Sunday 6 December 2009

Nathan's Write Up

I believe that our media product uses conventions of other media products and also develop and challenge their forms. Many of the conventions we use deal with Goodwin’s points. With our music video we’ve got performance and slight narrative elements. We’ve tried to give the video as much of a relationship between lyrics and visuals as we could where narrative is concerned. For example at the end we have a shot of seventeen candles being blown out, this of course is the name of the song we’ve produced a music video for. The genre of the song we’ve chosen is the ‘indie rock’ genre and we believe we’ve created a suitable video that matches the genre. The mise-en-scene of the piece, we chose to reflect the genre. For example, the clothes the actors in the video are fairly indie and we’ve chosen to turn the video black and white for most of the piece, creating and indie style. We knew turning the piece would help us make an indie nature because it closely resembles the style of the Kook’s music video for their song ‘Ooh La’.
If we were the Pink Spiders, we certainly would have sold the lead singer of the band as an artist. All of the performance elements of the piece are the lead singer of the band singing. To the audience, they would have total exposure to the lead singer, selling him completely. Also our video creates a lot of voyeurism for the audience. If it’s not the lead singer being shown on screen, it’s a girl (Emily), that fits into our narrative structure of the piece. We watch her throughout the video without her knowing, where the lead singer acknowledges the audience’s presents by singing directly to the camera. These are 2 of Goodwin’s points we made sure we included.
Unfortunately there is no way of linking music and visuals for we didn’t have means available to us in the time we had left. We had planned on it though.

Our combination of our main product and ancillary texts is very effective together. The two pieces work together with great style and continuity. They both feature black and white images and shots along with the artist spread across all three pieces. Both the DVD cover and the magazine advert have the same text styles, and the same logos to promote the video it’s self.
The black and white styling’s of the DVD cover, I believe, keeps with the indie look we have in the video, helping promote the genre and hopefully audiences with that taste in music looking for an eye catching buy. I also think the text styles of the piece and their colours also help identify a genre for it, with most indie related products having bright colours in their style. The bright colours would also be quite eye catching from a marketing point of view.
All three pieces of our project feature the artist, this helps to sell the artist in a successful manner. The pictures taken for the ancillary tasks for the artist were shot in a professional way and the look of the artist is continued throughout.

The feedback we received about all our products was very helpful. First of all, the feedback we received about our roughcut video stated it was too repetitive and it was missing large sections. We were able to take this information and use it to improve our final piece. We received mix reviews concerning our ancillary texts. Many said it looked profession and we had used continuity well. This, of course, is what we were trying to achieve with all products. We did also receive some constructive criticism about the products, including the noticing some out of sync singing in our main music video. There was also a problem with an effect we’d used, that at one point hadn’t been integrated properly with the footage from the video, causing it to look rather messy.
As for the text products, there was some mention of a spelling mistake we hadn’t noticed on the DVD cover. Unfortunately it was too late to change any of these points raised by our peers. But I believe it has taught us, that in the future we should always check our work carefully before submitting it.

The music video we made was constructed with the PC/Mac software Final Cut Express. We used Final Cut all the way through our creation of the music video to splice together the footage we’d shot on a digital camcorder and edit that footage into the way we wanted. We also used Final Cut Express to create effects for the video, to help it look better. One effect we wanted was turning some balloons, that were in the video, against the rest of the footage that was black and white. We were unsure how to achieve this, so we looked towards the website ‘Youtube’ for a guide to teach us how to do so. This helped our cause greatly and improved the look of the video.
To created the ancillary texts we used the software Photoshop. The templates had been pre-made for us, but it was our job to fill them. We took some photos we took from a digital camera and edited them here. As well as that we were able to try out different fonts for the texts and also import images saved from the internet to there.
During the planning stages of the project we typed it all up onto our internet blog, here we were able to note down locations for filming as well as a props list and even upload pictures of our shot-list onto there. We saved pictures we found from Google and placed them on the blog to, to help us envision what we wanted to create.
When it came to the evaluation stages, we were asked to make a video commentary. It was of our group talking about how we created the music video. We also edited that video on Final Cut Express and uploaded it to our blog, along with all our other finished products.

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