Evaluation Question 2

How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

I think my music video, digi-pack and magazine advert work in sync together as they all have similar theme. I like to think that I've have made my genre clear through my three products.

For my digi-pack and magazine designs, I chose to use the same font to link to the two together. Using the same font for both the magazine and cd cover will hopefully make my target audience recognise the band I've chosen, therefor, allowing more publicity and selling of their products.










































After researching other alobum covers, artists such as The Gorillas, The Beatles, Owl City and Fireflight all seem to have a rather a simple font for their album covers but is just as recognisable as something more extreme. The popularity of these bands is proof enough that you dont have to have an amazing font for your album or magazine advert. They do however make up for this for their interesting take of their music videos, an example of this is Owl City's video for FireFlies, whilst the video in itself is rather simple, the content does bring a smile to your face with its childlike nature



I wanted to use this in my music video because I wanted the audience to focus on the story more than the graphics.

I've taken inspiration for my album cover from The Beatles. I really liked the idea of having all four band members on the front cover but with them doing their own thing with the added element of different colours to match their personalities. Also, because they are an indie band, I wanted them to have a querky style to them that would be recognised for my target audience.

The combination of my products has hopefully established the genre of music and style of the band is. I used bright colours against black to make them stand out and show the band members which will hopefully attract people to buy their album.

Evaluation Question 1

In what ways does your video use/develop or challenge the forms and conventions of real media products?



I think that my video followed most of the conventions in real media products. To get inspiration for my video, I looked at artists such as Saosin, Jessie Mcartney, Fireflight and Owl City. I used these to my advantage and was able to create a video with a mix of ideas from these artists.
My biggest inspiration for my video was Jessie Mcartneys, Just So You Know video, the narrative involves a love triangle where Jessie is in love with his friend’s girlfriend but he can’t show it but he wants her to know his feelings. The video has a happy ending where the girlfriend and Jessie are shown hugging, This helped me to design my own narrative for the song I’ve chosen, from what I’d gathered from the lyrics, a couple are having problems with their relationship and ends up in the girlfriend leaving and the boyfriend is reminiscing their time together.

















My video ends in the girlfriend returning to the boyfriend but rather than having a happy ending for two, I decided to end the video with the boyfriend looking at girlfriend.















One of goodwins 6 points is a relationship between lyrics and visuals, I have done this in my video to help the narrative have more flow, an example of this is when the line says ‘Let me know how you’re feeling, while we’re alone in this place’, I’d filmed my couple in the park to simulate them being alone and having Victoria pushing Craig away when it appears that he’s asking how she’s feeling.

However, for the scenes where my band is playing, I have someone different singing the song, this differs from conventional music videos as normally the actor in the narrative would sing the song as well. I had to use someone else because Craig was at work all weekend and it was too difficult to do it after school so I was able to film a friend’s band to fill in the gaps.

















The costumes in my video are simple. Seeing as most indie bands have a simple clothing style, I felt I should follow these conventions. The locations of my video were at Arnold park, Lodgefarm lane and my bedroom. As the song is called Main Street, I felt that there should be at least one shot of Craig walking down a street to fit with the title of the song, the park was used because most couples would visit somewhere like that whilst on a date and the bedroom shots were used to connect with my target audience of teenagers who spend most of their time in the rooms.
Most of the shots used in my video focus on the boyfriend as he is left with the memories of his girlfriend, to simulate the memories, I put a black and white filter on them, this proved popular in one of my feedback quotes as they said that it separates the past memories to the present in a subtle way.

Overall, I feel that my video has followed the conventions of real music videos but also has my own twist on it to make it slightly unique in the music video world.

Evaluation Question 3

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

My audience feedback has been a great in help in producing the final cut to my video. Most of the critical feed back focused on the fact that there were little to none shots of the band in the first few rough cuts, however, they did like how I edited the narrative but that too also needed more editing to make it more entertaining.

Whilst they enjoyed the first cut, I was told to add more memory shots of Craig and Victoria when they were still together. I also needed more shots of Craig when he was dealing with the breakup to match the subtle sadness of the song despite its fast beat pace. Also, during the part of the song where the line 'I wake up screaming your name' is playing, I originally had the shots change from good memories to bad memories on each verse, this recieved positive feedback at first but later found it a bit slow and not fitting with the beat of the song. Now the shots change on prominent drum beats.

The band shots were hard to edit and I recieved some critisism that you could tell that they werent singing the song playing, however, after some editing and carefully watching Sam singing, I was able to edit to a point where it seems that he is singing the song. Thankfully, I was able to to place the instrumental shots at the right times in the song, I recieved positive critism that these were good.

