Evaluation Task 2

How effective was I in selling my artists' brand to his audience? from SamMullerMedia

Evaluation Task 1

Keith Negus defines the generic conventions of music videos. These include:

- The evident promotion of the artist's "image" as a product

- The featuring of the artist in the video

- A large variety of shots

- One key theme that provides the structure, with other minor themes recurring

- A potential narrative structure

- A potential performance element

- The ability to be unrealistic

- Shots cut to the beat of the track

- The use of special effects (e.g. lighting, CGI, animation)

- Carefully arranged mise-en-scene relevant to the track

- A high impact on the audience to compete in the industry

How my website used, developed or challenged conventions from SamMullerMedia

Magazine cover

Jay Harper's mailing list

Development of our digipak

We started out using a template for the digipak, adjusting the photos to fit. Originally, however, we somehow places the front and back photos in the reverse positions and so it ended up back to front.

Developing upon this, we swapped the covers to be the right way round, and placed an image of Jay with his guitar on the back cover to further show off his organic star image. We also created an inside slip for the CD and the CD itself with a picture of Jay on it to make his star image even more recognisable.

After this, we removed the title ‘Best Fake Smile’ from the front of the album as that was the single name and we wanted the album name to be ‘Jay Harper’ so as to help people recognise his name and establish himself in the music industry.

For the next draft of our digipak we changed the font to a bolder, more curved font. The boldness allows his name to stand out which is needed for a new artist, and the curved lettering connotes that he is a relaxed artist and therefore demonstrates that he is indie and organic and so sells his brand as such. In addition, we added the track names to the back cover to make it more professional and changed the inside slip, making the text smaller and adding another photo of Jay to show off his star image more with his guitar.

After realising that we had put the title of the album, his name ‘Jay Harper’, on the back cover for the previous draft of the digipak, we removed it. We also decided to remove the image we had recently added to the inside slip because after we had looked at it for a while and taken advice from other people, we saw that it was too much and was crowding the digipak.

Feedback from our final music video

Development of our narrative

Our narrative started as Jay being a social outcast who's girlfriend, Zoe, is in the 'popular crowd', a group of mean girls who's harsh judgement of people deter her from being herself and showing her affection for Jay in public. He tells her via song that she shouldn't have to wear her 'best fake smile' in order to impress her 'friends' and she should just be herself and forget about them so as to maintain their relationship and end her inner turmoil. However, after reviewing the shots we filmed for this narrative, we didn't think they showed what we wanted them to show well enough due to the poor acting of the popular girls, small range of shots and unintentional cheesy feeling created. We decided not to re-film it and instead changed the narrative as we thought it would be a greater opportunity to get better shots.

This narrative change removed the 'mean girl' plot completely and created a different story where Zoe's boyfriend is a guy called Ben, and Jay is Zoe's friend who can see that she is unhappy in her relationship and wants her to end it. To do this, we had to shoot new scenes with Ben and Zoe together.

We then decided to change the narrative to make it more exciting where Jay and Zoe are in a relationship, and Zoe seeing Ben behind Jay's back. Jay is aware of this, however, and is telling Zoe via song that he wants her to come clean to him and not lie to his face. Although, after reviewing the music video, we realised that we didn't have enough footage to efficiently portray this and so we changed the narrative again to something easier to portray and filmed more shots for it.

This new narrative became Zoe being in a relationship with Ben, but seeing Jay behind Ben's back. Jay can see that Zoe is unhappy in her relationship with Ben as he doesn't pay her much attention, and Jay sings the song for her as a way of telling her to end things completely with Ben as he cares a lot more about her.

However, after looking at the music video and showing it to a focus group, we realised that the narrative was still quite hard to understand as there still weren't enough shots of Ben to demonstrate his role in his and Zoe's relationship. Therefore, we removed all the shots of Ben to eliminate this confusion and changed the narrative to Jay and Zoe thinking about their past relationship together when they used to be happy. This narrative is a lot clearer in the video than previous narratives and although simpler, this simplicity can relate to the indie genre as the narratives of indie videos don't tend to be very convoluted.