Evaluation Question 3B - Distributions

3B "How would your products be distributed as real media products?" 

VODCAST

Our products would most likely by distributed the same way BMTH is distributed which is through their record label company RCA. RCA is a subsidiary of Sony Corporations which is one of the big 3. Just like the big 6 in movie distribution music has the big 3 which are the 3 record company's with the largest market share (More here). RCA which is most famous for signing Elvis has a bunch of signings and because its a subsidiary of Sony it means that they can distribute the product easily through Sony's Horizontal and Vertical integration.


Physical sales have dropped massively over the last few years with the introduction of streaming services such as Spotify now domination the music market. Even with the rising trend of Vinyl lately it is still no match for streaming. This is why we integrated a link to both spotify and iTunes from our website and we also have it so you can test listen to some of the tracks before you buy them on iTunes.

Even though physical sales are falling bands are still creating and selling cd, digipaks and some like BMTH sell Vinyl. For our album we created a digipak as well as a Vinyl. The vinyl design was directly inspired by the "THATS THE SPIRIT" vinyl. Whats impotent when marketing your product is Social media. Social media has changed how marketing is done as web 2.0 has turned the audience into consumers and are now more or less creating the ads for the band. Its important for a band to stay active on social media as it takes only a second to interact with the audience and therefor makes it easy to promote new products as well as tickets for upcoming concerts.


We posted links to our website through social media to where they can buy tickets for concerts as well get a chance to win prices. We also created a music video which will be up on Youtube which is an effective way to distribute media as it is free and reaches people all around the world. With the change in technology it has made it easy for audiences to create stuff of their own and is why you see lyric videos as well as gifs.

Unboxing videos is another way that fans interact with the producer as it is advertising the bands product without the band paying them. Even though most people would stream the music there are people who are collectors or just like the feel of a physical copy that will buy the vinyl or digipak. Thats why its important to make the digipak special which is why we had a nice design and added a sticker saying you get bonus tracks.


Originally we where going to use a prop gun and have the video end just before he pulls the trigger, we decided against this as this would have increased the age rating of our video making it harder to distribute.  There is more detail about why we didn't use it here. The BBFC is who rates videos in the UK I did specific BMTH research on their videos and the age rating they got. Even though BMTH target audience is 15 and up we wanted the music video to at least get a 12 so it would be easier to distribute and could be played on TV and YouTube without having to be blocked.

Interview "Le Resevoir"

We interviewed an employee that works at "Le Resevoir" in Luxembourg city. "Le Resevoir" is a shop that started of selling CDs and Vinyl but has expanded to other products such as Comic books, Video Games and Movies. We asked the shop keeper about the effects of Piracy and the increasing sales of Vinyl.

Evaluation Question 3A - Audience Engagement

How do your products engage with the audience?

Follow the band for 1 day.

This video shows how the band is engaging with the audience and how our different products such as the website, digipak and music video are engaging with the audience. Since, the video isn't very detailed, we wanted to do a live feed Q&A on our facebook maybe, where we get more specfic questions that fans send us. These will focus on our products and we would be able to show our  products. We will also have a radio interview focusing on Web 2.0, explaining how our audience has been the producer throughout this entire year. 

Radio Interview : 

Interviewer: Good afternoon everybody and welcome to Radio 420. Today in the studio we have  the leadsinger of BMTH, Oliver Sykes, who is going to talk to us about his latest music video "Throne" and how big an effect audience feedback has had on the products they created for their new album. Welcome and thank your for coming!  

Sykes: Thank youfor having me. 

Interviewer: So tell us about your newest music video! 

Sykes: Well the video is about a love relationship between two people that break up. The male protagonist, played by myself, is feeling lost without the girl and is drowning in his own sorrows, which is portrayed to me being under water and running around lost in the forest. And then ofcourse we have our band's performance integrated in the video as well. 

Interviewer: And how does it end? 

Sykes: Well, you are going to have to go watch it on our website or YouTube Channel. 

Interviewer: Heard that folks, fo check it out now on bmthehorizon50.com! So Oli could you tell us about how your audience helped in creating your newest products? 

Sykes: Well I believe in our products our audience were somehow the producers as well. Dan Gillmor who is a Web 2.0 theorist talks about the former audience and says that the audience has the tools to create media themselves. I believe this is a good explanation, cause throughout our entire post-production we have had a lot of audience feedback and the music video especially wouldn't have looked the same without our audience.

