Evaluation

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?- Part 1

In our music video we have followed some alternative pop/ singer songwriter music conventions and included a range of well known techniques to support our video.
However we also wanted to create a unique music video, something that wasn't already out there on the market and we feel we have succeeded in all areas we catered for. 

STAYED  CONVENTION #1

Here we are comparing a shot from our music video to one from Michael Bubles music video of "Haven t met you yet" (http://youtu.be/1AJmKkU5POA Micheal Buble)  We chose to use this Artist and his music video because he is of the same genre and the same style of song. Its not to solemn and has a bit of a kick to it, whilst staying with emotional lyrics. These particular shots we are comparing are two head on views. We decided to stay with this convention of the artists regularly looking and engaging with the audience because we feel it is important for the audience members to know their artist on a personal level. It is necessary in a music video and song like ours and Mr Bubles as they are songs which involve a lot of emotion. If we didn't have these shots then the same heartfelt feelings linking with the lyrics would not be portrayed and this would take away a big input for the video. We show this with the artists staring right in to the camera and getting an eye connection with the audience to show his genuine personalities and  feelings.  The whole point of our video is to connect with the audience and link a situation to one they may have experienced personally.

If our video was not of this genre the conventions would probably be different and locking in with the audience may not be as important. For example in David Guettas video "Love wont let me go" there is no influence or vision of him as an artist at all and the whole video is made up structurally through a narrative. This song can get away with this convention as its genre of dance doesn't necessarily support the same characteristics as our genre of alt pop and theme of music. It isn't as important for the audience to know what their artist looks like as it not emotionally attached in the same ways. 

As we can see by watching this video we don't actually see the artist himself, we see dancers and actors which are the focus of the video and the actions being performed. I think this is effective for this music video as the style needs to be lively with a lot going on, with a fast cutting rate and a lot of movement. However this wouldn't suit our song as our artist needs to have a relationship with the audience to go with our style of music which is a lot slower and therefore requires a slower cutting rate, allowing time for artists appearance as well as other actor influence.

 STAYED  CONVENTION #2 / INSPIRATION

Here we are showing an inspiration we have stayed with and we used the singer/songwriter artist Josh Groban (http://youtu.be/fzk09LOxszc Josh Groban). When looking at Josh as an artist we found that we really enjoyed a lot of his conventions, for example his filter, his showing of his piano skills, connection with the audience and slow cutting rates, and they worked really well in his music videos as they work well with the melody and beat of his style. Although our style wasn't exactly the same as his, as ours was slightly more up beat than his "February song",   we decided we would like to involve his filter style in our music video which was sepia to give an almost old photographic look. We worked with a few filters, for example black and white, a blue hint and a gray-scale, and then decided eventually that a slightly "off sepia" would work the best as it gave off an authentic touch in the sense of creating something classic which would hopefully never age out of fashion. We felt that with a song in the style of ours we needed to have a mellow look which gave the image depth and a genuine character. We tried to keep the colours original but only some of the shots gave off good effects. We found most of the shots we used looked slightly amateur as we didn't have a high tech camera or any useful equipment like a dolly other than a tripod and obviously we were aiming for a professional look so we came to the conclusion to insert a filter as this helped cover this up. Again if our video was of a different genre, for example "dance" then brighter colours would have been the obvious aim. However we needed our video to suit the flow and theme of our song choices, so bright colours were not an option for us. 

DEVELOPED CONVENTION #1

For our developed convention we have used influence from "Daniel Powters Bad Day" (http://youtu.be/gH476CxJxfg Daniel Powter)  video, in particular his use of a split screen. Here we can see how he has used two people’s lives through the narrative to create this shot, showing a routine through their every day lives to get across the theme of "Falling in love and being made for each other". We really like this method and we thought we could use it for the work scene with the "worker" and his girlfriend in two different places. However we then decided to take it a step further and instead of doing this we chose to split screen the narrative with the artists instrumental and used a close up/ extreme close up. We felt it was important for the audience to be reminded throughout the video who the artist was and so there is a positive integration between the two mediums.

