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EVALUATION QUESTION 4

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Okay so after months of hard work we finally got to watch our music videos at The screen on the green cinema in Islington, Angel. It was an exciting few hours and enabled us to experience how an audience reaction would be straight after watching our videos. 

While in the production stages of my music video we often asked for feedback in order for us to improve throught. Common comments that usually repeated itself were things like

• Good use of different types of shots
• The rapid faces edit was really good
• Nice use of locations in Bricklane
• The artist fits the genre of the song that we decided to use

This is a video captured from the viewing at the cinema back in December. The audience reaction seemed rather positive and while watching many did say they enjoyed it.

There are a few changes that people said we should think about if we were to film this music video again.

• Our artist needs to add a bit more movement
• More high angle shots would work well in certain parts of the video 

Through comments such as those i have learnt what is important in a music video and it can really determine the success your video ends up having. It is important for your Artist to look at the camera alot and not to be so detached away from the camera such as looking away, feeling uncomfortable, hands in their pocket etc. However with our music video our Artist was supposed to feel slightly 'depressed' and we wanted him to illustrate this through lack of movement and staring blankly at the camera at times. 

Videos such as Example-Midnight Run show how the artist has good eye contact with the camera and looks as if he is singing to his audience which makes the audience then feel more interaction.

This is a video of me briefly talking about audience feedback and how it is very helpful.

Some audience feedback from a few of my facebook friends.

A few people 'liked' the image of my digipak that i uploaded so i presumed that they thought it was good so here's a screen shot.

Audience feedback for video

From Shani's audience feedback i learnt that our music video was successful in many ways. She discussed how she thought we had a great use of high, low and mid shots as well as many close ups. I thought this was a nice piece of feedback to receive and i learnt that through this we were able to let our audience identify with the artist as they were able to see his face as well as his posture (mid shots). She also liked the use of the faces edit where she said it was exactly on point with the beat of the song. This helped reiterate my skills of final cut pro and reinforced that i have been able to learn different techniques and editing skills. I think one thing i would change about   our video product is that maybe we could have put a shot of our artist between the shots of girls for example (girl, artist, girl, artist) etc this would then show a strong link as to why we decided to use that idea.  Shani also commented on the use of the REC edit and liked the use of black and white shots which showed a contrast between the rest of the colour footage.  

From Prince's audience feedback i learnt that our music video was successful in many ways. He discussed how we used a variety of shows and there was a good range. He really liked the fact that the artist changed outfits a few times and his style contrasted well with the genre of music. (dubstep). He also touched upon lip syncing and how it was quite successful in the sense that the artist performed it well and it looked as if it was really his song, this reinforces Prince's comment about the artist looking 'serious.' I learnt from this piece of feedback that we did capture alot if different shot types, i do agree with him to this extent as i think we worked hard to ensure that we included many different camera angles as possible to show a good variety. In addition to that i think next time we would do with a slipping a few more scenery shots in because at times one of two shots were shown quite a few times during the music video and a bit more footage of the actual location down Bricklane would have been nice. Although Prince had lots of good things to say he also discussed one negative which was that at times the camera was a bit shaky. In many ways we wanted to convey this because our artist was suppose to feel 'confused' and 'uneasy' during the video and we thought adding elements of filming free hand (without tripod) would help was portray this message.

From Adam's a feedback it highlighted some of the decisions we took when figuring our how we wanted to film and plan our music video. He commented on the use of locations and how it reflected the type of artist we had in our music video, he also liked the sight of imagery such as the graffiti backgrounds and bright colours. The fact that there was a good edit on the 'faces' part of our music video was mentioned again and he thought we did a good job editing it so it matched the beat of the song. This idea reinforces Caro Vernallis theory of editing that seems to have a rhythmic basis closely connected to the song. One negative comment that Adam said was that our the artist performance was rather lazy, and didn't put in enough effort. However, that was what we were hoping for, not exactly wanting our artist to look lazy but we wanted him to seem depressed and sad because of the lyrics of the song. I do understand how his attitude my come across as showing limited effort but we had a reason behind this. This taught me that maybe we could have used different ideas to illustrate this idea like, a shot of him walking down a long dark road with his back to the camera, connoting feeling lonely.

