friendly video that was original and had never been done before.
We have asked the artist Roni Size himself to comment on our music video and as he is a busy man, he couldn’t do it on time but he said he will by the next couple of days and we are going to put it up as our audience research. We wanted to make a music video which shows the reality of everyday life and things that happen around us and we don’t see. We made it real and showed the violent and it informs the audience without being too aggressive and hard to watch. The final product was successful at sending the message and audience didn’t have any problems understanding it specially the lyrics really fits with the scenes as the music plays. I think that we challenged the generic conventions of a typical d&b music video by simply focusing on the narrative more than the performance.
Question 4 :How did you use media technologies in the construction and research planning and evaluation stages? part 2
We started filming straight after we planned our story board. We used digital cameras with tapes for the filming and all the footage was converting on apple Macs with the camera’s wire fire. We bought tapes for camera and used it on tripod and free hand filming (hand held). In this post I am going to write about everything we used involving our music video such as this blog!
iMovie
We used Mac software called iMovie for most of our editing because it is so easy and straight forward to use. We imported all our footage in that software and we put the song on the line with it. Even though it is simple looking software it has the ability to do some complex work such as changing the flow of our video so it gets faster/slower depending on how we want it and this was definitely a handy tool to have because we needed some parts to be slightly fast forward to fit the song.
AfterEffects
This is a more complicated software for editing the video which I mainly used to add the CGI’s. I played with the colours and contrast of the music video quite a lot to make it cinema style and I finally managed to get a greenish tent to it where it looked more like the similar music videos. I also had to over lay the singing part to the narrative which was impossible to do with iMovie so we really needed this software and it helped us out a lot. Other stuff like the blood and cigarette was also made on this software for our video. Finally I wanted to make the whole thing look faster and kind of “dance” to the music so I wrote a code for the whole footage which made it jump around and zoom in and out randomly. This effect was very effective according to our viewers.
Windows Movie Maker
This software is just like iMovie but it can support more file types and when we had our footage all edited and finished, to put it back on iMovie it wasn’t the right size and it was hard to copy it without losing the quality. So I used this software to resize my footage without losing the quality and I also added the texts on top of the music video with it. So it might look very simple but it was powerful software which saved me time to change the size of music video.
Video Converter
On After effects the output was set to 1080p HD video because I wanted to get the most out of our video but when I tried to put it back on Mac, it couldn’t read the format of the file which was expected since Macs and computers don’t really have much in common! Anyway so I changed the format of our music video to .MOV so it’s readable for apple Macs as well as computers.
iTunes
Definitely one of the most used piece of software to listen to songs on. We mainly used this to find our song in the beginning of the course. It was easy to look between the songs and find the one we needed thanks to the user friendly interface.
Photoshop
My favourite software was Photoshop which makes everything possible. We edited all of our images with that software and turned all the stills we had to posters and cd covers with this software. It can be complicated to work with if you are a beginner but once you know how to design with it, it becomes fun! I edited most my pictures for the poster with Photoshop. It is very easy to turn a picture to black and white scale and we used that effect for all of our cd covers to have the cohesive between all of our other products.
Internet
Of course communication between the group members was an important part and sometimes it was just simply easier to use Facebook to write our ideas down and only one of us type it all out. We used Facebook to find our actors. We also used it to send each other the pictures we took while filming and the pictures of cd covers etc...
Hardware
Hardware wise we used many different types of equipment such as tripods, video recorders and tape. We also used computers and macs for editing. The data transferring was done with portable hard drivers and usb sticks.
Even though we had made some posters and sleeves from the start of this year, Tuesday was the day to finish them and produce the finals. So we all went to Orchard school where they had advanced iMacs and best of all, they had Photoshop there! This was a group work and we all had to make at least two CD inserts and a front and back cover + a sleeve and magazine advert.
