Also because of the target audience chosen, the i-pod gives implicit meaning that this album and single are on i-tunes. The increase in song downloads has increased massively over the past years and it has become easier to access music and music videos, now being able to use internet on mobile phones. This is convergence of technologies, so by advertising the sale of the song on i-tunes it lets the consumers know it’s there. It does this by have the artist start the song using his i-pod. In my market research I asked; How effective do you believe the costume, setting and location of clips were in the music video? I asked the audience to rate this out of 5. 30% of people asked rated it at a level 3 and when asked to elaborate the main reason was because of the background letting it down. I understand the downfall of having the still image but I believe it fitted in well with the narrative and theme of my music video. The other 70% rated it at 4 out of 5, explaining that the settings and costume were believable but location could have been more romantic such as crashing waves on the beach. Overall I believe it was a positive reception to the mise en scene I had incorporated within my music video. Another important aspect was the styling of the hair - hair has become a huge trend setter for consumers, for example when the premiership footballer David Beckham got a Mohican hairstyle, males of all ages copied it. Therefore the hair of all the characters had to be considered when making the music video. With the cinematography of my music video I had analysed music videos and found that one of the conventions of a music video is to use close ups to let the audience connect with the artist and watch them in every detail. I decided to break the conventions and use less close ups with the artist performance sections because I believe you lost the wider context which created more impact on the message of the lyrics. Also the close ups were not as aesthetically pleasing as medium close ups and medium shots in which I used more. I decided to use a fixed camera position in the performance because the music is not very fast paced I felt it did not warrant a lot of camera movement as the performer was acting out his emotions with gestures and allowed him to connect with the camera and therefore the audience. With the flash backs I used more hand held camera techniques it gives it a home video effect which I wanted because it produced a more authentic feeling to the photographic memories and flashbacks of the relationship. To find out what my target audience had thought about the techniques used I asked them the question; How effective do you believe camera angles of clips were in the music video? The response I got was good with 20% of my research group rating it 5 out of 5. This is positive feedback with cinematography being a main aspect of a music video. The other 80% rated the use of camera angles at 4 out of 5. If I was to change something about the camera angles I would add in more close ups and make them more aesthetically pleasing for the viewer, but when I was producing my video they stood out as a negative and drew focus away from the rest of the video. Narrative theory uses a gratifications model which argues that the audience are active and that they consume the media in relation to their social and cultural setting and needs. This is summarised by theorists Blumier and Katz in 1974, saying “media usage can be explained in that it provides gratifications (satisfying needs) related to the satisfaction of social and physiological needs.” Camera shots play a big part in satisfying the needs of the consumer so I tried to make the video in keeping with the uses and gratifications theory. Editing is a massive part of music videos as editing creates the pace of a video, and this is a convention of music videos. This is done by cutting to the beat of the music which can create pace in a scene and it can also slow down the pace of video by using cross fades. This is something that I had to take into consideration as the track is not fast so I used cross fades which fade one clip over the top of another because it is more subtle than a straight cut and suited my clips. I introduced editing to the beat into the production in more fast parts with short fast sequence of shots. This is done by matching the editing with spike in the music track or using a tool that shows you where there is a beat in the music, and in turn this helps to follow the conventions of a music video and editing to the beat. I believe that my music video had a good range of edits with different pace, for example you can stretch the cross fade to make the transition from one clip to another longer this suited the chorus towards the end. I asked my audience research group; How effective do you believe the editing of clips were in the music video? 70% of my audience rated the editing at 4 out of 5 which is a large percentage and I am happy with this as it demonstrates that I kept within the conventions of a music video. A further 20% rated the editing of my video 5 out of 5, and 10% at 3 out of 5, this shows a difference in views which is good because negative feedback is constructive. If an opportunity arose to improve the video I could use more edits to the beat to quicken certain sections of my video allowing a change of camera angles; however when I was producing the music video I went with a different approach with a more mellow feel. I conducted my research on a group of people with an age range from 13 to 19 I believe this gave me a good idea of the opinions my target audience would have. I looked into the socio economic grouping that sets people into different groups depending on the age, gender, ethnicity or religion and educational backgrounds of customers and the geographical location in which they live. This is known as demographic segmentation. This all helps to determine in what bracket customers are put into; Group A is higher managerial, administrative or professional e.g. surgeon or company director. Group B is intermediate