final music video

Evaluation

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


Firstly, we gathered ideas from both previous groups videos and famous ones. We studied their ideas and how effective they look and turned them into our own. One of the main videos we looked at was Joshua Radin - I'd rather be with you, our idea wasn't based upon his although we discovered that it follows the same storyline. This helped us get a feel as to how we want to portray our video as also looked at the conventions he uses such as lighting and costume.
The enitial idea of the woodland scene and the guitar is very stereotypical for an acoustic video, however it works well for ours and we all had a similar idea when we first heard the song.
In terms of Goodwins points we looked at previous videos to see if they met the criteria, by doing this we saw what works well and what doesn't. We used voyerism in our video as the main character is dressed in a way that suits the genre (pop/rock) by doing this the audience can relate to the video better and it becomes easier to follow. We also gave the main character the most screen time, this promotes the artist and he becomes reconisable.
Furthermore, the lyrics are about a love story so we tried to link this to our video, by using flachbacks and making them desaturated we managed to distinguish the two so they are clear.

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



We tried to make all three of our products relate in some way. To do this we used either the main character or the guitar in both our digipack and magazine advert. For the digipack we used the same location as the video, this helps the audience to identify the song and the artist. Also, we featured the guitar a lot in our video so we thought it was necessary to use this object for our magazine advert. Despite this we changed the color of the guitar to a de-saturated b&w, this gave the effect that its quite a sad song and also relates to the color of the flashbacks in our video. 
The mood of both the video and ancillary texts is quite dull, we felt it would look effective to have the empty woodland in the texts as it shows how lonely the main character is, this also relates to the lyrics of the song as he has lost his 'girl'.
Furthermore, we quoted on the magazine advert that you can consume the digipack from hmv and itunes, we decided to use these as they are the most popular places for our target audience to get music.
Additionally, we labeled our video as certificate U, this is because there is no inappropriate content or scenes in our video that viewers would find disturbing. We made sure we featured this on the digipack so it is visible to our audience. 
Overall all three products relate in some way and they all include the same theme, this is recognizable to the fans and the target audience. 


What have you learnt from your audience feedback?


We felt that our audience feedback was appropriate and useful whilst we were in the process of making our video. By taking it into consideration we got a view other than our own about how it looks, this helped us improve and also notice things we may not have seen.
Firstly, we received feedback quoting that there was no lip syncing involved, at the time we had not done this however it was our plan to do it in the final cut. Also, people liked the idea of the flashbacks and how they fit in well with the lyrics, we decided to keep this idea but elaborate on it more so the flashbacks were more clear. Another quote we got was that we had a good variation of shots, at the time we weren't happy with what we filmed however this feedback influenced us to experiment even more with shot types. 
The feedback on our final video was mainly positive although most of the comments included how out of time the lip syncing and the guitar was, we found this hard to edit effectively and fit in. Despite this the other feedback suggested that people enjoyed our video and liked our idea. They commented on the flow of the story and the editing technique for the flashbacks mostly. Also, they liked the transitions and the simpleness of the overall video. 
In conclusion we found the feedback very useful especially for future preference, the one comment that stood out was that the main character wasn't enthusiastic enough, we would change this if we had the chance as we believe it would improve our video.


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


Over the entire duration of making our video we all advanced in several different programs and technologies. By using blogger to write all our research we found it easy to navigate and sort through it, we also liked the idea that we could all access the blog from different locations, this helped show that we can all have our own individual input. Other feedback was featured on here as-well so we were able to look at it in order and view who said what.
When we first got given the camera we already knew the basics, however we enjoyed looking for techniques and 'cheats' online. This research proved to be helpful as we found how to pan using an elastic band, we then used this whilst filming these shots. Also, the video quality was extremely good and this helped us make the video look effective and more professional.
When it came to editing our video we found final cut quite challenging despite having used it before. The effects we wanted to use were difficult to find and we had to render it a lot. Additionally, there were many clips which we weren't quite happy with, we found it hard to delete some of these without getting rid of the ones we wanted. Overall after we got used to the program we used it to our advantage and felt our editing techniques worked quite well.  
Furthermore, to portray a good effect on the ancillary texts we used a digital camera to take new pictures, this improved the quality of them and helped us when using photoshop. 
Luckily, everyone in our group knew how to use photoshop so we felt we done well in that part of the project.

