Welcome to my blog!

This is a podcast I created to talk about this year.

Final Cut

This is our final cut in which I have edited the last few details of the fast paced sequence. Since this was the only thing that was still missing, I tried out 4 different paces in Final Cut Pro, which you can see an explanation and a video on below.

PLEASE NOTE THAT DUE TO A BAD CONNECTION BETWEEN BLOGGER AND YOUTUBE   NOT ALL SPECIAL EFFECTS CAN BE SEEN HERE ON BLOGGER. PLEASE WATCH THE VIDEO ON YOUTUBE FOR ALL INCLUDED SPECIAL EFFECTS. 

The original pace of each take was only 0.4 milliseconds. When trying to play around with it a bit I had one sequence where the takes were 0.18 milliseconds, one sequence when the takes were 0.12 milliseconds, one sequence where the were 0.8 milliseconds and the original sequence with 0.4 milliseconds. Doing this I was able to compare each sequence and see which one was the best. I ended up with going for 12 milliseconds in the fast paced sequence. Below you can see the video of the different takes. 

Final Digipak

This is our final digipak.

You can follow the production journey from the links below: 

BV: DIGIPACK: Ideas: http://sophvid.blogspot.lu/2017/03/bv-digipack-ideas.html

KO: DIGIPAK: Inspiration (hand): http://sophvid.blogspot.lu/2017/03/ko-digipak-inspiration-hand.html

SR/BV: DIGIPACK: Back Cover: Research: http://sophvid.blogspot.lu/2017/03/srbv-digipack-back-cover-research.html

SR/BV: DIGIPAK: Back Cover Details: http://sophvid.blogspot.lu/2017/03/srbv-digipak-back-cover-details.html

SR/BV: DIGIPAK: Back Cover Draft 1: http://sophvid.blogspot.lu/2017/03/srbv-digipak-back-cover-draft-1.html

SR/BV: DIGIPAK: Inner Pannels Draft 1: http://sophvid.blogspot.lu/2017/03/srbv-digipak-inner-pannels-draft-1.html

BV: DIGIPAK: Inner Pannels Draft 2: http://sophvid.blogspot.lu/2017/03/bv-digipak-inner-pannels-draft-2.html

BV: DIGIPAK: Inner Panels Draft 3: http://sophvid.blogspot.lu/2017/03/bv-digipak-inner-panels-draft-3.html

BV: DIGIPAK: Inner Panels Draft 4: http://sophvid.blogspot.lu/2017/03/bv-digipak-inner-panels-draft-4.html

BV: DIGIPAK: Inner Panels Final: http://sophvid.blogspot.lu/2017/03/bv-digipak-inner-panels-final.html

SR/BV: DIGIPAK: Complete Digipak Version 1: http://sophvid.blogspot.lu/2017/03/srbv-digipak-complete-digipak-version-1.html

SR/BV: DIGIPAK: Back Cover: Smoke: http://sophvid.blogspot.lu/2017/03/srbv-digipak-back-cover-smoke.html

SR/BV: DIGIPAK: Back Cover Draft 2: http://sophvid.blogspot.lu/2017/03/srbv-digipak-back-cover-draft-2.html

BV: DIGIPAK: Final Back Cover: http://sophvid.blogspot.lu/2017/03/bv-digipak-final-back-cover.html

SR/BV: DIGIPAK: Front Cover Final Version: http://sophvid.blogspot.lu/2017/03/srbv-digipak-front-cover-final-version.html

BV: DIGIPAK: Complete Final Version: http://sophvid.blogspot.lu/2017/03/bv-digipak-complete-final-version.html

Final Website

This is the link to the final version of the website.

http://bmthehorizon50.wixsite.com/website

This is a screen recording I created to demonstrate the different pages and looks of our website.

Evaluation Question 1A - Conventions

Overall the evaluation question 1 is: "How do your products use or challenge conventions and how do they represent social groups or issues?". However I have decided to split the question into 2 parts, because I thought it would give a better overview. Therefore part 1 (1A) will be: "How do your products use or challenge conventions?" and part 2 (2A) will be: "How do your products represent social groups or issues?"

1A "How do your products use or challenge conventions?"

PLEASE NOTE THAT THERE ARE 3 SEPARATE VIDEOS THAT HAVE BEEN CREATED FOR THE PURPOSE OF THIS EVALUATION QUESTION

We decided to create a music video with a band, Bring Me The Horizon, which is in the genre of Metalcore, alternative rock. However, the band hasn't always been assosiated with these genres but also, death metal, alternative metal and post-hardcore. 

