Message To Examiner

Dear Examiner,

Welcome to my blog, owned by David Leighton. You will find all my coursework in the order as follows:

- Advert For Digipack
- Final Digipack
- Final Edit Of Music Video
- Evaluation Question Four
- Evaluation Questions One To Three
- Digipack CD Cover
- Digipack Insert Booklet
- Digipack CD Case, Back
- Digipack CD Case, Front
- Evaluation Question Two (filming)
- Evaluation Question One (Filming)
- Evaluation Question Three (Raw Presentation)
- Evaluation Question Two (Raw Text)
- Evaluation Question One (Raw Text)
- Digipack Front Cover Rough Drafts
- First Rough Cut Of Music Video (including comments from audience feedback)
- Stop Motion Rough Cuts
- Recce Shot - Music Video
- Risk Assessment For Filming Of Music Video
- Shooting Calendar/Schedule For Filming Of Music Video
- Mood Board
- Audience Research Video
- Treatment Sheet
- First Ideas Initial Storyboard For Video
- Lyrics Breakdown To Misery By Maroon Five
- Initial Ideas Presentation
- Audience Profile (Two)
- Final Song Choice As Well As Permission Email (Two)
- Analysis Of Digipack (Three)
- Nine Frame Analysis (Two)
- Analysis Of Advertisements (Two)
- Shot Count
- Analysis Of Advertisements (Two)
- Personal Skills Audit (Two)
- Opie (Display Picture Exercise)
- Key Media Concept Analysis (Three)



I appreciate you taking the time to mark my blog, thank you.

David Leighton

Advert For Digipack - David Leighton

For this advert I took our own images, logo's and stills from the video in order to create the background; I then added the information in orange writing (in fitting with the colour of the video writing) in order to create a simple, yet effective advert for a live performance of Misery, by Maroon Five.

David Leighton

Digipack Final - David Leighton

This is our final digipack, with all elements added in, including a spine. I have placed it in an order so as if put together when printed you would be able to fold it into a fully working CD case.

David Leighton

Final Edit - Misery By Maroon Five - David Leighton & Bradley Hope

This is our final edit of our music video Misery by Maroon Five, we added our final clips of stop motion, edited out some of the pauses in the other stop motions and made the lip syncing more accurate. Most of the changes from our class comments were put into effect.

David Leighton.

Evaluation Question Four - David Leighton

Evaluation Questions One To Three - David Leighton

A2 Media Coursework - Evaluation on Prezi

Digipack CD Design - David Leighton

This is the CD design for our Digipack, I used Photoshop and created my own template of a CD along with the thematic writing used in the lyrics for the 'Number One', I changed the opacity of the symbolic M, and also edited out the edges in order to fit it onto the CD.

David Leighton

Second Page Of Inside Booklet For Digipack - David Leighton

This is my inside second page to my digipack booklet, it contains still images from the video of which I removed the colour and a taken image of me and Bradley. It also uses a made logo and text edited into the background.

David Leighton

Back Of Digipack - David Leighton

This is the back of our digipack, I edited in a bar code, some tears (of which I colour replaced and smudged) and also my own edited label of 'Misery' in the top left hand side as well as some imposed text stating the band and the fact it is a single.

David Leighton

Final Edit - Digipack: David Leighton

After a pole of twenty people said they preferred the 'Un-blurred' version of the photo I decided to remove the blur effect, I also added in some stills from the video down the side of the front cover to relate it back to our original video. The size of the image is 12-12 cm, this is the average measure of a CD case.

David Leighton

Evaluation - Question Two - Filming - David Leighton

Evaluation - Question One - Filming - David Leighton

Evaluation - Question Three - David Leighton

Evaluation - Question Three - David Leighton

View more presentations from WhiteBoiThsallyLover

Evaluation - Question Two - David Leighton

Question Two – How effective Is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

