Tony Likes To have Grass On His Blog Page

(research results and evaluations found at: www.tonyrules.wordpress.com) — My task for my A2 media studies advanced production was to create a cross media promotional package for a new and upcoming band. I chose to explore band promotion through the means of a web-page, Poster/Flyers, EP CD Cover and Band photography. Giving myself an event to advertise allows me to promote the band further whilst giving something back to the audiences who are drawn into my advertisements. I have had experience from my first year of media studies in the fields of filming and working in live/active environments when I was working on an opening to a film noir styled film. I am familiar with software such as final cut pro and I’ll have to sync up moving imagery with an audio track. I’ve have experience in sound and music in my music technology course where I’ve used programs such as pro tools and cubase midi sequencer which I hope that the experience there will help me too. I enjoyed the experience and wanted to see if my knowledge and experience of the mistakes I made last year with my production would have a positive effect on the methods I use this year.

The group and I decided upon the band ‘Orgazmatron’ who have been together for approximately a year and originate from the local area. Their name and music style gave we a huge amount of ideas for the visual advertisement and Luci did some research into the name and found out that their name originates from the 1973 Woody Allen film ‘Sleepers’. I began to collect ideas for the band logo and for poster/fliers, taking some influence from the film ‘Sleepers’ with the ideas of sex robots but deciding to give it more human-like features. While I was drawing up ideas for the visual promotion the group and I came to decide on a promotion team name. I expected our target audience would be within the range of 16+ year olds and we wanted to choose something quick and easy to remember that would appeal to late teens. Baring in mind the language popular to late teens we decided upon ‘Arse Kickin’ Promotions’ as its punchy and outrageous status would likely attract attention from our target audience.

I collected ideas to what I find is effective promotion and in which way did I find out about upcoming bands/performances. I wrote these ideas down then highlighted my best options and I found that the most effective way to get the word out about my band would be to make posters/fliers to hand out and to broadcast the band over internet social networking sites myspace and facebook. I collected a few examples of imagery I planned to use to get ideas for posters and then put my results through some teenagers to see which idea seemed most appealing. A bold comic style showed most popular so I now started using the ideas of the robot and the other sci-fi objects to start drawing together some development ideas. I received positive feedback upon the robot logo from the focus group (See Focus Group Evaluation) and decided to take that idea further. I sketched out some design ideas for the posters and flyers in a comic style as it was voted most eye-catching and then shown them around to some family and friends and received feedback on the most popular idea. 

I came down to my final idea for the poster and fliers and I particularly liked this idea as the composition and features in the imagery were both interesting and eye-catching. I began to draw out the final design on A3 piece of paper using some good quality felt pens to give out the comic book effect. Upon completion I made sure I had all the necessary information on my poster which was the band name, the band website, our promotion name and the eye-catching imagery with the Robot clearly shown on the front. I felt that the bright colours and use of composition made the poster both appealing and effective. I found out after completion that I incorrectly spelt a part of our promotion team name but as I had drew the whole idea down on paper I couldn’t correct my mistake without depreciating the quality of the poster. The only other option was to change our promotion name slightly from ‘Arse’ to ‘Ass’ everywhere else in our project to avoid confusion. This however proved unpopular with the rest of my group who wanted to remain with our current name so we were left with no choice but to have the incorrect spelling on our advertisements and hoped that it wouldn’t be too much of an issue.

I now started to look into possible places where we could possibly host a gig for our band. I could only find 3 ideal places that was appropriate and accessible to our promotional threshold which were; the home town’s local venue called ‘The Square.’ A nearby popular music bar in Hertford, short train ride away called ‘The Marquee’  and then I arranged access to a performing theatre within the college with the music tutors so I could host the whole gig completely. In the focus group we put our initial ideas past some students, this allowed me to find out where the most popular venue would be after giving them the choice. I found that the focus group’s most popular choice due to sound quality and access was The Square. The Hertford Marquee being the second choice because it is more difficult to get to. Which leaves me the college held gig as a last resort if I was unable to find a slot at The Square or The Marquee.

