EvaluationMusic Video

A2 CourseworkNatasha Calder, Katie

Capstick, Mark Knowles & Tom Pilkington

In what ways does your media product use, develop or

challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

We used close ups of an actress performing the song in our music video. This technique is used in most music videos so we saw it as an essential to include in our video.

We used the MTV logo in the top left of our video. We watched music videos on the television and found this logo appeared there.

We used a two part video, with an actress performing the song as shown above and a story of two people in a relationship involving domestic violence.After watching many music videos we discovered that most videos used two separate stories that related to the song and the lyrics but did not link to each other.

To help our audience distinguish between each part of the video we decided to edit on to make it black and white while leaving the other in colour.

We found that some professional music videos also use black and white so we did not challenge the conventions. However we could not find a music video that used both full colour and black and white, this makes our music video unique and it also challenges the conventions.

When we filmed our footage we had a scene which involved the smashing of a glass. However the footage wasn’t very effective so we decided to place a small sound clip of the glass smashing in our video. Many of the videos produced professionally include sound effects from outside the music.

To promote our music video we produced a poster which included the artist, a picture of the artist and the different songs included on the CD. This poster is very similar to most posters produced, with similar content and a three colour scheme.

This is the front cover of the CD case to accompany our music video. We followed the general style of the usual front cover with the name of the album, the artist and a picture of the artist.

How effective is the combination of your main product and

ancillary texts?Throughout our music video, we have used themes of black and white to represent the depressive mood of our media texts due to our main product being about domestic violence.

We have used to recognisable and common aspects of music videos such as the ‘MTV’ logo for the music channel and the description of the music video, including the artist, song title and album name.

We have also followed the common conventions of album artwork features. For example we have included the names of the songs on the album, bar codes and logos of record company’s. This conveys a sense of realism and looks professional.

The concept of using the singer to act as a narrator in the story of the music video, it was sensible to use this person as the model for the album artwork and other ancillary texts.

The clips showing the troubled couple in the music video have been shown in a black and white effect, this reflects the depressive, angered and sad emotions that the song conveys. This is reflected in the ancillary products also.

The model artist chose to wear a black leather in both the music video and print work. This indicates the theme of the album the through fashions worn and reflects the genre of music.

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

We showed our video to four classmates in order for us to gain an objective view. We then asked them to tell us honestly what they thought of our music video and we filmed the response:

SEE BLOG

How did you use new media technologies in the construction

and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Internet – browsed the net for ideas, inspiration and a sense of genre within the piece we wished to create.

·YouTube – watched variety of music videos in the genre we wanted to pursue, for example Rihanna, the Wanted and Katy Perry.

·Google – research the sort of characters and appearance we required in our music video; had to be accurate to convey the correct messages to the audience both consciously and subconsciously.

Storyboard – used the Microsoft Word to produce a suitable layout for our storyboard, to give us detailed guidelines to work to and compare at the reviewing stage.

Construction

HD Video Camera – the whole of our music video was shot using a HD Video Camera, high quality and high definition imagery was vital in making our media piece look professional and suitable to be released in the current media environment.

HD Stills Camera – our coursework required a variety of still images to go not only in our music video but also on the blog as implementation devices. It was important to have good quality within these photographs to keep a consistent collection of our work and working environment.

Tripod – extremely important piece of technology as without this, many shots would be impossible and the overall steadiness of the camera would be unprofessional and would appear poor in quality.

Adobe Photoshop – we used this program to edit all images we planned to use in our music video, it was important to involve detailed and good quality programs when editing and producing imagery. An example is:

·MTV logo- we imported an image from the Internet and edited it to suit the video we were creating by: changing brightness and contrast, size and shape, and also vibrancy.

Adobe Premiere Pro – we used this program throughout editing our video, it is a real-time, timeline based proprietary video editing software application. Premiere Pro also integrates with Adobe Photoshop. Photoshop files can be opened directly from Premiere be edited in Photoshop. Any changes will immediately be updated when the Photoshop file is saved and focus returns to Premiere. Having this software it was extremely useful in transferring numerous files between Premier and Photoshop (MTV Logo).

There are a huge variety of effects available on Premiere Pro:

•Range of video transitions when cutting

•Range of video effects to place on chunks of film (for example we used the colour change effect, to make the majority of our media film ‘black and white’)

•Varieties of techniques were used by our group to create quick, clean cuts and to create an overall professional look to our media piece.

Evaluation

Blog – we used a program called ‘blogspot.com’. It is a blog-publishing service that allows private or multi-user blogs with time-stamped entries to post any number of links, images, pieces of info and even our finished product. It was an extremely useful program as it helped to give our project structure and ourselves and audience updated with our ongoing progress. Most importantly it brought our whole media coursework together when we posted this evaluation towards the end of the ‘blog wall’.

Overall we challenged and developed different forms and conventions of real media products. We tried to make our music video look professional and similar to others. We also tried to make it unique and change and use media forms in a different way. When we produced our print work we looked at many professional prints and used the basic forms and conventions to make our print look stylish and professional for a female solo artist.