managerial, administrative or professional e.g. teachers solicitors. Group C1 is skilled non-manual e.g. sales assistants, shop floor supervisors. Group C2 is skilled manual e.g. electrician and plumber. Group D is semi-skilled e.g. assembly workers and cleaners. Group E is the unskilled unemployed and pensioners. The target audience for my product would be between the C2 and E bracket because between the age range I have targeted most would be in school, college, university and training in a job or unemployed. Also as they are not the wealthiest potential consumers and do not part with their money as easily, the product has to be appealing, suited to the audience but also accessible and advertised in places where they will be seen by the target audience. Therefore I chose to create a poster for a magazine that can be pulled out and put on the wall as the younger people in my target audience will decorate the walls with their favourite artists. Looking at artists like Justin Bieber and Chris Brown, one can see that they are targeting young teenagers (particularly girls) with catchy songs and modelling themselves as heart throbs. Young girls support the male artists because they are attracted to them due to the idealisation of romantic relationships through fanciful love songs and clean good looks. So the target audience for my artist “Danny T” is females because of the nature of the song and the pop industry itself. The way I targeted the male audience is through clothing and the way he acts and looks in the video, young males have idols and copy trends with fashion and hair that they see in the media. Another audience theory that links is two step flow, where one person sees something and then tells another - word of mouth advertising . Convergence plays a big part in this, as technology grows, access to downloads becomes easier and consumers can now swap songs using internet sites such as myspace and facebook. That is why I showed my album cover on an itunes page to show it fits in with other albums and that that it could easily be a professional cover. These are the results that I got from my questionnaire: Question 1, On a scale from 1 to 5,- how convincing is the music video? 30% of my research group rated the video at 3 out of 5, I can understand this figure because it is not a professional piece of work and is done with basic technology and they will have compared it to music videos on music channels such as MTV. 50% of my feedback group rated the music video at 4 out of 5 and 20% rated it at 5 out of 5 which I am happy with but I can not fully justify the rating of 5 out of 5 as I would have liked to improve aspects of my video. Question 2, how effective did you find the performance? 30% of the feedback group rated the performance aspect of the video at 3 out of 5 which is surprising because 50% audience rated of the video at 5 out of 5. I agree with the higher rating because I believe my artist really connected with the song and portrayed his emotions across to the audience. Possibly the lower rating was affected by an external factor such as comparing it to professional acting in music videos. Question 3, how well do you think the green screen clips worked with the rest of the video? This was the performance part of the video and again it gained some mixed reception with 10% rating it at 2 out of 5 and 30% rated it at 3 out of 5. In my opinion this was because of the stationary image in the background. If I was to do it again I would have a different image chroma keyed in and maybe a moving video. I believe the image I used worked with the video though and this was illustrated with a further 50% rating it at 5 out of 5. Question 4, I covered within the first bit of my evaluation. Question 5, How effective did you find the video poster and digipack? 20% rated it at 2 out of 5 and 60% at 3 out of 5, because these figures were much lower than I had expected them I asked for an explanation and the main feedback was that “the back cover, front cover and poster were all very good but it lost its way inside the digipack”. I can agree with this but I wanted to keep it simple and make sure the continuity ran throughout my products. 20% rated them at 4 which is more what I was expecting so I was disappointed that my audience felt that it did not work throughout my products. Question 6, Do you think that the song and video worked well together? With the audience feedback from this question I can see that overall my audience can understand and connect with my video and ad campaign. This is backed up with 30% rating it at 5 out of 5 and 60% rating it at 4 out of 5 which are positive figures and demonstrates that I connected the video well to the song. The production of my music video and advertisement campaign has been a relatively new experience especially using the adobe editing software. At the end of last year we had to create a perfume campaign using the editing suite which gave us some experience of it. However it was very different when it came to producing the music video as it required a more complex editing and is longer with it being over 3 and half minutes. In the production of the video I was quite confident with digital cameras but the difficult thing was getting the framing right when it was a moving image so I would take more than one take to get it right. After uploading the material on to the editing suite it was then working out how to use the tools and what worked with my video and what did not. In my video I used the green screen to record the performance shots this meant that we had to learn about lighting, this is very important because if the green screen gets a shadow on when it comes to matroxing and chroma keying there would be grainy patches from the shadow. I had this problem in some clips and had to re-shoot, but I had to re shoot and shoot new material a lot as my ideas evolved and changed throughout the project. To put in the background behind green screen, clips had to be matroxed which took away the green screen and left my performer, then it had to be chroma