Music Video Evaluation

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

I feel that our music video was very good a meeting the conventions of music video but there were also times when we challenged them as well. It especially met Goodwin's point of analysis but also challenged some other music videos of the same genre.

Firstly, it does have some good visuals and music in my video. We made sure that all the shots cut on the beat and that the duration of some clips matches how quickly the the music is playing. This ensured that the video is easy to watch and helps the viewers to watch the video as it flows well. We also made sure that the video sold the artist. We did this in a number of ways by showing the artists, singing, playing instruments and having fun. this meant that the viewers would be able to connect with each individual character. We tried to make all the different members of the group have a different character so that the audience can relate to them easier.

Another way in which we sold the artist, and another of Goodwin's points, was by using voyeurism. The main way in which we used voyeurism min this video was what the artists were wearing. We all made sure that we wore similar clothes in the music video so that the audience can see that we are a group. This also helped to show that the artist was modern and this meant that are target audience could relate better to them. Because of the clothes we were wearing we also had included some intertextuality into our video as we were wearing clothes from places like top man and Jack and Jones.

We also followed Goodwin's point of genre characteristics. Our videos genre was indie/hip-hop. we found that the song was very fast and upbeat so we tried to show this in our video by making the shots fast and making the footage fun and enjoyable to watch. However, one of Goodwin's points which we couldn't follow very well was music and lyrics. We found it very hard to do this as the lyrics were so random and didn't really have a narrative. This is why we decided to make the video have random shots of lots of different things which were in our location (Cambridge). There was some lyrics that matched and that was the whistling scenes. we made sure that we made the match as well as we could.

How effective is the combination of the main product and the ancillary tasks?

We wanted to make sure that our music video, digipack and poster all had a link between that all so that the target audience can easily see that link between them. We feel that we did this successfully and that was because we used our split screen style throughout the entire project. this therefore, meant that the ancillary task would stand out and they would be more eye catching. This also helped to sell the artist as the audience can easily see that link between each product.

These three products also helped to create an image of the artist. i  this case it shows how we are fun and a bit different to other artist in this genre. we did this by not showing the artist directly and just showing the name of the artist with randoms clips from our video on our ancillary tasks. Throughout our video we kept using the split screen effect especially on the whistling clips to break up the footage and make it more interesting and advanced. this is why we decided to use this on our digipack and poster as well. because we had a black background in our video with the images over it we decided to do this on the ancillary tasks as well so that they stand our from others.

What have you learnt from the audience feedback?

Whilst designing, making and editing this music video i have received a lot of feedback from my other peers and from teachers. I feel that this has helped me learn a lot and has helped know what I needed to improve and change in the actual video. Firstly, in the initial pitch we were asked a few questions by our other classmates and this helped us come up with some baseline ideas for our video. Firstly we were asked where we were gonna film or video and this is when we decided to film in Cambridge. They also asked if we are going to included any instruments which made us realise that it would be good to include some shots of us playing the drums as this was a main instrument in the song. Finally we were asked if we would use any effects in our video which was when we thought about using fades and quick cuts.

We then made our first cut, our rough cut, and got feedback from this too. This was probably the most important feedback as it really made us think about how we needed to improve it and what we needed to improve. The main feedback that we received was that we needed to include more shots of us actually singing. Obviously this is one of the key elements of a music video and a key part of selling the artist so we realised we had to go and film more of us singing. We were also told that some of our shots are slightly contrast with the colours and some are too random. So we decided to smoothen up some shots using colour correcter and we also took out some of the more random shots.

After we had finished these changes we showed our final cut to our peers. The main feedback that we got was that the video matched the mood of the song as it was fast paced and this meant it was fun and enjoyable to watch. People said that they really liked the effect of the split screens we used as it helped brake up some shots which would otherwise be fairly long winded and boring. They also said that even though we didn't have any real narrative it still worked because the song also didn't have a narrative. One thing that we wished we could have improved is that some of our shots weren't colour corrected as well as we had hopped. Even though we included more singing than in our rough cut some people still thought that we should have include more than we did.

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

To create these three media products we had to use a variety of different technologies. Software we used to construct the products was the HD video cameras and the still cameras. We had 3 days to film all our footage for the video and then we had to upload it to the Apple Macs and then onto final cut to edit it. On final cut we could edit the length of each clip and where to put it in the song. It also has a lot of different effects to make the video more interesting. While using this we learnt how to do split screens effectively and we then used this idea throughout the 3 products. We then put our video on blogger which is where we have researched all our ideas and evaluated at each different stage.

To make our digipack and our poster we used the softwear Photoshop also on the Macs which is brilliant for making mote advanced things. This also has a lot of different things to help change the size, shape and effects of each photo. We used the stills camera to take the photos for our digipack and poster but ended up not using them as we just used shots from our video. While using Photoshop the main this that i learnt to do was how to fade just the edges of the pictures which gave it a really good finishing effect.