Ancillary Task

Digipack Design

How effective is the combination of your product and ancillary tasks?

My project was a music video for Damien Rice's song; 9 Crimes. Damien Rice is an acoustic singer/songwriter who has had slight mainstream success but has a rather smaller and direct audience, thus it is easier to tune his promotion towards his target audience.

I would say there is a slight match between my Music Video and both of my Ancillary Task pieces, however their is a strong link between the two ancillary tasks. I feel this is how the project should be approached so not to over-saturate the viewer with one aspect of your sales pitch. The music video features on the insides of the digipack so as to continue a style and theme, however the front and back are entirely hand-drawn by me and are hardly connected to the music video at all, which I strongly believe is the right way to go about it. The magazine advert is similar to the digipack as it's entirely hand=drawn and in a similar style, this will help the viewer relate the release of the song to the cover of the digipack when they see it, creating a link between knowing it's for sale and seeing the product itself.

A good comparison of the two could be the overall mise en-scene of the pieces, chilled and calm, along with their lacking of colour. I feel I can implement this as generally the target audience know what they're looking for and who Damien Rice is, and if the music video were to connect any new fans they would pick up on the overall image and intimacy of my pieces.

Another comparison of the pieces could be the real attention to detail throughout my pieces. My whole music video is shot in HD and the shots are all manually focused and I spent a long time adjusting them afterwards in post to get them exactly as I wished. This can be matched with the incredibly fine detailing in my hand drawn digipack covers, which each took well over

8 hours to complete.

The first and most obvious difference between the pieces is that the ancillaries are hand drawn and the music video is not an animation and is shot true. This provides a great chance for the audience to try and bridge a gap between realities using their imaginations, which is to be encouraged! Say a fan buys the digipack and is watching the music video, they are going to pick up on the eyes, the rain drops as performance starts, the puddles, rain and splashes later on in the fast editing where the car drives along and when will walks past another puddle with large rain drops hitting it. They are going to pick up on the wetness of will's eye as he looks out of the window nearer the end. Now they've picked all this up they are going to try and subconsciously relate this to the product, the ocean, the clouds, the rain drop shaped paisley patterns, and the calm section of ocean over on the back of the cover. Who knows what memories will bridge that gap for them but it's sure to help them relate back to the products and the artist in the future. The calm after the storm scene on the back of the digipack could also be related to the passing of the story i.e. will and anna both accepting the horrible things they did to each other in the music video. The clouds clearing away and the calm section of ocean help re-inforce this and represent each other characters.

Overall I feel the combination of my product and ancillary task is very effective, it brings the audience into it as part of itself and helps connect them and the artist through their own experiences and imagination.

In what ways does your Media Product use, develop or challenge conventions of real Media Products?

What have you learned from your Audience Feedback?

Pros:

Mise En Scene

-'Visually Pleasing, even in B&W'

-Silhouettes

-'Shots repeated, but don't get old'

-Will's posture whilst playing piano

Editing

-'Flows superbly'

-Focusing on shower head and piano keys

-'Sound to Image matching - Very Good'

-Piano & Singing parts cut in 'cleverly' and 'remind that it's a music video'

Camerawork

-Good variety of shots

-Shot clarity (HD Focusing)

-'Great' Camera angles

-Shot Framing

Acting

-Well received in general

Cons:

2 of my 25 feedback sheets commented that the final sequence dragged on too long

Several people commented on the 2/3 shakey shots (although one single person commented saying that they thought it worked rather well in one of the parts)

Another couple of people commented saying they actors should have worn different clothes for the flashbacks

3 people commented on too much shot repetition

Criticisms:

"Emotional story line"(Suggests immediate understanding of the characters and what is going on)

"Brave to carry on the story line, but it works"

"Captures viewers"

"Silhouette carry mood well"

"Good song choice, fits narrative" (Suggests some people are so engrossed in the narrative that they have forgotten that the film they are watching is promoting the film. Does this take away from the film or prove to give a memorable film which helps raise the song's profile?)

"Top Class Editing - Outstanding!"

"Emotions shown through eyes. You see emotions through the girls eyes at the beginning and through the boy's at the end, brilliant!" (This comment made me smile the most as this is something I had wanted to include in the film the whole way through and hoped it would be the key to provoking emotion, that fact that somebody picked up on my little subconscious clue meant the world to me)

"Powerful images that move"

Out of my 25 feedback sheets 23 people gave me a medium Lv. 4 mark and 2 people gave me a high Lv. 3 mark.

Also from reading my feedback sheets I got the distinct impression that as all the basics of the film are so well covered (minus the shakey section of film that I loathe and drives me crazy) and the quality of the HD recordings is so professional-grade, people expect a lot higher quality standard from what they are watching and forget that they are in fact just watching a student film and I feel this leads to some of the harsher criticisms I received. The shakey section of the one part of the film I would give my arm to change, it annoys me to such an extent. If I could go back to re-do the filming from what I have learned, I would have gotten a wider variety of shots of Will playing Piano, bigger variety of shots of them as a couple and in different clothes and made ABSOLUTELY sure that there were NO shakey shots. I have to say I do agree with all of my audience feedback and is all completely fair and am still pleased with the vast majority of it all.