keyed which allowed the background to be put in underneath the film and matroxing makes it transparent. I then chose my clip and this goes on the work row below the green screen clip which is how I got the performance over the top of my background. Black and white is simple to do because it is in video effects and in colour corrections, which allowed you to choose the colour and I had a play about with some others such as ‘warm summer day’ but it was too yellow. The black and white looked more professional and it also fitted with the narrative and theme. Other tools allowed me to slow down clips by extending them and quicken clips by shortening them - I used this within my video when the song was slowed down. I had chosen to do a poster and digipack, I created both of these on adobe Photoshop which I am relatively competent and I believe this shows in my poster and didipack as all the image I used had to be cropped down and the background rubbed out to leave just the artist. To get it to that point I used the erase tool and the magic wand which allows you to select patches of the same colour to be deleted. I had a yellow background throughout providing continuity and a running theme. My idea for the poster relates to the video in that it has colour images which fade to the black, present turning in to past or past turning in to present. This is done in my video by colour clips to represent present and black and white clips to represent the past. I faded this by duplicating layers and turning the bottom image to black and white and reducing the amount of red in the black. I then changed the opacity of the foreground image to have it fading to black. I had this theme carried through my digipack and also my poster. Blogger is a useful website as it can be accessed in college or at home, and when you do a piece of work you can upload it and then it is there to refer to. I did not take full advantage of blogger and I would if I did it again, where instead of uploading documents I would just leave them on my computer instead of uploading them. I would also have done an online poll if I was to do it again because this opens up the target audience and get feedback from a wider age range. The bright range of colours I used on my digipack is to entice the audience in yellow is an eye catching colour and with black writing it stands out on a shelf or in a magazine or on a billboard in the posters case. The font I chose was deliberate and wanted it to match the feel of my poster and digipack with my artist being dressed in retro jacket I chose to use 60’s style font, I believe this worked very well and suited the artist and also went with what he was wearing in the music video because it shows different character - you take of the jacket and it reveals a different style. I also included synergy in my digipack to link the album with the artist’s video, by having a page on the fold out of pictures from the production of my music video. I think this worked well as it helped to connect and produce continuity between my items. Overall I believe that the coursework has gone well and I have produced a quality product which works and has continuity, however if I was to change this I would have chosen a more upbeat song to express more performance than narrative but I enjoyed doing something different. Working in a group was difficult because it was finding the time to be able to do it together but I believe by the end me and my partner had good communication and worked together and individually well. The organisation of actors was also another issue that I found both for pictures for the poster and digipack but also for the filming for the video, but I believe that I found two actors/actresses that worked well more individually than together but performed well in front of the camera.
Friday, 15 April 2011
Evaluation
Evaluation Conventions of a music video The brief I chose was to create a music video and two ancillary texts. I selected the poster advertisement for the album and artist, and the designing of a digipack as ancillary texts. The first thing I did after choosing my brief was research the history of music videos, which showed me how they had developed from black and white pictures to go with songs to digitally produced cartoons. It also taught me that the whole reason for developing a music video was to advertise a particular artist or artists. How an artist is represented in a music video is pivotal because the target audience purchase and watch music videos to feel closer to their artist and use it to create most of their perception of the artist. Aspects of any music video often help to create an alternate reality of wealth and fame for the audience. Conventions of a music video Sound • Music tempo – the pace of the music regularly determines on how fast the editing is, when it is used and the moving to the beat that the artist does. • Lyrics – These set the general theme of the song and convey the artist’s message to the audience. Cinematography • Camera angles – the most commonly used shot in a music video is a close up because this helps the audience connect on an emotional level. Music videos keep the audience entertained using a variety of shots. Editing • Editing - This is used in a way to add visual effects to the images to make it more exciting to the audience. Mise en scene • Costume- used to promote new styles of the artist. The clothes relate to the theme of the video and the surroundings the artist is set in. The narrative structure I have taken is non linear because there is no set timeline for the events that have taken place; however it is set in the past. The shots with just the artists are in the present and the shots with the female actress are created to look like her flash backs. By doing this it conforms to the conventions of a pop/ r’n’b song, which I found out when I analysed “Jason Derulo-What if”. The regular appearance of flash backs are common in music videos that have an undertone of relationships and love. After filming I then realised the connection between the