Music video evaluation (ciaran)

1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products
We looked very closely at the lyrics of are song and choose to try and tell a story. We tried to involve them when filming and think in of ideas and certain line work well around the story idea, such as the line “it was late at night I meet you at a party”. For this line we put in a party scene where the main character is pushing thought the crowd. Andrew Goodwin talks about this in his book (‘Dancing in the Distraction Factory’1992) he says that this is one of the six point to analysing a music video. The video is soft and simple very arty and individual. We felt that this is what the record company would like to portray the bands style of music. The camera, lighting and Mise-en scene backs up the idea that the band is not a mainstream band. There’s a mix of digital photo’s and video footage. The lighting was fresh and open and free a lot like the style of music. We wanted a vintage style for the video so we used a vintage dress and bedroom we also put an old style scratchy effect on the footage to emphasize this point. In the video we use a lot of istopmotion, which we got, from Kate Nash’s fountains. Where two socks fly across the room by themselves. We also looked at Kate Nash’s sweetest things video, which is where we got the idea for the girly cute handwritings and drawings. Will Young’s you and I video had him standing I front of a white wall singing to the camera which is were we got the idea of Hannah singing with the white wall I believe that are album cover is like beyonce’s B-Day. Where her face is the whole of the front cover. We used magazine advert conventions such as “coming soon” and reviews. It also showed her face on the magazine.
2. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
For our magazine we got images like the music notes and swirls off Google images. We also found images from the music video and mixed them all together using Photoshop to blend them into one. We then used the font off the bands page, which we have used through out This Project. We Think It’s Very Successful And Elegant, And Goes Well With The Song. We downloaded a new font to use on our digipack, as nothing PhotoShop offered was what we wanted. We wanted a very cute, handwritten text, to make each digipack look like the artist has personally written it on. We feel this adds a much more personal feel to the digipack, which fits in with the theme of our video. The font we decided to use in the end was called 'Hannah's Messy Handwriting'.
Our real video, the magazine ad and the album cover were very effective together we got across the cute and girly ideas because in all forms of the task we had cute handwriting and we had little sweet cartoon picture in both the video and the album cover. As well as that we also had the singer in all of our tasks.
3. What have you learnt from your audience feedback?
We got a lot of class feedback on the video blog and ancillary. Such as for are video people said that they liked the stopmation and cartoons. For the blog people said that there were good amounts of posted and picture. we learn a lot from are feedback our teacher gave as feedback on both the blog and on our video. He said the video was basic with a lack of shot types. We also got feedback on our rough-cut from the class such as poor lighting, un professional acting, and poor locations we took this in to account and changed much of are video. Such as the locations and actress. We then got a much more positive feedback on our real video which seemed to be much better. People liked the locations and shot types. Our teacher like the effect that we used on are final video but said that the colour that we used (a dark sepia colour) and told us that maybe we should take this off from the outdoor footage. We took his advice and I feel that the video now looks better.. How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
We used many different types of new technologies in our task. Such as websites where we used facebook to get feedback, we used myspace to contact the band, youtube for research, and we put are video on vimeo for the best quality. We also used final cut for the editing and Photoshop for the magazine and album cover, we used a digital camera and also a video camera for our final video.