That's All Folks!!

So thats it, we are all finished! :O

There is nothing left to do, the last little changes have been made and now my blog is done :'(

Just want to say thanks to everyone who helped us with our fiming, shout out to Ricky for being our guy in the video! And a big thank you to Mr Johnson for all his help so....THANKS SIR :D

It is sad as I've had a great time with Becky and Charlotte and have enjoyed the times in the editing suite with the greatest media class ever!! :) But i guess this is it, Goodbye!

Evaluation. Question 4

Question 4 - How did you use new media technologies in the research and planning, construction and evaluation stages?

Research

During our research we used many internet websites. Firstly we needed to find a song. Our first song was found on http://www.newgrounds.com/ and the second on http://www.unsigned.com/

We also used http://www.google.com/ for any pictures needed for our blog etc, and we used http://www.youtube.com/ to search for other music videos and to research our genre of music.

To research into our artist we used the artists official website http://www.sparrowheart.net/ and the artists' facebook www.facebook.com/ainelemmemusic/ae/ , twitter www.twitter.com/ainjelemme , myspace www.myspace.com/ainjelemme , and youtube pages www.youtube.com/ainjelemme

Planning

During our planning we needed to find locations, aquire the song and people to be in the video and create a storyboard and animatic.

To find locations we firstly google maps and google earth to search areas we would like to film in, to see if they would be acceptable. We then used google images to get pictures we could put on our blogs.

We then downloaded the song from an email, sent to us from our artist, on http://www.hotmail.com/ and used itunes to play the song.

To ask friends if they would be in our video we mostly used mobile phones however we also used facebook.

To create our storyboard and animatic we used the programe iMovie on the Apple iMac's.

Construction

For our filming we used HD digital video cameras, and for taking pictures we used digital photo cameras.

For editing we again used the apple iMac's and the program iMovie.

We used bluetooth to transfer the song to mobile phone, and pictures to the iMac.

We also used mobile phones to play the song, to listen to when lip syncing.

Evaluation

Technologies we used in our evaluation are:

• iPod-we played people our video and asked them their view on it.
• SurveyMonkey-we created a survey to send out, to recieve audience feedback
• MSN hotmail-to send the survey
• Facebook-to upload our video and recieve comments for audience feedback. Also to send the survey.

Evaluation. Question 3

Question 3 - What have you learned from your audience feedback?

To gather feedback from our audience we created a survey. We used http://surveymonkey.com/

We chose questions that would help us identify if our music video had done its job e.g. "would you buy this song or video?"

We sent the survey to a range of ages, however we were looking for the opinion of 16-21 year olds, as this was our target audience.

Survey Monkey

We sent our survey to 13 people:

Here are screen shots of our questions:

We got 5 replys. Although this is not great, we can still work with it.

Question 1

"Are you male or female?"

All of the 5 people who took our survey, were female. This is not a helpful result since we will not have the views of any males, so will not know if we managed to target them, even though they were not our main target audience.

Question 2

"How old are you?"

One of our participants was under 18, while the rest were 18-21. While this is good because it is our target audience, it would have been good to have had the views of an older audience to see whether we were able to reach other ages, not just our target audience. Also it would have been interesting to see how the older audience felt, since the older audience tends to prefer a slower song, which is an example of Levi-Strauss' binary oppositions.

Question 3

"What genre of music do you listen to?"

The most popular genre was indie, next rock and lastly one person answered RnB. Also one person answered anything. This is a great result as our genre is indie/folk. This means that our participants listen to indie, and if they like indie then they will like our song and will be more likely to enjoy our video, maybe even purchase the song or download the video. Therefore our video would have been successful.

Question 4

"Did you enjoy our music video?"

100% of our participants enjoyed our music video. This shows that even the people who liked RnB, and any type of genre, both still enjoyed our video, even though it was not their type of music.

Question 5

"What was the key moment for you in the music video?"

The most frequent answer was the flashbacks with 4/5 answering this, were our girl was having fun with her ex-boyfriend, which we showed in black and white as memories. However the last person answered that they liked the last seconds of the video with the umbrella flying in reverse. We also felt these parts were our favourites in our video, so it is interesting that our audience felt the same.

Question 6

"Out of 10, what would you give us for our overall video?"

3/5 people gave us a 9/10 for our music video, and the other 2 gave us an amazing 10/10. This is very rewarding as we worked very hard. This also shows that our music video would be liked by most people and this would most likely lead to people purchasing the song.

Question 7

"For downloading and marketing purposes, would you purchase this song?"

100% of the people who took our survey said they would purchase the song. This is great as we have achieved our goal. We have created a video that would add value for the song, increaing the revenue and identity for the artist, label etc. which is the point of a music video.

As part of our audience feedback we also filmed our friends Katie and Stacey, asking them what they thought of our music video (as they were our target audience). Here we have Becky asking them what they felt the best and worst parts of the video were and what they thought overall, after watching the video on my iPod.

This shows that our video was liked and that there were key moments that most people liked, and stuck in peoples minds.

To illustrate what people thought of our music video i used a website called www.wordle.net Here i put in all the words from our survey and things our classmates had said when they watched our video in class and produced an illustration. The bigger the word is the more used the word was.

Evaluation. Question 2

Question 2 - How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts (DVD digipack, magazine advert)?



When we were deciding on how best to design our magazine advert and digipack, we chose to look back on our video and what things stood out most for us. After looking back we decided to expand on the idea of blue which was used alot in the video, (umbrella, Becky and Ricky's clothing, blue effect matching lyrics) therefore we decided to use blue in the magazine advert. When we designed the digipack we wanted to use stills from the video rather than take new pictures. From our audience feedback we learned that the umbrella shots were liked so we decided to use one of these pictures as our digipack front cover and on our magazine advert. Therefore by using the same theme in all of our products it enables them to be tied together and work effectively.