Mark Nunn - Media Evaluation

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

My group made a music video for the song “Mayday” by the German band Tenbucks. I believe our video is a very effective fit for the song, and done to a relatively high standard. We had a collective idea of what we wanted to be included in our video from the moment that we heard the song, but also spent a large amount of time searching the internet for other inspiration along the same lines as our original idea. Our original idea was based on the very cliché music videos that the public are subjected to daily, I believe that to be the reason we all had such similar ideas for the video. Whilst searching, we found a video by the artist Joshua Radin, whose video was very similar to our concept, enabling us to gather our ideas and visualise what our video could potentially share a theme with. I believe the woodland setting of our video; although cliché and very common for acoustic songs worked very well for our song, and was the obvious choice amongst the group. The idea for our music video was to create a love story to match the sombre tale told by the lyrics. For this, we used two members of our group as the couple, and filmed the pair of them in romantic and “cute” situations (Such as playing in the woods, and at a pub). From this, we also filmed clips of the couple arguing to show the other side of the relationship that the lyrics convey, we included these clips throughout as flashbacks. As mentioned above, our music video and products may have embraced many conventions used in the past by real artists, but we believe we have also added our own touch by including the flashback scenes etc.

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

I believe that the ancillary products that our group created – The Digipack case and the poster – match our music video very well, both in terms of mood and style, for example, the poster highlights the genre by using a guitar as a main focal point of the image. Not only that, both the Digipack cover and the poster showed the environment that the video is set in, illustrating the location and mood of the video. I believe that these features are very effective at attracting a target audience as it is easily noticeable what sound the group have. Our ancillary products also have extra depth to them that we believe, as a group really add to the solemn sound of the track, for instance; the DVD cover shows the lead character of the video (Used to represent the lead vocalist of Tenbucks)  standing alone in the woods. The front of the Digipack shows the singer facing the camera, with the dark woods behind him, seemingly endless. This image is reversed on the rear of the video, where the singer is standing in the same position, just from the back, showing the other 180 degrees of environment – still empty woodland. The effect of having the singer isolated in this dark, somewhat dreary environment is that it shows just how alone he really is, to match the lyrics which show his sorrow at losing his love interest. As for the poster/advert that we created for the video, the group came up with the idea to use the guitar as the main focus, to really show those who see the poster what type of genre and sound the band have without even listening to the music.

In my opinion, all of the products that we created link very well together as a package, all of them complimenting each other and showing the public/audience what the band sounds like, and what their music is all about.

What have you learnt from audience feedback?

There are numerous lessons that we have learnt from feedback over the period of making the music video, almost all of it very helpful and constructive, helping us to improve the piece drastically. The feedback on the initial idea was overall very positive and showed that the class were very interested to see the product that we had envisioned and shared. The only issue that the class raised was “How are the night time scenes going to be lit?” This issue was evaded in the final product since the group decided against using the night scenes as we agreed that we couldn’t make them fit well in the storyline. Once our first cut was produced and shown to the class for feedback, the overall response was, again, very positive. We did understandably receive some creative criticism, with some saying that parts of the flashbacks were too bright, which mad it slightly difficult to make out some of the facial expressions within them. This was a very easy fix as we just had to return to FinalCut and lower the intensity of the effects that we applied to the flashback scenes. The second and final piece of feedback we received was that there weren’t actually any lip synced sections included in the video. This issue was down to an error involving mis-communication regarding when we could borrow the camera from the media department. Our planned date was supposedly unavailable, leaving us to film the whole of our rough cut in one lesson, without the lyrics prepared. This issue was already noted by the group, and justified in our second filming period where we re-filmed all of the clips that we had rushed in the previous session with lip syncing.  The final piece of feedback that we received was that that the storyline was a little difficult to follow, and that it should be made clearer. We took this feedback on and went straight back to the project to justify the issue. This was also a simple fix and just involved rearranging a few of the clips into a more obvious order to make the story clearer.