Overall, the final version of my video recieved a lot of positive feedback from classmates and friends outside school, one comment said that they didnt get bored whilst watching the video and that for me is a big compliment as I feared that video was boring.

Evaluation Question 4

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

As in my AS project of making the begininning of a thriller, I used iMovie on the mac computers. This proved easy to do as I've used this softwear before.

For researching different music video's, I mainly focused on watching these via Youtube as it is well known for uploading music videos from all kinds of artists. I was orginally going to watch music channels but none of the videos that were played didnt link to my genre of music. Youtube was also a lot easier to use and I was able to post an embed code onto my blog. I was also able to post my final music video onto the website to improve the quality of it.

Blogger was a big help in journaling my research and showing the stages I went through and where I ended up. However, this website has been a pain on numerous occasions, varying from me being unable to post any posts to the most recent being that the entire website crashed on the 12th march 2011 and was down until the late evening of Friday (13th, coincidence?) Whilst the website was eventually restored, any posts posted the night before were deleted and had to be done again.

For filming my footage, I used a digital panasonic camera. The quality from this camera was very good but I found that zooming in made the footage too blurry so I tried to avoid from doing this too much.

For my digipack, I used a mix of windows live movie maker and paint on my laptop, I was originally going to use Paintshop Pro to add effects to front cover/inside/back cover/cd design etc more striking and effective but it was no longer available. I used Windows Live Movie Maker to make the lyrics video for my song and I also used it for the animatic of my band.

Finally, for my evaluation stage, I simply used the webcam on my laptop and uploaded the footage to Youtube and then published it to blogger.

Final Cut Analysis

All in all I'm proud with the outcome of my video. I feel that I've portrayed the lyrics through the narrative shots enough to show what is happening and so that the audience understand what is going on. To make my seem like a real music video, I added the name of the song and the band in the bottom left corner.















I wanted the audience to focus more on the narrative rather than the musicians and instruments so I spent much more time filming the couple than the band members. The used of transitions used throughout also work to my benefit, the black and white transitions are meant to represent the memories the boyfriend has whilst the colour shots represent the present time and the bad memories he has whilst they were breaking up. Though this video is not really meant to be 'romantic', I used a 'Romantic Filter' on a couple of memory shots and once shot where it shows the girlfriend to show that he still loves her. This proved popular with feedback, a friend outside school said that the black and white helped to seperate the shots effectivly without drawing the attention of the viewer too much.




























Whilst experimenting with different effects, I found out that I could create a shot within shot effect, I haven't seen this type of effect used in professional videos but I felt it added a unique touch. The smaller shots in the corner are the shots that would follow after the drum beat, again, I used the black and white effect to represent to good memories and regular colour to represent the bad memories.















Incorporating Goodwins Six points was rather easy but not all the points occurred in the final product. The point that I used most was point about there being a relationship between lyrics and visuals (either illustrative, amplifying, contradicting), this was easy to do and is apparent through the narrative of the story. However at the end of the video, the girlfriend comes back to the girlfriend even though the song shows no indication that she comes back at all, I felt this would be an effective ending to my video that leaves the audience wondering if they get back together or not. Over the shoulder shots show the expressions they're feeling and shows that the emotions felt are completely different.





























After drawing out my story board, I found that I was making a lot of changes in the final product of my video. Orginally, I was going have Sam playing guitar for the first 12 seconds, but after testing this out, I found that watching a guitar playing for 12 seconds became a little tedious so I decided to have a memory shot of Craig and Victoria having fun together. I'm glad I did this instead because it fit with next scene with Victoria walking away from Craig. I did eventually use the guitar shot but again, the issue of watching the same thing for a long time got boring so to break up the shot more, I flipped the shots to make a pattern of mirriored and normal.

However, due to a technical fault in iMovie 9, background audio from other shots are replaying in the beginning of my video. After researching the problem on a forum, I discovered that iMovie has a bug, if you slow down/speed up shots then background noise will play over the music, the audio glitch appears only in the exported movie, but is not evident in preview. There is a way to fix it but that would include re-editing the shots. But, as the band I filmed aren't actually singing my chosen song, it would be far too difficult and time consuming.

The information for this was found at: www.discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=13380510

Final Cut

Rough Cut 3

Now with band shots :D

Really hate how blurry it is, sounds will be fixed.