Audience feedback on ancillary products

From Shannon's audience feedback about my ancillary products was quite positive. He mentioned that i had a good colour scheme and it was consistent throughout which was what i intended to do. He also felt my design worked well and the photograph on digipak cover was a good shot. However i feel that if i were to do this product again i would use a different image probably a close up or mid close up. This is because the genre of my music 'dubstep' in a way suggest an 'in your face' attitude as the music is upbeat, lively and urban. I think that maybe it would contrast my genre better but i feel that the image i did use is effective as it shows the laid back characteristic's of my artist as he 'seems chilled' sitting on the chair with his hands together. Shannon also commented on the fact that my digipak was 'visually friendly' as it looked like it had an urban edge to it and the contrast between light and dark colours looked good. This was something i wanted to show as creating colourful products were typical of the dubstep genre. A few  negatives comments did arise such as that the typography of the song titles may be a bit difficult to read and maybe a clearer font could have been used. He also touched upon some of the conventions of an advert which i successfully achieved which was 'promoting' my artist and he added that it looked professional.

From Jermoe's  feedback i learnt that my ancillary products was a good variety of bright colours. He too also mentioned that a closer shot of the artist should have been used on the front panel because we are suppose to be promoting a new upcoming artist. He also spoke briefly about my music video and how he felt that we took the time out to edit very well. The way the faces of the girls changed on every beat of the song was really good. I feel that this has taught me that the skills we had previously learnt paid off because we were able to produce a music video with an element that nobody else doing this project had done. Two or three groups had aspects of faces changing throughout their videos but ours was deliberately matching the beat of the song to create excitement, adrenaline and create a 'wow' factor.

Hmmm she was camera shy so it is only 8 seconds long, ha. But Brenda's feedback touched upon the attire of the artist and she felt that his casual look really did work well with the song choice and location. She described him as 'funky.' We were inspired by many artist as well as our actual target audience as we realised that alot of people that do listen to dubstep songs dressed in a very similar way to our artist and we felt that we didn't over do his outfit nor did we put little effort into it.

EVALUATION QUESTION 3

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


The amount of media resources that were available to me during my research, planning and evaluation stages were really good. 

• Brand new state of the art video cameras which had 2 different slots for our groups memory cards. This was very easy to use but need a considerable amount of care.

We used this piece of  equipment to plan and carry out our music videos. We filmed short animations as well as the main product (music video). This video camera is very useful especially for the period in which we were using them for. During our filming stages it got rather dark at around 4pm and my group were sometimes our filming. As the darkness fell upon us the quality of our footage looked quite rubbish and unprofessional we were really getting stressed out as our deadline for filming was fast approaching. After ages of trying to look for some sort of solution we found a filter light on the camera and this created more light and our footage was so much better. Clearer, more precise and contrasted well with the night sky.

Memory card was very useful as this is were we stored all our footage from filming. It was important to keep it in one place so it was easy to access. The memory cards were also able to store a huge number of files such as pictures, videos and audio.  


This is a video taken back in the filming stages of our production explaining our difficulties with lightening.

• Blogger-Research, planning and evaluation

Used for part of our coursework assessments. I often referred to blogger as my online diary were i would write all my ideas and thoughts about the filming progress. Uploading influential videos that included ideas that i wanted to show in my music video. Pictures and screen grabs of programs such as Final Cut Pro, Voila, Photoshop etc. Blogger is also able to allow me to add a much more animated style to note taking such as embedding youtube videos, pictures, gifs, sound, slideshows etc which shows that it is open for all types of media platforms. 

• Internet for research purposes including Youtube, Background information on the Artist from our chosen song, websites like Myspace as they focus alot on independent artist and this was based around our ideas because etc. Websites were also very useful to research on because it gave me an insight into hour artist promote themselves and so gave me some ideas onto what to include on my advertisement, such as Twitter and Facebook accounts, producers, gigs, upcoming events etc. The internet was also very helpful in letting me gather quickly and efficiently.

http://www.dubstepmusic.biz/

EXAMPLES WEBSITE

http://www.trythisforexample.com/

Being able to embed a number of different videos to help with my research and planning stages was important to show comparisons and how i tried to develop ideas. Vimeo was a website which has lots of previous student work this was very helpful especially in the research and planning stages as it allowed us to analyse their music videos. Through this we were able to learn some of the strengths and weaknesses of their work, this opened our minds to rethinking or developing ideas that we had initial. This helped us so we didn't make the same mistakes as other students such as poor lighting, or badly famed shots.

 

• Photoshop was used for the construction of my ancillary products.

This program was typically very useful and enabled me to create good products to go alongside my main product (video) I was able to add effects to images,download text and import it onto the program, crop images,using the quick selection tool i was able to delete/erase unnecessary backgrounds that i didn't need/want. For example as my digipak had a black base background colour. The image of my Artist was against an 'off black curtain' so the two types of black tones didn't look good together. I had to then use the quick selection tool and go around my image and then go to 'Select' then 'Inverse' this allowed me to separate my background from my image.

