Evaluation

Q1: In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Task 1

Goodwin's points:

1.) Music Videos Demonstrate Genre Characteristics. (e.g stage performance in rock video, dance routine for boy/girl band)

2.) There Is A Relationship Between Lyrics and Visuals. (either illustrative, amplifying, contradicting.)

3.) There Is A Relationship Between Music and Visuals. (either illustrative, amplifying, contradicting.)

4.) The Demands Of The Record Label Will Include The Need For Lots Of Close-Ups Of The Artist and The Artist May Develop Motifs Which Recur Across Their Work. ( a visual style)

5.) There Is Frequently Reference To Notion Of Looking (screens within screens, telescopes, etc.) and particularly voyeuristic treatment of the female body.

6.) There is Often Intertextual Reference. (to films, T.V programs, other music videos.)

Throughout our Music Video and the two ancillary tasks, I feel that we used a range of conventions typical to the music genre of our chosen song, referring back to Goodwin's points.

1)

The first shot in our music video is a panning shot of a city, straight away establishing where the artist is from/living. Which links to the urban feel we are trying to give our artist/music video. Even though our genre is a pop ballad we want the artist to come across urban, up to date and trendy. Which is why we establish the city setting straight away, this also works well as the beginning of the song is just music which is a perfect time to put it in.

2)

As soon as the lyrics start in the song we have a medium close up of the artist lip syncing. Which is typical of the pop genre. From this shot the audience have a clear view of what the artist looks like and what their style is. We wanted the artist to look casual but at the same time we wanted him to appeal to our target audience by creating a star persona. We did this by using a popular branded jumper, jeans and trainers for his costume in this shot. This will appeal to teenage boys who may aspire to be like him, it will also make him look desirable to teenage girls. For the background of this shot we used a plain wall and then used torches and gels to create the different lighting effects. We used a variation of close up shots of the artist throughout the music video to sell him as a person and making him appeal to an audience.

3)

In this shot the lyrics were 'You've carried on so long you couldn't stop it you tried..' so here we created a scene where Sam is sitting watching Jess as she walks away, this is a typical convention used in this genre of music- Lyrics matching the visuals. As in this scene the male artist is singing, we used a torch to light his face, therefore he is the main focus of the shot. This shot is also an example of cutting on the beat, Jess walks onto the shot just as the beat changes, I feel this technique is very important when making a music video.

4)

This image is used throughout the chorus of our music video, we used two torches to light up the sides of his face and set it at night so the background was pitch black, therefore the light really outlines the artists face, making him stand out and also giving the shot a professional look and feel. This close up shot helps to generate a star image as he is again wearing a popular branded product, the shot makes him look desirable to girls. This shot also meets the demands of the record label as it is a close up of the artist which is shown more than once in the music video, promoting the artist.

5)

In this shot we followed the convention of the lyrics matching the visuals. When the artist sings "You built your wall so high" we used a long shot of Sam standing in the dark and as the lyric said "high" he put his head up and looked to the sky and the camera tilted upwards and then came back down to a long shot of Jess, which linked her to the lyrics as that is who he is singing about. This shot added movement to the video typical of a music video that is telling the story of the lyrics.

6)

The genre of our music video is a pop ballad and one of Goodwin's points is to convey genre characteristics so after looking into music videos of this genre in more depth we found that they use a wide range of different shot types and angles, also different editing techniques are used throughout, in the first shot we used a medium close up panning shot of the female artist which then dissolved in to a medium shot of the artist from front view. We did this to make sure we had a wide variety of shots throughout this verse as it was quite long and we wanted to keep movement in the video and keep it interesting, we edited this shot using final cut. We wanted to keep the shot simple so we filmed on a plain white background keeping the artist as the main focus .

7)

This shot in the music video matches the lyrics 'you built your walls so high' so as the word 'high' is sung the artist lifts his head up, again matching the lyrics to the visuals. We slowed this clip down to make sure Sam lifting his head was the same duration as the words being sung. The use of the torch lighting his face is to keep him the main focus of this shot, meeting the demands of a record label, we used a range of close ups of the artist throughout.

8)

In this shot the camera is panning down the artists body from head to toe, this is an example of voyeurism paying close attention to the female body, this shot will attract a male audience as it encourages them to enjoy the video. We used a pretty female to star in our video therefore she is desirable to males but will also attract a female audience as they may aspire to be like her or look up to her, paying attention to costume in particular.

9)

This close up panning shot of the two artists together shows the love interest between the two of them as they sing to each other, this is very typical of a pop genre music video as it tells a story. It will really appeal to our target audience as they will be interested in what happens between the two artists, in particular this will appeal to females as the relationship shown in the music video is a 'perfect' relationship.