I had to come make the front and back cover and Aiden and Oscar each had to make 2 CD inserts. They used the still’s we’ve had from earlier but I wanted to stick to the idea of having a simple cover. Teachers kindly helped me to develop the old idea and design the final covers; I had to get rid of the knife, flowers and the tree. This had changed for a more minimalistic look with the title and artist shown in red in the top right corner and just a mask in the middle removing the knife and flower.
As you see on the picture above, this was the first cover I made but on the final cover, I had to change almost everything. So I started with a picture of sky for the background, then I added a new layer and I put the mask on it. Then I changed the opacity of the mask so it’s just slightly visible and have a ghostly look to it and I positioned it right in the centre so half of the mask goes on the back and half on the front cover. Then I added the title and artist’s name on top right of the poster with a red font to stand out from the black and white background. We had decided to go for a black and white look with red font and so enhanced all of our images so that they were cohesive. This also was similar to “Sin City” style. Anyway so after all the texts on the poster I added the band’s logo, websites and songs. The final product was simple but effective.
We were asked to record everything we did from the start to the finish so we can put all the steps on our blog so the technically here’s exactly how I achieved the final poster. First I had to log into Mac to be able to use adobe Photoshop CS3 because the windows had the element and I find that slightly limited and I’m used to work with full version. So on Photoshop I opened the template for the CD cover and I used a picture of sky as the background but it was in colour so I changed the picture to grey scale and it looked very shiny and unrealistic so I added the noise filter to the picture to make it more pixelated and CD cover style. Then I changed the contrast on the picture and made it slightly darker so the mask stands out more.
To add the font I played with the size and position of it then I added a shadow to all the text so no matter what colour they are and what’s underneath them they will still stand out over the black shadow. And for the final touch I cropped the artist’s logo from their previous poster and added it to mine with a slight reflection under it. Final picture was made out of 6 layers.
We originally hadn't planned for the front cover to be black and white but for the sake of cohesion we did. For the inside of our sleeve we decided to input the details of who would have produced, arranged and mixed our album if it had ever been released into stores. Two of our images inside were of two of the criminals as they are a main part of the whole campaign and these two images were stylized using "Dark Strokes" on Photoshop which made the contrast brighter and made it look more like art although still showing realism and grittiness. For the inside we chose to write on each picture a small phrase relating to anti-crime such as "walk to the light" which is written in red so that they are noticeable and emphasised immediately. To keep with the cohesion of the artist we had to find the logo used by Roni Size and add it to our sleeve, which was placed on the inside in the top left corner.
We also changed it slightly so that it would fit our style.Lastly we came up with the idea for the magazine advert together, Oscar and Aiden were writing the quotes from magazines, website address and availability of the song and I was designing and bringing their ideas on the screen. We changed the font size and style for each line to make it look more efficient but the main black and white background didn’t change and the red font was still the same colour. I played a bit with the style of the main title but for the rest of the text I just added shadows to make it more visible over the lighter areas.
I have been busy lately trying to edit all the scenes and footage that we had that’s why I didn’t update my blog but thankfully the editing is all done now and the final product is almost ready!
We had five different footages, three scenarios, one rapping and one of the main singer. Although the scenarios on their own were more than the length of the song so I had this idea of putting the main singer over layer to the parts so everything is still happening in the scene but all behind the performer and the viewer will be able to watch both footage at the same time.
To do that I had to take all the footage home and start editing it on my computer where I had Adobe after effects because I find iMovie so limited and basic. Although I did use iMovie to put the song in line with the footage then imported it all in Adobe after effect. This was the main program that I used for all the editing.
There are some screen shots of the final footage and as you can see, the colour looks more dramatic and studio like. All the special effects are also done with after effect such as the blood and cigarette. I also added some lens flare and shake to the footage so the video will connect more with the dram and bass song. Because our song was fast and we mainly had slow narrative parts I wanted to somehow make the video faster and when I watched some similar dram and bass videos I realised the use a lot of flash lights, random zooming on the screen and shake. As a finishing touch I wrote a formula for the footage which made the whole footage flashy and shaky as I wanted!
