2. In What Way Does Your Media Product Use, Develop or Challenge Forms & Conventions of Real Media Products? Some Conventions of Music Videos: - Tracking shots of singer/band - Jump cuts - Sudden changes to different scenes - Laid back costume - particular in this genre of music - Close-up shots - Narrative alongside performance
3. Like in Lily Allen’s video for LDN and Theory of a Deadman’s video for Hate My Life, our video featured close up shots of our singer walking down a street.
4. As well as narrative, our video also featured shots of the band performing. Like in the original video for All Star.
5. I think we challenged the conventions of a typical music video in the amount of effects we used. Changing the colour settings on certain shots and making some shots black and white. This isn’t something that we found in the music videos we researched however, I feel it added a comical feel to certain parts and also helped to break up some longer shots.
6. How Effective is the Combination of Your Main Product & Ancillary Texts? The magazine cover features the image of the band as shown on the digipak cover. The members of the band will be familiar to the audience. As well as promoting the album, the magazine advert also promotes the video to “Break the Mould” and the band’s live performances as featured on the DVD. All in all I feel that our ancillary texts and video together were very effective. By using bright, primary colours for our CD cover we continued both the abstract and almost cartoony feel of the video and the genre style of the music. Typically, metal bands use silver and dark colours in their promotional material. Female pop singers are usually candy pink colours. With the genre of music we were working with, we found that often very bright colours were used.
7. What Have You Learnt From Audience Feedback? “ It’s just like a professional music video. It has band performance as well as a little story” “ I think it works really well as a music video. It’s so similar to real band’s videos that you see on TV” “ I like to watch music videos that have scenes in them that aren’t the band performing. This video has that balance” “ I think it’s a good video however, I think the effects are a bit unrealistic. Not something we tend to see in real ones” “ I think there are parts I would change in this, for example, I’d have the band performing on a stage to give it a more realistic feel”
8. From This Feedback I Learnt... - That our video was successful - That it fit the necessary conventions to make it a music video - That adapting things seen in existing videos (tracking shot of the singer) is ok because every video has unique points - That music videos work well with narrative and performance together From the feedback given, I think that if I was to remake the video, I would perhaps use different locations, a stage (as suggested) or maybe somewhere outdoors like a park. I would also incorporate more of a story into it, perhaps create a character for the audience to relate to. I would tone down some of the effects and maybe instead change the lighting used.
9. How Did You Use Media Technologies In The Construction & Research, Planning & Evaluation Stages? As a group, the first piece of equipment we had to get used to using were the Macs. In the past we had worked only on PC’s so it was a challenge getting used to the different software. The only piece of equipment we had problems with during shooting was the dolly. We originally set out to use the dolly on the street scenes but when it came to filming we found the pavement to be too bumpy to give us a clear shot. In the end we decided on handheld camera shots for these scenes. This turned out to be a good decision as the shots now move with the singer.
10. The singer in our video mimed to the track, so during the editing process we had to delete the original sound and replace it with the music track. The replacing was relatively easy but getting the track in time with the miming proved to be somewhat difficult. This again relates back to us being unfamiliar with the programs on the Macs. The only other technological challenge I feel I faced was the programs we used creating our ancillary pieces. I used Photoshop for the editing of the band pictures. This was a challenge to me as I hadn't done any work on this program before. In the end I used Microsoft Word to arrnge the layout of our magazine advert as I found it easier.
