1.In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products.
• All music has a certain style to it that is shown to the viewer in the music video for example a rock band like Slipknot will choose to have fire and people jumping around to thier music, indie bands are abit different. Indie music videos are a bit different because there is no set style just general conventions and forms that are used. Too famous to get fully dressed by Butch Walker is the song we used for our media product and it uses conventions of real media by having a band performance then cut scenes of the band, but that is where we went off the track a bit instead of having cut scenes where the band are doing something oblivious that the camera is there, our cut scene features our main singer Charlie walking down a street singing into the camera
Usually an indie band are all male but that’s how we stepped back from the general stereotype and convention by having two female band members, one on bass and the other of a guitar. Also like a typical indie band e.g. Metro station or the kooks our main character changed costume a lot which our choice and not because we filmed on a lot of different days, we thought it would add more variety to the music video.
Choosing the costume was easy because we wanted to dress the main protagonist accordingly and keep to the indie genre and conventions. We did this by getting charlie to wear just a typical teenager outfit so the video appeals to our target which is people aged between 15-20. Too famous to get fully dressed is a chilled out song so we didn't want our video to be outlandish with costume, lighting or location so thats why we used naturalistic lighting and everyday locations and costumes.
We used a wide variety of shots so rather than the band working round the camera we go the camera working round the band so we introduced a bit of freedom towards our video. Using close-ups on the instruments like the drums, bass and guitar gives the viewer something to look at rather than seeing the main protagonist lip synching through the majority of the video. We took more shots of the singer than the rest of the band to satisfy the demands of the record label showing that he is the heart of the band and so people focus on him.
• The point of having posters, magazine adds and DVDs is to promote the single or album showing the band at its best for marketing purposes and the demands for the record label and in our case we showed the main singer again which met those demands.
The initial idea was to have Charlie and the wall behind him in black and white and the rest of the photo in colour to single him out from the rest, but that didn't work out because he looked like a ghost and to be fair it looked very dull and not appealing which isn't the approach we wanted.
At first we tried using screen grabs from the video to use as the pictures in the ancillary tasks, but the because of the quality of the video we thought it was best to take separate pictures just for the use of the DVD cover and magazine add which worked in our favour, because we could get charlie in the location and position of our choice . I think through the ancillary tasks the DVD cover and the magazine add, we have been able to keep the indie theme going which is a lighthearted down to earth theme which i think will appeal to our target market because thats who they want to listen to, not some outlandish guy in ridiculous costume in the middle of a swimming pool.
By taking in to account the Mise en scene we looked at location, props and costume in the video, we got charlie to stand in front of a brick wall with leaves at his feet crouching for one shot then standing for the other because even though we wanted to keep the theme and genre going we also wanted to show a bit of variety otherwise there wouldn't be much difference and it would have looked like we couldn't be bothered to create a new idea.
3. What have you learnt from your audience feedback?
Our original idea was to have the band performing in a field then cutscenes with charlie walking down streets, but when we hired the camera for the weekend and traveled to Bassenbourne the weather wasn't ideal because it had rained so the field was muddy so the equipment would get destroyed.
From speaking with Andrea as a group, we have decided to focus on the walking down different streets and move away from the scenes in the house and bathroom because they didnt need to be there and had nothing to do with the genre. Andrea thought that charlie walking down the street at the start was a bit not boring but it dragged on abit and thats where the idea for the screen splitting up came in so there was a bit of variety. We were given useful criticism about some of slides in the house, because we used natural light which was rather dull and as a viewer you couldnt see what was going on, so we used a light filter.
Looking at our groups peer feedback we found a lot of positive feedback from one of our classmates group. Group 20 liked some of the effects we used e.g. the multiple frames of the same shot and the writing around the main protagonist. Even though it wasn't said, personally i got the impression that people thought we repeated some of the shots too many times. The cut scene where Charlie was walking down the street got a bit repetative and if effects weren't used i think that if this was being watched on MTV the viewer would have found it not very interesting.
How did you use new media technology in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
The first step to any successful production is planning thats why in our first few lessons we started using www.blogger.com. Blogger is a website where you make a blog and you or in our case anyone in our group can access it any time and add to it. Our first task was to choose which song we were going to perform in our video, we had 3 in mind and an idea for all of them. During the course we added to the blog sharing our ideas and opinions. We could upload videos such as other music videos to compare and annotate and also we uploaded our rough cut and final cut of our music videos.
We continued using final cut to edit our video and because we have used it before we were able to develop our skills using more effects and transitions . Filters were also used and needed in our production because of our choice to use natural lighting.
Photoshop was the other program we used to create our ancillary tasks. Photoshop was helpful in that it allowed us to take images and edit them how we wished and what looks best. Using 'posterization' we were able to create a link in between the DVD cover and the magazine add displaying a sort of grainy edgy look.
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