Immediately when constructing my ancillary texts (which came in the form of a digi-pack, and an advertisement) I realised that I wanted them all to contain elements from one style and theme, and feature heavy elements as shown in the video. From the out I wanted to incorporate stills, logo’s and visual elements as seen in the video in all of our ancillary texts. I began about doing this by immediately replicating the ‘M’ as seen in the background of the elements of our video that included live performance and creating a logo for the title of the song (using other elements of the word Maroon, constructed by fans) and used this for the front cover of our digipack. I then also used the band logo ‘Maroon Five’ however I removed the ‘M’ and edited in our own making it a unique piece. Of these two titles I placed at the side and the bottom. Soon after this I screen grabbed stills of the video, including important visual elements seen in the video (such as the thematic writing and parts of both the stop motion and the performance), I discovered four was enough to create the right hand side edge. Eventually I placed all three of these items to form a sort of border around the edge of my front cover of my digipack and was pleased I had taken aspects of all the conventions I intended to use and actually used them (I had included video content, stills, themed logos and some creative text). However I then saw a problem, I had included all my elements and still had some space to fill. Furthermore I realised I was missing a key element as seen in quite a few Maroon Five posters, DVD’s, and cd’s; as well as featuring in most pop music covers. I was missing a sort of band identity. As seen in most of Maroon Five’s CD covers, large images of the band dominate the front, for example ‘MUSTGETOUT’, ‘It Won’t Be Soon Before Long‘ and ‘Call And Response’ all feature this. I felt however that I had already included enough video content and did not want to include another still from the video as this might seem repetitive and boring. I came up to a solution to this and it came in the form of an original picture taken specifically for this purpose. Bradley and myself went to a pier at night, taking a few extras with us for the picture. We used a high angle to capture the photo with a strong flash, we also had out extras walk behind us in order to make it seem like we were stood still in a world that was moving (essentially making us stand out). This took a few times however eventually we had a successful shot and were quite pleased with it, I then placed the shot on the computer and edited it into the front cover, by keying up the lighting and blurring the extra’s a little more I was able to make the picture look entirely more dramatic, and I believe it is rather effective, original and also in keeping with the conventions of our video, the band we imitated and the overall genre. On a little note I had tried editing the still so that myself and Bradley were smudged at the edges giving it the impression we were moving, yet stood still, however after receiving feedback from many saying they preferred the original style of the still I removed this effect.

From then on the digipack became rather easy. I created yet another custom logo for the back of the digipack, added misery related emoticons and the appropriate writing and a bar code. I did not feel I had to include many more of the conventions I have earlier discussed for the simple fact that they were already featured so heavily on the outside upon the front cover.

However when moving onto the inside of my digipack I realised I again could include all these conventions more-over I could include a lyrics booklet to make it seem more realistic. I immediately began on the lyrics booklet, I found an appropriate Romantic style font (as seen on the back cover) and typed the lyrics into the left hand side making sure the spacing and size fit in the with conventions of other lyrics booklets I had looked at from my collection of CD’s. I then added in the band logo for ‘Misery’ and a few stills from the video. I then realised I could fit in another convention from our video. The ‘recording session’ parts of our music video were all shot in black and white as we had discovered this effect to be quite attractive to the watcher in our ‘Film Noir AS coursework’, I replicated this effect and grey-scaled some stills from our music video and also of our unique front cover shot and placed them appropriately into the lyrics booklet. Finally with a little space left over I typed ‘Lyrics’ and ‘Love, Adam’. The reason I did this is because (and I am sure you will agree) Adam Levine (the lead singer of Maroon Five) is quite heavily focused on in practically every aspect of Maroon Five’s advertising, indeed Misery is filmed nearly entirely with him and barely any glimpses of other band members are seen,  and one of the more liberal covers for hands all over is of Adam Levine wearing nothing. This use of style Icon seems to show that Maroon Five’s fan base is heavily interested in Adam, I used this to my advantage as it seems a much more personal touch to the fan if it says ‘Love, Adam;’ and would make the product much more enjoyable, also making our product seem a lot more authentic.

Finally I moved onto the last element of our digipack, the CD itself. I realised immediately this had to be simple as most other CD cases are (from what I have seen). I decided to keep this one quite minimalist, using only the thematic writing seen in other parts of the digipack, our standard ‘M’ logo and the bands ‘Misery Logo’,

After doing the digipack I had to begin thinking about my other ancillary text, of which I chose to do in the form of an advert for a live performance of the band. I decided to keep this rather simple much like I had with my CD, the reason for this being that in most adverts you usually see little and large text with a great deal of pictorial/visual elements which is widely seen in the advertisement business as the most effective way to capture a potential purchaser’s attention for long enough to get them interested in the product (in this case a live performance of the band ‘Misery) the advertisement is trying to sell.