We chose to split screen these two shots in particular because they both involved the same hand movement on two different scales. 1- The performer playing the piano and 2- the actor typing on the keyboard. We found these worked particularly well because they are of the same nature (typing or playing on keys, whether this be piano keys or computer keys) and the result was them fitting together perfectly. Shows a link between the two peoples day jobs 1- a musician and 2- working in an office on a computer.

DEVELOPED CONVENTION#2 / INSPIRATION

Here we are looking at the costume used in our music video compared to what Josh Groban wore in his Music video in his song “February song" (http://youtu.be/fzk09LOxszc). We feel that costume/clothing is a very important component of Mise-En-Scene and we had to think about it very carefully. Every different genre requires a different style of clothing and every artist has their own signature look. This is a theory introduced called "Star image". Star image supports the idea that a representation of an actor/artist that is fabricated through media texts and promotion, publicity, television programs, and criticism through different mediums.

We looked for inspiration through Josh Grobans music video and as we can see he is dressed quite formally wearing a full on suit. We decided to take some ideas from him but to also change some areas of dress. We decided our artist would look best in Smart casual and not just purely smart as shown in Josh Grobans image. We felt this was appropriate as we aimed for our artist to be popular through a range of ages in our audience. We weren’t going to totally dress him down as this takes away from a sense of class, something the older generation would appreciate, yet we weren’t going to suit him and boot him as this wouldn’t appeal to younger members. In the end we concluded that we would dress him in smart trouser with a shirt and a casual tie. We also added a scarf to add to a genuine image for our artists in himself. We though this could be his "Signature" prop. Just like Niki Minaj has dip dyed hair and Dappy has a hat. 

CHALLENGED CONVENTION #1

Here we are going to compare a convention in our music video to one in Bruno Mars' music video for "Just the way you are" (http://youtu.be/LjhCEhWiKXk) We chose this music video for these of musical instruments being shown in the actual performance is included in his video, just like ours. In fact we chose to challenge this convention because we both used the same musical instruments (Piano) yet we used two different types to convey different messages. In Bruno Mars' music video he uses a normal bar piano and this suits his style very well as he isn't focusing on anything to serious.This is also portrayed through his costume and the framing of the shot showing just him being casual in brighter lighting.  His song is up beat but mixed with deep love emotion so a smaller piano suits this well mixed with brighter lighting. However we are challenging this because in our music video we used a grande piano. The reason for this being that we were aiming for a much more mellow and classy theme so we felt a normal bar piano wouldn't do this justice. We also linked this in with a sepia filter which creates a classic and slightly smokey lighting which helped portray this effect we were aiming for.
Once we had taken our preliminary shots of our artist on the grande piano we knew it would fit our song perfectly. However if we were doing a song which was a bit more lively and had a different beat and narrative maybe we would have used a normal piano.
As we can see from the two shots, our video is based in a grand hall which seems empty and classic, whereas Bruno Mars' video is set in a cosy apartment, again reflecting on the nature and tempo of the song choice.
If we listen to The Frays "How to save a life" video we can hear it is of a similar beat and chord as ours. It has the separate verses and chorus then nearing the end of the song there is a big climax before then dying down to and end. Then if we look at the style of video it is also very similar to ours in the fact that they use the Grande Piano to match the sound of it in their song. So the instrument is physically being played in the video and not just heard. I think it is important for this to happen when the instrument is such a bold and beautiful one, it definitely deserves some recognition.

CHALLENGED CONVENTION #2 / INSPIRATION



Here we are comparing a convention of ours to one of Beyonce's in her video "Single ladies (put a ring on it) In her video she supports the convention of matching her actions in the video to the lyrics in her song. For example shown in the picture, she is pointing to her hand when she sings " put a ring on it" and holds her hips when she sings "man on my hips". By doing this she is drawing attention to different area of her body for the audience. This convention really suits her style and her aims as she is seen as a classic sex symbol and she obviously wants to add sex appeal to her videos. For men its to look at her and for women its to dream of being like her. This is part of Andrew Goodwin's music video theory. She can use different areas of her body to symbolize certain actions and it helps that she has a quick cutting rate as her song is extremely upbeat. This means the audience wont get bored with the camera focusing for too long. However we didn't want to use this in our video as we were aiming for a wide, all round aged audience and this wouldn't be appropriate. We have made our cutting rates not too quick as this wouldn't suit our song style but not too long for our audience to get bored. We achieved this my having more movement in our shots instead of single still positions.

