Evaulation Question 1

There are no longer a set of defined conventions to be followed within the production of a music video, and over time the definition of it has become a lot more vague:

-  'a short film or video that accompanies a complete piece of music/song.'

-  'a motion picture produced to accompany a song, for promotional or artistic purposes.'

Although, most music videos can be categorized in terms of style, and therfore would fall under the subcategory of either 'performance based', 'narrative based', and 'concept based'. Ours falls under the categories of narrative based. This means it includes an embedded story displayed through the narrative of the video.

The most important thing for an artist to acomplish when producing a music video is providing the audience with a particular impression or understanding of them, which they can interpret and identify with within a short space of time; around 3 minutes. for a first video for an artist, this is even more important, as it also offers them the chance to introduce themself. We deiced to challenge this typical convention, by keeping the identification of the artist a mystery, and not actually including Kaneo himself in our video. We thought this would draw more attention, as it would attract the audience and intregue them to find out who he is, and more about him.

Typically, different videos of different genres tend to contain 'live' footage of the artist themself playing the instruments that can be heard in the song. this is genrally associated with videos from genres such as indie, rock, etc. As our style of song and artist fitted more to the contemporary R'n'B genre (a music genre that combines elements of hip hop and R&B) where the style is usually more narrative based than performance based, and we didnt have access to anyone who could play a piano realistically, we decided we would elliminate this element of performance.

We also found a list of conventions usually typical to a music video of our genre online, and used this as a guide in order to make the peice conventional to an R&B music video:

Shots: CU, MS, LS, Two Shot, Low Angle - This makes the artist look scary and in control.

Text: No text.

Colours: Colourful, Black and white scene if there singing about love stories or flash backs.

 Editing: Jump and stright cuts. Mainly jump cuts.

Evaluation Question 2

It is very important for a music video to stand out and be noticed by the target audience in order to encourage a success. A music video acts as a platform to advertise and promote the artist/group as well as the song.
Therefore it is vital that the video itself and magazine advert reflect the cd cover, for easy recognition by the audience.
Someone may enjoy a music video which encourages them to then buy the single or album, and will expect it to be easily accessible, rather than it meaning they will have to go out of their way to find it.
The cd cover should share some kind of attributes recognizable by the audience to the music video and any other advertisement, and something that connects the two things together.
This is even more important for new artists as it creates a type of identification for them that the audience can relate to and establish is unique to them. An even stronger link must be made between the product and its advertisement in order to encourage the necessary sales to promote the new artist and get them noticed.


For example, the cd cover for james blunts' you're beautiful, shares a likeness to the video.

A very direct link is shown between the two media texts and this makes it easier for the audience to make a connection between the two. It appears that the image on the front cover of the cd is a screen grab of part of the video.

This is also the case with our front and back cd covers.

Back cover

Front cover

Our magazine advert also shares the same recurring image as the front cover of the album - a screen shot from the video. This is so the audience can establish a link between the two, and when they see the advert, they can go into a shop easily and recognize the album from the magazine advert. This established connection, in the real record industry, would help to boost sales as the consumer would want the cd to bee easily accessible to them, and may not bother if it was difficult to recognize or find.

Evaluation question 3

Throughout the production of our video, we kept in very close contact with the target audience. This was in order to gain feedback from them, allowing us (in the planning stages), to understand what they would expect or want to see, aswell as being able to constnatly improve our peice whilst the producion was in progress.

To begin with, in the planning stages, we created a survey to find out what people associated wih a music video from the same genre (R'n'B). From this we found out that the majority of people thought of R'n'B music video to be associated with a lot of black and white shots as well as lots of attention on females, and focusing largely on a love story narrative.

As we began to construct our video, we go a few of our friends to watch it, and realised the narrativ of i was for too complex and created a lot of confusion. we modified this by cutting parts out and filming new footage in order to simplify it, therefore allowing the narrative to be more easily understood and the overall feedback of the video to be much more positive.

Once we had completed the video, we managed to gain audience feedback by putting our video on the social networking site Facebook. We posted it as a link, so people all over Facebook could watch it, this way we could generate a response from the target audience we had already previously identified in our research and planning as they are of similar age to us, with similar interests. Within the first night the total views went from 0 to 144 which showed it created a large amount of interest. People left feedback on the link in the form of 'likes' and comments, and this helped us to generate an understanding of audience opinion of the finished piece.
The type of comments we received were as follows...

We also uploaded the link onto my 13 year old sisters Facebook in order to retrieve  some feedback from a younger audience, as We felt these were also the type of people that would be a potential audience for the video. The feedback we got from them was all very positive, but also a lot more vague than it was from people of our age.

Overall, we were very pleased with our feedback, as the maority of it was very positive. the fedback rom eople o our age was very different to that of my sister friends, as it was much more in detal, and looked at from a media point of view. This was due to a much more advanced knowledge in media as a whole, as many of the comments came from people who are also media students, and therfore much more experienced and have the ability to understand more advanced concepts of media at a higher level. This helped us to take into account which parts were the most popular with the target audiece, and to generate a much higher understanding of what worked well, and whether the general idea of the video was understood and portrayed in the narative of it.