Tools/Panel

The image below is from the front cover of my album as you can see the Artist blends in well with my background so it adds a much more professional finish.

This is the orignal photo as you can see the background curtains do not look complete black due to the camera flash and lighting in the room. I also cropped the image so you can see a closer profile of the artist (above) and added an effect to make it seem edgy.

• Apple Mac computers for editing, research, planning and evaluation

This was one of the most important pieces of technology that we had to use during out coursework.  The Apple Macs were used through the process of making our video and ancillary texts (digipak and advertisement). The up to date software was a bonus when it came to editing or designing our work because it gave us the opportunity to use really good programs such as Final Cut Pro for video making and Photoshop C5 to create a professional digipak. The Apple Macs were fast, efficient and enabled me to produce good pieces of work that I am very proud of.

• Flip camera for filming

This is my animatic and digital storyboard. Filmed be using the Flip Cameras provided by the media department. This was an easy way to film a piece of footage and upload straight to the blog. The flip camera was also very useful for when we went out filming and we could record an update of how we were doing, and problems along the way and recording 'behind the scene' footage.

• Digital cameras-for taking still images while out filming, photoshoot of artist

The digital camera enabled me to take images while on set during filming down in Bricklane. (Location for music video). It was also useful during the photoshoot we carried out for our artist and for our ancillary production.

• Final cut pro- for editing and making our music videos

In this screen grab you can see how we used a 'REC' effect on some of our clips to illustrate the flash back our artist is having during the music video.

Final Cut Pro was a very very important program that we needed to use during our media coursework. This is what we used to put together all our clips in order to create our music videos. We were able to line up our base tracks (filmed footage), and our chosen song choice in a time line that looks like this...

• Clip Grab- For converting music videos from youtube and being able to trim the clips to show specific parts of the music video.

• iishow U- This allowed me to record the screen while i was working. I have shown skills of this in evaluation question 1 when i showed what i was doing on Final Cut pro and recorded the screen. This allows you to illustrate how you use a particular program 

• MPEG Streamclip-import video clips and trim them at certain parts that you really want to show instead of importing whole videos

EVALUATION QUESTION 2

How effective is the combination of your main product (video) and ancillary texts (digipak and advertisement)?


It has been said that a successful music video will make clear visual links between it and its ancillary products..digipak and advertisements. I think my products show a good link with the music video. 


There are many ways in which my video does this successfully and ways in which it fails to link with its ancillary texts link. We as a group really wanted to appeal to as many people as possible and obviously it really is impossible to have on product that everybody would like but we wanted to try and incorporate different ethnicities. As our ideas developed we decided that we would incorporate a slight storyline into our music video were our artist is reminiscing on his previous relationship but it ended because he was a cheater. The fast edits of girls faces are supposed to represent all the different types of girls he has been with which illustrates our idea of multiculturalism and the fact that we wanted to show a variety of different people, Asian, Black and white. This then reinforced us to continue with adding lots of colour to our ancillary products so there was a link of 'advertising' and 'appealing' to lots of different people.

• For instance aspects of the colourful Bricklane location from my music video is shown through the use of visual colour and patterns on my digipak. This can be seen though the design i done on the actual CD Disc. I wanted to do exactly half of the Disc with the printed colourful pattern but i decided to make it look a bit quirky and added pentagon shapes and formed then in weird angles so it created a jaded effect on the disc. The artist is also wearing the same outfit as he does in the music video which allows the audience to identify him.

The other side of the inside panel is a photograph of our artist Paradox in Bricklane that initial picture was taken while filming our music video.He was leaning against a graffiti background which i quite liked. My audience can recognise that these products are all linked through the colourful background which is seen in the music video itself and the fact that the artist is wearing the same clothes.

Other images with colourful background

Colourful design work that inspired us



Success of  my main( video) and ancillary texts?

GoAnimate.com: Effective combination of video and ancillary texts by Demi DS

Like it? Create your own at GoAnimate.com. It's free and fun!

The idea was to promote a new artist in 3 ways ( video, CD cover and advert). There are some features of the artist i wanted to emphasise and i promoted them in the 3 artifacts...

• His Afro hair was a huge bonus when it came to thinking about artist identity. This may connote a rebellious character and can reflect our target audience as fans of the dubstep genre are outgoing, lively and always seen to 'party hard.' Through all my artifacts his hair is consistent and so carries the message across all the media platforms. The image below is a screen shot from part of my music video, this can illustrate the 'rebellious' nature as the background is tatty and vandalized.

