FINAL PRODUCTS:

Untitled from Sophie Butler on Vimeo.

Evaluation 1:

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

In order to even begin and create our media products, we needed to familiarise ourselves with the conventions of real music videos. We researched different videos that appear on the

television, mostly being popular songs that have reached the charts. After analysing two music videos that would be familiar to most people of the target group we were focusing on, I was able to get a more in depth understanding to the different aspects.

General Theory of Conventions:

Lyrics: establish the genre and mood of the song rather than the a meaning.

Music: the tempo of the song helps to drive the editing.

Editing: most important part to the creation of the music video. The editing consists of adjusting the cuts, lighting, sound so that it all fits in well with the pace of the music.

Genre: the genre is mainly reflected through the mise-en-scene, camera movements, editing, and the music itself.

Camerawork: the movement, angle and distance of the shots all play a part in the representation of the artist/band

Reading the different conventions, our music video had to do all of these things in order to achieve success and pass as a realistic video that would appear in the charts.

Andrew Goodwin has identified some key features of a music video:-There should be a relationship between the musics and the visuals. The visuals should illustrate, amplify or contradict the music.
-A relationship between the lyrics and visuals. What we hear should illustrate what we see.
-Genres have there own iconography and style.
-Voyeurism is present in many music videos, especially in relation to females.
Music videos are often constructed by the links from the lyrics and the visuals. The relationship that is built between them gives them representation in the music video. Many of these features are present in almost all music videos, however they an vary depending on the genre of the song.

John Stewart being another theorist says:

-The music video has lots of aesthetics of a TV commercial, with lots of close ups and lighting.

-Visual reference in a music video should come from a few sources, cinema, art photography and fashion.

-The mise-en-scene can be used to emphasise an aspirational lifestyle.

-The essence of intertextuality, using something with which the audience may be familiar, to generate nostalgic assossications and new meanings.

Taking the genre of our song 'Halfway Gone' as Rock/Pop, different genres have different conventions.

-Some special features are used-Usually calm setting, but changes when the beat kicks in
-May be black and white

-Close up of characters in the video

-Appeals to a younger target audience

-Video usually has a narrative

-Desaturated shots

-Many different camera angles are used

How did we use conventions in our music video?

Before beginning the process of actually filming the product, we needed to plan what conventions we would use to make our video fit into the genre of the song efficiently. Our initial plan was to sit down as a group and analyse the lyrics so we could enhance the convention: a relationship between the lyrics and visuals; what we hear should illustrate what we see.

The main lyric that emphasises this is 'If you want me out then I'm on my way.. I'm halfway gone'. As we hear this, one of the main scenes in our video can be seen. It is important that the lyrics actually fitted with the image in our video at some points of it because our sequence was very narrative, as it told a story which could still be understood without the music and lyrics. After finding out from some theorists that there should be some sort of relationship between the lyrics and visuals, gave us a sense of achievement that we was able to

do that.

Conventions of our music video:

Transition

Ancillary Tasks:

Looking at our finished magazine advertisement and digipak work next to real media products, allows me to see that we have used the conventions of the real products. By researching real media products enabled us to get ideas and create our own.

Evaluation 2:

Evaluation 3:

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

To gain feedback from a wide range of people, we used the social networking site 'Facebook'. As this website is very popular with our peers and even family, we thought that it would be a good way to get feedback without putting anybody out of their way to help us. Also, the people who would be giving us feedback are our main target audiences so this would be the most efficient comments that we could get.

Here is the comments we have taken from Facebook:

As well as the feedback we got from the social networking site, we was able to individually interview a few people from school that have watched our video.

The main feedback that we recieved was how well our actors worked in order for us to complete the video. The time lapse section where we showed the time moving by quickly, was a big hit with our target audience! As well as this, everyone we spoke to thought that the black and white convention worked well at highlighting the memories and times of the past, separate from the hard times the couple are facing at present. We also learnt from our feedback that our ancillary tasks fit well with the theme and genre of the video.

The main negative feedback that we got from the feedback was that the suit at the beginning of the video is slightly green, we put this down simply to a camera fault that would of been time consuming to re-film all over again. This was what we also learned from the feedback from our rough cut.

Evaluation 4:

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

At the beginning, we didnt realise how different the software we would use for the editing and creation of our music video would be from the the Photoshop and InDesign programmes that we used at AS Level to create our music magazines. It was a huge jump in use of technology terms.

Blogger enabled us to easily publish posts whenever we wanted! It was such an easy way of just putting down any ideas and being able to post research and planning ideas. Using a computer nearly all day every day in our lives made it easier to do work. Having the Internet as a whole has helped the process from to start to finish of construction, research, and planning as we were able to use search engines to find out information.