10)

This is a screen shot of our digipak, we edited all of this using Photoshop, we looked at a range of other artists digipak's and got inspiration from Rhiannas new album, where the photographs were black and white on the inside and color on the outside. We wanted to make sure that our digipak linked to the video and album cover so the whole project comes together well. We linked them by using a photograph of London city for the back of the album keeping it personal to the artist as he is a city boy, in the music video we used a panning shot of a city as well, linking the two. We wanted to continue the urban feel throughout therefore we took our photographs against a brick wall and edited using the burn tool. We found that most album cover are quite simple so we wanted to stick to the conventions so we just had a photo, the name of the artist and the name of the album on the front. We kept the costume very casual and he is wearing something that  our target audience would wear, making him very appealing as a person.

Q2: How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

Task 2

Q3: What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Task 3

Throughout our music video project we have been given different types of feedback, we have had a lot of positive feedback but we have also been given points we can improve on, helping us to make our project appeal more to a target audience.

 The two main pieces of feedback we received were on our rough cut video where we showed it to our class and they told us what bits they liked and the what could be improved. The same applies for our final video and our two ancillary task.

Rough cut feedback:

-Fill in blank gap, make sure that you get all the footage you need.
-Make a few more cuts.
-Fewer static shots.
-Lighting was really good/well thought out.
-Just fill in blank spaces and improve girls lip syncing.
-More camera movements and angles.
-Cut the kiss scene before the actors walk away.
-Fill blanks, otherwise best we've seen.
-Shots were really good, but some were a bit too long. 

The main faults we picked out from the feedback we were given was that there were too many long duration shots and not enough camera angles, shot types, edits etc. So we decided that the longer shots needed a lot more movement in order to make the video interesting. We then decided to re-film some shots and  film them at different angles so we could cut between a range of different shots. We also found we needed to improve on the female artists lip syncing so we re-filmed her singing shots so we could match the lyrics and music correctly.

Final music video and Ancillary tasks feedback:

- I liked the digi-pak and magazine advert, they look really professional
-The lighting in the video went well with the tone of the song
-The magazine advert and the digi-pak were simple but really effective, I liked the use of black and white images
-I like the variation of different shots in the video
-I liked the fact you had scenes of the boy and girl separately
-I liked the fading transitions, it looks professional 
-When the song changed to the chorus the lip syncing needed more impact as the song got louder and more upbeat
-The digi-pak needs more variety of shots, change of outfit
-The magazine advert has all the information you need on it
-The star persona is clear throughout all three tasks

From comparing the feedback we got from our rough cut video and then looking at the feedback from our final video, I feel we improved on all the negative comments made as we received completely different feedback, we had a lot more positive comments, overall I am happy with the feedback given.

Q4: How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Task 4

Throughout the project we have used a range of different technologies to design and make our products. The 3 main ones are:
-Final Cut
-Photoshop
-YouTube

Each technology has really helped to improve our project.

Final Cut
We used this technology the most, this is where we added our clips after filming, we decided which ones were worth keeping and then were able to place the right clips in the right order to go with the music. We were able to match the lyrics in the song to the clips of our artists singing them by using markers to find the exact place. We were able to shorten clips by cutting them which created a good range of short duration shots, adding depth to the video giving it a diverse range of editing styles. We were able to edit shots using 'fade' which enabled us to have shots crossing over each other, I feel this really gave the video a professional feel. We also edited some of our shots on final cut using the brightness and contrast, this helped to make some of our shots really stand out, especially the shots of the male artist therefore we were keeping him the main focus of the video. We used a technique called 'key frame' which enabled us to give a static shot the illusion of panning. We used this edit a couple of times in our video were we felt it needed a bit more movement.

YouTube
YouTube was a big help with our project, we used it for a variety of different reasons. When planning are video there was a number of different things to take into account, one of the main ones was lighting. We used YouTube to find a tutorial that would help us light the artist when we were filming at night, but we still wanted to keep it quite natural looking, therefore we were able to figure out what equipment was needed to create this effect and do it properly. The tutorial also showed us the effects you can make using colored filters which we then used in our final video to add different shades of lighting, we used blue and red filters which link to the colour scheme used on our digipak and magazine advert. We also used YouTube tutorials when editing our digipak and magazine advert photographs on Photoshop. We wanted to use a really good editing style that would really make the main image stand out so we found a tutorial on dodging and burning, which we used for the photograph on our magazine advert and album cover. We have used YouTube to upload our rough cut and final video to get the embed code to then upload to our blog.

Photoshop
We used Photoshop to edit all of our pictures of the artist. We used a range of different editing styles to make our photographs look professional and stand out. For the close up shots of our artist we cleared his skin up so it looked perfect which is typical of any photographs used for album covers. We also used it to edit the photo for our magazine advert, using the burn tool, giving the photo a really urban/rough feel which is what we were aiming for when creating our star persona. Overall Photoshop helped us to create a particular style and feel throughout our project.

Here I have created a step by step tutorial of how to get clear skin when editing a photo with Photoshop.