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

New media technologies have been essential to completing this project successfully. First of all the creation of this blog means that I can easily post a range of different media such as photos and videos to aid my research and planning.

When we were researching fans of The Coral and what people thought of their music, we found Facebook useful to quickly contact a wide range of people. YouTube was also extremely useful as The Coral have an official channel with their music videos available to watch and analyze. I find Google easiest to use of all search engines, and allowed us to research what we needed quickly and efficiently without getting lost in the enormous amount of information available on the internet. Google images was also helpful in finding photos of The Coral and other bands to get an idea of the image they create.

During the planning process, Google Street View was particularly useful in allowing us to find the right locations for our video and digipak. This feature is only about 3 years old so we were very fortunate to be able to go on a 'virtual' recce to possible filming locations without leaving college, especially as we were on a tight schedule and would have had trouble going to have a look at the locations before the shooting dates. It also meant we could grab screen shots from Street View to post on our blogs.

Our initial plans for the video and digipak were hand drawn on paper. Since this coursework is entirely electronic we used scanning equipment to access our plans on the computer, and then send the files to each other. Our group members emailed each other a lot throughout the project to share information and files such as Word documents, for shooting schedules and scripts.

Also on the shooting schedule were our mobile numbers, so that we could contact each other during the shooting days. Fortunately none of our group members encountered any problems meeting up so we rarely used phones, but the knowledge that mobile technology meant we could easily contact each other if we were in trouble was reassuring. Obviously for the actual shooting we used a video camera, and we also had a digital camera for the digipak photos. The use of a tripod meant that we could film with the camera in smooth and steady movements, and was particularly useful for keeping the camera still when filming and avoiding wobbly, unprofessional looking shots, which will have made a big difference to how the video looks overall.

In post production we used Adobe Photoshop CS3 to create the digipak and advert. The program's technique of placing each element of the picture on a new layer meant we could easily edit the product if there were things we wanted to change while keeping other parts the same. For the video we used Adobe Premier Pro CS3 which is also easy to use, with the simple drag-and-drop technique on the video time line meaning we could finish the video in good time of our deadline.

Once the video was finished, we found use for YouTube again as we could post the video on there where the public could watch and comment on it. YouTube is only 5 years old but in this short space of time it has gained millions of users from many different backgrounds, and we hoped to use this to our advantage and get some real Coral fans to see what they thought of our video. We also used the Survey Monkey website to create our own feedback survey for free. Furthermore we raised awareness for our video on Facebook, again sending a message out to a large group of people with a link to the video on YouTube. Recently social networking sites are working more and more to connect and share information with each other easily. All of these ways we have tried to get feedback have been linked together - for example the Survey Monkey web address is posted on our YouTube video and Facebook message.

All of these new technologies have meant we could find information (and share it) extremely quickly and efficiently, meaning we have managed to create a promotional package from scratch and then make it available to the world all within 3 months.

3. What have you learned from your audience feedback?

The audience feedback we have collected can be seen in this earlier post.

2. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

When producing the music video, digipak and magazine advert, the idea was that together they would create a promotional package for the Coral album we were supposed to be advertising, and by linking the 3 products together they aid each other in raising awareness for the album.

In our AS year of Media Studies we learned about synergy, where a product is promoted across different media platforms, such as a film being developed into a video game to coincide with its release. We have used synergy by promoting the Coral's album on video and print.

We have connected the digipak to the advert by using the same image of the bear in both. The bear acts as a motif throughout the products and can be something that the audience finds familiar and immediately connects to the album. The bear is also used in other Coral videos that we looked at, which is where we originally got the idea from, and means that our products can be linked to real products of The Coral, helping our video to appear more professional. The use of the bear in our products and the other Coral videos is we think to help create the surreal concept that The Coral goes for in their products. We continue to use this concept on our digipak, particularly when the album cover shows the actor playing the bear with the costume head taken off, showing them out of character and showing the bear as more of an illusion throughout the other products.

Another theme we use throughout our products is the main character in the video as a typical indie music fan. The character's bedroom can be seen at the beginning of the video and as an image on the digipak, and the mise-en-scene shows how we have tried to make this the stereotypical bedroom of our target audience.

Overall the 3 products give a bright and lively vibe that ties in with the main character's care free life and other Coral products.

1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Evaluation

Now that we have completed our product, the last part of the coursework is to evaluate how we carried out the project and what we have learned as a result. The 4 questions for the evaluation are:

• In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
• How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
• What have you learned from your audience feedback?
• How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Audience Feedback

Here are the YouTube comments we have received so far on our video:

And here are the answers we received from our feedback survey on Survey Monkey:

What rating out of 10 would you give our video?