My next task was to get a gig for the group. I found this very difficult at times as the square were too busy at times to talk to me and on top of that the band were experiencing problems with the members and were on the verge of splitting. (Logs of conversations and summary of getting the gig found on the blog) after a couple of months i managed to negotiate with both the Square and the band and booked the gig for the 24th of January 2008 

Whilst I was communicating with the venues about available dates I began the website that audiences could familiarise themselves with the group. I began building the website on an online web-builder,‘Freewebs,’ as I knew the software and already half knew how to work it (see website write-ups on blog). Upon the website I had pages such as Home page, Tour, Media, Band, Myspace and Guestbook. I felt I did the website to a satisfactory standard. The site is clearly laid out, informative and beneficial for the viewer. As a user I found the site is easy to understand, navigate through and entertaining. All the information on the site is necessary and is what I would expect from a band website. Making sure I had an official website to compare to helped me to achieve this. Having a list of Tour date for the band was effective because it informed viewers of upcoming gig dates for the band even if it isn’t hosted myself it was promotion of the band that was most important and a fully informative site was essential. The Band page and Myspace page was good as they provided the viewer with links with other pages so that a fan could explore the band into further detail or possibly contact them. 

The next priority was to get word out about the gig to our target audiences so that they have the most notice possible to make plans. (read ‘Creating the posters and distributing them’ on my blog) I advertised the gig thoroughly upon connection sites on the web and Luci had taken photographs and printed the posters a fliers which we distributed around all the hotspots in college and around sixth forms in my home town of Cheshunt. I felt that our group has spread word of the gig very well as i could see my advertisement constantly walking around college between lessons.

When the evening of the gig came to an end I packed up all the equipment and made my way back to the main desk to pick the fliers collected from audiences when they enter the venue. I received back 3 fliers which means that at least 3 people came to the gig due to our promotions. This result wasn’t as much as I hoped because I advertised the gig thoroughly. Factors to why the feedback was so small maybe due to the gig date being a Thursday when most of our target audience have college/school/work the next day. It was booked for late January and nobody had much money either. I was fairly pleased that 3 people did manage to come presenting fliers because it does show that regardless of these factor our advertisements did work for some people.

When the gig date arrived I hired out a camera and made a quick note of what questions I wanted to ask the band so that I could complete the interview quickly and sufficiently. I chose to make the promotional video about the band and one song in particular, one of their oldest called ‘Active Mental Freedom’ because I found the subject really interesting and having the band describe to us what influences them I feel would interest the viewer. The Interview ran fairly smoothly and was only interrupted once when a woman enter the room to get some water. Even then she didn’t make any noise so there was no necessary reason to cut her out. When editing I kept her in as the singer made a good point about something I asked him and also keeping her in reminds the viewer that the whole video is shot in a live environment and I felt it gives my video a sense of reality around it. I felt that in order to make my production better it would have been ideal to have access to two cameras during their interview and performance so i could leave one in a fixed place, as you can see in all the interview moments the camera never moves whilst holding another camera to zoom into some of the members faces or the body language they express. This would have given the entire interview much more appeal but as the venue has a one camera policy due to some health and safety issues i was only permitted to bring one. I chose to leave the camera in it’s fixed place so that i had a shot of each performer and i wouldn’t miss an opportunity if one decided to contribute and i wasn’t expecting it. The performance itself would look more effective as i could sync up the performance perfectly with a variety of angles without having to keep my shots too vague for the viewers to unable recognize any continuity errors.

Before the band came on I asked the staff working on the sound desk at The Square if they could possibly record the bands performance so that I didn’t have to worry about capturing a good audio track using the camera which would have been impossible. The plus side to have the audio track recorded on the sound desk is that it’s the best quality sound I could possibly receive from the performance and that all my recording on the camera would fit along side it perfectly.