There are loads of general conventions that can be found in music videos. These include:

1. Intertextuality, Kristeva 
2. Narrative, performance and concept - Simon Firth 
3. Todorov's theory on equilibrium - Narrative fragmented or linear? 
4. Andrew Goodwin - 7 features of a music video - link between lyrics and visuals and star image and link between music and visuals
5. Male gaze; Laura Mulvey 
6. Lip-syncing verisimilitude and playing instruments verisimilitude. This is important because the band would want a lot of people to attend their concerts since they get most of their money from tickets and merchandise
7. Voyerism/Looking: The audience feels more engaged when the protagonist looks immediately into the camera. The Uses and Gratification's theory - "direct gaze" Guns and Roses Jungle and Iron Maiden Can I play with madness Common idea that the performer is also represented and they are looking at themselves
8. Special effects - SFX Layering and slow-motion are really common editing techniques (long takes-youth) - emphasis on the beat drop 
9. A diegetic intro and/or outro. An example I have blogged on with a diegetic intro is Wannabe by Spice Girls 
10. Costume change

I created a video, which references to the old "Top Of The Pop" videos, where i am in this case referencing to the "Top 10 common conventions in music videos"

The vodcast below I created to be able to show more on screen what I did. I am not only talking about common conventions in this one but also our genre specific conventions for our metal core genre. 

Below you can also find some more writing on what we did. 

INTERTEXTUALITY:

Intertextuality is used to widen secondary audience appeal, especially an older secondary audience appeal. For example a music video that has clear intertextuality is the one by "Weird Al" Yankovic, with his track Fat. The track is making an intertextual reference to Michael Jackson's song Bad and his looks in his music video for the track Bad.



The costume of "Weird Al", helped to make the clear reference to Michael Jackson. Michael Jackson was known for a lot of things, such as his dance routines, his changing from black to white etc.

However, the dressing style of Michael Jackson before he died was the typical leatherjacket with buckles on it and also the typical boots. So before even seeing the face of "Weird Al", we know that it is the video will be making an intertextual reference to Michael Jackson.








OUR INTERTEXTUAL REFERENCES

We have some intertextual references to several music videos, which we have gotten our inspiration from. One of them includes the reference to the color powder in the music video by the band 30 Seconds To Mars, track Up in the Air.

When I blogged on this music video back in October, I immediately knew that I really wanted us to include color powder in our music video's. At the beginning we wanted to have footage of 20 people running at each other and throw the color powder at each other, which they do in the Up In The Air music video.

However, we quickly discovered that it would be very hard to get so many people together, especially because the first throw we would only be able to film once in order for them not to have color powder on their whole body for the sake of continuity.
Therefore we decided to have the color powder thrown at the male protagonist, the drums and we might still throw it at some of the band members, because it has become so popular and we got a lot of good feedback for it in our audience feedback sessions.

Another intertextual reference is the one we have for our underwater pool scenes. This we got from two different music videos. One of the videos is by the band Panic at the Disco for their track This Is Gospel. Whereas the other video we were inspired from is the video by Naught Boy ft. Beyoncé for their track Runnin'.

These are images of the two different music videos. The 1st picture is from This is Gospel, where the leadsinger is under water. This was filmed inside a box. At the beginning we intended to film our underwater scenes in a bathtub like this (left). However here again we found out how difficult it would be, because it would be hard just to have a GoPro stuck in a small bathtub with the leadsinger and it wouldn't look half as good as if it was in "open waters".
This is when we came up with the idea for a pool, which we as mentioned above, got our inspiration for from the track Runnin'. We didn't have an open ocean around Luxembourg and it was not summer, but we did have a heated pool and could put some effects on it so that it would look more ominous than the usual light pool blue.

This is the result we ended up with. We filmed under water with the waterproof GoPro and were able to see it at the same time due to the advantage of the newer versions of the GoPro having a screen where you can see what you record. We got shots of the pool empty and the pool with our male protagonist in it and we think it worked really well and managed to connote the darkness of the lead singer and his dark thoughts and that he feels as if he is drowning in his own sorrows and thoughts.

Bronwen has a detailed post on the This Is Gospel video, whereas I created a post on Runnin'. In my post: reflection on pool shoot, you can read more about the intertextual reference.

Another intertextual reference in our music video is the one to Twenty-One Pilots track and music video for Ride (top right picture). We thought that it had a really nice natural effect when having the instruments outside, than having our band play in a normal studio with a green screen background.
Some challenges we faced in the woods included our re-shoot and the fact that it was really cold outside, since we were filming during January.
When doing the re-shoot, the instruments had to be placed on the exact same spot, for sake of continuity, and it was becoming really cold for our band members, because they were (most of them) only wearing T-Shirt and/or thin jumpers for mise-en-scene. So when we filmed someone like the drummer on his own or the keyboarder, or the drummer with bass guitar etc. the other's were sitting inside a car so that they wouldn't cool down entirely. Despite the challenges faced, we are very happy with the result, since a lot of the audience who watched it, like the fact that it was outside in the woods and were impressed with the fact that we had taken all of the instruments up there for the purpose of our music video.

A last intertextual reference we have in our music video is the one from the music video by Alt-J for their track Hunger of the Pine, which Kristian did a post on. In this music video there is a running sequence, which we also have in our music video. We liked the running sequence, since by using it in our music video we wanted to connote that our male protagonist is trying to run away from his problems and try to think about something else while running. We filmed this using a GoPro, an IPhone 6S for the slo-mo and the CANON 70D for the other long-shots.





