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.