Of course the editing was impossible without the good old Photoshop! Even thought Photoshop is a 2D program, I still had to use it quite a lot for our video! For example on the picture above I had to change the cigarette then animate it with after effects.
This is the day we filmed the rapping scene and as you can see on the pictures, we found a “rough” area where there are graffiti on the walls and looks kind of empty and where “gangsters” are more likely to hang out. This will add to the realism of the film and will make more sense.
On this picture I’m doing a panning shot of the 3 criminals as they take their masks off and because I wanted to have a steady shot I put the camera on the bike and used it as a tracking device.
Rather than have Joe wear the common uniform for British police, we decided his clothing to be in the style of those worn in cop films/tv shows (such as Miami Vice) - this included the use of aviators and smarter clothing.
We modelled Joe's appearance on this kind of policeman look
rather than this one
Our actor Joe He was involved in acting out the rapping part of our song which was given as a speech to the criminals showing them the errors of their ways.
For this scene we took a variety of angles to make it more arresting. I think that Joe did a good job of imitating a policeman and also learning the verse to a good standard on such short notice. For the policeman costume we had him wear quite typical things such as aviators and smart casual clothes which take reference from such films as "Heat" and "Miami Vice". During the speech which is being rapped the criminal characters start to feel remorse and they begin to stop their ways. this is shown by them first removing their hoods and then throwing their masks away. And we used his hand movements to fit the words and look like what he is rapping.
To show the process of the characters' understanding, we first take off our hoods (towards the end of the rap verse) and once the policeman finishes the lecture, we go all the way and throw away our masks. Because there is still a minute left of the song after the rap, we thought we would fill some of the time by having Joe give a thumbs-up to the camera after he sees us take off the masks (as if he was saying "mission achieved"), this is a post-modern element as the character breaks the fourth wall by doing this. The three 'cured' youths then start dancing briefly as a way to represent their transition from anti-social actions to starting a pleasant lifestyle, as well as a way to inject some silly humour into an otherwise somewhat depressing video.
We made a questionnaire – people thought our music video was original, they hadn’t seen anything like that before. They were shocked by the horrifying scenes but at the end they really understood the message we tried to send and I’m really happy that people said that because that’s what we were aiming for! One person said: “It was incredibly unique and a brilliant performance”. I’m unsure whether or not it was a performance from the singers they were referring to, or a performance from our brilliant actors.
Many of the viewers were impressed by the amount of special effects on our music video and they thought it was “amazing and looked real” but some said the CGI was not realistic enough for example we used to much blood for when one of our actors gets kicked in the face. I was happy that we did get a few negative feedbacks about the editing because now we know what to add or remove next time we start another project and it helps us get our future results as natural and real as possible because audience feedback is crucial to the media and music industries. It allows producers, directors and even the artists to reflect on their work. It outlines the flaws and what is needed to improve, and it can also encourage people to work harder. Positive feedback allows producers to acknowledge their success, so they know what they're doing right. It also helps in terms of research for their target audience.
If they’re pleasing their target audience, it means more money for the media and music industries. More sales from artist, more demand from the press, more concerts being fully booked, more money being spent by their fans – it’s a vicious circle and it all benefits the musicians and their team. A consequence in ignoring audience feedback, whether good or bad – means that the production companies, managers etc do not know the views of their target audience and they don’t know if they are pleasing them or not. If the audience feedback is bad and they don’t act on it, they risk losing money, endorsements, fans and of course respect from the public. Once an image of an artist is made, the artist has to stick to it to please the fans and the public. I wasn’t surprised by the positive feedback, because we knew we had made a good video. I had all faith in our product and we followed our creative direction through and succeeded. However, I was aware of the weaker elements in our work. I feel like the mirror scene referring to ‘taxi driver’ wasn’t clear enough because most our audience didn’t get it (maybe they haven’t seen Taxi driver in the first place) also the whole story fixed up really fast and we didn’t have time to include some of the footage such as the criminals meeting up at the end before the rap starts. It still made sense but it would be much easier to understand if we could put everything together under that limited time.