I feel that the main disadvantage we faced was with the magazine advert. Since we wanted to use the same picture as at the biginning of the video (Becky with the blue umbrella), the only colour we could use on top of that was black, which still did not show up perfectly.

How Effective Is The Combination Of Your Main Product And Ancillary Texts?

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Evaluation. Question 1

Question 1 - In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms of real media products?

When we were planning and producing our music video, we tryed very hard to make it original. However we still needed to make sure we used the typical music video conventions.

Since it is a music video, LIP SYNCING is a very important convention. Some video's choose not to use lip syncing (abstract), however we decided we definatly wanted to so it would make it obvious from the beginning that it is a music video.

We also used INSTRUMENTS, another popular convention. We had Becky use an acoustic guitar when she was singing in the drama room. This fitted with the song as you can clearly hear a guitar being played.

We also TOLD A STORY in our music video, which is another convention. This makes our video more about escapism and realism. This also means that we did not use DANCING, since dancing is used more in abstract videos, which tend to not have a story. For example Rihanna-Rude Boy

MISE-EN-SCENE such as costume and make-up is very important in music videos. The convention shows a costume which reflects the genre of music i.e. folk has country, flowery costumes or rock has dark colours, jeans etc. We made sure that Becky's costume reflected our genre however we decided to keep make-up to a minimum to show a fresh-faced look, going with our folk/indie genre. This made our video MARKETABLE and GLOSSY.

And lastly we used the convention of LOCATION. Many videos use exotic and impressive locations, e.g.

Club Tropicana-Wham!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkTRh5YlEVE

Rio-Duran Duran

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KanKLnRUlg

Beat It-Michael Jackson

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WObfcDIf6lY

This again goes with the idea of escapism. These videos are about escaping the real world and living the dream. However we wanted our video to be realism so we did not use exotic locations.

Overall we felt that we captured the mood of the song well and our decisons were the best for our song genre and story.

Evaluation link between the Twilight film and our music video

When we were planning our storyline, we decided to incorporate some scences from the film Twilight. Part of the story was similar to ours, so we decided to make a link and copy some of the scenes. However we were still careful to make our video unique and different.

Bedroom scene

In Twilight, Bella has a dream of waking up and seeing her partner standing in the bedroom watching her. However when she wakes up startled and looks over to were he was, he is not there.



We decided to do a similar thing. We had Becky asleep with Ricky standing in the corner of the room. We then filmed Ricky sat in the bed watching over her (as a dream) She then wakes up and eagerly looks to see him, but he is not there.







Tree scene


Another scene we took inspiration from was the tree scene. In Twilight, Edward carries Bella to the top of a tree and tey share a moment there. So when we filmed in Regents Park, we decided to film Becky and Ricky in on of the trees in the wooden area.





We chose to incorporate these things as we knew the film twilight is very popular, and we felt it would help give our video some popularity. The use of intertextuality would mean when the audience watches the video, they would think "This reminds me of Twilight" and therefore when they watch Twilight it would remind them of our video. However this would only work if they had watched the film, otherwise they would not understand the reference.

This makes our music video postmodern, in the fact that nothing is original and there are no more new ideas, so idea are copied 'borrowed' from other texts.

Analysis in terms of film language

Camerawork

During our time of construction we tryed to demonstrate different aspects of filming. While shooting made sure that we always held the shot steady (even when we had problems with the wind!) One example of this is when we did our high angled shot in the park. The wind was very strong and the camera was very high on the tripod, so it was very hard to keep it from moving, but we managed to keep it steady:




We also made sure to use a variety of shot distances:

-long shot


-mid-shot


-close-up


-extreme close-up


These different shot distances give the video a more sophisticated and professional look.


We also took care to frame our shots and think about what we wanted to be inside the frame (mise en scene). Here are some examples:

(Please click on the images to read the labels)

1. The fountain scene



2. Singing on the stage




Lighting

Most of our filming was outside so we did not need to worry about lighting too much. However when we filmed in the drama room we did think alot about lighting. We decided to shoot different scenes in the drama room and to show this not only did we have Becky wear a different outfit but we also used different lighting. In the image i used above, i explained how we used a shotlight to make Becky the main focus of the shot. At other times we used many bright lights to make the whole shot bright. We generally did this when we were shooting different ages. However when we shot Becky standing on the stage we used red and blue lights and alternated them:

Blue

Red

We felt this would give more of an effect that she was at a gig and performing.

Editing.

When we were editing we tryed to watch the work back from the beginning whenever we did something knew and watched it as if we had never seen it before, to make sure it would make sense to the audience. We made sure to put memories in black and white to show they were in fact that, memories.

During instrumentals we edited different clips together to create a montage, used a variety of transitions: wash in, fade in, cross-dissolve, wipe etc. We also used a variety of effects: n-square, black and white, fast/slow/reverse, etc:


We also coloured one of the shot in blue. We used the blue colouring at the moment we hear the lyrics "can i paint it blue?" so it reflects the song. Also we used the theme blue throughout the production: Becky and Ricky wear blue tops, one of the lights used in the drama room is blue, Becky holds a blue umbrella, and we use blue on our magazine advert.

We also decided to include a graphic match between Becky sat on the bench in the park, to her sat on the edge of the stage in the drama room. We chose to do this as we felt it would be a different and more interesting way of switching from one location to another: