In What Ways do your media products use, develop or challenge forms an conventions of real media products?
When we were planning our media product we looked at a number of existing products such as the Jonas Brothers, Eliza Bennett and Miley Cyrus’ music videos. In all these videos there is a convention of a performance based video with a story incorporated into it. We thought this was a really good idea and so used it in our music video. For example: There are scenes where Katie is singing along and plucking on the guitar and singing into the camera such as when she is sitting in front of the lit up tree and singing into the camera. There are also scenes in our music video that has a story element. For example: When Katie is driving in her car and going on a journey.
While watching the music videos we also learned that a lot of music videos have a voyeuristic feel/ the notion of looking in on someone or an event. We took this idea and developed it to make when me and matt are walking through the field.
Generally we have followed the conventions used in typical music videos. However we at times we have challenged the conventions of real media products. For example we used almost all natural lighting throughout the whole video. We wanted to do this to give a more natural feel as it fits with the music and lyrics of the song.
Our Feedback!
I was generally were very pleased with both our peer and teacher feedback! Some examples of our feedback are: “In the video there is one main likeness with lyrics and visuals, the video is mainly shot outside highlighting the metaphors in the lyrics. When the lyrics mention love and being together, the visuals show two people holding hands and looking joyful.” We thought this was a good bit of feedback as our main aim was to represent in visual form, the story being told in the song. One of our most positive comments which kept coming up was how well we synced Katie with the song, and we were told it looked like a real product and like she was actually singing. However during the process we did get some constructive criticism and tried to use it to help us finish our final product. For example: We were told that the quality of the footage differed. The shots of Katie were excellent but the close-up of the guitar was really grainy. We realised that this was because we had zoomed-in on Final Cut Express. We were determined to have the same quality of footage so went out the next day to re-shoot. We were also told that we needed more close-ups of the lead singer. We already had this footage but just hadn’t used enough of it, so decided to add more of it in and cut to and back from it from the other pieces of footage.
How effective is the combo of your main product and ancillary tasks?
To complete our project we had to make a DVD cover and an advertising poster as well as the music video. Our aim was to link all three together, to represent the artist and so if it were a real product there would be almost a signature style of the artists work. I think the combination of our music video and ancillary task is overall quite good. We thought a good way to link both the ancillary tasks and the music video would be to have the main characters on all three products. We decided to make a prototype in our free time to get our head around what a digipak would actually look like as we had only seen pictures on the internet. We also made it to see what our actual DVD cover would look like if it were to be released and to get our ideas across before we started working on the final product in lesson. We made the prototype out of a cereal box and corrugated cardboard and drew pictures of what we wanted to be on there. An example of this would be: On the front cover of our prototype, there is a drawing of all three main characters from the music video with the artist/singer in the middle. Both ancillary tasks promote the artist in the same way by using stills from the videos and images taken on the same day of the artist in the same outfit as in the video. Both the DVD cover and the Advertising poster use the same style of font to link in with each other. In the end half of our group made the DVD cover and the other half made the advertising poster. As we hadn’t consulted about the colour scheme the Advertising Poster turned out black and white and the DVD cover was bright and colourful. This was a big mistake and something we would need to improve on if we were to release the product
How did you use new media technologies in construction, research, planning and evaluation stages?
While we were conducting our research into our product we used lots of new technologies to help us with our research. To start with we used Wikipedia to help us find out the meanings of words: Such as digipak. Once we had chosen our song for the music video we used iTunes to import the song into the computer. We used YouTube to look at existing music videos with similar and different genres to give us ideas: e.g. camera angles, Storyline, lip syncing etc.
We also kept an online blog to keep track of what we were doing. We also imported pictures from Google and YouTube videos to help convey our ideas.
During the construction of our music video I used a DV camera to film. We mainly used the DV camera on a tripod to keep still steady shots. However in some shots we wanted a ‘home-movie’ effect. An example of this is when we were in the car, we free-held the camera to give the feel of a group of teenagers on a road-trip and documenting their experience. During the construction of our music video we used technology such as Final Cut Express to create the music video: e.g. put the cut the footage, put the clips together, sync with the soundtrack and add special effects. An example of a special effect we used was to give a good effect to a transition. We took the footage of the tree lights and lit them up really bright so it covered the whole screen. We then dimmed them back down to reveal a new scene to give the effect that time has gone by.
We used the software Photoshop to create our CD/DVD cover and our advertising poster. For the CD/DVD cover we used photos we had taken with the stills camera on our trip filming as well as some photos we had taken around the back of college to fit in with the video.
For our Advertising poster we used the same idea. We imported photos of our filming trip in the nearby village Hildersham to represent the artist and the characters in the video. As the pictures all had different colours to them and so clashed we decided to turn them black and white and used Photoshop to do this. We also used Photoshop to import already existing logos such as Amazon.co.uk and to re-size the pictures.
For our Evaluation we were asked to create a video commentary which would later be filtered into our music video. We have again used Final Cut Express to cut the video and will use it to disperse clips of our music video and outtakes into the commentary.
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