What was your favourite part of the video?



How would you suggest we improve our video?


Any other comments?

Our Video

Here is our completed video, which we have uploaded on to YouTube.

We have also set up a survey for people to leave feedback on the video:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/BY8PJLR

Completed Digipak

Here is a copy of our completed digipak:

Editing Update

The video editing is going well, and we now have a rough cut of the whole video. We are now going back and improving things such as the cuts, which we are trying to get in time with the rhythm of the song. We will also add some brightness and contrast effects to give the picture more life and look more professional.

Once we have finished the video we will post it on YouTube and encourage people to leave feedback.

Magazine Advert

We have now started editing our video. Although we filmed some extra shots which we planned on the filming day, the storyboard is proving useful during the editing process.

Last week we completed the magazine advert, and the digipak is also nearly finished:

We managed to find the exact same font The Coral have used on some of their albums. We have also used this font on the digipak which makes it look all the more realistic.

Here is an example of The Coral using this font for their band name:

Editing Update

Unfortunately the college computers are currently unable to capture the footage from the video cameras, so we won't be able to start editing until next week. Meanwhile we have been working on our digipak and magazine advert.

We wanted to use one image from one of the panels of our digipak for the advert, and decided that this image would work the best:

We want to keep the advert eye catching but simple, so we will add the band name and title of the album, along with a couple of logos. We think the image works well on its own to grab the reader's attention.

Digipak Photos

These are the pictures we took during the shoot for our digipak:

Filming Update

We have now finished the filming for our music video and we will begin editing on 8th November.

On the first day of filming we encountered problems with hiring a bear suit, meaning that the morning's planned scenes in the museum gardens, and the other scenes featuring the bear, would have to be postponed. Instead we managed to get all of the house scenes completed, by which time we now had a bear suit and could move straight on to the bus stop and shop scenes as scheduled. While we were at the house we also took some pictures for the digipak.

On the second day we were free to shoot all of the scenes in town, including Coney Streeet, the museum gardens and Clifford's Tower. This was a very productive day because we had time to shoot some extra scenes for the shooting script's "man walking as background changes" to make sure we had more than enough footage to work with when editing. We got several shots of the main character walking down some typically English streets, often accompanied by the bear and tambourine characters. We also took some more photos for the digipak, which we will be working on during the first week of November. We are due to start editing from the 8th November.

Shooting Schedules

Shooting Script

More Locations

Here are the locations in the centre of York we will be using in the video:

Coney Street:

A typical English high street to show the main character arriving in town. We could use the large clock just to reinforce the face that it's the morning.

Museum Gardens:

English gardens for the characters to dance in. We hope to find a clearing that has plenty of greenery with the combination of the stone abbey ruins or city walls which are defining features of these gardens and always look good on camera.

Clifford's Tower:

Another historical and English location which York is well known for and would fit well in a Coral video.

Parliament Street:

We like the way the trees are spread out on this street and we plan to film down the centre of this path with the main character walking down towards the camera.

Friargate:

We like the cobbled path on this street, another typically English feature.

These images are copyright of Google Maps

Locations

This is the bedroom we will be filming in at the beginning of our video. We are also hoping to use it for our digipak front cover, and will bring more posters and a drum kit.We like the idea of placing guitars all over the room as well as the drum kit. The yellow colour of the room is a good bright colour that we associated with the morning sun, and also with The Coral's own video for In The Morning which features lots of yellows and oranges:

Filming Days

We have found out that we will be filming our video on the 18th and 19th of October.

Storyboard

As part of our planning process, we have created a storyboard. We are also creating a shooting schedule and shooting script.

Digipak Final Plan

Here is the improved plan for our digipak - the 'messy bedroom' has been moved to the CD panel and the front cover has been replaced by a shot of the characters in the video standing casually in an outdoor, typically English location:

We will bring a digital camera with us on the shoot to take the pictures for this.

We hope that the front cover photo will capture The Coral's laid back, indie-like image as this picture shows:

For the magazine advert we plan to take one of the photos we take for the digipak and add the band title and some logos. We will choose our favourite photo on the filming day.

Planning

We have been planning our video over the last couple of weeks, and this is what we have so far:

The Story
The Coral's videos are unusual yet quite simplistic, so we came up with a similar theme, but expanded on it with our own ideas.
The general storyline for our video is an ordinary man going about his seemingly daily routine, with random positive events occurring throughout eg. no food in the kitchen so someone hands him some toast, no money for the bus but there is a spare ticket at the bus stop, balloons handed to him. The positive events remedy the negatives.