• Through the choice of location Bricklane enabled us to show a personal aspect of our artist as he likes graffiti, bright colours, paintings and hanging out in an urban area. This can also be reflected through my print products because of the use of colour, paint splash symbol (image below) it can be found on the digipack.

Links between video and ancillary products?
There are not many visual links between my products but this is because the dubstep genre is aimed at a young audience. The whole idea of direct continuity gets a bit boring and typically for younger people the fact that my products are different but still have the same concept might be even more appealing than having the exact same style and design. I kept the most important things consistent such as colour, good clear images of the artist and graffiti imagery.

I also decided to break the typical conventions of a dubstep genre as digipaks and averts usually contain only graphics and graffiti typography however i thought that as we are promoting and upcoming artist it would be beneficial to put a photograph of the artist on the front cover as well as incorporating graphic elements such as my speaker design and the broken text font for the artists name and album title.

EVALUATION QUESTION 1

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

The funny thing about my group is that we came up with so many ideas, (one of our first every posts were a list of our ideas) but it was impossible to include all of them. Our first idea was extremely complicated to convey through a music video and it would be quite difficult to make it seem like a professional video so we scrapped that idea and came up with something different. Through unanimous agreement our new idea was creative, simple but still Incorporated a lot of our initial ideas.

Videos that influenced us?

At 0:38 Seconds is the part of the video were we got really excited. The imagery of  faces rapidly changing to show a different person on every beat. We thought that this was a particularly good edit to include in our music video and believed it would give some recognition to our editing skills. This was one of the aspects that we wanted to use in our own music video and try and challenge it in a way that was at least a little bit different than the original. We came to a decision that instead of colour we would change it to black and white so that it stood out in our music video especially since it required a great deal of editing skills. As we decided this we found a video that had a very similar approach..(the black and white effect). It was a video from the aritst Professor Green and so because we noticed that another music video had this idea we thought that it was conventional and could possibly work well in our own music video.

Professor Green-Upper clapton dance

The only different between our music video and this one is that the girls we used stood in the exact same position and had blank expressions on their faces. However in this music video the camera man is moving with the people so the camera shakes and creates a different illusion than ours. 

Carol Vernallis studied the edition and camera work closely in music videos. She began to observe that the edits formed in music videos where much more frequent than that that may appear within films. This made her believe that they stood out more as disjuncture and that the editing seemed to have a rhythmic basis that related closely with the song.  Like our song we made our 'faces' change exactly on the beat of the song. This followed the conventions of her theory and i feel it was our main success of our music video.Kickstart by Example also follows the same idea.

This is how we challenged this real media product

 you will notice our rapid faces edits.

(recorded using iShow U)

 

B.O.B-Nothing on you

Also quite influential when it came to figuring out exactly how we wanted to shoot our 'faces' and edit them.

OUR MUSIC VIDEO- AMPLIFICATION

Password: Student

Kudiwa, Demi, Ismail, Joseph from 283goswell on Vimeo.

Andrew Goodwin discuses ‘Dancing in the Distraction Factory’. His main concepts are the way the music videos may be structured in order for the viewers to perceive the video in a particular way. There are different narrative structures such as pop videos are built around songs, pop videos uses the singer as both the narrator and the character and thirdly the singer often looks directly at the camera, commonly big close up’s are used for this. Like our music video we made sure we included lots of close up shots of our artist because we were promoting someone new so we wanted our target audience to familarise themselves with him.Some videos are autonomous from the music they spring from. The visualisation of a song may go beyond the original meaning. Sometimes the video provides a visual pleasure that encourages repeated viewing which therefore promotes the music. We done this through using the REC effect in our music video where it looks as if our artist is recording his girlfriend, it just adds a personal touch to the video in hope to make the viewers feel  sympathetic as he remembers his relationship. 

Ideas that were challenged from real media products

Evaluation 1 on Prezi

Ideas that were Used and developed from real media products

As you can see from the image about, an influential music video was Wretch 32-Don't go. Even though we came up with our idea while out filming i came across this video that had slightly the same concept, were the artist remains standing still while pedestrians walk normally. However we chose to develop this further and sped up how fast people were talking by so it added a faster effect to match the beat of our song which was very up tempo. We also changed the camera shot and made our artist stand facing the camera, long shot. Unlike the Wretch 32 video where he has his back towards the camera, mid close up. This type of shot has been seen in many other videos and is one of the main conventions.