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

In terms of the programs that we used to learn everything we know now and create the products that we used, there were numerous vital to the task’s completion. The first of these technological aspects was the website Blogger.com where all of our work is showcased. This website acts as a portfolio for the whole project, and shows when the products were completed etc. The next most important media technologies involved in the project, were most definitely the Final Cut and Photoshop programs, without these, we wouldn't have been able to create the products that we had spent all of our time planning.

I knew how to use these programs relatively well before beginning the topic, so I didn't feel that I learnt many new skills in the process of making our music video. The one thing I did learn was how to use Chroma Keyer and a green screen to impose visuals on top of a pre-existing film.


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All in all I thoroughly enjoyed the project, I enjoyed using my pre-existing skills and developing them further.

evaluation

Evaluation questions

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

For our music video we decided as a team to choose a song by a German band called Tenbucks, the song was called “mayday” we thought this was the best choice as when we listened to all the tracks, we thought it was the best one and we all immediately liked it and had lots of ideas that we thought we could do for the video. As a group we picked the song out of a list of seven tracks that we were given I our class.

I think that our product used the conventions that we were given, such as Goodwin’s points because it follows them well, one of the points was selling the artist, we did this in our video by giving the main character (the artist) the most screen time, and only had the second character (love interest) in some sections of the video, which kept the attention on the artist, this helps to sell the artist because people remember his face and what he looks like from the video.  

 We all had ideas for what we wanted to have on the music video and from looking at previous students work and music videos from famous artists we found inspiration from famous artist’s songs theses were, “I’d rather be with you” by Joshua Radin and “Hero” by Enrique Iglesias’s, we liked theses two songs because they had the style, features and content in them that our group had thought about and we wanted to include in our music video, such as in Joshua Radin’s video of “I’d rather be with you” there is a clip of him sitting by a river playing his guitar and singing, which fitted perfectly with the style and sound of our song so we wanted to incorporate that into ours. We analysed the song by Joshua Radin and wrote down ideas and points that we thought were effective and liked to include in our video, such as flash backs and guitar shots.

We used voyeurism in our music video because we had the characters in costume that suited the style and genre of the song which was pop-rock, our main character wore skinny jeans and a shirt. As the song is a quite slow song we had a mixture of longs and short cuts between shots which looks good.

The lyrics fit well with the visuals, because when the main character is singing about his love for the love interest they are together. And when he is sitting or standing on his own playing the guitar it is in the slow or sad parts of the song which when you watch and listen to the music video really fits well.

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

The combination of the three products, the music video its self, the magazine advert and the DVD digi pack look and fit well together and relate well to the genre, this is because it promotes the artist without being  full of pictures of him as he features in two of the three products, the guitar is a strong feature in the video so we thought it would be a good item to put in one of the three products and we decided that it fitted best in the magazine advert as it is selling the artist because he plays the guitar in the video and people will remember that, it is involved with the whole promotional package but doesn’t take away from the feel of it all. The image that the product creates of the artist is good image as it shows him in the woods, which is in the music video when the artist and the second character are walking arm in arm thought he woods.  All three of the products tie in together as they have to wood theme which runs through all of them and the ancillary texts have something in them from the music video (artist, guitar and woodland)

It is successful in attracting the target audience, because it has the rating of the music video on the cover of the digi pack which we decided as a group to put as a U as it doesn’t have any contexnbt that would be inappropriate for children such as bad language and content of a sexual nature.

On the magazine we have included the name of the band and what you can expect to see in the digi pack, also where you will be able to purchase the digi pack which we put as on iTunes and HMV which are the best and most used places now to buy music. We also wrote a rating from a magazine that the music video would be talked about in and a star rating that the magazine gave it.

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

From the feedback that we were given for all of our products, the pitch, the rough cut and the final music video were mostly positive but some negative criticism that we needed to take onboard to help us improve the products. The audience thought that our pitch was good and that we had a lot of good ideas and that it could look good if we made sure we followed through with the ideas.

