Evaluation Question 3

1. Define your audience by their demographics:

This moodboard represents what our target audience is. I figured that due to the genre being indie/folk and not just one or the other it's containing a more specific type of people. I think that they are male and female of an older teenage age to mid-twenties, they enjoy the nature aspects of the world and like creating art either through drawing or taking pictures. They like spiritual meanings and enjoy quotations of guidance they like listening to music through vinyls and enjoy collecting their favourite music in this way. They love fashion shopping at Topshop/man, Urban Outfitters and unique labels of their own and enjoy blogging in their spare time along with writing their own music and playing acoustic guitar. Their dislikes could be considered being heavy metal rock music as it doesn't in their taste have a calm and gentle nature.

From doing research into subcultures I found this great mixtape on youtube that represents the different sounds of Indie/Folk music in which we were taking into account on our music video.


2. Discuss the importance of audience feedback and how it's used by industries.
The importance of audience feedback to an artist is very high as the artist needs to ensure that they're reaching out to their intended audience because if they aren't they may not make any sales. For example One Direction has created a slightly different image to how they started off, they've gone for the older approach and some fans are starting to dislike their new ways. However, if they're then attracting new fans more than what they had before then this means they aren't losing any profit. It's different for a band who make a totally new album like Arctic Monkeys 'AM' in which fans could then begin to dislike the band as a whole for a while until they get used to the band themselves. Therefore, using audience feedback helps to show the artist if they're making music or creating the identity they need to fulfill the needs of their audience or whether they're drifting away from the intended product and not attracting the number of fans needed. This is an example of customer reviews on what is consider a 'bad' album:

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3. Audience feedback collected in different stages of production

Evaluation Question 2

1. Outline what products you created and the general theme that you were aiming for.

The general theme for our products was indie/folk as we didn't want to be too specific in the field of folk or indie as we liked the idea of having a mixed genre for our band. A running theme throughout our products is the basic colour of the album and the website pages because we needed to be continuous in the field of the design. The fact that the band was called The Cassettes we emphasised this feature by adding the cassette icon to our website for the buttons and a cassette on the front cover of our album making sure that our audience can identify us clearly. As we didn't use much colour in our design of the abum cover or website we wanted to highlight different parts of them by focusing certain sections in colour. When doing our research we found that colours used within the products were only limited or used a very dull colour palette because of the genre it is.

2. Outline the marketing packages of bands/artists that you researched.

• Twin Atlantic (website)
• Royal Blood (website) 
• Jake Bugg (website)
• Of Monsters And Men (merch)
• Mumford and Sons (video)
• Lily Allen (video)
• Catfish and The Bottlemen (promo) 
• Lumineers (album cover)

We liked how the framing made the characters very central making sure they were focused upon in the video, there were different angles to how the characters were looked upon in the video in different cuts in which we tried to portray in our video aswell. We liked the fact that it was in a barn setting which represents the genre very well, the costume of being "farmer-like" we also wanted to incorporate for the male character we made sure that he had the same outfit as the people in this video. The whole costume was consistent within the whole package of the website and cd too so that he kept the folk costume continuosly. We found that in the Mumford and Sons video they make sure that they always use the same instruments per artist and that throughout each seciton of the marketing stragety eg. album they also have their instruments with them to portray the genre and represent it in a clear way. Mumford and Sons were our main basis for the male character because we felt that the girl character in our video would need a certain aspect of indie rather than folk because the folk image upon girls was too extreme for what we wanted to create. Across all three platforms e.g. the website, video and album the same font is used because they're going for the bold but western-country music type of look which is different from the genre but helps emphasise that they sometimes could be thought of in that sense due to their instruments. They like to keep a clear image and genre throughout all their products using the same font and colour because they want to make sure they're easily recognisbale.In relation to the female character construction the costume was based around London Grammar and Birdy because their indie genre and the way they dress suited the constume our male character had and we needed them to fit together. Another video we gained inspiration from for the music video was Lily Allen's Not Fair video. Within the website we used a variety of different marketing packages from different bands, they each have a different genre for example Twin Atlantic are an alternative rock band, Royal Blood are modern garage rock and blues rock, Jake Bugg is indie folk and so are Of Monsters and Men. As you can see from the video to the right I have used the layout of each of the four bands pages in the video to use as a template for my website however I've changed the font type to suit my genre. This is because for example, Royal Blood uses quite edgy writing throughout all of their products e.g on their album cover because they feel that is their identity so the band name font would never be changed for them it also represents their genre perfectly in that on their music videos distorted imagery to represent to contrasting worlds of the woman character as seen in the video below.