Interviewer: Can you give me some examples of particular audience feedback that helped you produce your music video?

Sykes: Oh yeah loads! Some things they argued included bad lip-syncing from the lead singer having the lip-syncing not achieving versimilitude. This is not something you want to happen as in the music video world lip-syncing is the bread and butter of a music video. It is THE common conventions of a music video and is therefore really important. 

Interviewer: I agree, that is always what I notice first as well, when I watch a music video! Anything else? 

Sykes: Yeah, our audience brought up was that there should be a clearer narrative. At the beginning we had a fragmented narrative, which our audience argued was confusing, so it didn't bring the preferred reading (Stuart Hall) accross. They suggested we should have a linear narrative containing more footage. After having done that, we got the preferred reading from our audience that we wanted.

Interviewer: Oh wow! So your audience was what led you to do a re-shoot of your narrative?

Sykes: Yeah, and I mean that's what often happens you know? The band members write the song and are helping to argue what they want in their music video and since I was co-director with Plastic Kid on our music video for Throne, the narrative made sense to me. And since I had also written the song together with the other guys, I knew what I wanted and what the lyrics meant to me. However, when someone else than watches it who doesn't really know the true meaning yet, it can be difficult for them to understand it. That's why audience feedback i so important! 

Interviewer: Well it sounds like it really plays an important role in what the music video ends up looking like. Are there any other points they point out in the audience feedback besides the things that are unclear? 

Sykes: Ehmm, they also give us feedback in terms of what looks good and what there should be more and less of. Our audience argued that we should have more color powder in our music video. At the beginning we only had 3 takes with color powder and our audience said there should be more of it because it had a very nice effect since everything else was so dark and in black and white. 
Also, our audience were actually the ones who argued that there should be less of the running sequence in our music video. We had quite a lot of it in our first few cuts and they said it was just too much and it took the focus off of everything else that was actually important such as the performance and the narrative. 

Interviewer: It is impressive to hear how your audience really shaped your music video to the way it looks now. 

Sykes: Yes, I was very impressed by all the feedback they gave. 

Interviewer: Was it just with your music video or was it also with other things. 

Sykes: Well it was mainly with the music video but also with our digipack and our website. For our digipack thay all said that they really liked the front cover because the hand seemed quite special and original. They also argued that it was a really nice effect with the splash effect over the hand. And the back cover they also liked but mainly they commented on the front cover, since it was so special and the back cover was inspired by the smoke in our music video and was quite basic yet fitted well with the front cover. 

Interviewer: Yeah, I have a copy of your digipack, that you brought me so thank you very much for that, I must say it really is quite something for the design of your front cover. 

Sykes: Thanks

Interviewer: And what did your audience say about your website? 

Sykes: Well the main points included that the website colors and simple design fit well with the genre of our band, so our audience clearly noticed that we had chosen black and white on purpose. They also liked our merch, especially the T-Shirts with the printed heart on it and the T-Shirt with the Wolf-Design which was designed particularly for this music video.

Interviewer: Well it seems to me that you have gotten good feedback for everything and that your products will be a success. I am afraid our time has run-up but thank you so much for coming and talking about how your music video and how big an effect audience feedback has had on your products. 

Sykes: Your welcome. 

Interviewer: Next up is You Me At Six's song from their new album "Night People".

Q&A with fans through Facebook:

Q: On what platforms will I be able to listen to your new album?

A: Well you can buy the album on our website as both a physical and downloadable copy. The album will also be available on Spotify and if you want to watch the music video then you can check that out on YouTube.

Q: Where can I buy your newest merchandise?

A: If you go on our website then you can check out all our merch, and if you subscribe to our website you will get a notification when new merchandise arrives. 

Q: Do you have any other social media other than Facebook?

A: Ye of course, you can follow us on twitter as well as Instagram, like I said you can also subscribe on our website to get updates.

Q: Do you have somewhere where people can post fan art?

A: We don’t have a specific place but if you want to post fan art then just post it on twitter with the #BMTHFanArt

Q: Where will your next concert be?

A: We have 4 more concerts coming up, our next one will be in San Francisco, you can find out where the other concerts are on our website. You will also be able to buy the ticks there.