characters was not appropriate, so this had to be re-shot with a different story. We went for a conventional narrative in our video, with the typical romance associated with a slow pop song like the song we chose (Bruno Mars – Just the way you are.) By analysing the lyrics of our song we tried to relate the messages from the music to what was happening on screen. For example, when the artist sings: “and when you smile,” I included a slow motion clip of our actress smiling. By looking at other songs of the same genre and style I realised that there is a regular pattern of love and relationships in the music videos. The genre that we chose is pop and the conventions of this are that they are predominately colourful, and a light mood. Also, the pop songs that I looked at had continuity and a strong narrative. Pop videos often have a performance incorporated into the video and appeal to a wide audience including all ages and gender. In my video I have followed the conventions of a pop video and tried to use them to improve the video and produce high quality. In pop videos the artist is always stylish or has a unique fashion which makes them stand out and create trends in consumer fashion. Using this information I had the artist in clothes that are current; artists have to be up-to-date because they are regularly publicised in the media and criticised on their appearance. This is part of modern pop culture and artists often use it to their advantage in order to increase their fame and popularity. A feature of a pop music video and pop culture is the variations of colour to match the tone of the video, shown through the mise en scene, lighting makeup and hair colour in music videos. I interpreted the mood to my video as romantic and quite mellow so I had to consider if the conventional colourful pop video would go with this. I decided to use clips in black and white to represent flash backs, then use colour to represent the present and happiness of the artist thus creating a contrast between different time and moods. The black and white clips also help to create a separation between performance and narrative, the narrative being a teenage romance and love that he wants to share with his audience. By having the artist creating more of a cheeky light-hearted atmosphere in the performance parts, it helped to create personality that I was able to run through the ancillary texts. As the main target audience for my artist is ranged 13-23 where relationships are new and exciting, new romance is what I tried to capture with the different aspects to my music video. I analysed the lyrics to create an understanding of what the music video can be about and produced my original idea to have just pure narrative with no performance. However this did not work because of the chemistry between actors and I did not believe it fitted in with the conventions of music videos of recent years. Often now music videos will have narrative with performance or performance with narrative, yet it is rare in modern times that a music video will get pure narrative. Hence I chose to change it into performance that relates to the narrative, which meant more hand gestures and cutting to narrative clips that related to what he was singing. The song is quite slow and romantic in terms of lyrics so a full dance routine would not have worked and instead the performance is more gestural, i.e. using his hands and facial expressions to tell a story. Mise en scene is a huge aspect of producing a music video including the consideration of props, clothing, locations and backgrounds which have to be compatible with the music and target audience. A convention of a music video now, especially with pop and r’n’b, is the materialistic parading that artists do, because it creates an alternate reality for the audience to go into. As the artist I have created is a teenager, the clothes he wears in the video match the fashion within the target audience so I chose low crotch jeans with a polo shirt and a jacket. This is not a particularly outgoing fashion outfit but I decided to go with less is more because the song did not warrant flashing of materialistic items. The actress’ outfits were more extravagant and had a more unique fashion style, for example at the forest and beach part of the video she adorns a white fur hat to show class. The dresses she wore throughout the video were of a high quality and in keeping with the target audience’s fashion. Although men in my target audience would be fashion conscious, often teenage girls and young women are more interested in standing out and being fashion-forward. Bearing this in mind, I decided to keep the male character a simple, casually dressed artist because I feel it’s in keeping with his age and the song. The locations that I chose for the narrative are in-keeping with the feelings of a new romance of excitement, passion and getting to know one another. In my opinion the conventional romantic scenes correlating with these feelings were piggybacks on the beach and a stereotypical play fight that would be seen in a romantic film and although can be seen as cheesy, it worked within my narrative. The locations are what one would often see in films and television programmes, this also helps to connect with the target audience because everything is dominated by media now and they will have seen similar settings in different texts and can now read into their meaning. The chroma keyed background behind the artist performing was chosen because it is a colourful happy image which goes with the lyrics, and it also utilises part of the setting and memory from the narrative part of the video. Being an upbeat, happy song about romance, having the colour shows that he is happy and it also contrasts the black and white which is more deep and powerful. In the opening scene of the song I have placed the artist with an i-pod because in a lot of music videos with large artists have product placement, for example the Lady Gaga and Beyonce music video telephone has a t-mobile logo on the mobile phone that they show on screen. 