The colours were similar even though the genres were different because I felt that using a black background was better for the audience and emphasising different stories as any colour could stand out against it. From the video below you can see the inspiration I had from each artist within their marketing packages, of the websites, all of the artists you see used simple font so that their stories and other aspects of the website stand out clearly within each section. Using different colours to signify different titles and subheadings (Of Monsters and Men mainly) I wanted to use that feature so that my audience would be able to navigate around my website in a simple way.














Each package of what is shown in the image below uses the same font type throughout all of their products, even the merchandise they sell to fans. The website accommodates the newest album available for example the Kasabian website is now pink in colour because of their new 48:13 album they also have a new theme of having words written behind them on stage so therefore they have used this in their eez-eh music video and on merchandise. The arctic monkeys is an example of where the font is used throughout the products, they have now used the soundwaves for their new album and that is shown on the set of their tour and also on their first video released for this album.

The Cassettes have their own marketing campaign in that we tried to use the same features within all our products. For example, we had the props in the video which were then shown on the album because we needed to make sure the genre was simplified for the audience. The fact that we used a cassette on the album cover meant that the feature of our band name and the cassette buttons I made for the menu on my website follow a identity clearly. I created my own merchandise for the website because I found this is an important feature of promoting the band. Again, by using the cassette imagery I put it onto t-shirts and phone cases so that our audience would be able to buy the products and therefore could be seen by others promoting the band in a different way. We have added the record label to our album because we wanted to show where our band was signed too. Also, the fact that some colour is highlighted in our album shows that represented on the website too as the stories and menu buttons are emphasised through the use of the black background.

Why Do Artists Use Social Media

Evaluation Question 1

In what ways do your media products use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Our video was based on the conventions of Indie Folk because focusing upon just the folk genre wouldn't have been suitable for us as a group because it would have been too difficult to get the correct instruments solely for that genre type. We therefore analysed bands that are placed in this genre category and looked at some of their music videos, clothing and albums to grap some ideas from them.

Here is my prezi showing how we used the conventions of the genre and how we challenged them.  

This is a powerpoint showing the features of Andrew Godwin's theory and how we incorporated them into our video.
 

As you can see this gif shows that our music video atmosphere had a very happy tone, which was created by the upbeat dancing within the video and the smiling faces on the characters we used too. This is because within indie folk videos the music and atmosphere must be parallel in that happy songs have to be replicated in the video by the visuals. This is apparent in music videos like The Lumineers - Hey Ho as seen in the gif below. The lighting also has to replicate the tone as bright lighting emphasises the colour of the background and costumes more whereas darker lighting gives a grungy feel.

Within the video we focused on the costume similarities between Mumford and Sons for the male because we felt that they had the best style to straight away simplify what the genre is without any confusion. The use of props also with the tambourine and the guitar also highlighted the conventions of the genre and because the song had both these instruments in it was simple to show this.

The way in which we showed our characters in the video was that we used many medium close-up shows of the pair together in the barn whilst they were singing. We found this happens a lot in the genre to symbolise the tone of the song as the facial expressions help to create the tone itself and how the audience should be feeling. The movement of the camera to follow the people around when they're mixes up the style of the shots instead of just having still video shots in the video as this was also a feature of Mumford and Sons. We showed the different locations of the video within cutaways on the video, we tried to ensure the lighting was similar throughtout the whole of the video especially in the barn because this again helps to show the atmosphere of the video.

For the actual set design in the barn we used the main setting for Mumford and Sons - Hopeless Wanderer with the barn location and the hay scattered around and then also using the design of Lily Allen's Not Fair video as she doesn't usually have a folk type genre to her music so we wanted to see how she thought the representation of this genre in her video. We found that she used different costume to us but she also used hay bails in the background so therefore we had another cutaway where the two of our people dance in between hay bails.