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Chloe Jones - 8113

Let Loose - The Night Shades : The Music video

Link to our Website

http://ryanjameslomas.wix.com/thenightshades

Our website analysis

The website that we created for our band was created on Wix. This was hard to use at first , however after many drafts and the two of us spent time practicing and redoing work until we had finally figured how to use it. From this we can see the first draft to the final draft.

This is the first draft of the homepage of the website in comparison to the final website homepage: 

The left image is the first draft of the website. we changed the logo as we thought are starting logo was too serious for our band. We changed the logo and made it on Fireworks we choose to make it more quirky and fun like our video , we knew we needed to make a clear link between our website and video and also our band so it was simple for our audience to find us. We still kept the video on the front of the page as it was a main thing we needed the audience to see. The background however we changed as we asked 10 people what they thought of the background and the majority of the respondents said that the background isn't effective, although it is very nice, it doesn't reflect the band image. From hearing this feedback we changed the background to the band. 

Other changes that we made were that we made it so there was only three pages we done this as we felt the more the audience has to search for what they wanted to see the less they would see and our website wouldn't be successful in promoting our band fully. We liked the idea that the audience saw all of the band's stuff quite easily 

The homepage is much more interactive. We took this idea for the Katy Perry website as her website is extremely interactive, with photos to scroll over and links that connect the whole website to one another. However our website is not up to the standard of Katy Perry as we have a lack of resources and funding to make this.

In comparison to the first draft, the homepage has much more on it for the audience to view. We liked the idea that from the start the audience are captivated by colours and interactivity. 

Whilst making the website, and knowing that we wanted the website to be much more interactive so we decided to make a welcome page for the website. This enables the audience to be more interactive with the website. 

This is the welcome page for our website: 

The small door in the middle of the page is how the audience would enter the website. Inside the small door is a gallery of images. It clicks through adding a small effect to the welcome page. 

Looking at our welcome page we decided to add a pop up window where fans can enter a competition. We done this so that it has more of a website effect. The pop up enables fans to enter their details with a contact form. 

This goes with the feedback that we received from our audience. The said that the website should interact with the audience, and this enables the audience to interact. 

Here are some other pages of the website. We kept the theme the same as the background is the same and the contents have been kept minimal.

We wanted to keep a shop within the website. Fans can then buy merchandise directly from the website.

 This page is the tour page. It features a link to buy tickets for the tour, tour dates and a map of where the band is right now. This shows the audience where the band is and thus helping them to be more interactive.

Link to website

http://ryanjameslomas.wix.com/the-nightshades

Evaluation Question 4

Evaluation question 3

in relation to audience feedback we got our some of the target audience to watch the video and asked the questions about it such as ' what did you like about it' or ' what would you change?' this helped us gain an of what the target audience wanted to see  . The audience responded sometimes it was what we wanted to hear and in other cases it was not. we looked at the feedback to see whether we agree or disagree with what the audience has said we hen went on in this explain to them why we had done certain things to the video and they seem to understand. We agree that the use of bright colours is effective as this appeals to the younger target audience and shows the them of the video which is letting loose.
The audience also commented on the relationship between the characters. We agreed with them on this, we wanted to challenge our genre here and make it so instead of being a video about love it was about friendship and the last moments of freedom and childhood you get before you have to become an adult. Overall people liked this aspect the most about the video. 

We disagree that the audience felt their should be a narrative to the concept shots. We feel that they make the theme stronger if they were just random as they just show us having fun and there doesn't need to be a narrative in case it is too serious. As one of the respondents said 'it shows the journey of the band' that is what we wanted to show the audience. The journey of the band is vital for us to show as that is the reason behind the concept shots. Overall the aim of the video was to make our audience feel happy and as if they wanted to do something fun, all of the audience agreed the video did make them feel his way.

equipment used

Evaluation question 2

Chloe and Ryan- evaluation question 1

This is our first evaluation question where we show how the video uses ,develops and challenges the conventions of real media texts and the genre. We chose to use a YouTube video to show the changes as we could show short clips of real media texts and compare them to our own video.

Laura Mulvey theory Part b

Here I continue to talk about Laura Mulvey's theory and explain how it doesn't link to our video, as we don't set our production with a male audience in mind. Furthermore Mulvey's theory has been criticised  for the following things:

1. It has been suggests that some women enjoy being looked at and enjoy embracing their body's.
2. It generalises the idea that the audience are passive, it ignored the fact that some men and women are not affected by the male gaze theory as they are active.
3. It ignores a new brand of females who are not shown as sexual in music videos and are being recognised for their talent.

Lara Mulvey Theory Part A

I used Laura Mulvey Male Gaze theory to evaluate my music video. I determine whether or not our video related to this.

Laura Mulvey says that women exist purely in media for the purpose of the male audience, she suggests that in music video's women are always shown in minimal clothing, lots of make up and very pretty. She says that women are used as a secondary character in music videos , they are used to make the male look or feel better and other than that they have no importance. She states that the constant objectify of women through the media means women soon adopt a type of male gaze and objectify each other.

In short Mulvey says that women have two purposes in media, one of these is for visual pleasure this means an erotic object for the  characters and audience to view, although this is aimed at men, in recent times women have adopted this view. The other purpose is gender roles, the women slow the man from whatever he is doing and are seen as a distraction.

Examples where male gaze is shown are in Robin Thicke - Blurred lines, Nicki Minaj Anaconda, and Miley Cyrus -Wrecking Ball. All of these show women in very little or no clothing, the idea of this is to attract the male audience because they need the audience to be intrigued and buy whatever they're selling. Therefore this tells women the only way to be successful is to play up to the male gaze theory.

Let Loose Final.

Our Digipak

we based our digipak on photos such as these shown below, we took all the photos over a long period of times even on holidays ,trips and etc. We knew the digipak would be the challenging ting so we prepared for this early. The photos Balancer and Fall out boy used for their digipak were our main inspirtation.

although we knew ours needed to look a bit more childlike but we still kept the idea of cloning photos and mixing colours. 

This was the first draft of our digipak although we thought the two pictures just didn't go and the colours on 3 photos look too similar.

We asked 15 people for feedback and they confirmed our thoughts, they also said there needed to me more use of colour so every photo was captivating and eye catching. We took this advice on board and tried lots of photos and different editing techniques until we found the right one.

We re-drafted

these photos a lot of time and spent a long time talking to people and asking them what they fought , we got opinions from people in our class, teachers, friends, family and strangers and from this we was able to determine what our final digipak should look like.

We asked 22 people what they thought of it now from when we original showed them and from when we showed them what pictures we would use. 

16 people said they really liked it ( or something similar to this) 

4 people said it was quite good and they thought it was the best we could make it with the resources we had 

2 people said although it was good , there was things we could improve. 

However we disagreed with the two comments which said we should have more serious photos, although we think that our photos should not be serious as our video and website are all very fun and chilled to appeal to our target audience. 

We then decided we needed another photo which fitted more with the front cover so we added this photo. The photos from New York i took on holiday this year and either added text or cropped us into into the original photos are shown below.

We then asked all the people we had interviewed about it before and they all agreed they liked this photo and it truly represented the band therefore we kept this and our final digipak is this.

digipak ideas

let loose draft 6