Cathy Mallett Evaluation

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

We definitely took a lot of inspiration for our video from other current artists in the same genre (as you can see from our blog). The conventions which we used include general conventions for music videos such as lip syncing/band shots:

This is a screen grab from our own video.

This is from a video by our chosen artist: 30 Seconds to Mars.

Other conventions which we stayed true to (in terms of the band) were:

- Conveying a message through our video; 30STM always try and put across messages to the people watching their videos e.g. 'The Kill' video is supposed to show the fans that everybody has battles with themselves, but we have the strength to overcome them. Our own video conveys a strong message about war: some of the men who go out to fight don't ever return home. We wanted to draw attention to this. 

- The Echelon 'A level or rank in an organization, a profession, or society'. The Echelon is the name which 30 Seconds To Mars use to describe their fans, making it into some sort of 'cult'. In many of their videos, 30 Seconds To Mars include the Echelon to make them feel more connected and part of the band. We tried to create the same effect in our video: 

 On the album 'This is War' which our song is from, 30 Seconds To Mars used recordings of the Echelon singing and used them on the final record. This is why we chose to have Echelon members singing along.

This is taken from our video, it shows some of their 'fans' singing the lyrics.

This is from 'Closer to the Edge' by 30 Seconds to Mars. The whole video is about the Echelon and features thousands of them!

- The Triad. This is the symbol for 30STM. It's like their logo:

The triad is supposed to show unity: triangles are the strongest geometric shape, it symbolises the Echelon's strength. 

30 Seconds To Mars use the triad on pretty much everything they do. The members of the band often have the triad on their clothes, they use a glowing giant triad as part of their set whilst on stage and also include the triad on merchandise, CD's and of course, in their music videos. 

We decided to use the triad as they did, we used the image in our final video, our CD cover and our website. This would help promote the band and also keep to the convention:

The triad necklace is significant throughout our video. It helps our main soldier (Sam) to keep his faith whilst at war, acting as a crucifix since the Echelon see this band as a new religion. The necklace is then taken back to his wife when he dies. 

This is from 'Hurricane' by 30 Seconds To Mars 

You can see he has a triad painted on his chest and he is also wearing a triad necklace. This is just one example of many where the triad is significantly used.

-The use of quotes. 30 Seconds to Mars often use words/quotes to illustrate and draw attention to the message of the video. We decided to use both quotes and words (on boards) throughout to emphasize the pain of war:

The signs we used are to show who the people holding them have lost. Here shows Connor who was Sam's Comrade. We also had signs for husband, brother and father. 

It shows the people left behind and affected by war. These people suffer the awful traumas of war as much as the soldiers do. We wanted to draw attention to this. 

We also chose to open and close with quotes which we found to be emotional and highlight the point we are trying to make: War is Hell. We also used a quote on our CD cover about war:

This is the quote at the start of our video. To do this we simply clicked on the 'add title' feature on imovie.

This is from 'This is War' by 30 Seconds to Mars. The band use this quote to open their music video, using the quote for the same purpose as us (aswell as adding a dramatic effect!). 

-Use of strong narratives. Every single 30 Seconds To Mar's video shows a very strong, if somewhat strange, narrative. The band inter-cuts shots of them performing into the narrative, but the narrative always remains the dominant section of the video. The band brings out music videos which are 10 minutes long, purely because the narrative is such an important aspect, they can't fit it into the length of the song. We decided not to use more time then our song to build a narrative because our song (Vox Populi) is already 6 minutes long. However, we kept the narrative dominant but included performance shots as well. This was seen as a negative by some people who gave us feedback. Some commented that the performance aspect was overrun by the narrative, which I can understand BUT we were staying true to our band's style.

I think that we slightly challenged the conventions of not only this genre, but also our artist. We added a conceptual aspect to our video to give it a slightly more emotional appeal. This aspect includes the use of flashbacks and hallucinations had by Sam as he is dying. 30 Seconds to Mars are quite well known for having strange, conceptual, grotesque aspects in their videos, but we kept our video much more realistic then they do. For example, in The Kill by 30 Seconds to Mars, the band all become clones of themselves:

We used flashbacks (shown in black and white, also with 'ghost trail' effect) when Sam dies. He sees his comrade trying to save him turn into his wife. This shows him thinking about her and only wanting to see her one last time before he died: she's everything to him:

We also used another conceptual aspect towards the start when we showed some of the clips being played backwards. We did this to foreshadow the events about to happen and to show the audience that they are about to watch a memory as opposed to a present happening (unlike 30STM who always set their videos in the present). So I suppose we stuck to this convention on some level, but also rebelled against it. 