Performance
We are going to have an actor who plays the tambourine and is also the one who gives the main character some of the positive objects (balloon, toast etc).
The bear costume appears in several Coral videos, almost like a mascot for the band, taking part in certain activities, so we wanted to depict this in our video. The bear will pop up occasionally in the shots 'playing' the acoustic guitar.

Locations
The video begins in the main character's home as he is getting up and leaving. He then moves on later in the video to the streets of town and York city walls. This is to reflect the distinctly English look that The Coral's videos give, which are often filmed in generally average streets or fields etc.

Costumes
The main character will be wearing clothes that The Coral typically wear in their videos - casually stressed jeans, a t shirt with some sort of design on it, a dark casual cargo style jacket and perhaps Converse trainers.
The tambourine man is probably going to be dressed as a busker, so in scruffy dirty clothes, but we might give him other surreal costumes as well.

Dreaming Of You

'Dreaming of You' begins with the band members performing in a confined space, away from the outside world to show that they are 'dreaming' and don't want to come back to reality. The walls are plastered with posters that would be typically seen in a young male's bedroom. Later on in the video the band are in various locations, such as cycling quite unrealistically through English streets, suggesting that they are in a dream world.

The man in a bear costume makes another appearance in this video, taking part in random activities, such as playing a trumpet, like in the '1000 Years' video. We have decided that we would like to feature the bear costume in our video, as a link to previous The Coral videos and as something familiar to the fans.

Digipak

We have been thinking further about the design of our digipak, and for the cover we have had the idea of setting up an image of a messy bedroom. The bedroom could have items featured in our video strewn all over the room, such as a guitar and drumkit.

This had been developed from our idea to make a 'scrapbook' cover image, but allowing us to give a better picture of the kind of person that would be listening to this music - I have the image of a man with a positive outlook who enjoys indie bands who are dedicated to their music, regularly going to see them in concert. Their bedroom would be colourful with lots of retro posters and band photos - they might even be in a band themselves.

This was the first draft we created for the digipak, but we will go back and improve it later, also adding in the bedroom idea:

Album Covers

As well as creating a music video, our group has also got to produce a digipak and magazine advert for our song. The Coral's past album covers are, much like their videos, very surreal and varied.

While there are covers like 'The Invisible Invasion' and 'Nightfreak and the Sons of Becker' (featuring the bear's head again, as seen in '1000 years' below) which are completely different from one another, the majority of the album covers are in the style of a scrapbook.

There is a mixture of drawings and photos which have all been stuck randomly onto the cover, continuing the 'casual' and laid back image of The Coral, and giving it a 'home-made' feel.

We are thinking of continuing with this scrapbook idea for our digipak, incorporating images we take while filming our video with perhaps some hand-drawn images.

The Coral Album Covers

1000 Years

This music video features a vague story line of a man in a space suit perhaps trying to "find your way" - the space suit clearly shows just how lost and alienated the man is. He is also joined by a range of bizarre characters, including someone with a bear's head and a cowboy.

Meanwhile the video also cuts to shots of the band performing, who are wearing casual clothes such as denim jackets and shirts with jeans, giving a very laid back look. There are some artistic shots of the location - a deserted, dry rocky landscape - and of the sun setting above the sea.
The majority of the video is given an 'old-fashioned' camera effect, playing on the title of the song '1000 Years'. This along with the jumping, jerking picture adds to the surrealism of the video and is an effect we are considering using in our video.

Indie

Most of our interviewees agreed that The Coral is primarily in the indie genre.

Indie has origins in alternative rock, post-punk and new wave and will typically include guitar, drums, bass, keyboard and vocals. Indie performers are known to have complete control over their music, but in recent years their popularity has increased due to internet exposure. This applies to The Coral as well, who have publically critisised the more 'mainstream' music acts signed on to major record labels.

Research on the internet suggests that a stereotypical indie fan is a bit of a 'music snob' who wears vintage clothes, although the generalisation of the term 'indie' in music means that this stereotypical image is growing out of date. The way that The Coral present themselves gives them a casual and relaxed look, focusing on their music rather than their image.

Here is a clip of The Coral performing live at Glastonbury:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5B--1X_qWk

This supports the idea that The Coral like to dress casually and appear unconcerned about making an impression onstage of the way they look as other performers might. In this screenshot it is obvious they are merely wearing their own everyday clothes, such as jeans, jackets and casual shirts:

Student Surveys

Here is the feedback we received after asking some students questions about The Coral:

Do you like The Coral? Why?

• yes, folky, easy listening
• yes, individual sound, catchy
• yes, pleasant, easy listening
• yes, jazzy, cheery
• yes, their style and catchy songs
• yes, I like a couple of their songs
• yes, they're just nice songs. wouldn't want to hear them too much though
• yes, awesome songs, my kind of music
  

What genre would you class them as?