Q: Do you think you will work with the same director again?

A: I hope so, working with PlasticKid was great, but we will see what happens but when we find out you guys will be the first to know.

Q: Ive been a long time collector of your albums, will this album have a special edition of some kind?

A: I’m happy to hear you’re a long-time fan and yes, for this album you can buy a digipak as well as a vinyl if you want that.

The questions and answer's where altered a bit when people commented on the post. Here are the sreenshots of the Facebook comments:

Digipak unwrapping

I pretended to be the bass guitarist for BMTH and did a unwrapping of our new digipak. 

Sophie also created an unwrapping where she pretended to be a massive fan.

Evaluation Question 4 - Technologies

How did you integrate technologies - software, hardware and online - in this project?

This post I will discuss the software, hardware and online that we used to create our video, website and digipak.

Software

Final cut pro X

This is the editing software that was used for most of the editing process, I had no experience with it so I had to learn how to use it for the first time. I used the basic tools in the program when I edited the music video.

Adobe Premiere Pro

This was the editing software I used in my AS course and what I was originally going to use when editing our music video this year. Due to that we couldn't transfer the project between these to editing software's I ended up not using Premiere Pro when editing the music video. However because I had Premier Pro on my computer I used it to edit together all my other work, such as my Vodcasts, Lyric Video, and Podcasts. As I didn't use it extensively I didn't learn anything new through this program but I did have to learn how to use a different program.

When I created the first lyric video I used a techniques called color correction which lets you change the video to black and white but have a few key colors stand out. You can read more about it here.

Offliberty & SaveFrom.net

These two software's let you download YouTube Videos, this was very us full for us this year as it was an easy way to use YouTube footage in vodcasts and examples. I have used SaveFrom.Net before and but it was blocked on the school computers and thats when I found out about Offliberty.

Skype

As I was working in a group of 3 we used Skype as an easy and cheap way to communicate. We used it in the start of the year to talk about ideas and what we needed to to, later on in the year we used it for the evaluation question as I send some sound files that I had recorded over to Sophie where she then edited the radio interview.

Apps

This year I used a lot of apps to help me throughout the year. The apps I used where Facebook, Twitter, Wix, YouTube, Spotify, Polaroid Zip and the Internet. For our band we created a Facebook page, a twitter page and an Instagram page as well as a website. I would say that I used Facebook the most as I used it to communicate with my group members as well as the other actors that helped us. I also used Facebook to update our Facebook page. I also used the Twitter app to look at what our twitter account looked like as well as to add a comment. I didn't use the Wix app that much all I used it for was to check out what our website looked like. I used the Internet app on my phone a lot throughout the to search up information about the band. I used spotify as research for my Vodcast 3 and to listen to the track we used for our video. I used YouTube to look at BMTH actual music video to give one of the actors a better idea of how to create verisimilitude. The Polaroid Zip app was used when we created the Polaroid Photos, the app connects to a small Polaroid printer that prints out any photo on your phone.

Photoshop

I am not very familiar or good with Photoshop but I learned some of the basics so I could create some of the merch. Bronwen used Photoshop the most as she has experience with it, she used it to create the digipak as well as the merch.




Here you can see an example of when Sophie created some merch for the website



Here is also a video where Bronwen goes through creating the digipak.

Hardware

iPhone 6S

My group members have this phone and we used to to record some footage, the camera on the phone isn't as good as the camera we used for filming the video but it was good to use when we needed to film behind the scenes moments. We also used this phone to take pictures that we then used as the Polaroid pictures.

Samsung Galaxy S5

This is the phone I have which I had all my apps. I also used my phone for some behind the scenes filming. Originally we used both phones to film slow-mo for our first video idea but later we decided not to use it.

Green Screen 

This year I used a lot more green screen then last year. We had originally planed to borrow a green screen from the school but we went on a school trip to a location in Luxembourg where they had a large green screen room. You can read more about our use of Green Screen here.

Camera - Canon 70D

For most of our filming we used my camera the Canon 70D. We used this camera for a few reason, 1 being that the quality on the camera is better then the school cameras, the other reason was because we shared cameras with other year groups and sometimes there where not enough cameras.

Camera - SONY A58

This was the camera we borrowed from school, we used the camera for our practice video for "Follow You" as well as for "Throne".