Below you can find a video, which I created a post on at the end of March. It refers to videos where we got out inspiration from and what we did. I thought it would really allow to compare and contrast and supports Kristeva's argument that media texts are based on other texts. (intertextuality) 


SIMON FIRTH: 
PERFORMANCE, NARRATIVE AND CONCEPT

Firth explained that music videos may be characterised by 3 main types; performance, narrative and concept. Performance is a video that shows the star in one place or the studio, which is often used to just have the viewer listening to the soundtrack rather than "just" watching the video. This allows a form of escapism (uses and gratification's theory) to the listener. Narrative is when the video is telling some story. There are 2 types of narrative fragmented and linear. Concept music videos all rely on a poetic form, most commonly a metaphor. Instead of telling a story in linear form, a conceptual music video created a feeling to be evoked throughout viewing it. Each viewer may have a different feeling or opinion on what emotion has been created, as a metaphor can be in interpreted in different ways.
In our music video we have performance of our band in the woods, which we were inspired by from Twenty One Pilots music video for their song Ride. More detail about this you can find in my vodcast.



We created a linear narrative, which consisted of a male and female protagonist who were at first a happy couple, which we denoted by showing several footage of them laughing and cooking together (vodcast) and then towards the end of the video they break up, which is denoted by our female protagonist slapping the male protagonist and then burning the pictures she has of them together. Other elements of our narrative include our male protagonist running through the woods, which we were inspired by from the music video Hunger of the Pine by the band ALT-J, which Kristian did a post on. Also, we had our male protagonist under water, which we were inspired by from Naughty Boy ft. Beyoncés music video for their track Runnin', which I did a post on.

TODOROV: THEORY OF EQUILIBRIUM 

Todorov explained that in movies there are 5 stages of equilibrium, which can also be in a music video. However, what should be noted is that very often in a music video there are only 2 or 3 of the 5 stages taking place. I created a post on Todorov's theory and also talk about it in my vodcast. In our music video there is a clear state of equilibrium, where everything is as it should be, which is signified by the couple being happy and laughing together and it being summer on screen. And then towards the end of the music video there is a disruption of the equilibrium, which is signified by them breaking up (her slapping him) during the dark winter time.

ANDREW GOODWIN: 
FEATURES OF A MUSIC VIDEO

Andrew Goodwin explained that one of the 6 common features in a music video is the star image. The star image is when there are a lot of  camera shots making the central protagonist the centre of attention.
In our music video we definitely have a big part of that feature since we have loads of centrally framed close-ups of our leadsinger Wayne, not just in one but many different locations. One of the particular shots, which contains star image is this one on the left, which we included 3 times in our music video and ofcourse also the close-up shots of our lead singer with a green screen background where we layered a color smoke effect onto it.
Another feature is the link between visuals and lyrics, which we defintely also have in our music video. As mentioned above, we were inspired by This Is Gospel and Runnin' for our pool scenes. However, the only reason why we got this idea in the first place was because the lead singer sings "I was an ocean, lost in the open" and we wanted to establish that link between visuals and lyrics.

The next feature is a link between music and visuals. This feature I conformed to by editing to the beat. I especially tried to cut to the beat with the drums and I also edited to the beat a lot when it came to our fast paced sequences throughout the music videos. See more of this in my vodcast.


via GIPHY

I had a really useful shot, which was just of the drummer's foot, when he is playing on the bass drum. Most of the drum scenes were really hard to edit completely too so that they looked realistic, because it wasn't always that the drummer played the right rythm. However most of the time it did work and especially with the shot above, our audience argued that it was a success.
The fast paced sequences were also edited to the beat of the track, both at the beginning of the music video and towards the middle and also there is a slower cutting to the beat towards the end of the video.

This is a video of the fast paced sequence in the middle of the music video.



This is a video of the slow paced sequence cutting to the beat of the music towards the end of the music video.



LIP-SYNCING VERISMILITUDE

This is THE common convention and most important feature of a music video. If the lip-syncing does not achieve verisimilitude it will simply not look as good. When filming our music video we directed our male lead singer to sing out loud. He was quite shy in the beginning because he argued that he couldn't sing. However, everyone supported him and said it wouldn't matter because you wouldn't here that in the music video after anyways, and the fact that he would sing out loud would make it easier for me to edit and achieve lip-syncing verisimiltude.

STUART HALL: AUDIENCE

When receiving audience feedback for the first 6 rough cuts our audience did not get the preferred message that we as producer's wanted our audience to view, especially of the narrative of our music video. A lot of people argued that the narrative wasn't clear enough and had their own views on what was happening on screen (oppositional reading). This is when we then decided to do an extra shoot of the narrative, which helped because in the end we got the preferred reading accross.

USES AND GRATIFICATION'S THEORY

Our audience might have been able to identify themselves with the female and male character due to the linear narrative of the break-up which a lot of poeple from our target audience will have experienced. Some might be able to identify especially with the male protagonist in how he is feeling about not being able to handle the pain and his sorrows anymore.

SPECIAL EFFECTS

We included layering a lot more this year at A-Level compared to AS. I used layering with green screen and also layered 3 shots over each other such as the one shot where the singer sings: "beat me black and blue". In this particular shot I had layered the pool footage on to it and I had the color smoke effect and ofcourse the green screen footage of the lead singer himself.