• alternative/folk
• indie/folk
• indie/folk/soft rock
• indie/pop
• indie
• indie/rock
• indie

What sort of people would you expect to listen to The Coral/this genre of music?

• vintage/retro/indie people
• people who are into less mainstream music
• early to mid-twenties as they've been out quite a while. ordinary people, who are slightly dis earning perhaps, selective
• shiny happy people (?)
  

What other bands would you compare them to?

• Razorlight, The View
• Mumford and Sons, Supergrass
• The Kooks
• Supergrass
• Charlatons, Zutons
• Paul Weller.. maybe?
• The La's, Ocean Color Scene
• The Zutons, The La's

The similarity of a lot of these bands with The Coral is evident just by seeing pictures of them - The Zutons and The La's, for example, both share The Coral's casual, laid back look associated with indie:

If you've seen one of their videos, what's your opinion on it?

• razorlight style, typical British video, streets of England
• strange but in a good way, almost low budget but it works well
• they're just themselves, no unnecessary extra nonsense
• the colours are nice, busy yet very simply done
• it was really weird. Didn't really like it
• yeah they're pretty funny
• pretty entertaining. Good laugh. Not much choreography though :(

What sort of artwork would you expect on the cover of their next album?

• them stood with vinyl's/some sort of vintage photograph
• complicated, random images
• something psychedelic looking
• bright swirls, camper van
• crazy stuff
• bright colors, eye catching fonts, "hand-drawn" pictures
• something like that one by 13th Floor Elevators???
• hippie like images

Interviews with The Coral

Here are some interviews with The Coral, which tell us more about their personality and attitude to the music industry.

This interview tells us that the band are focused on their music and don't seek celebrity status, giving them a laid back, casual image:

http://www.liverpool.com/features/interview:-the-coral.html

The same applies in this interview, which also gives an insight into the band's attitudes towards songs at the top of the charts, saying that "good music doesn't get into the charts". James Skelly also says "music has been forgotten and been replaced by attitude. I don't care about posing. I don't care about impressing people. I just want to impress myself":

http://www.2-4-7-music.com/newsitems/march02/thecoral.asp

The Coral

The Coral was formed in 1996 in Hoylake in Merseyside and is signed on to the Liverpool label Deltasonic. Their distinctive musical style is a mixture of psychadelic folk with modern rock, which has influenced many other Deltasonic acts such as the Zutons, The Dead 60s and The Rascals.

The band members are:

• James Skelly - vocals, guitar
• Paul Duffy - guitar
• Nick Power - keyboards
• Lee Southall - bass
• Ian Skelly - drums
• Bill Ryder-Jones - guitar (1996 - 2008)

Many of their promo pictures are in black and white, showing the band in dark clothing, usually coats, looking straight to the camera. This gives the impression that they are a more mature band that takes their music seriously.

'In The Morning' is part of The Coral's fourth album 'The Invisible Invasion', which was released in May 2005.
'In The Morning' reached number six in the UK singles charts, and it was the second most played song on UK radio that year. This song is considered to be under the genre of Indie Pop.

Here is a link to The Coral's official website, which is currently promoting their 2010 tour and their latest album 'Butterfly House'.

http://www.thecoral.co.uk/

Our Song

Our group has chosen to create a music video for the song 'In The Morning' by The Coral

Here is the 2005 official video for the song:

Statement of Intent

My name is Beth Metheringham and I'm a second year student at York College. As well as Media, I'm also studying English Language, Music Technology and Ancient History. I am going to be writing this blog while creating a music video as part of my Media Studies coursework.

I chose to continues Media on to A2 because it is an enjoyable subject and because I am hoping to do a Television Production Course at university next year. The filming project will hopefully give me skills and knowledge that will help me on a course like this.

I'm using Blogger.com for this project because I used it for my AS year coursework and found it easy to use. Also, the fact that you can upload photos and videos will also be useful to me. WordPress seemed more complicated to use with a lot of features that I don't feel the need for, so I'm sticking with the Blogger's simple format.

I am expecting to work on this project for about 3 months, aiming to finish at Christmas time. As part of my research I have started looking at music videos on the internet that other students have created to get an idea for what works well on this project.

When it comes to planning our filming, I will expect to find locations in and around York by looking around and taking pictures, or by looking at maps on the internet. For actors or performers I might ask around college for volunteers, or search the internet. Once the video is finished, I plan to upload it on to YouTube to get a wide range of potential viewers and their feedback.

Planning ahead and staying organised will ensure that the project runs smoothly and successfully. I hope the video will be entertaining and look as professional as possible in order to gain filming experience for a practical degree course, and to ultimately help me achieve a high grade that will work towards a place at university.