For the rough cut the audience thought that we had some good ideas such as the flash backs because it fit well with the song and they thought that we used a good range of shots, and that it was the beginning of a really good music video, but they did say that there was no lip syncing as we hadn’t put any in at that time, and the guitar sections needed to be cleaner as at some points it was obvious he wasn’t playing it as it didn’t fit with the guitar of the track, they said that they ideas and shots were good but different shots were needed and the shots we had needed to be improved they thought that we had a good story line running through with the main and second character. They said that there were some areas that we needed to improve on.

On our final music video the audience feedback was positive, they thought that we had a good range of ideas and we followed them though well, they liked the range of shots that we had and said that they thought that the short and long shots work well. Some people thought that the lighting was good but as we filmed during the day the light was pretty good but we made sure that we had good light where we were and made sure that we weren’t in dark or little light but some people did think that it could have been improved. They thought that the flashbacks were effective and liked how we changed the colour to show a different time period. They thought that the story line was good and they really felt the emotion from the two characters and the acting was good.  Some people commented that our camera angles were simple but effective. People thought that the continuity editing was well edited. The negative feedback that we received was that the guitar sync could have been improved as it was out of time in some areas, and the lip syncing needed improvement as it was sometimes out of time. Some thought that the argument was too short and they would have liked to have seen it play out longer through the video. They also said that our main character didn’t seem very confident singing and didn’t put very much effort into it.

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

Technology is extremely important to help us with the making and the running of the project, if we didn’t have the use of the Macs every lesson we would have found it hard to complete everything as we used them for mostly every aspect of the project.

For the construction of our music video we used the Macs at college to do mostly everything such as edit the shots that we took when we went out filming, which we filmed on the school HD video cameras which gave us high quality videos and shots which without the quality we couldn’t have produced the music video at a high standard, we used final cut to edited the shots that we took and put them on a time line with the track to make the music video. For the research we use the internet such as Google and YouTube and CD’s that we were given by our teacher. For the digi pack we used iphoto to choose the pictures that we took using the college cameras and Photoshop to manipulate the photos to how we wanted them to look on our ancillary texts.

For the planning we used blogger which is what the college uses for everyone to blog and keep track of what is going on, we blogged our ideas for the music video and what we did in the lessons and things such as analysis of artists and music videos and evaluations also we used it to put all of our work that we had done such as the ancillary texts and the music videos (rough cuts) etc. We also tried out photo booth as we thought we needed a picture so we took it in the lesson but realised that it wasn’t what we wanted.

Evaluation of music video

Evaluation of our music video

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

The song we chose was a very stereotypical acoustic-pop song. The song was “Mayday” by Tenbucks. As we began to research this genre of music, we came to the realisation that the videos of this genre had various things in common. Through looking at videos such as Enrique Iglesias “Takin’ Back My Love” we realised that these videos often have a love interest and some kind of argument between the two characters. The lead singer of the song is also normally the main character. We incorporated this idea and made it our own. Although we obviously did not have the lead singer of Tenbucks we made it obvious that the character was supposed to be the lead singer by having him singing in the video and having him on the DVD we created. We used parallel editing to have our lead singer character playing the song to himself in the woods while the love story plays out in-between these shots. We also looked at Joshua Radin’s music video “I’d Rather Be With You” and all agreed that the style of video fitted very well with our song. The video shows a man alone playing a guitar and singing the song while he thinks about a love interest he once had. We liked the idea of having the artist as the main character of our video and so incorporated it in to our own. The song is about a girl he was in love with and then they fell out of love. With the combination of the sets, camera angles and narrative the video is very emotional. This is what we were trying to achieve with our music video. We also decided that the costume of our characters was important in make the video seem authentic. The right clothes were essential to make sure we followed the conventions of a acoustic-pop music video. We dressed our main character in smart casual clothes. We felt this reflect the general feel of the song. It look mature and showed that the artist is serious about their music. Making the main character look fashionable also helps to sell the artist as fans would want to copy the fashion sense that the artist will be associated with.