 How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts: Part 2
Here we have compiled a voice recording of all 3 people in our group and a montage of photos appropriate to what we are talking about. We did this by recording ourselves having this conversation and then taking away the visual and adding in pictures that we needed. We merged these aspects together by using Final Cut Express on the apple Macs. We decided to so this as it created a much more flowing way to talk about our products. This talk was based upon what we thought of our Music video, DigiPack and advert and what we found out through our audience research.  

We thought it was really important to do a project like this as it allowed us to get a strong amount of audience research done and then allow ourselves to see what we could have done better and what possible changes we could make in the future.

EXTRA

Back cover

This was our first attempt at our DigiPack back cover. We created it using a grand piano for the main back cover image and used the natural floorboard background. We added the song names and some of the legal labels but decided that it just didn't really look right. We thought that the writing was too similar to a dance style Digipack and it didn't suit our genre at all. We tried the writing without the outer glow effect but it still looked to similar to a dance record and this wasn't what we were aiming for. We also came to the conclusion that our dragon records image looked too fake and it didn't give off an authentic look which is what we were aiming for. We think that the image is bold enough and fine for our blog but we just thought that it didn't suit a DigiPack in the same way.

Credit inlay

We created this for our credits inlay of our DigiPack and we really liked the style and technique used to produce it. However we all agreed and came to the conclusion that again it didn't really suit our genre of music and it wouldn't work with our style of songs. We felt that it took a lot away from the artists image and we really didn't want that. We found that having some kind of focus on our artist was extremely important. Whilst we didn't want our artists to come across as wanting to be center of attention all the time we needed his influence involved in some way and this wasn't it. We are still going to include a credits page but we have decided to include a different, more realistic to our genre, image which will have some kind of feature or influence of the artist him self, whether it just be a certain ares of his body, or a certain feature or even his whole self. We are aiming to create a more natural inlay which reflects on the artists image and genre of music.

Front Cover

 Here is our first created front cover for our DigiPack and whilst it was good to practice our photo shop skills on we decided, like the matching inlay, that it wasn't the style to suit our genre. We again thought it was too much of a dance style cover to suit a different style of song. After doing more research in to other artists, I came across the front cover for Jason Derulos album (shown)  and it was extremely similar to this. That decided it, we were definitely going to start again and create another, more suited DigiPack for our style.

Advert

After a lot of work we decided this was our final creation for our advert. We has adjusted the writing but we just had to change front cover image as our front cover was now different.















After our first attempt at our front cover we then decided to move on to a more natural image of the artists and a bold back ground, but not so technical. We then applied a slightly cartoon filter on to our image as the floorboards just on their own didn't look very good. However we have now realized that this doesn't look great. After asking other members of the school and family we have come to the conclusion that this looks too fake and not natural enough for the style of our artist. We did like this style but we can now see the elements that dont quite suit what our artist represents and the types of their songs. We are aiming on now stripping all the images back to being natural, with not added techniques or effects dded on. We are hoping that this will reflect the artists personality in a natural sense and portray him as a genuine character.

What have you learned from your audience feedback: Part 3
Here is our final music video that has been posted on Youtube but with added annotations. These annotations highlight the areas that our audience found good and aspects that our audience thought could have been improved.

We have pointed our positive comments out in green and our negative comments in red to make it easier for onlookers to see and so we can see a clear distinction between the two.

Audience feedback from our chosen Artist NICK GARDNER. 

How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planing and evaluation stages? : Part 4

Here is a recording video of me speaking about what we would need for our music video and DigiPack, the conventions we used, how we were going to organize and plan everything, how we researched other artists, technologies and evaluations.