Thankfully Aiden and his uncle Mr. Roni Size made a video of him commenting on our final music video which is always a nice thing to know what the artist think of it and here is the video:
Did you enjoy the video? Answer honestly
Did you feel there was a message being conveyed, if so what?
How did you feel about the violence displayed on the music video?
Did you understand what the mirror scene was referring to; if so what correlation do you see between our video and its original source?
Which of the three scenarios do you find the most effective?
Which part of the video did you enjoy the most?
How clear was the meaning of their taking off the masks at the end?
How well do you reckon the visuals matched with the audio?
What is your opinion on the shaking/distorted effect used throughout the video?
How conventional is the video for its genre of drum and bass?
Would this video encourage you buy the album (which would be filled with other social themes)?
What would you have changed?
What would you have added?
Please rate the video out of 10. Do it!
1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 – 6 – 7 – 8 – 9 – 10
Cohesion is extremely important, because it is the foundation of the trademark of the artist. Once the band has ‘an image’, they have to maintain it continuously. Like any brand or product on the market - the band needs to be recognizable and have its own flair. If they were to suddenly change their image, their fans may feel that they have ‘sold out’.
There are many drum and bass artists and DJ’s out there and each are unique for how they represent themselves, there needs to be an element of satire in all products for continuity purposes. I think it’s also important for the band’s music and visuals to be recognizable. For example, if the ‘Eastenders’ theme tune is heard from another room –you would know that ‘Eastender’s’ had started without having to look at the visuals. If our song were to appear on ‘Radio1’, we’d want it to be instantly recognizable if it was seen in a magazine. Even though I do think our products are cohesive, I would change the advertisement and add the red font into it subtly. I think it would be too obvious and cliché for us to add the black and white effect with red colour in our music video.
Some of the other things that we have had trouble with at the moment are that we had found it hard to get some of the actors as people had busy schedules and were also camera shy, and so this delayed our filming in the early stages of production. At the moment we haven't gotten the music for our video as we have been having problems finding it due to it being unable to download. We also found it hard to get some of the props that were needed as they were an integral part of the production and people were probably worried about their possessions although they would be present during filming. As of now our filming is going well and on time, and the editing has gotten off to a good start.
This is a screenshot of software I used "Adobe Photoshop"
So we decided to design 8 posters for our project to get the highest mark and we could design 4 each and choose the best ones out of all the posters for our final outcome.
I’ve used Photoshop to edit some of my stills that I took from the footage and I’ve turned them into posters. I just need to add the title on each individual poster.
here are the 5 CD covers which I designed and I tried to use different technique for each so they don't look all the same.
Layering
Contrasts
I changed the contrast level on this picture and added a slight glow over the brighter area
One colour stand out
I changed the picture to black and white and added noise to give it an old effect, then I added red blood to it which stands out and the title will be in red also.
Black and White
On this picture i just wanted to make him stand out a bit more and I changed the brightness and contrast as well as turning it to grey scale.
Mixed media
This is more experimental CD cover that I attempted to make and I have added the typical colours and speakers to the cover with music waves.
There are 3 types of post modernism that we have used in our music video which are explained bellow.
Intertextual references - the way that text interacts with or re-uses elements of other texts. The Simpsons does this continually with its versions of famous movie scenes. Tarantino also does this
Our main postmodernism in the music video is a scene from Taxi Driver where the character is talking to himself on the mirror and to make it obvious we are going to use the same mise on scene and camera angles and if possible the same lines would be used but since it is a music video and the dialog is muted we have to have subtitle for his speech. Here is the video of the original scene.