When it came to shooting the performance itself I decided that I would leave the camera in a fixed place on the balcony seating area for the whole duration of Active mental freedom so that I knew that I would definitely have enough footage to last the song and have a foundation shot to fall back upon if some shots were badly taken, I also chose to do this so that I could later sync up the audio track with the visual to give the live appearance. I came across a problem when doing this because the camera was making errors in recording and only recorded for a short period of time before stopping. I couldn’t understand what was going wrong. I had made no errors in setting up the camera and recording ran smoothly when filming the interview so I knew there was technical problems occurring with the camera itself. I checked the camera memory to see if it had recorded what I just shot and regardless of what errors it said it had it managed to record the footage perfectly. I had no time to work out the problem and solve it because the band were performing the song I wanted to use and this was my one and only chance to capture it, even if it were in small pieces. So each time the camera would stop I would press the record button once more until the error came up again. I checked once more to see if the camera did capture the footage which it did so I continued with the same method.

Once the band finished their song I decided I would try sorting out the camera. Although the camera didn’t say the battery was running low I changed it anyway then turned the power back on. After a little while the camera started working properly again so I then continued to take close-ups of the performers playing their instruments. I hand held the camera from here on so that I didn’t take up too big of area which would cause conflict with the audience. By hand holding the camera it gave the performance a more live effect which I liked but I tried my best to keep the camera steady as possible so that the video ran smooth. I came across a few collisions with the audience as they danced and enjoyed themselves. They could clearly see I was hold equipment and when I was by the front stage they made sure to try and keep clear of me.

I uploaded the footage I captured from the camera onto one of the college Macintosh’s so I could begin editing. As the camera was a new piece of equipment I asked the college technician if using Final Cut Pro was alright but he directed me to Final Cut Express which is a smaller program but following his guidance I used the express version. I later found out that it would have been a better choice to use Final Cut Pro and he had made a mistake directing me to the express version. I didn’t come across any problems  using the equipment but I was slightly less familiar with how it works causing me to work slower. 

Before I could begin piecing together the footage I had I needed to get a copy of the sound recording of the gig from the band. The Square charges for their recording services. Luckily the band wanted a live recording of themselves so they happily paid for it. I therefore agreed to let them take the disc first so that they could copy the file for their own purposes before taking the disc myself to copy the file. Reece Jones the singer of the group agreed to hand over the disc within the next few days. However problems kept occurring and Reece kept finding excuse why he couldn’t give me the disc yet. My patience was coming to an end and I finally got the disc in early March.

I ripped the audio file off of the disc and cut it down to the one track I wanted to use. Once the track was down on the timeline I filtered through my footage to find any footage of the song itself so I could drop it on the timeline and sync it up with the audio. I was really pleased I captured the band performing the middle 8 to the song as they particularly mention that part of the song as an improvement made to it and the audio track and my footage work together brilliantly. After I synced up all the footage I could with the audio track I began cutting the video of the group sitting in the interview room to all necessary moments making sure that I had a healthy balance between the footage of the performance and the footage of the band talking to the camera. I cut out all the audio the camera caught in the performance footage and kept only the parts where they are talking to the camera.

I chronologically structured the questions when I put them into the final video so that they made sense to the viewer when they watch the video. I chose to film my interview in a style that you never hear the interviewer speak you only ever hear the band speak to show its all about them, similar way to how MTV shoot theirs This turned out O.K. but at parts of the video its hard to recognise what the band are talking about. This was a planning error and in future I’ll need to consider carefully how I ask the questions or inform the band that they’ll need to include the question somehow within their answer so that the viewer isn’t left behind. To put these shots into the video wasn’t a huge problem. I realised that I had to structure the whole video around the interview itself and sometimes the length of time the band took to answer one question cause me to leave out some performance parts  whereas they were shorter with other answers making me find suitable footage to follow.

I recorded the performers from a variety of angles and used zooms and extreme close-ups so that the viewer cannot recognise what the performer is playing/singing. If I did this I thought I could possibly get away with using these shots in my video, making out they’re still playing the same song. The lighting in the venue helped with my editing a lot as I could line up the flashing lights in time with the music so that they look a part of the same clip and it sometimes masked what the performer is playing so the viewer is unable to tell if it’s the same song or not.

Finding Footage of the performance to fill gaps between moments of talking had its difficult parts. I realised that sometimes I showed far too much in the shots and it was clear to see that the video and audio wasn’t doing the same thing. This problem was due to the camera malfunction at the gig as I was forced to find suitable clips to fit t the music rather than going back to the initial angle which would have definitely fit. I felt that after careful consideration and analysis of my clips I found suitable enough footage to put along side the audio. I checked everything I put in careful to see if it tampered with continuity and the flow to the piece and I was glad to see that the footage look genuine alongside the audio.

