Written Evaluation

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

 As a group, we picked to use the song “Good Time” by Owl City and Carly Rae Jepson. The song is a mix between Owl City’s Electronic and Carly’s Pop music genres to make synthpop.

In the video, we followed Andrew Goodwin’s theory. We included thought beats in the video to make it more exciting and to keep to the pace of the song. We used the star image of both artists whom can be seen singing both of their parts and acting in the video.

Throughout the music video we’ve tried to link the scenes into what is being sung, the main narrative of the song is in the name as well; they are doing what allows them to have a good time and are singing about it.

The Original “Good Time” Official music video shows both Carly and Owl getting prepared for the outdoor party then traveling to the great outdoors to have a good time. throughout the song both of the artists are separate doing their own preparation for the night, and only in the later parts of the song are they finally performing together, we tried to re-create this in our music video. 

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

Our brand identity is made up of the mix between the genres of Carly Rae and Owl City.
We've taken the Pop from Carly and the Electronic from Owl City which owes it's partnership to the synth pop genre; from these genres we created our brand identity.
The the Advert and digipak uses the same colour scheme throughout, this is to help people to indicate the relationship between the advert and digipak.
The typical pop conventions would include bright colours and more repetitive colours or images associated with one of the songs or the name of the album in the case of the digipak or tour.
With the bright and repetitive colours from the pop genre, i also included the more electronic styles with the techniques that included these colours. It is often that the typical pop conventions includes the bright and repetitive colours but so does electronic; the main difference between them is the style/techniques which are used to create the final product i believe.

The narrative of the song "Good Time"is about two people getting ready to have just that, a good time. throughout the original song the first part of it is compromised of the two performing artists preparing themselves and gathering friends then making their way to the meeting place for them to have their party. With our cover of the song we tried to mimic the same process that the original goes through, however in our version in the stead of the wild party in the woods we have the firework display and the arcades. In the advert and digipak the digital art used is an attempt to mimic the bright lights of fireworks but some other images stray form this, such as the tri-pane images witch i am the most proud of.

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

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

During the planning stages for the Digipak and advert, I wanted to keep it within the genres of Pop and Electronic in keepings with the two main artists.

After seeing the planning of the music video; seeing that we were going to go with night time and fireworks for the great finale at the end of the song i decided that i should base the digipak around this.

During the planning thought process I was going to try and create a very typical colour scheme for the work, picking blue to represent Owl city and pink to represent Carly Rae. I needed to plan to create the digital art for six panes and with the colour scheme already chosen, I then started to use photoshop tutorials to find new techniques that I could later implement into the creation of the digital art. During the tutorial that was to create a fire orb I gave me the idea of creating a Katharine wheel firework and placing it on the back of the Digipack where the song listing and copyright information would be. I would of created it so it was quite big, and then place it on the back where you could only see one quater of the image witch would be placed in the top right; I also intended on having sparks flying off to the edges of the back cover.

This however proved to be initially difficult to merge blue and pink into the Catharine wheel and also to create the sparks, and at this time I had not decided on the constant background colour being black.

After looking at many other Digipaks from pop artists I thought to myself that these look too easy to make, the majority of the albums had a picture and slapped a layer on top of the picture to change it's colour. To me this was very boring way even though is was simple and sometimes effective which I admit can be the best solution or way to proceed.

Some Examples of the albums i was talking about.

These albums show the artist, with some colour layers slapped over the top on top of some air-brushed artists.

During the construction phase of the digipak and the advert, I had a set idea of what i wanted to create. I decided to go with a black background and use blue and pink for the colours, this was intended to represent the night time (black) and both Owl city and Carly (Jonny and Ellie, Blue & Pink).
In my work I focused more on an electronic styled digipak and advert, but in keeping with the genre I added pictures of the artists.
When I was creating the digipak the first image I created was the front cover, or what was supposed to be the front cover. In the final digipak this picture is still used, but instead it is used for an extra pane. The image is very simple and has the word "Good Time" centered on the pane and with photoshop I gave it a glow and made it look distinct and I believe it is eye catching. The reason it didn't become the front cover is because it didn't have a picture of the artists; unfortunately adding a picture to the picture didn't seem to fit and in my personal opinion made the image worse, which happens a lot when you add people to images I believe.

Later the second part of the Digipak i created was the disk, although originally the disk was going to look like this:

This was going to be the CD, but i felt that the text didn't fit and that the sound wave could be used to better effect it it was bigger. Although i liked this art for the CD, I changed it to better look like the Catharine wheel as i thought that would fit the CD better.

After i created the CD i went straight onto the creation of the spine, i did't really have an idea for any graphic art on the spine but i ended up simply putting two semi-circles witch differ in colour; the different colours are still consistant with all of the colours used.

The next part of the digipak i worked on was the back cover, originally the back cover was going to have a Catharine wheel in the top right corner, then the idea moved onto a firework. But after some time experimenting with ways to create fireworks and from some feed back from my other group members we agreed that the firework just "didn't fit.

So then I ended up creating an symmetrical pond ripple which in my opinion worked really well and i was happy with the results. I did use the same wind technique that is used over and over again to make it; I also use the pond ripple technique again when creating the front cover.  

The next part of the digipak i created was the tri-pane, I was going to create a image for each one separately but then i had the idea of using the sound-wave on the tri-pane instead and knocking three birds with one stone in the process. During the creation of the sound-wave i tried to get the colour the same as that on the back cover, however for reasons i don't know the colour never seemed to get the exact same which really irritated me. But none the less i continued to make the tri-pane sound wave, after it was finished i was really happy with the result, and i believe that if viewed large enough it's good enough to be a desktop background!

Lastly i created the final front cover for the digipak, i used the same technique that i used of the back cover for the front, originally i was not going to include a picture of the artists on the front cover and was going to display the name of the album in their place. I did however include a picture of the artists onto the front cover; with my main goal for the front cover was to keep to the constant colour scheme (which unfortunately i couldn't get the colours to match) and to make it stand out i believe that i managed to achieve it.

I then went on to make the advert which was the last piece of digitalart that needed to be created.
While pondering what i could make for the advert, i finally landed on the original front cover; although the technique i used on the original "Good Time" front cover is also used on the CD itself i felt that this technique could be used again and that on a larger canvas, it would look considerably better than the limited space it was already in.

I started out with the same black canvas, i then used the same technique from the CD and extra cover to draw the lines. I spaced the line groups out; from the placement of the groups, i started with one group being low, then the next being high then the last being lower. The reason for this was to imitant the pitch of the song, it starts off calm then it kicks off and although it does not maintain the high pitch it levels at a higher pitch than when it started.

After the initial feedback for the digipak and advert, one of the main issues to arise was focused on the wrong order of the digipak. Compared to other digipak's the template that i had was in a different order from everyone else's. After a little editing i re-ordered the digipak so that the tri-pane included the back of the CD instead of the extra pane.
I also tried to edit the advert to make the pink lines brighter but 

In conclusion, i enjoyed the creative side of the project; creating the Digipak was interesting but at certain times i wish i had some more inspiration and for photoshop to stop changing the colours when the properties are the same.