MacBook Retina

This was the computer Sophie used to edit the music video on. I borrowed her computer when I had to edit the music video because she had the editing software on her computer.

Lenovo Yoga 3 Pro

This was the computer I used in class and for most of my blogging. In the start I used this computer for editing until I had some computer issues and the computer had to be send in for some repairs.

Alienware m15x

This was the computer I used when I worked at home, because it is a powerful computer I used it to edit most my videos. I used this computer to blog on when my Lenovo was having problems.

iMac

In our class room we had new iMacs to work on, some students like myself had our own laptops to work on but we still used the iMacs if we needed to use a programs the school had such as Photoshop. I was not very familiar with the the iOS software so i preferred to work on Windows when I could.

Portable Hard-drives

Throughout the year we used hard drive to share footage and files within the group. We used from 4GB USBs to 2TB harddrives. We also used them as back up storage incase we lost anything on the computers.

SD cards

We used from 4GB to 64GB SD cards. The 4GB SD card was just to small for the quality film we shot and therefor I got a 64GB SD card. Sophie used a 32GB SD card so combined we didn't run out of space. We also used a Mirco SD card for the GoPro.

GoPro Hero

I have a GoPro Hero that we used to film close ups of the bass guitar playing. In the start of the year the school got new GoPros which we also used. We used mine for filming when we couldn't get a hold of the school GoPros.

GoPro Hero 4

We used the Hero 4 with a waterproof case to film underwater, because I knew how to use a GoPro i tough Sophie how to use it. The good thing with the Hero 4 compared to the Hero is that the Hero 4 has a screen so you can see what you film. The problem was however that we did have googles to see what we filmed and it was also hard to film steady underwater.

GoPro Hero 5

The Hero 5 was completely new and can shoot in 4k. We used this GoPro to film some of the Green Screen footage. We hadn't properly prepared for filming with a GoPro so we didn't have a gorilla Pod so the footage ended up being to shaky to use.

Tripod

We used a tripod for almost all of our filming, we didn't use a tripod for the underwater or the running sequence, we also didn't use a tripod for some of the couple scenes. The tripod really helped us and made the footage a lot better.

Dolly

When we filmed the green screen we got to use an attachable dolly. I did a post on the dolly which you can check out here.

Polaroid Pictures

For the scene when the female protagonist burns the Polaroid Picture we used Polaroid Zip Instant Printer. I did a short post on it you can check out here.

Drone

For some of the Follow You scenes we used my Parrot Bebop Drone. However due to some wind on the day we couldn't get the framing right and the shots where a bit shaky. When we changed track to Throne we decided on filming in the forest and because im not a very skilled drone pilot we decided against filming with it due to the high risk of crashing.

Social Media

Facebook

We created a Facebook page for our band as Facebook is the most used form of social media and every band has a Facebook page. We where all admins of the page so we could all post but I was in charge. We all posted the same thing on each social media as we found that that was often done by real bands.

Twitter

Sophie created a Twitter page. The Banner and Profile Picture where the same for twitter and Facebook. The content of the tweets where things that other band have or would say.

Instagram

Bronwen was in charge of the Instagram page where she has posted photos of the the main singer and the band.

Blogger

This is the same blogging website we used last year so I knew how to add links list and how to navigate the website. We used blogger to show our journey and give evidence of everything we have done

Soundcloud

This year we used soundcloud to upload some of the podcasts, I am not to sure how soundcloud works so Sophie uploaded all here Podcasts to Soundcloud while I added them to YouTube.

YouTube

Seeing as the music video editing was done on Sophie's computer she uploaded the rough cuts but all the Podcasts, Vodcasts and other videos that I created I uploaded to my YouTube channel.

Crossword

I also used a website called crossword labs which lets you create and try other peoples crossword. My crossword was filled with terminology which other people could use to test themselves. You can try it out here.





GIPHY

I also used the website GIPHY which lets you create gifs from youtube videos or videos you've created. I created some of my own gifs for use of reference.

WIX

Wix.com was the website maker we used to create our website. Wix was easy to use when you leanred the basics and created professorial websites. I started creating the websites and started added the foundation needed for as our website and as time went on we had all contributed to the website, here you can see a screen recording of the final website as well as a video where i go through different parts of the website in more depth.