The blurring of ‘real’ and ‘simulated’ – through CGIs eg Lord of the Rings, Tory Story or through narrative questions such as those posed in the matrix or Blade Runner ‘ Is it human or not? Does it matter?
In our music video I’ve used CGI for making the fake blood in one scene and in other place for making fake fire and cigarette. Also the effect on the whole screen is CGI. I’ve added a few lens flares on the scenes to make it more like a music video.
Bricolage – refers to the process of adaptation where aspects of one style are given quite different meanings when juxtaposed with stylistic features of another. The gull Monty does this well when mixing gritty issues such as unemployment and depression with anti-realist scenes, for example when the men start dancing in unison in the dole queue.
This is out last postmodernism when we are ending the music video and all the criminals start dancing and it’d an unexpected move for the viewer but it will make sense why they are dancing if you watch the whole music video.
So far we have done more than half the filming and I thought I’d update the blog with what we have filmed already and post the rest when the filming is completely done.
The filming schedule was mainly two parts, first part was the narratives of our music video and the second part was the singing and performance. We tried to film all the narrative part before half term so it’s done and dusted so then I can edit it during holiday and when we come back we can film and edit the signing part. Fortunately we filmed all the narratives and also managed to have enough time to do almost half of the performance!
although while I was checking the footage and putting them in order I realised the singing part wasn’t as good as we thought it’d be because the background behind her was white and the backlighting made her face so dark that you can’t see it clearly on the screen so we might end up filming that part again if I couldn’t edit it.
I think fixing it with computer would look obvious and not natural but since it’s a music video I can add lenses flares and spotlights around her so it won’t look that obvious that I’ve made her lighter. All we have to film now is a police man arresting the criminals and rapping to them which would roughly take 2 to 3 days when we come back after holidays.
We started with the scene where a pregnant lady gets punched in her stomach and leads to death of her unborn child. But since we couldn’t find a girl at the time to do the part (cause all the girls were camera shy) we changed the scenario to a guy getting mugged by one of our criminals and he takes his phone and runs away. We did almost all the shots in our story board but since it was a different scenario and no girls were involved I tried to be more experimental and take shots from all the possible angles which we could then use in our music video.
Here are some of the pictures my team mate took while I was filming.
Next filming session was the part where a bike gets stolen by another criminal and I was the prison riding the bike. :D So I didn’t do as much filming but we always try to film each scenario at least 3 times so all of us get a go to be behind the camera and we get the best shots of all to use in the final music video so I got the chance to film the beginning part of this scenario where I’m still not involved and you can see me in the picture bellow, filming Aiden’s footsteps from behind (close up tracking shot).
This is the last scenario that we’ve filmed and in this one a young boy gets hurt by another criminal while he is playing football. Level of safely is very important for us and we will not attempt to do anything to hurt the actors. For that reason we didn’t use a real cigarette for our scene. But I edited the footage by Adobe after effect and made it look real and natural as you can see in the picture bellow. This wasn’t a real cigarette and his eyes were completely normal. Thankfully when I edited it, the cigarette looked real and his eyes looked burned.
How do you think that we can involve Julia’s scene’s smoothly with the scenario narrative?
How do you think each scenario should begin?
In what way do you think that the criminals should get arrested?
Do you think that the policeman should look traditional?
Do you think that the masks are effective?
How many scenarios do you think there should be?
Do you think that using special effects could enhance the film?
How do you feel about the video being cut down?
Which scenario do you think is most effective?
We took some shots from the sky, also thought that we would add a scene of a church to symbolise the cleansing of the wrong doers in our video.
For the start this wasn’t what we were planning to do. But since the masks that we had ordered didn’t arrive on expected day, we had to change the shooting schedule and shoot these establishing shots first.
first attempt at making the first cover. I will design the final after we recorded the music video. this one is designed with Photoshop and cinema 4D.
