Music Video Evaluation-Sian

Music Video Evaluation Commentary-

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

The song we chose for this project was ‘The Hill, The View and The Lights’. We first spent time researching the band and listening to their music, as it was important that we understood their genre, which was Indie. We used Goodwin’s Theory in order to keep in theme with this genre; Goodwin identified several key features that help differentiate music videos. One of these is that there is a relationship between lyrics and visuals and that by using visuals you can help illustrate what the lyrics are trying to show. Nearly all the lyrics in our video relate to the visuals, the key lyrics we chose to visualise in our music video were, ‘gritty, city shadow’ and ‘The Hill, The View and The Lights’ which is also the title of the song. We felt these lyrics were really important and needed to be portrayed in our video. We used a number of scenic shots in order to emphasise a city view, in particular when Josh is on the top of Castle Hill and you can see the city background. Our final shot goes from a close up into a low angle shot of the sky, reflecting the first line of the song ‘high up in the sky’ which is actually how the song starts not ends. The Indie genre often relates the visuals to the lyrics, often having a narrative, so we wanted to make sure we kept this in mind and showed this in our video.
The song’s theme is love and romance and has not only a female, but a male singer as well. It tells a story from both their viewpoints, with a female vocal first and then a male. At the end they sing together as though they are finally together and the ‘light has reappeared’. Hence at the beginning of our video you see Marianne and Josh at similar places but never at the same time, until the end when the music changes and you see them in the same shot.
Goodwin also said there is a relationship between music and visuals. The beginning of the song we chose is slow to start with but, just over half way there is an instrumental, it is quicker than the rest of the song with a faster beat and more unusual in comparison to the rest of the song. To reflect this difference in the song we sped up some of our visuals and made them more unusual to fit the music we also edited shots to make them slower or in reverse. When the instrumental has finished the music returns to a slower melody like before and the visuals are longer and slower to fit this. Each time there is a new verse we changed the scene to a different location and usually changed the costume as well. The video includes both close ups and long shots, with both Marianne and Josh singing into the camera. This is typical of music videos as the artist is typically young and attractive and the viewers want to see them up close. This is an example of voyeurism. Record labels often want their artist to display a strong visual style in there videos, occasionally being iconic and memorable. I think in our video it was Marianne pink prom styled dress with her converse as the two wouldn’t normally wouldn’t be seen together. Intertextuality was another of Goodwin's conventions and through research we felt we had a good idea of what is a typical of an Indie video. This is why we had a strong narrative and made sure the lyrics related to the visuals, to make this clear. We also took time on the costumes to make sure they fitted this style, hence why Josh was dressed in skinny jean a typical indie style and Marianne wore converse. The costume is an important part of the video, as the audience want to be able to relate to the style, which is usually similar to what they will wear. Our main audience was teenagers and young adults so we needed to make sure this was reflected in the costumes as converse are not typically seen on an older generation.
Generally I think our video followed the conventions of Goodwin’s theory and kept in theme with an Indie genre. However I think we added more effects than may have normally been seen in an indie video, as they tend to concentrate more on the narrative. I think when we sped up the people around Marianne in Cambridge that worked particularly well, as well as the slow motion. The only thing I think our music video didn’t have that is quite typical in an indie video was a band or artist playing a musical instrument. I don’t know if this would have worked as well in our video though, so this is why we decided to leave it out, we also weren’t sure if we could get hold of any musical instruments.

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

We knew that we wanted to have a strong visual link between our music video and our ancillary products, so whenever the audience saw the Digipak or the Magazine advert they would immediately relate it back to the video. We thought about what this could be and came up with the idea of using the multi-coloured umbrella featured in our video. It has been one of the key aspects in our video and directs straight back to it, letting the audience connect the two together. The umbrella also represents The Cajun Dance Party, with its bright colours and being slightly unusual, which is what I think the band like to do, i.e. differentiate themselves from other groups, through the use of bright colours and quirkiness.
We decided to put the umbrella on the back of our Digipak as although it is a main feature, linking the Digipak to the video, we thought it was important that the artists should be on the front, with the umbrella being more of a trademark for The Cajun Dance Party. The umbrella is open on the Digipak, as it is at the end of the video, because this is when the song changes and Marianne and Josh have ‘finally met’. The melody is more cheerful as they sing together. We showed this by having shots of the umbrella open, whereas at the beginning the umbrella is closed as they haven’t met and the lyrics are more sorrowful. So we felt is should be open to illustrate the happy end to the song.
As the umbrella is the main feature of the back of the Digipak we decided to write the songs over it, in white writing as we didn’t want to take away from the colours on the umbrella. Other than the ‘The Hill, The View and The Lights’ we made up the rest of the song names. We made these fun and creative having titles such as ‘Teabags’ or ‘Worms on Fire’ again as we felt this showed the style and personality of The Cajun Dance Party. The writing is also in an creative and handwritten style to fit with this, but we kept the background a more pastel colour to add a contrast and show the more serene side of the song. Originally the background was black but it was too harsh with the image of the umbrella and the image on the front and didn’t fit the style of the band as well as the pastel colours, which we also used for the titles.
The front cover of our Digipak is of Marianne. Our initial idea was to have the photo on the top of castle hill, with the city background and at night time for a slightly different effect. However we found some problems with this, such as it would be hard to make out Marianne, we weren’t sure if you would be able to see the city background and finally would it look professional. As we weren’t sure on all of these things we opted for a scenic background to fit with our video. We chose a slightly wooded area and on the day there was really good sunlight, which worked well and made the picture look more professional.
Once we uploaded the photo into Photoshop, we thought we should edit the image to make it more interesting, we added different effects and in the end chose an artistic feel to represent the video and The Cajun Dance Party. However it was still missing something, so we decided to take the image but triple it adding a different effect to each but still keeping in theme with the artistic feel. I think this reflected the Indie genre in the video as we tried to make sure everything we did kept within this style and overall I am very pleased with the outcome. I think it looks professional and represents The Cajun Dance party.
Our Magazine Advert had a simpler style and instead we opted for a more edgy style by just having a brick wall as the background and Marianne leaning against it. This reflected the more ‘urban’ area of the video. We changed the picture into black and white as we thought this fitted with the style of the picture. We then had ‘The Cajun Dance Party’ and the song title, ‘The Hill, The View and The Lights’ in white and the information underneath in red.
We did incur quite a few problems with the Magazine Advert, more so than the Digipak. The first one was that we had planned to have both Marianne and Josh in the Advert, but had a problem with josh making the photo shoot. We also wanted to add an image onto the wall, either the umbrella again or a sunflower to add a contrast of colour, but we couldn’t find the right image or get hold of a photo. I do feel this would have made the advert more interest as the video had so many colours, it would have related better to it. Therefore I am quite disappointed with the Magazine Advert and do felt it could have been more representative of the band and our video.

