In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms andconventions of real media products?
There are ranges of different music videos they
ca
n run from five-minute dance videos e.g. “Michael Jackson thriller” to band performance such as the killers “Mr. Brightside”. Each music video is different, depending on the genre of music it is it will shape the type of music video they will have. Music video usually use a lot of quick cuts and close ups so that they audience will stay w
atching th
e video, also they have the artist involved in the shots. Each music video usually tends to last around three to four minutes, but in some cases you can get music videos that last longer than that such as “Thriller”. Our song “The Killers- all these things I’ve done” follows “Andrew Goodwin’s Dancing in the distraction factory” theory with our video following a relationship between the lyrics and visuals.
The genre of our music video
indie/rock. The conventions for our genre of music are the following;
Artist and band performance, which are normally shot as a live performance, performing on stage within a blank room no windows or audience. In this genre of music they tend to use a lot of close up shots to show the main artist singing, also a lot of wide shots to show the whole band
performance. W
hen indie follows a n
arrative it is usually a symbolic meaning and does not relate to the lyrics of the song.
Within our music video we have broken conventions by using a narrative which the lyric and the visuals relate to each other. The song/lyrics are about
somebody who is strugerling in life and in our video we see that he is on his last option in life by turning to religion. Another convention we broke was the band performance that we did not use in the entire video we wanted to change the feel of the mus
ic video by using the alcoholic aspect and the religious aspect to try to relate to an wider audience then just people who like a particular genre of music. But we did stick to a few conventions su
ch as the c
asual clothing the main
character is wearing and the colors of the overall video. The black and white scene are scene that you would see in a typical indie music video.
The construction of our music video was to be different from the original and a one of a kind music video. We felt that the best option for our music video would be a narrative with intervals of band performance in scene, which include the confessions box. Our target audience would recognize that there is m
ore than one theme in our video and that mean there are more than one type group/social class that would relate with our music video.
There are a lot of connotations in our music video which make it stand out fro
m o
ther music video, for example; we used different shad
es of colour for are two different characters. We used dark colours to represents the problem and negative person in our music video. Then on the other part of our video the character that represent help and solution to the negative, is colour.
Other connot
ation would be the style of bo
th the characters clothing fits well into the genre of music we are working in they or both wea
ring casual clothes, the female is wearing bright colours
which make her st
and out in our media piece, wear as our lead male character is sticking to conventions buy wearing darker clothes. The colour of the clothing also relate to the first point about the scene colour theme.
For this part of the evaluation we are comparing and analysing the different aspects of the ancillary products and the main video product for our A2 media coursework. The ancillary part of the course work consists of the album cover and advert that we have made promoting the band and the release of the album.
I designed the album cover for the Ancillary part of our course work with a plan to try and kee it as simple as possible. Researching different styles of Albumwork I took an interest in the new Take That album progress, this image made me think about the cartoon image of evolution. Researching these images I found one that we thought would fit in with the genre because it was slightly humours and had a simple design.
To make the product stand out and catch the audience attention from other products on the shelf, we added to primary colours in one for different images in the timeline. I left the person on the end of the timeline/present time black and white to show the lack of freedom now in present time. The background for the our album cover was just a simple metallic grey gradient fading to white, felt like this was effective because it is simple but look very professional with the contrast of colour. The intertextuality between are two products was good and effective because the colours on the background are similar to ones used in the video (black & white). The fontfor our too pieces of texts on our album cover was taken for the website “Dafont.com”, we was search for a font which was not as bold, more of an italic style. “Black chancery”was a font that we all though would stand out well on our cover. When selecting a name for our band we wanted a name that would relate to out music video, “highs and lows” was a good title because in our media video we see the ups and downs of our main character.
We made this advert as our very first draft advert, we had a lesson where we showed the rest of our class our work and we got their feedback, theywere able to tell us that this advert was not going to be professional enough and they thought the design was not good enough. so we had to design our second one which we got the classes approval.
We also made a second advert to help promote the band album and to promote tour dates. The advert included quotes from magazines, the latest tour dates including location, information on where to buy tickets and album. This advert also has a different theme than our other advert, we main and image of a guitar the main focus of attention with information dotted around the main image. we used a dark blue background with a pale blue font to show different contrasts of colour. For information on were to buy product from we used the company logos because it is more recognizable and stand out more to audience. This ancillary piece is different from our other product because there is no subtextual link from this product to our main production. Overall I feel like we have achieved in making very professional products and that they are very similar to mainstream product that we see today. We feel like we have created some strong links between all of our products that we have produced for our coursework, And Finally that we feel that the intertextuality between our products is strong because we keep the same colour schemes and font.
What have you learned from your audience feedback?
As a group we have realised how important audience feedback is in the making of a music video. During the research and planning stage we had been organised in the way we approached deciding the music video we was going to be using, after choosing the song that we was going to use we were instantly thinking about ideas that we can put in the video. Having the ideas for the video we pitch these ideas to the class to see what they thought of the ideas, the feedback that we got from the class was pretty good and from having these ideas we were able to keep adding to the ideas, the main idea that we started with was to have a man who has been struggling with life commiting all sorts of sins, we had our first idea was to have him as a religious man who has come to church to speak to a preist in a confessions box but from this we was going to have him go into a fantasy world. Our peers then suggested ideas that can make our idea better such as; not to have the man go into this fantasy world as they said that this would be hard to film and that they couldn’t see this fitting in with the theme we was going with.
In another lesson that we had we was acompanied by a proffessional director Bevan Walsh. In our groups we had one on ones with Bevan who helped us with a lot, we told Bevan our ideas for the music video, he was able to give us feedback and what he would like to see within, we had a good discussion about these ideas and he said that he likes the original ideas. From talking about it Bevan was able to give us alternatives to having him go in to a fantasy world. After this one on one we had with Bevan we were able to come to a conclusion which left us with our character facing real life events such as alcoholism and his love life.