Q4-How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

To begin with we used Google to search around and look at the type of genre of artist we cold choose from. this meant we had a wider insight into what was out there and most popular at the moment, enabling us to decide on the genre of an r&b artist.
Once we had chosen our artist, we turned to social networking sites such as Facebook and Myspace, to see if there was anyone we knew that created this type of music. This is where we came across our artist, a friend of Sam Gillard, Kaneo Rees. We spent some time studying and looking inot our artists music, before we wrote him an email via facebook asking to use his music. Facebook also enabled us to be able to gain a clearer understanding of the audience Kaneo has, and without this technology we would not have known for sure what kind of people we were trying to appeal to.

We then used youtube to look into other media texts from the r&b genre, and studied the style in which thy were portrayed. This helped us get a clearer understanding of what we needed to include in order for it to be successful.

Once we had done this we chose a song from our artist, and played it over and over, in order to generate a selection of words we felt could be associated with it, whilst it was playing. We then applied our ideas more creatively in the form of a 'Wordle.' Whilst we progressed with our planning and research, we used blogger to make a progressive log, in order to capture all our ideas.
Without these forms of digital technology, it would have been very difficult to construct the efficient amount of research necessary.

Once we had enough resarch to be able to begin planning and constructing our video, we used a HD camera for the first time of many to capture pictures of each section of our storyboard and turn it into an animatic. By playing the animatic alongside the track we had chosen, it helped us to generate an initial basic idea of what each section of our video would look like.
We then filmed our clips with a Hd camera. The Hd aspect of the camera made the quality of the footage a lot better, and a lot more defined.

To construct and modify our video we uploaded the footage onto final cut pro, where we cut and edited our clips to fit alongside the track. We used transitions such as fade and cross dissolve to make our video flow better, and become more fluent and professional looking. These transitions also acted as a means to switch between the past and present.

Throughout both the planning and the construction of our video we used Blogger to create a detailed log of our steps. This helped us to keep up-to-date with what we had to do next, as well as being given an easy way of electronically logging our progress.

Without access to all these kinds of software, it would have been very difficult to be as creative and add such a professional looking finish to our video, which acquires to all the normal conventions of a music video.

Evaluation

Q1-In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge the forms and conventions of real media texts?

Theory and concepts related to the form and conventions of music video

· Stephen Hill article from the Media Magazine-‘How Video didn’t kill the Radio star’

· Andrew Goodwin’s features of the music video from ‘Dancing in the Distraction Factory’

· Post-modernism-the idea that everything is borrowed

· Intertextuality

· Genre-does this concept apply to music video anyway?!

· Pastiche

· Parody

· Industry conventions-any rules for a first video? Video as marketing device.

· Impact of the DIY aesthetic and ‘YouTube culture’ on the form

· Relevant print terms for the ancillary texts

Q2- How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

· Textual analysis and deconstruction of your products to demonstrate their effectiveness-what you did to ensure an effective combination?

· Demonstrate you understand why this combination has to be effective-launching a promo package/new artist into the market/audience identification/representation of the artist to an audience

Q3-What have you learned from your audience feedback?

· Analyse responses in detail-what is the feedback from the target audience you identified in your research and planning?

· Are the responses different outside of the target audience?

· Does audience preference for a particular style of music affect their appreciation of your video?

· How significant is your audience feedback? Do you agree with the comments or not? Justify your answers

· Does the feedback reveal anything about differences in gender/age?

· What are the factors that make a great music video in audiences’ eyes?

Q4-How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

· No theory as such for this one but consider the key concepts for Section 1A of the exam e.g. creativity/technology/use of conventions from real media texts

· Describe what you used and the role it played in all stages-could you have been as creative without the technology?Were their conventions of the form that you couldn’t create because of the technology we are limited to in college?

· What things were made easier because of technology? Was anything more difficult?

· Summary of the ways in which technology is affecting your media practice

Final Cut

Digipak Final

Here is our final draft of our artist's album covers - front and back.

Front.

We made our front cover by screen grabbing a shot from our music video. We then used a variation of effects and colour correction to reinforce the idea of an urban style 

surrounding. We also changed the brightness and contrast of the image, so that the illuminations created a counterbalance, to the darkness of the cityscape. We wanted to create a 'city glow' effect and we managed to achieve this by turning up the saturation.

Back.

Again, we took a screen grab from our video, and edited it so it had a direct correlation with the front. we used filters such as film grain to create a more visually alluring effect. 

Magazine Advert.

We used the same image from the cd cover to construct the magazine advert. This was so the audience could make a connection between the two, and find the album form the advert easily.  

we added a bit to the top using the same filter, as well as creating a flash light effect to emphasize the entire point of the piece - to advertise the release of the album.

