A2 production research and planning: 2010

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

I think that my music video, my magazine advertisement and my CD digipak all combine well to make a good final product. I took the idea of some of the shots in my music video being black and white and the idea of the storyline being dark and dismal and applied these things to my two ancillary texts. When I thought about all of the things in my music video, I thought of calling the band Black and White however this seemed rather obvious so I decided to call the band Noir and Blanc. This name also has references to film noir. The images I used for my digipak and poster are all images that I took when out shooting my video on the council estates of Hull. I chose to use the images of tower blocks and the phone box as they are iconic images of working class Briton. This also gave all of my products a sense of cohesion. I didn’t just take the images from my camera and place them straight into my digipak, I edited them first. I turned all of the pictures into solid hard contrast black and white images using publishers editing tools as they gave me the exact effect I was looking for. This also gave them an arty look to go with the French band name and the fancy “bleeding cowboys” font I used.

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

When making my media product I chose to stick closely to the conventions of my particular music genre (indie/rock). I watched music videos by my chosen artist to get an idea of what things I should use in my video to create a similar feel. One of the things that I took away from the videos I looked at was the theme of British social realism. After looking at the Arctic Monkeys music videos by directors W.I.Z and John Hardwick I decided to base my video around the same theme of British working class life. I also took away things such as using grainy film to have a more gritty effect and the use of dialogue without sound or subtitles. When doing my research I also watched two films The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, from 1962 and directed by Tony Richardson. I also watched Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, from 1960 which was directed by Karel Reisz. Both films where written by Alan Sillitoe. These two films reflected the mood of the times and I wanted to do the same in my music video. However unlike the films and music videos that I watched that where either all black and white or all colour I chose to have sections of my video in black and white and sections on colour. I did this to create the feel of past and present and to also give my video a harder edge to it.

I have chosen to film my music video in four different locations around Hull. Orchard Park estate,Bransholme estate, Hull city center and West Hull. I chose these areas because they really show Hull in a true light.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bransholme

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchard_Park_Estate