Initially I was unsure of how to proceed, so I began with an element I was already adept at incorporating into ancillary texts; the logo. I used the logo ‘Misery’ as I had been using earlier however I edited out all background imaging leaving only the writing itself and placed this in large capital letters at the top of my advertisement (thus in keeping with the convention of ‘Large letters capture attention’ as widely used in advertising). I then added In some photo’s and still’s I had used in the lyrics sheet on my digipack, I did this in order to make it obvious that these two products were of the same style/line, I then keyed out all colour in these pictures and after deciding it looked rather effective (with some input from class members) I was advised into adding more in, and I took this advise even further by completely making the background up of a sort of collage of various pictures incorporating the theme of my chosen band, my digipack and the rest of my ancillary texts. I took pictures from all aspects of my coursework, from the video shoot itself with scenes both in and not in the video, some from my digipack and a few from shots and pictures I had taken outside the parameters of my video. Finally I added in smaller text the date of the performance, the place and how to get tickets (essentially all the relevant information with no ‘waffle’, as in keeping with the conventions of modern day advertising in today’s ‘no-time-world’).

Evaluation - Question One - David Leighton

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

During the research, creation and production stages of our music video we made sure we looked at, and kept in the style of Maroon Five’s ‘pop-rock’ genre making sure we adhered to any conventions we saw within this genre. We found in the original Misery Video that typical male and female conventions are reversed with the female being in a position of power and effectively torturing the male lead. Misery is demonstrated in both the original video and our own and is shown to be a emotion caused by the actions of a ‘female character’. It is this use of role reversal (which we used) that allowed us to show and convey feelings of ‘Misery’, as the cause of this misery is undoubtedly from a female. Another convention we used in our music video is continuous cross cuts between a diegetic story and recording shots in a studio, or some other sort of set. Our video intermitted between stop motion narratives of two male characters separately, and both roles performing the song in a studio.

 The use of a female who is ‘stronger’ than a male in our music video goes against typical feminist theory, which usually states that in media women are shown as an inferior gender and are completely subjective to the type of male they are around. However in our video our female actor is shown to actually hit the male actor and he continues on his way crying. This shows a sort of dominance and is a type of gender reversal. The use of females in pop music is usually important as more of a ‘scene setter’ than an actual character or important role, usually females are seen as love interests, or they are dancing (if the band is predominantly male). However in our video rather than being a love interest or actually making a positive impact our female role is more of a bully, or a negative character to the male lead than anything else, inverting female stereotyping once again.

The use of males in our video however is very stereotypical for a pop rock genre, they are simple performers and any sort of real in depth background into the character is favoured for a interesting performance and catchy lyrics. The use of clothing is meant to give colour to the set and represent the typical fashion of the period in which the music video was brought out. Typically in any sort of pop video the performers wear clothes that link in with the trend of the moment, but that can change completely within a few months, giving a rather diverse trend in clothes between music video’s in the last few years.

Inspiration for our video was varied, we got ideas of female dominance and gender conversion from the original music video to Misery, performed by Adam Levine and the band. However the idea of stop motion we took from Peter Gabriel’s ‘Sledgehammer’, and ‘Don’t Stop – Innerpartysystem’.  These both managed to combine pictures to make a diegetic stop motion narrative. From ‘American Trash by Innerpartysystem’  we took ideas of the modern lifestyle and the repetitive and incorporated it into our music video, this is meant to give it a more significant meaning as seen in American Trash. The video states all these mundane tasks are ‘pointless’ and ‘trash’ but yet we continue to undertake them. Showing how import they are.

We then developed the concept of the mundane being turned upside down by interaction with the female type by making sure everything the male characters did after contact with a female was out of the norm, for example planking in a lecture theatre or spinning around in a table.

The idea of having stop motion feature so heavily in our music video was that; although stop motion is often done research on other videos showed that is less often done with such length, meaning by including so much stop motion in our product it made it stand out from the others, making it more unique and hopefully more enjoyable as a piece.