DIEGETIC INTRO AND OUTRO

Our music video has a diegetic outro. This we decided to create since we thought it would be a smoother ending rather than just fading to black. Our diegetic outro, consists of our male protagonist seeing the girl and taking his headphones out, when he sees her walking buy. This we thought was a good ending because it connoted that maybe he had just been dreaming all of the events in the music video or he had been thiking about her a lot and had these flashbacks.  

Evaluation Question 1B - Social Issues

Overall the evaluation question 1 is: "How do your products use or challenge conventions and how do they represent social groups or issues?". However I have decided to split the question into 2 parts, because I thought it would give a better overview. Therefore part 1A will be: "How do your products use or challenge conventions?" and 1B will be: "How do your products represent social groups or issues?"

1B: "How do your products represent social groups or issues?" 

The main social groups in the media are: 

• Age 
• Gender 
• Sexuality 

These points we addressed in a Radio Interview, where Kristian is playing the interviewer and I am playing the director of the music video "Throne", Plastic Kid. Below the video you can also find the full script that I created of the radio interview. 



Radio Interview Script (SR): 


Interviewer: That was Bring Me The Horizon's new song Throne, check out their new music video on YouTube now. Today in the studio I'd like to welcome the director of the musc video for Throne, Plastic Kid. Welcome to our study! 

Plastic Kid: Hi

Interviewer: So let's talk a bit about your music video, I mean I absolutely loved it and I am also a huge fan of both alternative rock and metal core so this is just my type of music, but still I have several questions about the social groups and issues in this music video that I wanted to ask you about. 

Plastic Kid: Sure, go ahead. 

Interviewer: Well first I wanted to ask where you got your inspiration from? 

Plastic Kid: Well, I mean as Kristeva would argue you never really get an idea just like that, you are inspired by other music video's that you have seen before and directed before. So together with Sykes I checked out a lot of music videos and we based our ideas around some of them. 

Ofcourse we also wanted to create a link between visuals and lyrics, because that's what a music video is all about according to Goodwin you know? 

Interviewer: Yes, I have read a lot about those two theorists. And what is the song actually about then? 

Plastic Kid: Well it's about a guy who is drowning in his sorrows and doesn't know what to do with his life anymore after having lost his girlfriend, so we portrayed that through having Sykes underwater when he is singing "I was an ocean lost in the open" and him running through the woods. 

Interviewer: Well seems to me as if you definitely got the preferred reading accross there, cause most of your fans wrote on YouTube that they could relate to this heartbreak. 
Moving on to the next question, why did you decide on only using male band members in your music video? Because there are other rock bands such as Paramore and Angel At My Table who have a female lead singer, so why not go for that? 

Plastic Kid: Well we are really just conforming to the stereotype that rock music is just for men,  it has become a norm to society due to the long history of bands such as AC/DC, Rolling Stones and Queen only consisting of males. Therefore we are only conforming to this stereotype, and ofcourse Bring Me The Horizon consists only of males, so some argue it would be odd to have a female lipsyncing with a male voice as voiceover such as in the fan made music video for Sail by Awolnation. 

Interviewer: Yes that does make sense, but staying focuse on the female side of things, why would you only have one female in your music video and not more like in the video from Fall Out Boy for their song "My songs know what you did in the dark". Then it could also be more appealing to a male audience or not? 

Plastic Kid: Well yeah it would be more appealing to a male audience, but I mean males already listen quite a lot to our music in general. They are our target audience because they are just generally more interested in rock than women. I mean Bring me the Horizon have featured on the cover of AP (Alternative Press) many times and they have also been on the cover of Rock Sound a few times.  Rock Sounds average readers are aged 15-24 and around 72% or so of their audience are males. So males generally already listen to our music and follow us. 

Interviewer: Yes, but why would more females then be interested in this video by just having one female instead of two? 

Plastic Kid: In most music videos where there is more than one female, they are the dancers or just there to make the singer and male protagonist look good. This is the case of the song from Fall Out Boy. It is easy to assume that a feminist would not like to see an objectified female in the music video showing cleavage and being the female that the male breaks up with and being the stereotype of the female cooking. Therefore, we did the exact opposite, we have the female breaking up with the guy, the guy cooking and the female burning the pictures and wearing a bit more appropriate clothing, not showing as much cleavage. And it turns out we were right, we found a bigger female audience being attracted to this video.

Interviewer: I noticed that even though you didn't have the female objectified there were still a few elements of male gaze in the music video, would you like to comment on that? 

Plastic Kid: Yes, I mean Mulvey would argue that several videos have male gaze. One of the main reasons for this is ofcourse to attract a male audience. Mulvey argues that the woman is objectified through clothing and make-up and ofcourse the editing that is used when showing the woman on screen. So as mentioned,  we wanted to try and appeal to a bigger female audience with this video, hence we focused less on having females in our music video. However, our female protagonist is still wearing make-up, has the typical long hair and is skinny and good looking, therefore there still is that little element of male gaze. 

Interviewer: Are there ways through cinematography that you specifically showed that the female had more power in this video? 