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

The feedback we received helped us to improve and develop our video. It meant we had an opinion from others, most of whom were seventeen to eighteen and were the targeted audience of the genre of video we were making. It was really useful to see other people’s viewpoints that maybe we had missed. We received feedback on our rough cut, so we could make changes before our Final cut and on our pitch and blog, which were our first initial ideas on the video.
The feedback we received from our pitch and blog was that it is good and there are clear links in our initial developmental stage between our music promo video and our ancillary products, also the contrast between locations and costumes, for example the pink ball gown. The criticism we received from this was that we were lacking visual representations of our influences. From this we added more images to our costume list, to give an exact idea of what style the Marianne and Josh should have. We also did more research on bands and music that had influenced our ideas for our video. This was really helpful, as not only could we analyse in more detail the influences we had, but we also gained further ideas. We got a lot of inspiration from The Cajun Dance Party themselves, as we learnt that they liked to use bright colours, scenic settings and in one of their videos- ‘Amylase’, used a animated, cartoon style in the second half of the video. We were originally going to use animations in our music video, so this was really useful to watch and see how they did this. The setting of this video was again useful, because the beginning is in a field. We knew from the beginning we wanted to have some of our shots in a field and then a contrast to more urban areas, to fit the second half of the song. So we saw how we could make this look effective and more interesting, as the female vocalist has a prop; flowers, this is how we can across the idea to use the multi-coloured umbrella.
Our feedback from our Rough cut was also good and this was probably the most constructive feedback. We knew we had a lot of areas that needed work and there were quite a few gaps we still had to fill, but weren’t sure what they needed. From the feedback we learnt that we needed more close up shots of Marianne and Josh, more effects to enhance our footage and to correction some of the synching.
After this feedback we added more close ups of Marianne, which also helped to fill our gaps. Unfortunately we couldn’t any more of Josh as he was unavailable for the time we had. We then worked on adding effects such as, putting shots in reverse, fades and slowing shots down and speeding them up. Finally we sorting the synching out at as best we could, however we did face some problems as some areas we couldn’t correct due to how the lyrics were sung.
This feedback definitely helped us to improve our video, in that it proved that the overall concept had worked successfully, but identified one or two techniques and visuals that we could to refine the overall production. This brought a higher quality finish to our video and a better representation of what a music video should be like.

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

The main technologies we used were Final cut, Photoshop and our blog. All of these helped us to create a professional and creative music video.
Final cut was the most important technology we used, as it helped us to edit and modify our video. We used it to correct the synching in our video, add effects and condense our footage down to our final three minutes. It meant we could make our shots lighter to match others and cut and paste shots, as we did at the beginning of our video, with the swing and the umbrella. I think the most effective edit we used was to reverse certain shots, such as Marianne jumping off the swing and her picking the petals of a flower. The shots were average before, but when reversed fitted better with the music and made the video more interesting. We used the blog to add all our research from the internet, to write down our planning stages and any ideas we had. This helped a lot as it meant we could use research from other sites, such as Google or YouTube and then import the information on to the blog. It also meant we had a really precise planning schedule, which made shooting on the day so much easier as we knew what we had to do. I think this is why we were able to get all the footage we wanted and extra. This meant we had a variety of different shots and were able to cut,edit and replace shots to improve our video.
We added images and videos to our blog to emphasise key points and features of our video and to make it more interesting to read.
We didn't use Photoshop as much as the others, however it was still an important technology as it helped us to create our Magazine Advert and Digipak, as we could import pictures and edit them to create the look of professional ancillary products. These may not have been as important as the video, but in real life help to promote a new song, so need to be effective in order to do this. What I particularly like about Photoshop was all the effects that were available. We used a various numbers of effects in our video and wanted to do the same with our ancillary products. There were many to choose from so I felt we could get the look we wanted. I also did the initial idea for our Digipak in Photoshop, were I edited an original image from The Cajun Dance party. I added a neon-glow effect which I think worked well and gave the image a totally different effect. I am not sure after producing the video that this was the right image for the Digipak; however it showed how you can edited images to get the desired effect you want.
I think due to all of these technolgies we were able to further our Music video, we used them for our AS Media, however now that we are also able to use them to a higher standard we can continue to develop our product and our ideas.

Overall I am really pleased with our music video, there our areas that if we did it again; for example our Magazine Advert and my commentary I think could have been to a higher standard, However I think we have improved a lot since AS level and we have shown this in our work.