Another convention which we challenged was using different actors for our band and soldiers, enabling us to keep the performance and the narrative completely separate. A lot of bands keep to the same rule as 30 Seconds to Mars: the band members play the characters in the narratives. This is also the same for My Chemical Romance who are of the same genre. I think that bands choose to do this to promote their videos; the fans want to watch THEM, not some actors they don't know. However, we chose to keep our band and our soldiers separate because we thought it made the narrative seem more real. The band are only representing the idea of war, they have never been through war themselves. Having the band playing the soldiers wouldn't have has the effect which we desired; showing war in the most realistic form as we possibly could. The only problem with this was that we couldn't show as much lip syncing as the other bands could, purely because the narrative was our focus but our band wasn't in the narrative.

This is an image of Gerard Way playing a character in the music video for The Ghost Of You by his band, My Chemical Romance. I did think that he did a good job because he's a talented actor and is also passionate about war, but I thought for ours it wouldn't work. We need two separate images.

The conventional shots which are used in the genre of music we were looking at include band shots, close ups of the band/instruments, close ups showing emotion and silhouettes.We took inspiration for some of our shots from our band 30 Seconds To Mars, and also from My Chemical Romance:

These are from our video and The Ghost of You by My Chemical Romance. We really loved the emotion which MCR used when one of their soldiers was killed. We tried to replicate the emotion and shot type as much as we could to bring forth a similar reaction from the audience. 

We used some tutorials on YouTube to help us with certain parts of the video, CD and website process. These included:

- Help for Photoshop: Photoshop Tutorial

- Gun sound effects: Machine Gun Sound Effects

The final tutorial we used was about how to safely paint a plastic gun:

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

Throughout the creation of our video, CD cover and website, we have maintained the theme of war but also tried to show what you would expect from a 30 Seconds To Mars product, incorporating certain synergies.

Firstly, we considered the bands iconography. As I previously mentioned, 30 Seconds To Mars are constantly using the triad shape as their symbol for the band and the Echelon. Taking this into account, we decided to incorporate this symbol into not only our video, but also the website and CD:

This is a print screen of part of our front cover for our CD. We added in the triad but only faintly so that it wasn't the main attention of the image, but it was still a prominent part which kept to the band's symbolism/conventions.

The idea of having the triad as a faint image behind text is similar to the cover which 30 Seconds To Mars used to promote their single Kings And Queens (above). We think that if someone saw our CD cover without the writing, they would still make the connection to the band.

For the website, we created the background ourselves making a triad shape out of photos of the Echelon as well as images of/about 30 Seconds To Mars.

We chose to do this because it makes the triad seem more personal to the fans. It's something which I could imagine 30 Seconds To Mars doing since their fan base is the most important thing to them. This also shows a firm bond/connection from the fans to the band which is what they are constantly wanting to achieve. 

Another example of intermedia synergy which we used was the use of fonts and colours:

These are the two fonts which we used on the website and CD cover. We chose to use them because they have been used by 30 Seconds To Mars on numerous occasions (T-shirts, CDs, website, music videos, merchandise, posters etc) and would therefore fit into the bands promotion techniques and make the products easily recognisable by the fans. 

We also used the same font for our CD  and website to keep the running theme:

After we managed to get the font we wanted, we then had to decide on a colour scheme. We experimented with several different colours for example:

30 Seconds To Mars are always using the same colour schemes throughout their videos, CD covers and on their website. The colour scheme which they use is made up mainly of: Red, white, maroon and black (in addition to black and white images). Taking this into account we decided to use those colours for the website:

I think that this makes our website look a lot like their own, even incorporating the main image at the top in black and white. We did a lot of research on band websites (including 30 Seconds To Mars') and most of them seemed to have the same basic things on their websites:

- Social network links

- Tour dates

- Mechandise 

- News reel
- Photos
- Twitter live feed

We used all of these for our website because we thought it made it look more realistic and genuine. We took extra care to create a 'live feed' from the band's actual Twitter accounts:

We did this because, again, we were drawing a lot of attention to the band's close relationship with their fans. The band have a live feed on their official website which we thought backed up the point which we were trying to make: Echelon is everything to this band.