             Ideas that were Used and developed from real media products

Just like in Example-What the sun come up we used a panning shot of a girl in the video which contributes to Laura Mulvey's view of how women are stereo-typically seen as sexual objects in music videos. However unlike the other real media music video the female character is wearing tights rather than exposing her bare legs and in this way seems 'less attractive.'  This was a way we tried to challenge the normal conventions of such statements and observations. It was also very important for Kudiwa and I being the girls in the group that we didn't want to portray women in the stereotypical way so we decided to challenge these typical ideas.

As seen above we used the same idea of having the artist and his'girlfriend' from the music video holding hands facing their backs towards the camera. The same idea can be seen in the video above...Exmaple-When the sun comes up. This is just a tad bit of performance that we included in our music video.

The mise en scene was adapted from various music videos and what we typically would associate with the dubstep genre. We wanted our Artist to look as comfortable as possible and seemed really chilled out and cool. So simple atire such as Vans, Chinos/Jeans, Casual jacket and a printed t-shirt was the dress code for our video. As you can see above one of the music videos that inspired us was Nothing on you by B.O.B, he looks stylish but still casual.


Mise en scene
(Influences)

My artist wore similar outfits to the ones above. Even though they are not artist from the same music genre of 'dubstep' we felt that they still had the same style and flare that we wanted out own artist to have. These outfits were quite helpful when it came to deciding what our artist should wear and how it will link to the rest of our products. Below are a few images of our artist with outfits on.

Inspiring Digipak covers

My Digipak is below and the one above influenced me in some aspects. For instance the DJ decks i thought would be a good idea to put on the front cover of my album. Due to the fact that Dubstep is all to do with mixing ad well as being electronic dance music.  As my artist is upcoming it would be best if i modernized the image at the front rather than putting a vinyl (like above). Even so, due to copy right and not being able to take images from the internet i had to come up with a different idea. I also didn't have access to a DJ booth so i had to think of something else to use. I wanted to be a tad bit creative so i took an image of a speaker in my college and edited it on Photoshop. As i wanted something visual on my album cover i thought that it was a good idea and it added a little bit of a 'Dubstep' feel to the cover. 

Many other digipaks have influenced the style and design of my ancillary work. I do believe that my print procuts are conventinal and refelct aspects of the chose genre. This is due to the use of colour and the abstract degisn i included on my digipak, especially the inside panels were i was able to be a little bit different with my creative ideas...I put the speakers underneath the Aritst's name and album title to create the idea that the the base of the song is 'breaking' the letters due to the fact that the typography i chose had that effect. It just linked all my different decisions together and added meaning behind my ideas. In contrast my artist is just sitting at the side as if its 'quiet.' 

This is the CD panel of my digipak and as you can see there is a colourful design on printed on my CD. As well as the typical convention of the artist's name and the album title. I made pentagon shapes on Photoshop and molded them in a weird abstract way to create a broken or 'snapped' effect on the CD itself which i believed makes it look quite different than typical cd designs.

This is the opposite side of the inside of my digipak and i chose to use an image of my artist on set. While fliming we took photographs of our artist while he was singing. I thought that it would be a good idea to include an image of our artist actually on set recording songs. As digipaks are usually conventional and aim to promote an artist i thought a good way was to do this visual. 

I believe that my advertisement is conventional and highlights all areas that supposed to be in an advert. Information such as the Artist names and album title allows the audience to familiarise themselves with his music. An image of the artist is importnat preferably a good enough size so it can still be seen a distance away. Contact information such as Websites, Twitter, Facebook and company address adds more interaction between the artist and fans so they are able to keep up to date with his new releases and tours.

The date of the when the album will be releases is also important so people know when to purchase it online through itunes or via stores such as HMV. I also included a screen shot of the album cover so people are able to  recognize the aritst's album.



Real media products (Advertisements)

Font

I decided to use this font because it was very eye catching. Something about it made me really like the idea of using it as my main font. In a way it looks as if the letters are slightly broken and 'exploding' this reinforces the dubstep genre as 'unesay' and 'loud'

I didn't want to use the basic fonts that are on photoshop so i downloaded one i thought would fit the theme and concept of my digipak better. www.dafont.com is a good website were you can download different fonts. 'Groovy', 'comic', 'ancient', 'techno', 'funky' etc.. i found my chosen font underneath the 'Graffiti' heading which was rather obvious to me.

My font: Blackleafs

Similar fonts i used for inspiration

The visual stereo on the front panel of my digipak was inspired by many real media products. As the dubstep genre is centralized around loud bass sounds, and fasted paced instrumentals i wanted to create a very similar concept and design. I used two different tones of grey as i thought it would make a good contrasting effect. One is much lighter with a speckle effect and the other is much more bland.

My speaker design:

(At the beginning it was this)

Real media products which influenced my idea