From going through the planning stages we had a really good idea of what we were going to to be filming, so we got on with the filming in stages of what we needed to film. For one scene we got some insperation from beven about different camera shots to use and how this would let the audience portray our character. The way in which our audience were able to portray the main actor was by having a scene of our video set in an AA meeting, we made it clear to the audience that it was an AA meeting by including posters and signs saying welcome to the AA meeting. After being able to film parts of the video we was then able to start piecing the video on the computer, once this had been put together we were able to do another feedback session with the peers in our class, this was an effective exercise as we were able to see what they thought of the video whilst still being edited, we was then told what they think that we as a group could do better and how to improve the video editing wise.
One of the tasks that we had to carry out was to create a focus group meaning we had to film people telling us what the thought of our video, these were not people that had already seen it, and the people that we asked were to be of any gender, race, religion or age. We just want to see what they thought of it and what they thought we could improve on and how they believe we should go about doing this. We were then able to watch back over the focus group and analyse what had been said and see which of the ideas we can actually make work.
Over the course of time we have had to do a series of Practical based work and also theory side of the work, as the video we have been creating is finished we were able to perform a peer assessment on each of the videos, this is were each group will get the chance to have a look at each video created in our class and leave them feedback on a sheet of paper next to the computer they were working on, this is a good exercise as each group will get an idea of what people their age think of the video that they have created. some of the comments that were given to us were that we were able to use the camera to a good standard meaning that we used good shots such as; close ups, medium close up, extreme close ups, panning, zooming shots and also high and low angle shots. The thing that we wanted to hear most was that the narrative follows the song well and that it all makes sense. Some of the criticism that we got about it was that we had to work on some of the scenes a bit more and for them not to be to cheesy, other than this we were impresses with the feedback that we received but we were most pleased about the video we were able to create.
To conclude on this subject we believe that audience feedback works as we are able to make our changes to the target audience’s recommendations, having a variety of ages, genders, races and also religions has help us find out who this video is best suited for and what people of all different ages want to see within a music video.
How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
During our media video with have used a varitey of media technologies which have molded and constructed our music video.The first technologie that we was introduced to was our group blog which as a group we have to create from scratch. Having a blog avalible on the internet gives us an advantage compared to keeping all of our work hand written in a folder as you can save and upload work to the blog resulting in keeping our work in more than one area. Another advantage for using a blog that the site is interactive meaning that all members of our group can log onto the blog individually resulting anyone of us can check and upload work without the other members at any given time. This left us being able to spread our work load between us and improved our time management skills in the process.
The internet was one of the most important factors of our music video, as all our work has been saved on the internet. The websites youtube and virgin media helped us hugely as it allowed us to search up music videos that we needed to analyse and watch, watching music videos gave us ideas that we may add into our own music video. Youtube helped us as a group to gain an understanding about our song by the killers “All These Things I’ve Done” as we were able to watch it over and over again and begin to read into the lyrics and begin to look further into the song than first impressions. The website “google” allowed us to search up about the song and find out information on the band that we are studying; we found out that the killers are Mormons resulting in us as a group being able to take an understanding to the song “All These things I’ve Done” has a relgious theme to it.
The filming equipment, we used a camera, tripod, and green screen. The advantage of using digital technology is that we can film a clip then look over what we have just filmed, if we don’t like it then we can re film until we do, by looking on the video playback menu that is built in the camera. The benefit off modern day technology is the fact that you do not have to produce your slides and cut them up and stick them back together so the shots can run, the shots can just be edited on an Apple Mac computer. Tripods improve any type of clips you are taking because of the professional look it gives you; it keeps your camera in one spot not allowing any handheld movements. The tripods also improve the variety of shots you are looking to do within what you are filming; our music video consisted of a lot of pans and low angel shots but still maintained the professional touch to all of our clips. Green screen allowed us to film in front of a sheet, which then allows you to take the entire colour out of the shot and place what you filmed in front of a different background, we used this when we got ten people to sing the lines “I got soul but I am not a solider “.
Final cut produced and edited our film, some of the techniques we used was the crop tool the cut tool and video transitions. Compared to analogue editing where you would have to cut and crop it together by hand. Final cut allowed us to upload your footage and crop each individual shot with a click of a button. Editing at a click of a button allowed us to use transitions that would structure the narrative of our music video. The black and white filter we used in a third of the shots to inform the audience that it is a past event. The fact that this is a digital editing we can change our transitions as many times as possible without reading any other part of our music video. The Apple Mac computers are a benefit to our group as we able to run more than programs, quicker than an average computer which also allows us to run more than one program at a fast pace allowing us to get more tasks done at a time.
Filming the focus group is evidence rather than writing down each place of information that each person has given us. Filming each candidate allowed us to pick up everything that they have said including quotes that they have said which could give us positive or negative feedback, which we may have missed out on. Having our music video available on youtube and the school website allows everyone in the world to watch it, meaning you gain a bigger audience feedback and therefore a gain a wider audience. This is a huge benefit because it is available anywhere at any time meaning that you can refer back to it at anywhere with a computer at any time.
Photoshop allowed us to design and create our advert and our CD cover for the music video. This helped us as it allowed us to delete sections of work that you don’t like where as if you drew the work you would have redo the whole thing from scratch.
To conclude all of these media technologies have benefited us to make our music video look very professional. We our very fortunate that we live in a era that has all of these technologies that make our videos look very professional, we have had many comments that’s tell us hoe professional the music video looks and it would not have been possible with the technologies available.