Plastic Kid: If I have to think about one scene it would be when she slaps him, this is really when she is the more dominating figure, and I decided to emphasise on this by adding a key frame that then zooms in on the moment she slaps him. Also, our female actor played it out really well so the moment after the slap she had a very powerful look on her face, which I had asked her to do so that the audience would be left there thinking "Woah". 

Interviewer: Well that was a very detailed answer, thank you for that. In a bunch of music videos you can see that there are the typical stereotypes or counter stereotypes, which ones did you include in Throne? 

Plastic Kid: Well ass mentioned we have the counter stereotype of the male cooking instead of the female, because we wanted to challenge the common stereotype and make our video a bit more interesting and our female audience actually noticed it and liked the fact that the male was cooking, because it was breaking the stereotype so through this we attracted a female audience.

Evaluation Question 2 - Branding

How do the elements of your production work together to create a sense of "branding"? 

This is a prezi I created to answer this evaluation question.



Kristian and i also created a script for a more creative point of view on our website. And to explain how we established a sense of branding in terms of linking our website with our social media and our digipak and video.

Evaluation Question 3A - Audience Engagement

How do your products engage with the audience?

For this question we decided to do 4 different things, a Q and A session on Facebook, two digipak unwrappings that Kristian and I created. Kristian playing the bass guitarist of BMTH and I playing a fan who just bought the digipak in a store,  radio interview where we discuss Web 2.0 and how our audience actively became the producers of our product through the audience feedback we got on our music video, our digipack and our website.

Audience Feedback has had an incredible large impact on our music video. When looking at my links lists it is even clear HOW MUCH audience feedback we have actually gained throughout the year. With every rough cut that I made major changes too, we got some audience feedback. Most of the feedback we got was from our Y1o students at St.Georges because it allowed them to use the media terms more and also see what A-Level students were working on. However, we also got some feedback from some individual year 12 and 13 students, who were always willing to help out. Most of them didn't know what to comment on so we told them before we started the interview. Unfortunately, we didn't manage to get any audience feedback for the final cut. However we had gotten feedback for rought cut 15 and since there wasn't much of a difference between Rough Cut 15 and the final cut and therefore we think the feedback would pretty much have stayed the same.

Below you can find the links to all of our audience feedback that we got for Throne.

Audience Feedback 2: Throne Rough Cut 3 - http://sophvid.blogspot.lu/2017/01/audience-feedback-2-throne-rough-cut-1.html

Audience Feedback 3: Throne Rough Cut 3 - http://sophvid.blogspot.lu/2017/01/audience-feedback-3-throne-rough-cut-1.html

Audience Feedback 4: Throne Rough Cut 4: http://sophvid.blogspot.lu/2017/02/audience-feedback-4-rough-cut-1-throne.html

Audience Feedback 5: YouTube: Throne Rough Cut 4: http://sophvid.blogspot.lu/2017/02/ko-audience-feedback-youtube-rough-cut.html

Audience Feedback 6: Throne Rough Cut 6: http://sophvid.blogspot.lu/2017/03/audience-feedback-6-rough-cut-2-throne.html

Audience Feedback 7: Throne Rough Cut 8: http://sophvid.blogspot.lu/2017/03/audience-feedback-7-throne-rough-cut-2.html

Audience Feedback 8: Throne Rough Cut 9: http://sophvid.blogspot.lu/2017/03/audience-feedback-8-throne-rough-cut-9.html

Audience Feedback 9: Throne Rough Cut 10: http://sophvid.blogspot.lu/2017/03/audience-feedback-9-throne-rough-cut-10.html

Audience Feedback 10: Throne Rough Cut 14: http://sophvid.blogspot.lu/2017/03/audience-feedback-10-throne-rough-cut-14.html

Audience Feedback 11: Rough Cut 15: Throne: http://sophvid.blogspot.lu/2017/03/audience-feedback-11-rough-cut-15-throne.html

As 3 or more of BMTH music videos were given an age range of 15 from BBFC, our target audience is above 15. We found that our target audience was around 16-25, which is also why we have adapted certain things such as the language and the merchandise on our website towards a teenage audience.

For example, at the beginning of the year, we looked at several examples from different types of websites, including websites that were within the metal core genre, such as Bullet For My Valentine, which is where we got out main inspiration from.  They have the same target audience as BMTH  and have also made use of the links list called "Merch" instead of "Merchandise" or "Store". This reference is informal language and can also be referred to as slang, which is done on purpose to engage with our audience.
Also our home button, BMTH, was inspired by another artist who has a young teenage target audience, Charlie Puth. We thought that it was a new was of creating it and as 18,19 and 20 year olds really liked it rather than the link saying "Home".


Q/A Session 

In the video below, Kristian and I are doing a Q and A session in, which we are answering several questions that Kristian designed and our fellow students posted the questions on our Facebook account so that it would look like a real Q and A session. I first posted a post that said 
"Hey guys! Matt and BMTH's manager Leila are doing a Q and A on their latest products tonight! Comment below an maybe they will answe your question!".  
We asked people to comment with questions that also really interested them, and were not just Kristian's designed questions. The example of Riona Drangsfeldt question at the bottom was an example of a question that Kristian didn't ask them to do, which we liked to answer anyway so it would seem like a "real" Q and A.

