1. In what ways does your media product use, develop
or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Our music video ‘Mr. Presumption’ is of the Pop/ Indie genre and we analysed several videos of the same genre during our planning stages to make sure that we kept with the conventions. Through our analysis we noticed that Pop/Indie videos have the following conventions: fast cuts, splashes of colour, performance, graphics and animation. We
attempted to incorporate all of these in the video to make sure that it was suita
ble for its intended audience. Another convention that we followed and incorporated in the music video was the relationship between music and visuals. Many music videos use the tempo of the track to influence the editing. It can also be used to emphasise sounds from the track such as guitar and drum solos or any other instruments by foregrounding them. This is another convention that we followed and be seen in various sc
enes from the video such as the guitar instrumental. We also made
sure that the lyrics were amplified through the visuals, another convention that we made note of. For example, in the song it says the phrase ‘Danny’s in the nick’. At this part in the video Tinashe is behind gates, which is meant to represent Jail bars because he is singing about his friend Danny who is in the nick/jail. There is also another scene where Tinashe is sings: ‘ You don’t know a single thing about me, she said..’. We also emphasised this by making the next scene a flashback and getting the female lead, who is referring
to, to sing the next bit
of the song.
In music videos the mood of the music is also reflec
ted through locations, settings, costume, facial expressions - something else we took into account whilst planning our own video. ‘Mr Presumption’ is quite an up-tempo track but the lyrics portray someone who is having financial difficulty, having relationship problems and friends who are ‘..in the nick’. We made sure that we emphas
ised
this through the recurrent use of a brick wall location under a bridge and behind gates to show that he is in a way trapped in a situation and has no way of getting out. We used close-ups to show his facial expressions, especially in the argument scene to amplify his pa
in and despair.
The target audience for the video are people w
ho listen to Pop/ Indie music and who might be interested in bands such as The Tings Tings, The Script, Kings of Leon or La Roux. We looked at and analysed some of the videos by the artists, and found that al
l of them seemed to present the same type of image. The artists were being sold in their videos as unique, creative and youthful. We attempted to incorporate all of this into our own video through the use of the mis-en-scene and also our own ancillary texts. For
example, a majority of the video is set around the east end of London and much of the video takes place under a stone bridge, which emphasises the urban, you
thful image that we were attempting to create for Tinashe.
We also made note of the shots used in the videos and noticed that close-ups of the artist/band were common as well as fast cuts, multiple transi
tions and performance scenes. We wanted to keep
with this style in our own video but we also wanted to develop it further by adding a narrative. The narratives for music videos aren’t complex because it needs to sell the artist to viewers and that’s it main purpose. This is the same with our video, the narrative is not complex and has quite
simple ideas that are easy to comprehend but are also relevant to the young audience that we have targeted - they can relate to not having much mon
ey and having relationship
issues. We decided to make the video a mixture of performance and narrative to try and make Tinashe unique from the other artists in his field - to make him stand out. This was something else we took into account when planning and producing the video, how our artist was being represented. We contemplated many things and asked questions such as: Is our artist marketable? Does he appeal to our targeted audience? Would race b
e an issue? We made sure that we looked at this fro
m every different angle when deciding on the way we were going to approach the video and our own ancillary texts.
2. How effective is the combination of your
main product and ancillary texts?
The main aim of the entire coursework was to promote our artist Tinashe as a Pop/Indie/Urban act and I crafted my ancillary text and video to try and cater for such an audience. I did this by making sure that I used a l
ot of bright colours on my CD/DVD Digipak and kept with a colour scheme of red, pink, black and blue throughout my Digipak, Poster and internal booklet. I chose to use a lot of bright colours after analysing CD covers from artists such
as The Tings T
ings and Lily Allen whom both have bold, bright colours and graphic anima
tions on their front covers. I also made sure that the location and setting of the images coincided with the scenes from the music video as well as the costume and colours, as I wanted both my main product and ancillary texts to have a theme, and lo
ok like a complete package, complimenting each other. F
or example, the image used on the front of the CD/DVD Digipak is set in the same location as the guitar scenes from the video.
I wanted to convey Tinashe as a sort of laid-back artist but also quirky and unique, and did this by carefully crafting the poses in the images. I focused
on the main image in particular and chose to have Tinashe sitting on the ground by a brick wall holding his guitar. I think this image portrays two different sides to him. Firstly, his musical side - he can play and instrument and produces rea
l, quality music. Secondly, the artistic and edgy side of him – shown through his choice of clothing and the urban setting. It also shows that he is quite laid-back because of his pose - simply resting on a wall with his guitar. I made sure that the font and the front cover as a whole was quite simple but still effective, for this same reason. I believe that the image that I have tried to convey is quite clear through our music vid
eo, my ancillary text and the results of the audience feedback also confirm this belief.