Another example of how our products and those of 30 Seconds To Mars inter-relate is the use of glyphics. What I'm reffering too, is another symbolic element which is specific to this band, similar to the use of the triad and the Echelon. 30 Seconds to Mars use these same glyphics on CD's, website, merchandise, in videos, on clothing, on instruments, tattoos and even on their tour bus.

Here are some examples of how the band/Echelon use the glyphics:

This is drummer Shannon Leto. As you can see, he has the glyphics tattooed onto his forearm, symbolizing the importance of the band to him.

This is the cover of 3O Seconds To Mars' album 'Capricorn'. As you can see from this, the glyphics are used going vertically downwards next to '30'. The band use the glyphics as a way of communicating almost secretly to the Echelon. 

We decided that if we wanted our products to resemble 30 Seconds To Mars' we had to include the glyphics somewhere in our work:

This is our CD design. We kept the theme of war and instead of using text for '30 Seconds To Mars' we decided to use the glyphics.

This is the top bar/menu bar on our website. We also used the glyphics here to break up each link/title, acting as bullet points. By including the glyphics here as well, we deffinately insured that the Echelon would trust our website as a 30 Seconds To Mars site. 

30 Seconds To Mars is quite hard to place when it comes to genres. Their sound is quite individual and unique to the band, so when it comes to band image we weren't really sure what to use. We did a lot of research into the band member's appearances and we found that they go with quite a 'rock' image:

To portray this image in our video, we took inspiration from their style and came up with this 'look' for the band:

I think we were successful in capturing the band's style by using black clothing and leather jackets. Also, the actors we chose for the band already have a rock style look anyway, so they had the hair for it!!

By constantly using 30 Seconds To Mars iconography, I think that our final products suit the band's image and reputation whilst firmly showing understanding as to what the band is all about.

3. What have you learned from your audience feedback?

We received around 17 evaluations sheets from our class who all watched our music video. Most of the feedback which we received was very positive and helpful, these are the things which the audience liked most about our video:

- Good variety of shots
- Strong/convincing narrative
- Good actors
- Good costumes/make-up/locations
- Use of flashbacks
- Use of effects (e.g. slow motion)
- Use of signs

I went onto Wordle (www.wordle.net) to create an image of our feedback: 

From looking at this and also the feedback sheets, it is clear which elements of the video were most liked and commented on by our audience:

-Flashbacks
-Sad
-Realistic
-Signs

 We also asked the audience to specify which aspects of the video needed improvement. Many people left that section blank or simply commented with ‘Can’t think of any improvements’ which is always a positive sign! However, the improvements we did get were really helpful and we agreed with what they said:

-         - Not enough band shots

-          -Too much narrative

-       -   Unrealistic guns

-       -   Performance of the band

I for one completely agree with the point made about using ‘more band shots’. Whilst editing the video we were constantly trying to fit in as many shots of the band as possible, but we’d filmed so much footage for the narrative that we just couldn’t get any more in. Also, as I previously stated, the band which we were replicating use mainly narrative in their videos with very little elements of performing or lip syncing. An example of this would be 30 Seconds to Mars' very controversial video for their song Hurricane which is almost 100% narrative... yet it is 13 minutes long:

As for the point about the guns, well, we’ve addressed the issue of using realistic guns on the blog weeks ago. It wasn’t that we didn’t want to use realistic ones, it’s purely because it’s actually illegal to.

We had everyone mark our video out of 40. When we received all of their marks, we found the average mark from the class which was 37. Overall, we are very happy with the feedback and will take it into consideration for our evaluations.


We also put our video on YouTube. So far it has recieved over 200 hits, so we're taking that into account and hopefully it is a good sign. We then posted the YouTube link (A2 Media - Vox Populi) onto Facebook. Here are some comments which we received from this:

These are just a few of the comments which we received on Facebook. All comments we got were positive, however this could be because the people who commented were quite bias as they are our friends!

Making this video has been both a tiring and yet a brilliant experience. The end result makes the hours of editing and filming in the freezing cold worth it! All of the actors were really good to work with and we got on very well as a group. I think that everyone within our group has pulled their weight and done equal amounts towards the final product. We are very happy with what we have achieved and I'm really glad we chose such a unique band to make a music video for!