We have come up with CD cover ideas that have various designs. Some of the designs weren't including in the drawing process because we had more or less chosen which images we were going to include. The images we have chosen to use are the ones where four silhouetted figures are standing on a hill with a tree next to them which would also be partially seen on the back of the CD but would then fade into another image showing a flower and a knife representing peace and violence.
The title of the album is 'No More' which is also the same name of what would be the first single of the album. The concept behind this is that the lead single is called No More and the image is showing that people don't want to live with societies injustice and so they escape to the paradise shown on the cover. The other concepts we had looked at including on the inside of the CD case were an image of a man smoking, a policeman in a spotlight and one of the masks that will be used in our music video.
Whilst I drew the front and back cover, Oscar and Aiden came up with 5 fictional track names each for the track list:
1. Tell Me
2. What Is It
3. Thunder
4. Rocket Storm
5. Fire
6. No More
7. Dove
8. Pimp Town
9. Corruption
10. Last Dance
11. Final Stand
Names for the tracks came to me under influence of the whole society-theme, like Dove (a symbol of peace), Corruption (a society injustice), and Final Stand (like a final stand against society's inequalities, as well as being the final song).
My teacher gave us 5 different adverts to analyse and this is one of them. On this advert there are many clouds shown and only a small title is represented in the middle with dark font colour so it’s easily noticeable but the advert is very simple. Name of the single is “Love is Noise” and I remember when I was using a computer program for designing I had this option which you could add noise to the picture to make it sharper and the noise was symbolized as a cloud icon.
Now the same thing is shown on this advert, you can see small and separated bits of clouds on top of the advert just above the album name. And lower of the page there are some information such as the release date of the song and what media it will be available on. Name of album the single is from etc...
Also I found it it’s interesting how the CD and the advert share a lot of similarities. The backgrounds of the clouds are very similar apart from the mag ad being slightly darker. With the background being almost identical and with the text used being the same it is almost impossible to not be able to recognize what the ad is advertising.
I don’t really listen to this band but just by looking at the magazine advert I got this feeling that they are not serious and just want to have fun and this magazine advert represents the joyful songs in the album.
I couldn’t find the same advert on the internet but it looked so alike to their CD cover so I uploaded that instead. On the advert there are two broken lamp balls, both smiling and one is smoking. Looks like the pilot lamp is waiting for the yellow lamp to hand him the cigarette!
Pink background and the pilot style font on top of the page are effective when audiences come across the advert. Cartooniness of the advert also breaks down the age limit and younger people might think of buying the album but you can still see the advisory on the bottom left of the advert.
I found these adverts in a magazine which we were given in our media lesson and I’m going to analyse them for my three magazine adverts.
This is the friendly fire’s album advert which shows half a mirror shattered by a small black ball on a black background and the title is written with thin white on top section of the cover.
The reflection on the mirror is not clear but you can see a tree on a blue sky whereas on the background it shows a dark sky with stars in it. There’s a contrast between both visions which represents the songs inside the album and says how there are two different types of songs in the album. Or you can understand the representation that the band has shattered the nice reflection and has focused on the dark side more.
On the advert there are some quotes and testimonials to get viewers attention such as “utterly sublime” or “Skilled craftsman of killer pop looks terrific"
- How do you feel about violence being portrayed in music videos? Please tick.
- Strongly agree
- Agree
- Don’t care
- Disagree
- Strongly disagree
- hat would you expect a gang of criminals to be doing?
- What would you expect a group of criminals to be wearing?
- How can criminals be made to stop committing crimes? Please tick.
- Going to church
- Going to prison
- Being told the error of their ways
- Being the victim of a crime
- Where would you expect to see drug dealers?
- In a subway
- On the street
- In shops
- Other (please specify)
- Would you expect policeman to be wearing uniforms or normal clothes?
- What colours do you think should be used in a music video portraying violence and redemption?
- Black and White
- Sepia (brown tint)
- Normal colour
Alireza | A2media
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Alireza Hemadani.
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