We used Final Cut Express in order to edit our video. The software was new to all of us so it was going to be a big learning curve, however, Sophie in our group got the hang of it before the rest of us! Considering that we had never even heard of the programme Final Cut, which is what would allow us to create our first music video, we was able to make the ideas that we had for different parts real. However, obviously, before we could even edit we needed to go out and get footage that we could actually properly edit to be a part of our creation. We used a Sony Handicam video recorder which we put a tape into to record all of our footage onto. The camera was easy to work with which was a positive to us as we were able to get straight on and film!

When working in Final Cut we were able to get screen grabs of some major changes that we made to the video in order to achieve our final cut.

When we decided to show time passing by using the sky change from daylight to night time. There was only one way that we could do it... set up our digital video recorder on a tripod and record for a few hours until we got the shot we wanted! In final cut we were able to speed up the shot by 40,000%!!! This meant that in the video, it would quickly change from daylight to night time.

A number of our cuts are merged in with each other using a cross dissolve. We chose to use this as we thought it was the most natural transition and really worked well for what we wanted to achieve.

We desaturated a number of shots within our video so that we was able to show past times/memories of the couple who were spliting up. We thought by making each cut black and white would easily distinguish what is a memory. The efffects in Final Cut enabled us to do so. For the dream sequence, we changed the brightness and contrast of the cut so that it looked slightly blurry and more dream like. We wanted it to look different from the other cuts in the video as it is a different scene. Using the filters on Final Cut enabled us to experiment with the shot and make it appear how we wanted it.

Photoshop was essential when it came to creating the magazine advertisement and digipak. Photoshop allowed us to use different techniques and filters in order to achieve the background that was used in the final outcomes.

Final Cut:

Untitled from Sophie Butler on Vimeo.

Music Video Feature:

From watching videos on music channels like VIVA and MTV, we discovered that when the song first comes on there is a feature that appears which shows the artist of the song and the name of the song. To make ours even more realistic we decided that we would create a feature that would appear at the beginning of our video.

To begin with we created a black background which we would use as our background.

Rough Cut Audience Feedback:

After showing our music video to the rest of the class, we was able to get some good feedback. This praised good parts of our music video and also highlighted the sections that needed changing/editing further to make it perfect.

Rough Cut:

Rough Cut from Rachel King on Vimeo.

Digipak, Ancillary Task:

Construction of Digipak

Magazine Advertisement, Ancillary Task:

FINAL POSTER

Here are some screen grabs of the important stage to creating the final poster.


To make the image of the hands black and white, I went to 'Image' and then 'Adjustments' 'Black and White'. This showed the following box so that I could change the preset from default to get the colour that worked best. As the 'preview' box is selected, it showed the changes in colour of the image without having to keep closing the setting.
Once I had inserted the text into the poster, I wanted to edit the layer style so that I was able to add a drop shadow. Once I had the background that I wanted by using the 'Filter', 'Render' and then 'Clouds' to get the effect, I added a lens flare so that it added a nice effect. I was able to position it where I wanted and change the lens type/brightness.

Magazine Advertisement Research:

As part of our ancillary task we have chosen to create a magazine advertisement for the digipak. This will be promoting and showing the release of the song we have made a music video for. I have been researching different music advertisements that are around, however I struggled to find many examples that were relevant and could influence our advertisement.

Both adverts have just one main image in the centre of the page which clearly shows the artist. Also, the artist name and title of the song being released is shown through bright colours and bold writing so that it is clear to the reader as soon as it is looked at. From this research, it has encouraged us to want to find a font that is different to normal writing, which stands out well and attracts its audience. The bottom advertisement for Ellie Goulding's 'Lights', has star ratings from the press. I think this is a nice addition to the advert as it praises the song and provides reassurance to people to listen to the song.

As well as looking at the two posters with the artists on the front, I was able to find the above advertisement for 'The Verve' which looks simple yet very detailed. I will be taking into consideration the different aspects of the different posters, and incorporating these into the designing of our magazine advertisement.

Filming Pictures

We took some pictures whilst filming our video.

Filming - Take 3:

After putting together the footage from the previous two filming sessions, we was able to see and create a list of what was left to be filmed or what needed re-filmed. This was quite a successful day because we was able to get a lot of good filming done. Using the list that we had made, we was able to get everything done that we needed too in a reasonable space of time. We will put this filming onto the computer and see if there is anything else that we will need to do in one final filming session.