Music Video Evaluation-Marianne

Media Evaluation

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

Our Music video is indie based so we decided to watch a lot of videos in this style. The Cajun Dance party was the band whose song we chose and there are quite a few factors we used from the way they presented and the settings they used. A lot were set in fields and green areas so a lot of our scenes we used were in a park, field and used a hill. We got the influence of using a flower and picking off its petals in Beyonce’s video, Broken Hearted Girl, we thought this was quite a significant moment in her video and thought it would go well as a prop in ours. The song we chose tells a story about a boy and girl meeting so we wanted to build up this story.

We looked at Goodwin’s theories to help `us, which were notion of looking, lyrics and visuals and Intertextuality. The helped to guide us into how we wanted our video to turn out. Mise-En Scene is a part of notion of looking and was important in our video, as we wanted to make sure it looked indie. Our costumes were also significant to show the indie style, Lily Allen wears a lot of big colourful dresses with trainers and thought it would look good in our video, the converse shoes how it was and indie based style. We used the umbrella as quite an important prop in our video, it is used a lot, I hold it underneath the tree and open, the male actor holds it when he is waling up the hill and it is in the last scene. Some scenes were darker than others, like underneath the tree so we filtered it to make it brighter and this also brought out the colours of the umbrella more so it stood out. The colours in our video were thought about quite a lot as it was quite a gloomy day we wanted contrasts. The multi-coloured umbrella and bright pink dress brought colour and were significant visuals so when these were used we wanted our backgrounds to seem more dull with quite plain colours. As it was autumn when we filmed it we wanted to have some scenes set with the colours from the trees, orange and reds which came out well with the lighting, we had to make sure the costumes were not as bright in these scenes so the colours wouldn’t clash.

We looked at a lot of indie videos and noticed that a lot had a band in them but there were also others that told a story and this was what we wanted to do as with the lyrics we had was easy to do. We had a lot of scenes where the actor is facing the camera and syncing to the lyrics. Also the setting was very indie themed set in fields and on hills. The only scene which you notice a change of setting was when the song speeds up, here we thought it would work well to have an urban feel on a street in a city, this worked well as we quickened the pace of the filming to go with the tempo of the song.

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

We wanted our video to relate to our ancillary texts and show what we thought would create and represent our band whose song we chose to do, The Cajun Dance Party. We went out and decided to use real life photos for both the digipak and magazine cover. We looked where we could take a photo that would either have been a set which had been in the video or related.

As the multi-coloured umbrella had become a main feature in our product we thought we should have it shown somewhere on either the digipak or magazine cover, we tried a few different ways and thought it would go well on the back of the DVD cover. We found an umbrella on the internet which looked very similar to the one we used in the actual video so placed that on the back, we edited it into place with the help of using Photoshop and made the colours more enhanced. We initially were going to use a black background for the back but after some thought realised it would look to dark for our cover and as the song isn’t dark wouldn’t have looked right. Instead we took one of the purples from the umbrella and filled the background, we also did this with the writing, took one of the colours for the different pieces of text on the back and front.

The front of the DVD cover is a picture of me and we thought about where would be a good place to take the picture and thought under the trees would be good where we had also filmed some of the video. At first we just had one of the photo on the front which we edited to look like it had been drawn, after some feedback and realisation we wanted it to not look just like we had placed a photo on so cut the photo and copied it three times. We then edited and filtered each photo to all look different and be individual. By doing this our DVD cover became more interesting to look at with still having the similarity and design to what our video looks like, as we wanted to keep that connection.

Our magazine cover is a bit more naturalistic than how our digipak turned out. Again we went out and found a wall with some graffiti on which looked like it could relate to our urbanised scene in our product so took a few pictures to see whether we could edit it and make it work. The picture was in colour at first but after trying out some effects decided on a chalk styled black and white colour. The font style was the same as the font we used on our DVD cover. We thought it looked right and using similar things like font makes it more recognisable to viewers and audiences that it is the same band and company. Although the magazine cover did not represent our video as much as the DVD cover has it still have some similarities as having a similar picture of me on the front.

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

The audience feedback, which we received, helped us too see how we have been getting things right and what improvements and changes we still needed to make. Our first ideas for our magazine pitch were for the characters in the video to be standing holding the multi-colored umbrella in an urban environment; we got this initial idea from one of The Cajun Dance Party’s photographs that we liked. We played around with some effects that we thought we could have used. The feedback we received said we had some good ideas for the use of colours, props and costumes we were thinking of using but needed to look at more work from other artists to get even more ideas.

For our rough cut we had the vision of how we wanted it to be produced but still had a lot of gaps missing, which people did realize. Feedback from our peers was good to receive as our video is an indie genre but also the fact that our audience would mainly have been teenagers and to get feedback from them is very important as they would be the ones who enjoy it most.
Our genre characteristics; people thought it was very typically portrayed in an indie style by having young actors, the clothing is typical and promoting artists who where similar clothes, that the narrative and footage is shown well. The feedback back from Lyrics and Visuals; the shot where there’s a birds eye view looking down on me represents the lyrics ‘high up in the sky’ well, also the lyrics ‘climbing up the hill’ are good because we literally are doing this and the use of long shots where I am dancing slowly represents the music and lyrics being slow. These good comments showed how far we have come and the ideas, which have worked. We also received feedback on which improvements we still needed to make; more close ups, the lyrics where there is the word ‘flying’ some people thought we should have more visuals of. Having these comments we then went out and filmed a few more scenes of close up and scenes where there were a few more ‘floaty’ images.
The feedback we received from our teacher for our rough cut was similar; use of mis-en scene worked well to create an image and some good high-angle shots. The feedback that helped us a lot was that we needed a few more close-ups to sell our artist, to experiment with filters and to sort our synching out as a lot was out of place.
By receiving this feedback we knew how other people saw our video and what they thought would make it better.
I do believe from our rough cut to our final cut there is a noticeably good difference. We added new scenes, cut out parts where we couldn’t have anyone singing as the synching was quite a challenge which we had to sort out, used different effects to brighten or darken parts and used a lot of fades so the video flowed well.

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

By being able to use new media technologies we were able to create our video and blog. Our blog has become very important to help show the progress we have made, our initial ideas and have they have changed to become final and set ideas we believe are good. We used ideas and got visions to help form our video and ancillary tasks from the Internet, using Internet sights such as google to search and look up information and youtube so we could watch other artists videos to see how we could create ours. We used google images to get photos of The Cajun Dance Party and multi-coloured umbrellas, which we had on our digipak. Without these resources it would have been a lot harder.

We used the application Final Cut to make our video. All the footage we had filmed on camera was placed on and using Final Cut we edited everything. Cutting so the synching could be exactly in place with the visual was important, creating fades so different scenes flowed into one another and made it easier to watch. We used effects like changing colour to black and white, filters to enhance colours or darken places. We also used it to reverse a scene, at the start where one scene was repeated, we thought it would look more interesting to have a reverse and create a contrast. We also used it to change speed. We fastened the speed where the song gets faster to create a more tense and dramatic scene and also slowed one scene where it changes back to a slower beat and lyrics.

We used Photoshop to create our ancillary tasks. On the DVD cover we fitted everything into a small space, we were able to edit the size of the photos and umbrella. We were able to have writing wherever we thought looked best on the page or overlapping something. We could filter and add effects to the photos to make them seem less real. We used the Internet to get the small images on the back like the barcode and DVD sign. We also used Photoshop for the magazine cover and changing the filter for the photo on that. Without Photoshop we wouldn’t have been able to create such a colorful DVD cover or a different and interesting magazine cover.