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.

Stop Motion Examples

This is an example of stop motion that we will be using in our video.
We made this using the 'I stop motion' Programme on our school mac computer.
We will use it to create lyrics and cute little parts of music video.

crew list/ call sheet

we have also created a list of all of the crew members and performers needed. This also includes numbers so that we can contact any who is missing. This will make preporation and filming more easy.

complications with filming

Due to close deadlines and time shortages we decided to film the rough cut, very roughly. To do this we filmed in one and a half hours and used the wrong actress due to complications with the chosen actress having time to film. We where then planning on filming in a weekend but found it difficult as all the team members wanted to be there for the filming but one was away on a university trip.
Further complications included the weather not fitting in well with the plans, also we wanted a bike and a dog but found both of these difficult to get hold of in the center of Cambridge. In the end we filmed a lot of random footage but found little of this appropriate or able to use. Also as we filmed during college hours it was difficult to find suitable miss-en-scene and costumes. Also due to not having a c.d player in school it was difficult to get the timing and words correct, this made it more difficult to match the miming with the track, we attempted recording the song onto a phone and playing it but this was fuzzy and quiet making it even more difficult.
Our finished product has turned out to be nothing like our planning and story boarding. Therefore we plan to spend more time working on our finished product over half term so we can use appropriate miss-en-scene and costumes. Therefore we are hoping that our finished product will be much better and fit in well with our storyboard.

Locations

We have used a variety of different locations such as:

1. Emma's bedroom

2. Hallway in house (Emma's house)

3. Cambridge punts

4. Cambridge streets

5. A nice park/ field (Emma's House)

6. Market Square in Cambridge

7. View from top of Cambridge building

conflict with ideas

There was some conflict with our groups ideas as ciaran was not so keen on the girly vibe we created by the track and the mis-en-scene. As a result he wanted to chose a different track with a totally different video genre to suite his own style. In the end we decided as group to chose the first idea (au revoir simone) as our final idea as we thought the ideas fitted well with the track and could overall make it a sucessful video.

story board.

In today's lesson we are starting to storyboard our initial idea.

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DVD Cover Ideas

This is an experimental technique that we may use on our DVD cover. It is a picture of the actual lead singer of the band, Au Revoir Simone. She looks similar to the girl we are planning to use in our video.

We have edited the original image in PhotoShop by using multiple techniques.

Postcard.

Props List.

Props/ Mise-en-scene..

We are keen to make everything in our video as realistic as possible. This list will help the organisation and planning of our video.

• Bike with basket
• Vintage dress
• Umbrella?
• Socks for stop-motion
• Lipstick for stop-motion
• Newspaper
  
• Cup of tea
• Bed
• Party outfits
• Mirror
• Notebook
• Extra characters
• Train
• Stairs
  

Our Group

This Is Our Group Photo, Our Team (:

Music Video Storyboard Timeline.

During today's lesson we are completing a music video storyboard time line which is a professional practice designed to map out basic timings and ideas. Ours is shown below..