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

In the research stages I used a plethora of media technologies to help me capture the idea of my work. For my music video I frequently used YouTube. First of all I used to it to view the original video for the song I had chosen, not something I would really do but I had been told by a friend it was quite an interesting and unique/controversial video and thought it well worth a quick watch, which it was. I also used YouTube to re-watch certain parts of 'Control' a black and white feature length film about the life of Ian Curtis, the film was a massive influence on my piece and it was handy to be able to go back and look at key parts of it such as CU of eye's and so on and how they bridge an emotional gap. I also used my family's Sky+ to record a documentary on the top 10 music videos of all time, which was running on VH1. I found watching this and the behind the scenes footage and interviews with directors to be very helpful towards thinking about planning ahead much further in advance than I usually do, which resulted in a higher standard of work. The other internet based media technology I used was Google along with GoogleImages. I used google to search for the lyrics to 9 Crimes which helped me in coming up with a basic storyline for my music video to revolve around. I recieved one comment on how the story line made it almost sort of feel like a short film, whilst not taking away from the performance or the overall music aspect, which was very pleasing to find out. I used google images to search for and collect other hand drawn album covers/digipacks to help me brainstorm ideas for my own digipack. I found this to be incredibly helpful drawing a large influence from a Thom Yorke solo album cover entitled 'The Eraser'. I would never have found influence from this album cover without this resource what with music downloading becoming the major way of acquiring music nowadays.

In the Planning stages I used a fair selection of technologies to help me, although mostly mainly for my Music Video as my ancillary task planning came about mostly from sketching and practicing my drawings for my final piece. To star out with I used E-Mail to communicate with Damien Rice's Record Label, 'Vector Records', however I received no reply. I also used FaceBook to organise and confirm my actors, this was so helpful as my mobile phone at the time was barely capable of sending a texts to one person let alone 3 or 4! I then used my MacBook to watch the start of Pulp Fiction on DVD to help me come up with a story structure for my piece, which prompted me to begin the music video with part of the storyline from the very ending, but not quite all of it, just a we see in Pulp Fiction. I also used popular website Blogger.com to help me track my progress and give myself targets and list of things to do for certain days to try and keep in due with my deadlines and responsibilities. FInally I have also used my iPhone to take a picture of how went about my planning for writing this, which is a big mess on a large sketchpad basically.





For the Construction stage I believe the technologies available to me to help me do this were undeniably key to the high quality outcome of my film, without them my project have been incapable of some of the stunning Super-CU's on the eyes and and depth of field focusing. For the filming part of the construction we were trusted with Cannon HD, FlashDrive Cameras with the all important manual focus ability. Whilst filming I used my MacBook to play the song as playback for Will as he had to mimic a performance of the piece and sing along, this was very helpful in the editing stages as in some parts I could simply match the background audio with the track audio. To edit I used the iMovie software that came as standard on my MacBook. The software is brilliantly intuitive and respectfully powerful for it's nothing cost. A good knowledge of the software and a combination of persistence and patience resulted in the fine detailed and very fast paced editing sequences of my music video. For my ancillary task I used a software called 'LiveScan' that works as part of an industrial photocopier/scanner in the Art department. This software brilliantly scanned in my drawings and used a precision grid like software to help reproduce my drawing in as higher detail as possible, I was overly pleased with the result. I then used PhotoShop to organise all of my drawing on to a template for my digipack that I had downloaded from a quick Google search before hand.


For my Evaluation I used a plethora of computer based technologies to obtain audience feedback to help fuel my evaluation. I started of Uploading my video to YouTube and receiving a few comments there from friends and receiving a good rating. I then posted the link to it on my FaceBook and asked for people to comment on it to help me in my coursework, which many people happily did. On top of this I also exported my music video to a QuickTime file and displayed from a projector on to a large screen in class and asked a large selection of my peers to fill out audience feedback questionnaires on my behalf.

Ancillary Covers

These are the covers for my Ancillary Task. The front and back covers of the digipack. The rest is to follow.

Audience Feedback Evaluation

Based on the analysis of your audience feedback, is there a consensus on how effective your work is? Do the replies pick out similar things to comment on? Do you accept the comments of your audience or would you want to challenge them?

Throughout my audience feedback people commented on a well chosen use black & white, continuing on the narrative, leaving the 'look' at the end a little bit long, shots of eyes, water and fingers. This was all brilliant news as these are all the things I set out to try and show in the first place in order to achieve an amotive response from the audience and when not watching with a critical perspective these factors add up to draw out an emotional response. I accept all the Comments made about my film. I know where I went wrong and would love to do it again without making the same mistake i.e. shaky shots, not enough footage.

If you were able to re-visit your work and develop it further which aspects would you focus on the improve the piece. Try and explain why you would make the changes.

Wider variety of shots of the couple. More of the girl after the attack. More Stable shots. More shots of the girl with the boy on the side. More depth of field shots.