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

As a group we decided it would be best to link our ancillary texts as best as we possible could to the music video. This would help to promote the video and would join the artist’s work together. The magazine cover we created as a group features the guitar played in the video leaning up against a tree. By doing this we are linking the magazine cover to the music video we created in numerous ways. The guitar links to the artist and their genre of music and the tree links back to the setting of the video. Someone who had seen the video would instantly be able to link it to the magazine cover. Our DVD cover also links to the video. The cover shows the main character/artist in the same woods the video was shot. He is standing by himself, as the woods appear to go on for miles behind him. On the back cover there is the same picture but taken from behind the character. This signifies the meaning of the song as it is about the singer feeling lonely, isolated and unloved. Because all of our products are connected by a reoccurring theme they will all promote each other. Fans will be able to find the artists material more easily due to the reoccurring themes.  We tried to make the images in our ancillary text as interesting as possible in order to attract audiences. We decided to have contrasting effects on our DVD cover, as it would make the project look unique. The mosque style background helps to make the main character stand out from the picture.  As a whole the products when combined together create a recognisable theme of which the audiences and fans can remember. We all decided upon having two pictures on our DVD cover. The front cover was to have the artist facing the camera and the picture on the back was to be the same picture but from behind the artist. We all felt this worked very well and looked very effective. We felt that by giving the audience a view from in front and behind the character the audience would get the impression that the person is completely alone and almost isolated in the woods.

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

From our audience feedback of our rough-cut video we learnt that our overall concept was good and we executed it very well. A lot of People felt that our storyline was very effective and it helped make the video interesting and was useful in explaining the story behind the song. Various people also felt that our characters were suitably dressed and the editing we did for the flash backs of our video was effective. Some people also made comments towards our camera angles and believed that although they were simple they were very effective.  However, there are things that people suggested we could improve in our music video. They suggested that we improve some of the lighting in our shots. Others suggested that we should try and make our guitar more in sync with the music to make it seem more realistic. We learnt from all of these comments and re-filmed the shots that did not come out great the first time. We also were able to lip sync in our new footage as complications with music prevented us from doing this the first time round. The feedback we got for our final piece was overall quite positive. A lot of people mentioned that our narrative was effective and our editing helped a lot towards the continuity of it. People also liked the changes we made to the colour correction of our flashback clips. Another positive mentioned in the feedback of our final piece was that the locations we used in our video made the narrative seem very believable. However, they did say that our editing could have been better in the climax of the song and suggested that we could have edited our video around the climax. They also believed that our lip-syncing could have been better in some areas of our video. Some people also felt that we should have given our story more time in the video as it seemed like it had been rushed into a small space of time. As a group we took all these criticisms on board and will use them to ensure our next project is as good as it can be.

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

Research was vital in the making of our music video and there are numerous programs that aided us in fulfilling our research into various music videos and genres. The first was “Safari” which allowed us to search the Internet for influences and ideas. We also used “Blogger” to blog all of our thoughts and ideas on our research and our music video. Blogger was an area where every person in our group could post individually so we had a way of keeping all our ideas organised and in the same place and it helped us enormously. Blogger also gave us the opportunity to show others our project and to collect feedback from them. Without this we would not have been able to improve upon our project from where it was when it was a rough cut and our project may not have been as good as it is now. The HD video camera we used to film our project gave us high quality videos for us to use and made the whole process very easy. The camera was incredibly simple to operate and we could not have completed our project to the standards we would have liked without it. We also used a HD digital camera to take the pictures of our storyboards so we could post them on the blog, the DVD cover and the magazine cover. This provided us with very good quality images for us to use to make our project look professional. To edit our video we used “Final Cut”. This was incredibly helpful as it allowed us to get all of our shots in order, to the places that we wanted them and allowed us to place effects on our footage such as fades and colour corrections. Final Cut was essential in our editing; it allowed us to syncing the video to the music efficiently and easily and allowed us to place effects on the video. These actions were essential in make our narrative flow continuously and without confusion. Final Cut also allowed us to edit the footage we filmed in front of a green-screen for our director’s commentary. This allowed us to have footage from our music video rolling in the background while each one of us explained how we filmed our project and how we went about editing it.  “Photoshop” was essential in producing our ancillary texts. We used Photoshop to edit the pictures we took for our DVD cover and Magazine cover. Without Photoshop we would not have been able to create the mosque effect we used for the DVD cover or add text and pictures to the images we had. Thanks to all of these produces and programs we were ale to produce professional looking projects efficiently and easily.