To give my video more interest I sometimes had the audio come in before the visual when the band would start talking again. This gave a lot of footage to the video a kind of ‘Voice over’ effect and provided a documentary feel to it. As well as overlapping video clips I used some video transitions. A lot of the time I used hard cuts between the conversation and the performing but this had a very jumpy feel after a while. I experimented with some transitions to see if I could find a more relaxing way to move from shot to shot. Some of the ‘Wipe’ transitions didn’t look too bad but they were too cheesy as the band wanted to go for a serious look. I therefore decided upon fades as they slowed down the momentum of the video whilst upholding the sense of seriousness. I tried looked at other transitions so I could include a variety within my video but cuts and fades were the only ones that fit well with the video. A couple of times the lighting was dark in the venue and at one part of my video I had the lighting darkened at the end of one clip of the crowd moshing and dancing and in the next clip which is a close up of a drum symbol the lighting came from dark to bright. I decided I would use this and exaggerate it by fading to black between the shots and after watching it over its easy to miss the editing altogether as it runs so smoothly.

Once I had all my video clips down in the order I wanted I then adjusted the audio levels to the soundtrack so that each time the band talk I can turn down the soundtrack so the listener can hear them more clearly whilst keeping the vague sound of the music in the background. As the music was too quiet to completely make out what they’re playing I could add extra clips of the performance on top of the commentary to break up the larger sections and add interest. I made sure I adjusted the audio levels last because if I did it before hand it would cause problems if I need to rearrange the clips.

All I had left to do on the video was the titles for this I used the program ‘Livetype’ which provided me with a wide selection of fonts, effects and transitions to experiment with. I wanted to keep the main title simple so I chose to have the band name and song name appear on the screen as we hear the band prepare to start behind the black screen. As the footage fades in I chose to let the titles remain for a short while more before fading away. I preferred to let the title linger over the next clip as it looks more attractive and it didn’t look so dependant on the plain black screen.

If the viewer isn’t familiar with the band members I chose to have small banners at the bottom of the screen each time a members spoke for the first time showing their name and role in the band. This was effective but it highlighted the fact that some members are quieter than others and the drummers name isn’t featured until near the end of the video. I would’ve push the clip further forward in the video but it would have interfered with the continuity of the question asked and it would have just confused the viewer much more so I had to leave it as it was.

To give the promotional DVD the extra touch of class i used a program called (blank) where i followed simple steps in order to create a DVD menu. First i exported my video file through quicktime so i could then import it on the menu program. when i began work ing on the software I found that this was really easy to use. I first chose which format to use and i decided to go for  simple film strip menu on  plain white background. the menu was simple but i thought it looked brilliant. I added titles to the bottom of the page and a small play button which i linked to my video file. I finally added small screens within the filmstrip spaces where i had the beginning of my video playing. This instantly gave my menu a professional and classy feel to it whilst making it more appropriate and personalised to the group. 

Overall I found that our project went smoothly. Although my group received little results through our methods of feedback i felt that the venue we respectfully packed out which is hopefully due to our advertisements, I managed to ask some of the audience ow they knew about the performance and i found a mixture of responses. Some came as the band themselves posted out bulletins advertising their gig as being already big fans of the group came along to the performance. Others i found saw the poster around the college but didn’t see any flier available. I’ve learnt more than before that having to rely on other people outside my group is time consuming and a bad idea. I felt that my posters and fliers were effective but unable to do their duty because the target audience didn’t wish to take part in the event due to money and chosen day of the week. The website had a promising start and receive approximately 10 hits and 3 comments in the first hour but soon became forgotten and not looked at by the audience. Band Promotion is a big job and with the time provided I felt we had a good attempt at it. To have got at least 3 people to come to the gig is a result although a small one which does prove that our methods of promotion did work a little bit and I think our variety of medias used in order to push the band helped their name spread more in local and surround areas.