Questions and Answers Script KO: 

NOTE THAT THE ANSWERS AND QUESTIONS WERE ALTERED BECAUSE PEOPLE ENDED UP COMMENTING IN THEIR OWN STYLE AND WE SPOKE MORE FREELY RATHER THAN READING OUT THE ANSWERS

Q: On what platforms will I be able to listen to your new album?

Well you can buy the album on our website as both a physical and downloadable copy. The album will also be available on Spotify and if you want to watch the music video then you can check that out on YouTube.

Q: Where can I buy your newest merchandise?

If you go on our website then you can check out all our merch, and if you subscribe to our website you will get a notification when new merchandise arrives.  

Q: Do you have any other social media other than Facebook?

Ye of course, you can follow us on twitter as well as Instagram, like I said you can also subscribe on our website to get updates.

Q: Do you have somewhere where people can post fan art?
We don’t have a specific place but if you want to post fan art then just post it on twitter with the #BMTHFanArt

Q: Where will your next concert be?
We have 4 more concerts coming up, our next one will be in San Francisco, you can find out where the other concerts are on our website. You will also be able to buy the ticks there.

Q: Do you think you will work with the same director again?

I hope so, working with PlasticKid was great, but we will see what happens but when we find out you guys will be the first to know.

Q: Ive been a long time collector of your albums, will this album have a special edition of some kind?

I’m happy to hear you’re a long-time fan and yes, for this album you can buy a digipak as well as a vinyl if you want that.

Digipak Unwrapping

This is the video that I filmed of Kristian, where he pretended to be the band member Matt, who is the bass guitarist from BMTH. 

This is the video that Kristian filmed of me, where I am playing a fan who just bought the digipak at the HMV store. 

Radio Interview

We wanted to bring Web 2.0 into our evaluation question since it is talking about that there has been a shift from a passive up to down model to a dynamic convergence between audience and producer. We specifically wanted to focus on the term " former audience" by Dan Gillmor who suggested that the passive audience is now gone and that the audience now has "the tools to change traditional media and create media for themselves". Through several hours spent with our audience, we gained a large variety of audience feedback for all of our parts of the promo package, digipack, website and music video and our audience ended up as playing the "producer" of our products. Below the video you can find the script that I created for the radio interview. 

Script SR: 

Interviewer: Good afternoon everybody and welcome to Radio 420. Today in the studio we have  the leadsinger of BMTH, Oliver Sykes, who is going to talk to us about his latest music video "Throne" and how big an effect audience feedback has had on the products they created for their new album. Welcome and thank your for coming!  

Sykes: Thank youfor having me. 

Interviewer: So tell us about your newest music video! 

Sykes: Well the video is about a love relationship between two people that break up. The male protagonist, played by myself, is feeling lost without the girl and is drowning in his own sorrows, which is portrayed to me being under water and running around lost in the forest. And then ofcourse we have our band's performance integrated in the video as well. 

Interviewer: And how does it end? 

Sykes: Well, you are going to have to go watch it on our website or YouTube Channel. 

Interviewer: Heard that folks, fo check it out now on bmthehorizon50.com! So Oli could you tell us about how your audience helped in creating your newest products? 

Sykes: Well I believe in our products our audience were somehow the producers as well. Dan Gillmor who is a Web 2.0 theorist talks about the former audience and says that the audience has the tools to create media themselves. I believe this is a good explanation, cause throughout our entire post-production we have had a lot of audience feedback and the music video especially wouldn't have looked the same without our audience.

Interviewer: Can you give me some examples of particular audience feedback that helped you produce your music video?

Sykes: Oh yeah loads! Some things they argued included bad lip-syncing from the lead singer having the lip-syncing not achieving versimilitude. This is not something you want to happen as in the music video world lip-syncing is the bread and butter of a music video. It is THE common conventions of a music video and is therefore really important. 

Interviewer: I agree, that is always what I notice first as well, when I watch a music video! Anything else? 

Sykes: Yeah, our audience brought up was that there should be a clearer narrative. At the beginning we had a fragmented narrative, which our audience argued was confusing, so it didn't bring the preferred reading (Stuart Hall) accross. They suggested we should have a linear narrative containing more footage. After having done that, we got the preferred reading from our audience that we wanted.

Interviewer: Oh wow! So your audience was what led you to do a re-shoot of your narrative?

Sykes: Yeah, and I mean that's what often happens you know? The band members write the song and are helping to argue what they want in their music video and since I was co-director with Plastic Kid on our music video for Throne, the narrative made sense to me. And since I had also written the song together with the other guys, I knew what I wanted and what the lyrics meant to me. However, when someone else than watches it who doesn't really know the true meaning yet, it can be difficult for them to understand it. That's why audience feedback i so important! 

Interviewer: Well it sounds like it really plays an important role in what the music video ends up looking like. Are there any other points they point out in the audience feedback besides the things that are unclear? 