Inside Cd Inlay.

most recent rough cut

To Do List

• shoot the rest of the piano shots
• shoot the 'happy' black and white shots (wine & laughing)
• shoot possible argument in past (B&W)
• redo our digipak
• do evaluation questions
• edit rest of video

too much really! ahhhhh help us :(

First Rough Cut

Here is a rough cut of our footage so far, we still have a long way to go. Adding performance footage and more narrative will help this...but we feel we have made lots of progress. We have changed our narravtive, so that anything in black and white is in the past, and anything in colour is the present. We are gonna show shots of Kaneo and the girl in happier times, laughing and drinking wine, then more shots of present, him turning up late and standing her up. Originally we wanted to be more abstract are arty, but we feel this is a better way to go. 
Also we changed the opening, so that the beginning is actually the end. So we'll use that opening shot at the end also. 

Work update.

After looking through our footage, our group has decided to heavily change the order of certain shots. This will mean that our final piece will look considerably different to our animatic posted several posts before.

animatic

This was made to show that our ideas are starting to take shape, its not the finished article.

Work Update 29.11.10

At the moment we are trying to complete our animatic, its almost there, but the editing and cutting is so much harder than first expected! We have all the images ready to upload for our storyboard. Then once we've done all that, we will be ready to commence filming.

possible album back cover.

This album cover that I have created using an image found on google inserting the same layers as in the other draft that has been made. although we cannot use the image above, we may choose to recreate it to get the same effect. We used 'The Pretty Reckless' - Light Me Up's album cover as inspiration. This is because both covers use shocking images that are meant to provoke outrage.

Digipak amendments.

Because it is not possible to use a non-original image as part of our work, we can't use the album back cover that we have mentioned in the post below. We intend to recreate it, to the best of our ability due to the fact that we believe that it is perfect for the artist and the message we are trying to portray.

Mid Production Evaluation.

Conventions -

The genre of R&B music videos are similar to hip hop in the way that many often portray women in revealing clothing in simple settings. The videos also generally portray wealth and power through the use of jewellery, clothing and flash cars.

Main production task and ancillary tasks

The different parts of our task that we will do needs to have a coherent theme throughout whether it be the same colour palette or the same theme as in the case of Janelle Monae with the ArchAndroid http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_ArchAndroid_(Suites_II_and_III)

In our instance, we have decided to use black and white in our video and also incorporate it into our marketing and advertising with our magazine advert and album digipak.

Media technologies

At this early stage, no video editing software has been used, but will feature heavily later on in the project. at this point, we have focused on using Photoshop and similar products. 

Update

To save any confusion, the song we have chosen (Next) has recently been given a new name by the artist, 'I Can't Do This Anymore'. We presumed it was called 'Next' as on the mixtape it was named this, but we soon discovered the video on youtube for exactly the same song, with a different title.

Our Chosen Song.

New Ideas for Video.

The general outline is that we'll be cutting from the performance of the piano, to random and abstract images. We have also decided our video will be following a rough narrative, the story of a guy who is heartboken and needs to move on, but cant let the girl go. This means our video will now consist of three sections; The narrative, piano playing, and Abstract shots. These three sections will intercut with each other.
Here are a few of our initial ideas for shots and filming:

• Shot of missed calls from him, on girls mobile.
• Location idea- sea front at night time, lights, the sea washing in and out, promanade.
• Shot out of window of the landscape at night, streetlights, town lit up, establishing.
• Ideas for types of shots for piano- side, revolve around, from high above, music sheets, just fingers or hands, shots of singer.
• Slow motion- walking down stairs.
• Shot of a door shutting as if she's left him.
• Water tap dropping (tears)
• Board with dice rolling (reference to games)

Lyrics.

I don't, 
wanna talk it all out i'd rather just forget, 
you got alot to say but i'm not listening, 
please spare me the tears 
cos they have no effect
and everything we had instead
i should of seen it coming. 
(Yeah) You had me dived by these disguise and i couldn't see
the way you played your game with your tricks you had me deceived, 
but now im over it 
I'm so down to taking that step,
I'm leaving i guess i gotta move on to the next.


[Chorus]
Oh i, 
don't wanna stay in love and live with this regret, 
please, i gotta take this of my chest, 
baby i, cant give anymore
when there is nothing left, im leaving..
I guess i've have gotta move on to the next.

You know, 
you got alot of nerve saying that its my fault, 
we should of thought twice 
before we got involved, 
everything thing you do, 
you let it fall, 
baby you were the cause, 
you didn't care at all! 
Don't tell me that you gave me your best 
you know that aint true, 
be real babe you set us up to fail with all that you do
but now im over it, 
i'm so done now im taking that step im leaving
i guess i gotta move on to the next.

[Chorus]
Oh and i, 
don't wanna stay in love and live with this regret, 
please i gotta take this of my chest, 
baby i cant give anymore 
if there is nothing left, im leaving.. 
I guess i've gotta move on to the next.