3. What have you learned from your audience feedback?
We decided that creating a questionnaire was the best way for us to gather audience feedback on the first draft of the video, however we also posted the v
ideo on youtube to gain additional feedback. For the questionnaire we surveyed 15 people who were interested in Pop/ Indie/ Urban music and asked them to fill out a questionnaire after watching the first draft of the video. The results gave us a lot of useful feedbac
k and improvements that we could make to the video
. For example, the results of the questionnaire showed that the narrative of the video was not clear thus allowing us to make it a bit clearer for viewers. It also gave us other improvements that I could make such as adding more performance to the video as well as adding
graphic animation and improving the lip-synching. What we did notice however is that the audience enjoyed the music video and distinguished
it as part of the pop/indie genre, which is the reaction that we were aiming for. After mak
ing a note of the results from the questionnaires and the youtube comments, we went on to edit our video further to try and improve it for our second draft. After creating the second draft we did another survey and found that the audience feedback was much better,
after making the changes. We decided to re-shoot some of the scenes such as the first scene set in the café because the performance was not to a high standard and the lip-synching was quite poor. We also added performance to the video wit
h a guitar,
which seemed to relate to the audience more and is one of the conventions we noticed in the other videos we had analysed of the genre. After gaining the feedback on our second draft we made a few changes such as adding more close-ups of Tinashe and cutting down some clips so that the video fitted the upbeat tempo of the m
usic. Overall, the people that we surveyed said that they enjoyed our music video and when asked if they would watch it again all of them said they would.
YOUTUBE
By posting our video on youtube we were able to gain even more valuable feedback on our video by allowing us to access an even larger audience. This also made our feedback less biased as the comments could be made from people anywhere in the world from people we had mever met before, opposed to the 15 pople that we surveyed in our sixth from college.
4. How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
We used many new and existing media technologies in the construction, research and evaluation stages of our final product. The technology that became most useful was the cameras, media editing software’s and the Internet. Firstly the cameras provided us with technology allowing us to film exactly what we wanted in quite a simple straightforward way- even allowing us to edit footage directly on location without the need of computer. In conjunction with the cameras, we used tripods to hold the camera in static positions; this was especially helpful when it came to close up and moving shots. For example the shots of Tinashe where the camera zooms into a close-up of behind the gate and the shot reverse shot scenes during the argument flashback. This would have been difficult to achieve without the use of a tripod as the shot would have been shaky, unaligned and end up looking unprofessional.
The editing software that we used was ‘iMovie’ during this project because of the shear amount of time it takes to edit footage and make it look professional. We had little knowledge in how to use the editing software but it wasn’t hard to use and once we learned the basics it was quite straightforward. Some of the tools that were most useful were: the cut tool for cutting clips to the correct length, the fade tool for fading either the sound or video in or out, the crop tool to change the frames of video clips, the mute tool for muting our recorded clips, the effects tool for changing the effect and lighting of certain scenes & shots, the transition tool for adding transitions such as the page turn and lastly the animation tool for adding the ‘Diddly Squat’ animation in the video. Using iMovie was quite straightforward although it took a long time to edit the video as the precision wasn’t as good as other editing suites such as Final Cut Pro but we did come across a problem. Although we muted all of the clips and when we played the video back on iMovie they seemed fine, when exporting the video, the audio from our filming sessions could be heard. This was a big problem and we tried to resolve it but there was simply no answer because the file was not corrupted and on iMovie it seemed to play fine.
Adobe Photoshop & Illustrator was another of our main editing software’s used to create our ancillary texts. We used both to edit the images for our digipack and magazine advert. We manipulated the images in Photoshop in terms of colour, layering, cropping etc to create our desired effect and used Illustrator mainly to create the template for the digipak. We also used Photoshop to add key features that a magazine advert and digipack would include such as: bar codes, record label, production information, release dates etc. which all helped make our products seem more professional.
The Internet was one of the most important new media technologies that we used in this project. It is a valuable research tool and before planning our video we used the Internet to research videos of the genre we had decided on to find out the conventions by using websites such as myspace and youtube. Youtube was extremely helpful when it was time to present our work and to gain feedback. It allowed us to gain a wider audeince for comments, feedback and improvements that could be made. Posting it online fpr it to be accessed worldwide, makiing it available helped us immensely when creating our second and final drafts, catering it to please our target audience. Once we had found the song that we wanted to base our video on the use of the internet was very useful in allowing us to look at the artist who created the song and get a feel for their vibe and music. It also allowed us to research and get inspiration for digipaks by looking at other bands from the same genres. This helped us a great deal with our music video and digi packs helping us to accurately have the conventions of the genre.
During our planning we contacted the Artist Tinashe and asked for their permission to create a video for the song and also asked for some insight into the lyrics. He gave us some great input concerning the nature and background of the lyrics and said he was ‘honored’ that we chose his song to use for our A Level Work. Our blog allowed us to record all of our work in progress and completed work by using www.blogger.com. We these blogs to capture our ideas that we may have forgotten, for example we put images of possible locations to record. Without the blog, it would have been almost impossible to document all these possible ideas to look back on and replenish. It has been a fantastic way to constantly upload our work and has given us the ability to receive feedback from any and everyone very easily, for anybody can comment on our blog to give us feedback; this was also a very useful way for our teacher to give us our feedback on the drafts of our videos so while working we could easily refer back to it, even out of the class room.