Sykes: Ehmm, they also give us feedback in terms of what looks good and what there should be more and less of. Our audience argued that we should have more color powder in our music video. At the beginning we only had 3 takes with color powder and our audience said there should be more of it because it had a very nice effect since everything else was so dark and in black and white. 
Also, our audience were actually the ones who argued that there should be less of the running sequence in our music video. We had quite a lot of it in our first few cuts and they said it was just too much and it took the focus off of everything else that was actually important such as the performance and the narrative. 

Interviewer: It is impressive to hear how your audience really shaped your music video to the way it looks now. 

Sykes: Yes, I was very impressed by all the feedback they gave. 

Interviewer: Was it just with your music video or was it also with other things. 

Sykes: Well it was mainly with the music video but also with our digipack and our website. For our digipack thay all said that they really liked the front cover because the hand seemed quite special and original. They also argued that it was a really nice effect with the splash effect over the hand. And the back cover they also liked but mainly they commented on the front cover, since it was so special and the back cover was inspired by the smoke in our music video and was quite basic yet fitted well with the front cover. 

Interviewer: Yeah, I have a copy of your digipack, that you brought me so thank you very much for that, I must say it really is quite something for the design of your front cover. 

Sykes: Thanks

Interviewer: And what did your audience say about your website? 

Sykes: Well the main points included that the website colors and simple design fit well with the genre of our band, so our audience clearly noticed that we had chosen black and white on purpose. They also liked our merch, especially the T-Shirts with the printed heart on it and the T-Shirt with the Wolf-Design which was designed particularly for this music video.

Interviewer: Well it seems to me that you have gotten good feedback for everything and that your products will be a success. I am afraid our time has run-up but thank you so much for coming and talking about how your music video and how big an effect audience feedback has had on your products. 

Sykes: Your welcome. 

Interviewer: Next up is You Me At Six's song from their new album "Night People".

Following the band for 1 Day

This video shows how the band is engaging with the audience and how our different products such as the website, digipack and music video are engaging with the audience. Since, the video isn't very detailed, we did the Q/A, where we get more specific questions that fans send us. These focused on our products. We therefore also had the radio interview focusing on Web 2.0, explaining how our audience has been the producer throughout this entire year. 

Evaluation Question 3B - Distribution

3B "How would your products be distributed as real media products?" 

I created a vodcast to answer this question. (UPDATE: THE TITLE IS WRONG BUT COULD NOT BE CHANGED DUE TO PROBLEMS WITH FINAL CUT PRO X) 




This is an interview we carried out for our evaluation question 3B with a shop keeper of the shop "Le Réservoir" in Luxembourg city. "Le Réservoir" is a shop that used to sell only vinyls and CD's but has gone into the selling of video games and comic books just like HMV (His Master's Voice). The shop keeper argued that lately the selling of Vinyl's has increased again due to people starting to collect them and it becoming trendy again. The only question that remains is: How long will this trend last? He argued that one of the main reason's why vinyl has become so popular lately is because of the deaths of so many great music stars such as David Bowie that then go into a store to buy and collect his pieces in forms of vinyl's. 

This is an approximate script, which I created to guide myself through the vodcast. 

In the music industry there are what would be called the "Big 3". The Big 3 include Universal Music Group, Sony BMG Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group. The Big 3, used to be called the Big 4, when another conglomerate, EMI (Electrical and Music Industries), was a big part of the music industry. However, after having faced financial troubles in 2011, it was sold to Universal Music Group and is now a subsidiary of them. 

As with the film industry, the music industry also has independent record labels also known as "indie", which are the ones that are working without any funding from an outside major record label such as one of the Big 3 or a subsidiary of the Big 3.

Through a lot of research into the BMTH business model of distribution, I discovered that their albums Sempiternal and their latest album That's The Spirit are distributed by RCA, which is the subsidiary of Sony Music Entertainment. 
The digital access to their music via streaming services such as Spotify has been the cornerstone of BMTH's distribution. This is evidenced on their website where users are offered the opportunity to stream their music on Spotify, Apple Music and Amazon. 
This is reflected in our own work since we included links to Spotify and Apple Music on our website, which was the same link as the real BMTH band had on their website. The awareness of our product as a whole was established through the extensive use of social media. This we also included by creating a Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, which allows the audience to stay in touch with their favorite band, follow them and see what they are up to next. It is a great opportunity for a band to advertise for their newest products such as a music video, new album, new single or even special offers on their website, which is the main reason why we included all 3 social media accounts. 

We found that social media interactions become more and more important nowadays. It is the way the band communicates with their fans, and the one place where they can reach them within seconds all together worldwide. Social media interactions therefore play just a big a role as the music, because a lot of fans only read and discover about the bands/artists music on their social media in the first place. 

We therefore focused on creating a lot of posts that said "New video out now" or "buy or newest digipack here" with a link to our website. BMTH make their fans aware about where they can buy tickets and when they are coming to different cities, which is really useful to do via social media because it has become such a big part of the music industry. Bands in general, including BMTH, often post to thank cities for showing up to their concert or they post "are you ready for BMTH tonight". Therefore, we also included this in our own project by posting "Kansas City are you ready for tonight" and then adding a link to where they could still buy their tickets. 

