Hannah Rose - Evaluation

Music Video Evaluation
Hannah Rose

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

We have created a few links between the lyrics and the visuals, not only are our visuals girly and delicate like the song itself but we have actually written out the lyrics at some points in the video using the stop motion technique. Another point later in the song she mentions a party a couple of times so their are brief party scenes when the music builds up.
I believe we have captured some very 'beautiful' shots with different camera angles, for example the sunset and sun beams gleaming through the tree branches. These were very precise and carefully captured, in contrast to the party scenes which were hand held as we wanted more of a spontanieus and 'wild' look to it, we also thought this would give our music video variation and keep the watchers interested. We got this idea looking at professional music videos as they used a bit of both. The stop motion was also an idea we got from watching some top music videos, we really looked at Kate Nash, 'The Nicest Thing' and 'Foundations'. Her music videos have a soft vintage feel to them which we wanted to create and she used a lot of cute stop motion effects, for example moving around socks and tooth brushes, we took this idea and made it our own.
We thought a lot about the lighting in our shots especially in the morning, night and party scenes, as we didn't want a shot out of place and our video to be jumping from light to dark to light again. We kept it smooth and getting darker slowly like it was a diary of her day. We really like the lighting with the sunset, especially when it created a silhouette as she danced in the trees, again this is all very elegant and girly linking it with our song type.
We have used a few bits for Misi-en-scene, for example the vintage dress and heels, and the girly vintage book she carries everywhere. We even thought about the bredroom, we wanted it simple yet cute, which could represent the song. The landscape senery also had to be very beautiful.
We have a few similarities between our digi-pack covers and professional album covers, for example most are kept very simple which we have done and include images which relate to the band and the style of music they create. Like most bands we have put a picture of the singer on the front cover and basic details like the band name etc. We have also included a bar code, the track listings and quotes.

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

The digi pack and the music video link together very subtly we have a picture on the front cover of the girl in the video and on the back we have an image of the stick man figures which were in the video. We have put swirls on the digi-pack and kept it very simple and elegant using neutral colours. Cream is a colour which is used in both the digi-pack and video, her cardigan, dress, and wall which she sings against is a cream colour and so is the digi-pack background. So to link them we used very simple ways of doing so, however i think it is quite effective.


3. What have you learned from your audience feedback?

We got a lot of feedback on our rough cut saying lots of clips were repeated, there was bad lip syncing, the actress kept giggling and the lighting was poor etc. however this didn't matter as we were not planning to use any of that footage in our final piece. We had a sudden deadline sprung on us so we went to town and filmed anything we could, none contained what we had planned so we re-did it after. This got us much more positive feedback, we are also a lot more happy with it as it was much more what we wanted, and how we originally planned.
An example of our latest feedback is, 'The idea is good (animation) I really like Hannah walking through the trees and the camera turning, and the dancing scenes near the trees are great' We also got a response from the bands manager after mailing them on Myspace showing them our final piece, Looks great, i'll pass it onto the band'

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

We used a few pages on the internet to help plan, and research our work, for example we used Blogger to record our planning and progress, it was almost a diary/ scrap book showing ideas, comments and what we had done. We used Google and Youtube to research and get ideas, Facebook to get feedback on our work, Myspace to research the band and get in contact with them And Vimeo to upload videos on as this has a higher quality than youtube. All these websites really helped us in some way of another.
We used a few programs too to edit and create our final piece and the ancillary texts. We used photoshop too create pictures, digi-pack and magazines and to create our frame for the lip syncing scenes. Final cut to do all the editing on and I-stop-motion to create the animations where she writes in her book. All were very useful and we couldn't of done our project without them.