Editing Process

Editing did not go to plan at all at first. The computer I was working on had a glitch and it although it allowed me to edit my shots as normal, iMovie wouldn't save the shots I'd edited past around 8-10 seconds. Luckily, a newer version of iMovie was installed and the problem was solved.

Editing the narrative shots was fairly easy and enjoyable to do. By following Goodwins six points, I edited the shots to fit wit the lyrics of the song to keep a flow to it.

The band shots however were rather difficult to edit as the band I filmed aren't singing the song I've chosen. To say that they aren't singing my song, I'd like to think I did a decent job with lip syncing Sam with the song and the other band members to music.

Rough Cut 2

I've really messed the timing up on 1:48 - 1:50, will be fixed very very soon.

Outtakes

Just to add a little humour, here are some of the shots that went wrong whilst filming.







Whilst Sam.P was tuning Sam. L base guitar, the string snapped and we had to stop until we fixed the problem.

Rough cut

Here's the rough cut of my music video, I have yet to film to band shots and for now have put black spaces in video to simulate where the shots will go.

The black white scenes are meant to simulate the good memories the boyfriend has of their relationship whilst the colour shots represent the memories when the relationship is over and when the girlfriend is being off with him.

Magazine Advert

Here is the final piece for my magazine advert for Ashes. I followed the normal conventions of other band ads by having all the band members on the front page. I also added a 'burnt' effect to the edges of the picture to link with the name of the band.

Here is the same image with different transitions:

Digipack - Cd design

Here's the final design for my CD, I wanted to keep it to match with the inside of my digipack. I decided to make a second cd design which would contain some bonus tracks such as the acoustic versions of some of their songs.



























This was the original design for my cd. I liked the idea of having a simple design with the name of the band across the cd but I felt it looked a little boring so I changed it to have the band members on it instead.

Digipack - Inside

The inside of my digipack design. They're the full photos on the ones on the front cover showing all the band members. It's hard to tell but each photo gets lighter.

Digipack Front

Front cover for the album. This was inspired by The Beatles and Gorillas album covers by having all 4 members on the front cover. I changed the colours to fit with the band members.

Digipack - Back

Here's the final design of the back cover for my digipack. It has a simple design with a faded sepia tone and pale red letters for the names of the other songs.

I got the other songs from www.purevolume.com.

Problems whilst filming

We encounted many problems whilst filming for my video, the main one being that it was difficult to get everyone together in order to get this finished on time.

As Craig and Victoria go to different schools and work all weekend, it was hard for them to find time to come to arnold and film for me, luckily, they'd booked 2 weeks off work and during that time we were able to film.

Filming the band didn't go to plan either. I was originally going to film friends from school to mime the song for me but different time tables made it near impossible. Luckily, Sam said I could film his band whilst they practised, however, going out the night before and getting up early the next morning wasn't the best idea. We were slightly hungover and wanted to get this done quickly. I wasn't able to get them to mime my song so hopefully I can edit the shots I have to made it look like they are.

Filming Schedule

Friday - 25/02/11

11:00am - Meet up with Craig and Victoria and show them what kind of shots I need

11:30am - Start filming shots down at the park - Shots of them being happy together and when Victoria is acting off with Craig.

12:30am - Films the shots of Craig reminiscing about Victoria - photos etc - Then 'see's' her whilst out for a walk.

1:30pm - Practise shots of Craig sending messages to Victoria saying 'I miss you." We found out that using the laptop/facebook was more effective and easier to see. This also relates to teenagers communicating on the internet.

2:00pm - Film Victoria responding to Craigs 'I miss you' message. Close up on her expression and her deleting the message. Close up on the message itself (her p.o.v)

2:20pm - Final shooting of the day and my favourite scene in the video - A shot of Craig at home watching t.v when he hears the door knock, he goes to answer it and Victoria is standing there, showing her then switching back to Craig to show his expression then the video ends. This shot also allowed me to put my continuation skills to work.

12/03/11 - Saturday

2:00pm - Meet Victoria and Craig

2:10pm - Re-shoot the scene where Craig 'see's' Victoria as the previous shooting didn't flow correctly on a noticeable level.

2:40pm - Go to a different park to shoot more 'romance' scenes between the couple - again secretly filming them to make it seem more natural. Accidental shots were also filmed here. whilst on the round-a-bout, I didn't realise the camera was filming but decided to use the shots anyway.

3:00pm - Film them walking then have Victoria walk away - hopefully I'll be able to edit so it looks like she's faded away.

3:10pm - More shots of them together for the happy memories.

19/03/11

11:30am - Film the band shots