1. What ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
In our music video, we use many forms and conventions which stick to our genre of music. Many which follow the Goodwin’s points of analysis. In the lyrics, we hear, “she believes that she’s a bit old for gifts and cakes and party favors.” To link this with the video, we decided to have a party with other scenes that show she’s not having fun which is implied with this line. We also thought we would have seventeen candles on a cake which we put at the end of the video as the song is called seventeen candles and cake is mentioned in the lyric which is shown above. We are selling the artist by having him in the video alone so the audience are not distracted by anything. This way we are meeting the demands of the record label and can also involve lip syncing into it so we are covering two of the Goodwin’s points at once. The use of close ups of the artist help sell his look and make him a recognizable face.
The genre we have chosen is the indie rock genre and I feel that we kept within this genre well. We researched into other indie rock bands to see what we could do and looked into bands such as The Jonas Brothers. We liked how they dressed and used this in our own video by having Nathan dressed in a big black coat and jeans with converse style shoes. We also looked at the Kooks song, “When the Sun goes Down” which has many different shots of the band. We wanted to film our video in the same style as this video which is shown with the panning around the tree with the band member singing and having many close ups and over the shoulder shots. However, we did use transitions which don’t fit in with this genre as they don’t use transitions but we all thought they went well in the video.
Our location was to originally have it in a house but none of us could have it in our house so we changed it to a garden party. We had trouble shooting this so we had to quickly come up with a back up plan which was a location in the college. The use of having it in outside is so we could keep it in our genre and showing the artist in the location helped the audience to recognise the location. Our artist is represented as a casual cool artist in whom people can look up to as a role model as more of the audience will want to be like him, want to listen to his music therefore selling the artist in a positive way.
We have extras in the video for the party scenes so we could make this part work to a good standard. They are dressed casually implying that they do not care which a part of this genre so it fits in well and their expressions show they are having a good time which contrasts with the main female character.
We use voyeurism in our video as the female character doesn’t look up at the camera throughout the video whereas the male character does when he is singing the chorus. This shows the difference between the two characters. This way we take more focus upon the female as she is part of the story behind the song. We do not use much intertextuality apart from when we used the sin city effect. This is when we have the black and white with coloured balloons effect. We used this effect because when we were researching on it, it looked very effective and stood out a lot. We wanted our video to stand out and thought this was the perfect way to do this.
2. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary tasks?
I feel that we have a strong connection between the ancillary tasks and our music video. We thought it would be best to have them all linked by having the main characters on the ancillary tasks as we did in the music video. We went out and took pictures of the female and male instead of using shots from the video as they would come out better. We also thought it would be a good effect if we put it in black and white like the video as this would be a great link to the video. This way we can link the DVD cover with the video and sell the artist and song better.
There are also some genre characteristics shown on the DVD cover that link them to the artist which is shown with the text being highlighted pink, which links with the name of band, ‘The Pink Spiders.’ We chose to do this as we wanted to do something that stood out and it links in nicely with everything. We ere originally going to use another font which was being taught to us, again from YouTube, but we couldn’t understand where we were meant to be going with it so decided against this and stuck to a font we were good at from Photoshop.
The DVD cover promotes the record label in the way we have different record label company’s logos on the DVD to show they sponsor the band making them look better when the DVD sells. We also promote the band by having them actually on the DVD cover so it’s easily recognisable to the audience when they buy it. Also by having the girl on the back of the DVD cover, it offers an insight into what will be in the music video. This is trying to attract the audience into wanting to know more so having to buy the DVD to watch it.
3. What have you learnt from the audience feedback?
We have learnt a lot from the audience feedback, some we knew about already and some which were new. They mentioned we had repetitive footage when we had given in our rough cut. This was because we hadn’t enough footage so had to put some old parts in. We took this on board and later went out to film more footage, this time coming back with loads, and put it in where we had repeated parts. We also had large parts missing in the chorus when we were meant to film the band. We had trouble shooting this so had to improvise and shot a band member instead which worked even better than the band would off.
We had positive feedback about our sin city effect which was amazing for us as we had a lot of work to do still so this gave us motivation to carry on with the rest. It took us a long time to do which was another reason we were happy that people like it. We also got positive feedback for the final pieces which gave us a boost as were not very positive about our video but looking back, everything went really well and we are glad other people thought so too.
The people who gave us feedback on our tasks where from our target audience so this information we received from them was very important to us in improving the music video. This was because we want to attract the same age group and by them giving us feedback on what they liked and what they wanted to see was very crucial to making our music video a good one and one that would appeal to the target audience of teenagers.
Feedback on our pitch was good and bad as different people said different things. Some people were pleased with what we had planned to do and where we wished to head. They liked the idea of having party scenes in the video and said this worked well with the song. However, when we put pictures up of our shot types, people couldn’t see them clearly so suggested we should put new ones up which we did. They were also very praising about our ancillary tasks, saying that they followed the genre characteristics, it looked professional and the continuity was done well. This made us happy as we liked what we had done but were not sure other people would so when they said this, we were relieved.
4. How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
We researched into many different bands and artists in our indie rock genre and got a lot of information from it which helped us to put together our music video in a proper way. For this we used YouTube and Google to look into specific bands and artists to get the information we wanted and giving us much more than we needed. YouTube helped us through step by step to get our special sin city effect in our video in the right way. We had no idea how to do it originally but with some help, we managed to do a great job as this is an advanced piece of software which we didn’t get taught in class.
In our music video stage, we used Final Cut Express to piece our footage together, adding effects to it and generally getting it up to a high standard of a music video out today. We wanted to have special effects to change from one view to another so use dissolving and shifts to create these special features. We did this buy clicking on the part we wanted and choosing the right effect from the toolbar at the top. We went through each one and decided on the best effects for each change. We also had use of I Photo which meant that we could easily get our pictures up so we could get our magazine and DVD cover to the best we could. These programs have been easy to use and I have learnt much more than I knew before this task.
We kept a stage by stage blog explaining, keeping track and generally keeping information about what we were doing in each lesson and out side of lesson. This was good for us as if we didn’t know when or where we were filming then we could just check the blog and it would tell us. We uploaded pictures and our final pieces to show everyone else where we were heading to and how it turned out. People from other groups added feedback to it, giving us advice on to where we could improve which was very helpful to us and we learnt a lot from that.
I have progressed well from As to A2 as I have learnt many new techniques from this project and have grown in confidence in the practical side of things. Last year I was more on the blogging side and hardly did any practical work so decided this year I would do more practical so I have grown in confidence on this side this year. We have even gone further by using the sin city effect as this is a very hard technique to do.
When we did the pre-lim task, this prepared me for what to do this time round. It was a fun experience as I had not done anything like this in media before so it was quite new for me. Filming it was long process as we wanted to get it perfect in having different angles so we had to film it though about 5 times. When we went on to editing, this was easy to get it all on and together but it took a little longer getting it all squished in and in the right position. Overall though, it was fun and made me really want to do the real thing.
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