Allthough the internet and digitisation have helped the bands by being able to establish their social media accounts, they have ruined and disrupted the main role of the big music companies. Several people do not want to buy CD's anymore, due to the fact that you are now able to download them and stream them directly from YouTube rather than having to go into a shop and pay around roughly 8£ and 13£ for each CD.
This links with the change in technology, since it has developed from vinyl's right on to the discman and the MP3 player, up to the first version of the I-Pod and now several people are listening to their music via their Smartphone, by streaming it from YouTube or using free apps such as SoundCloud and/or Spotify. People used to have to go buy vinyl's and CD's in a shop if they wanted to listen to music, whereas now you can stream the music by downloading apps to your smartphone that are completely free and allow you to listen to every music for free. 
iTunes, did up until even just a year ago, still charge 0,99 Euros for every piece of music that you wanted to buy. But during the last years with the development in technology it led to a major decrease in sales from iTunes.

However, their latest invention has been to introduce Apple Music where you then pay around 15 Euros per month and can then download as much music as you want. This has allowed Apple to follow Spotify and together become huge streaming services in today's music industry. 
The way we integrated this in our project was by adding the links of these streaming services to our website. Also, for question 3A, we created a video where we followed our band for 1 day and we went to a CD shop here in Luxembourg and found that the main focus was on the vinyl's  rather than the CD's. We were able to find more BMTH vinyl's than CD's. 

Following the statistics of the increase in vinyl sales we were very keen to follow the pattern by having a vinyl on our website. 
Our push on the vinyl front is also emphasised on our website, where we have included a vinyl that Kristian created. It is very simplistic and is based on the real BMTH's vinyl for That's The Spirit. 

Our digipack was another aspect of our promo package. We have distributed our digipack on our website and it would most likely also be available in a CD shop. However, the one place where it would have the most success would be on a streamin service such as Spotify and Apple Music. 

During the last couple of years physical media sales have dropped significantly, meaning that not many people want to buy CD's anymore. According to an article from the guardian the music store HMV (His Master's Voice) renewed and went into the video game market due to a decrease in physical media sales. According to an article from techcrunch streaming services grew to 317 billion song streams in 2015, which was the double from 2014 where 164.5 billion songs were streamed from streaming services.
Following the statistics of the increase in streaming services, we knew how important it would be to follow the pattern by having several streaming services, such as Spotify and Apple Music available on our website. 

Another element of distribution of our brand would be through merchandising. On our website we uploaded a range of different merchandise, which we had created ourselves. We offered a large variety of merch such as T-Shirts, a vinyl, digipack, phone cases and even baby clothes. It is important to appeal to the target audience. Since our primary audience are 70% males and 30% females, we had a bit more merchandise for males than females. However, our iPhones cases were aimed more at girls due to the pinkish color in the design. However, when looking at the real BMTH website, I found that their merchandise was very gender neutral and that they had just as much merchandise for females as for males. In this way, we changed our project to a decision we made instead of conforming to the real BMTH's website. 

So how else do musicians monetise their work, brand and fanbase? Well a lot of it is through public performances such as concerts, performances and interviews on TV and radio, streaming and live music.

BBFC (British Board of Film Classification), choose the ratings for physical movies, online streaming movies and music videos and is therefore part of the distribution process. 

Unlike movies that have 6 different age ratings music videos only have 3. They dont have the U, PG and R18 ratings for music videos as this is not necessary. The ratings appear on Vevo online and on YouTube.

It is important that the new music video in our case Throne, would be sent to the BBFC, before being distributed. The issues the BBFC consider in classifying music videos include:


- Drug Misuse
- Dangerous behavour being presented as safe 
- Bad Language
- Sexual Behaviour and Nudity 
- Threatening behaviour and violence

For more information about the BBFCs involvement in music videos you can click here.

When researching BMTH on BBFC website, it was found that 3 of their videos got an age rating of 15, which was drown, true friends and follow you, whereas the rest got a rating of 12.

This means that in our case our video would most likely get an age rating of 12, due to their being none of the above mentioned issues in our music video. If we had shown more physical violence between the boy and the girl besides just the slap, or we had shown sexual behaviour between them on screen our video would get an age rating of 15. 

A major issue with the streaming from YouTube is that it belongs under the category of piracy. Music piracy is the copying of copies of pieces of music for which the artist or the copyright-holding company does not receive any money and does not give permission. 
This is ofcourse also a contributor to the decrease of the money the different artists are earning in the music industry. 
Streaming services such as Spotify have been a great help to decrease the amount of users pirating music. Spotify is a free music service that allows users to listen to music without paying. However, it doesn't allow users to buy the music. 
So how does it earn it's money? By getting money from the users who subscribe and get the membership. Another positive thing about Spotify is that some of the money is going back to the record labels, which is then supporting them. 

In conclusion our products would be distributed the same way that the real BMTH video is distributed, which is through RCA, the subsidiary of Sony Music Entertainment. Our video would most likely get an age rating of 15 from the BBFC. 
 However, if it were real life and counting in the fact that we are students it would highly likely be distributed by an indie record company.