Also because of the target audience chosen, the i-pod gives implicit meaning that this album and single are on i-tunes. The increase in song downloads has increased massively over the past years and it has become easier to access music and music videos, now being able to use internet on mobile phones. This is convergence of technologies, so by advertising the sale of the song on i-tunes it lets the consumers know it’s there. It does this by have the artist start the song using his i-pod. In my market research I asked; How effective do you believe the costume, setting and location of clips were in the music video? I asked the audience to rate this out of 5. 30% of people asked rated it at a level 3 and when asked to elaborate the main reason was because of the background letting it down. I understand the downfall of having the still image but I believe it fitted in well with the narrative and theme of my music video. The other 70% rated it at 4 out of 5, explaining that the settings and costume were believable but location could have been more romantic such as crashing waves on the beach. Overall I believe it was a positive reception to the mise en scene I had incorporated within my music video. Another important aspect was the styling of the hair - hair has become a huge trend setter for consumers, for example when the premiership footballer David Beckham got a Mohican hairstyle, males of all ages copied it. Therefore the hair of all the characters had to be considered when making the music video. With the cinematography of my music video I had analysed music videos and found that one of the conventions of a music video is to use close ups to let the audience connect with the artist and watch them in every detail. I decided to break the conventions and use less close ups with the artist performance sections because I believe you lost the wider context which created more impact on the message of the lyrics. Also the close ups were not as aesthetically pleasing as medium close ups and medium shots in which I used more. I decided to use a fixed camera position in the performance because the music is not very fast paced I felt it did not warrant a lot of camera movement as the performer was acting out his emotions with gestures and allowed him to connect with the camera and therefore the audience. With the flash backs I used more hand held camera techniques it gives it a home video effect which I wanted because it produced a more authentic feeling to the photographic memories and flashbacks of the relationship. To find out what my target audience had thought about the techniques used I asked them the question; How effective do you believe camera angles of clips were in the music video? The response I got was good with 20% of my research group rating it 5 out of 5. This is positive feedback with cinematography being a main aspect of a music video. The other 80% rated the use of camera angles at 4 out of 5. If I was to change something about the camera angles I would add in more close ups and make them more aesthetically pleasing for the viewer, but when I was producing my video they stood out as a negative and drew focus away from the rest of the video. Narrative theory uses a gratifications model which argues that the audience are active and that they consume the media in relation to their social and cultural setting and needs. This is summarised by theorists Blumier and Katz in 1974, saying “media usage can be explained in that it provides gratifications (satisfying needs) related to the satisfaction of social and physiological needs.” Camera shots play a big part in satisfying the needs of the consumer so I tried to make the video in keeping with the uses and gratifications theory. Editing is a massive part of music videos as editing creates the pace of a video, and this is a convention of music videos. This is done by cutting to the beat of the music which can create pace in a scene and it can also slow down the pace of video by using cross fades. This is something that I had to take into consideration as the track is not fast so I used cross fades which fade one clip over the top of another because it is more subtle than a straight cut and suited my clips. I introduced editing to the beat into the production in more fast parts with short fast sequence of shots. This is done by matching the editing with spike in the music track or using a tool that shows you where there is a beat in the music, and in turn this helps to follow the conventions of a music video and editing to the beat. I believe that my music video had a good range of edits with different pace, for example you can stretch the cross fade to make the transition from one clip to another longer this suited the chorus towards the end. I asked my audience research group; How effective do you believe the editing of clips were in the music video? 70% of my audience rated the editing at 4 out of 5 which is a large percentage and I am happy with this as it demonstrates that I kept within the conventions of a music video. A further 20% rated the editing of my video 5 out of 5, and 10% at 3 out of 5, this shows a difference in views which is good because negative feedback is constructive. If an opportunity arose to improve the video I could use more edits to the beat to quicken certain sections of my video allowing a change of camera angles; however when I was producing the music video I went with a different approach with a more mellow feel. I conducted my research on a group of people with an age range from 13 to 19 I believe this gave me a good idea of the opinions my target audience would have. I looked into the socio economic grouping that sets people into different groups depending on the age, gender, ethnicity or religion and educational backgrounds of customers and the geographical location in which they live. This is known as demographic segmentation. This all helps to determine in what bracket customers are put into; Group A is higher managerial, administrative or professional e.g. surgeon or company director. Group B is intermediate managerial, administrative or professional e.g. teachers solicitors. Group C1 is skilled non-manual e.g. sales assistants, shop floor supervisors. Group C2 is skilled manual e.g. electrician and plumber. Group D is semi-skilled e.g. assembly workers and cleaners. Group E is the unskilled unemployed and pensioners. The target audience for my product would be between the C2 and E bracket because between the age range I have targeted most would be in school, college, university and training in a job or unemployed. Also as they are not the wealthiest potential consumers and do not part with their money as easily, the product has to be appealing, suited to the audience but also accessible and advertised in places where they will be seen by the target audience. Therefore I chose to create a poster for a magazine that can be pulled out and put on the wall as the younger people in my target audience will decorate the walls with their favourite artists. Looking at artists like Justin Bieber and Chris Brown, one can see that they are targeting young teenagers (particularly girls) with catchy songs and modelling themselves as heart throbs. Young girls support the male artists because they are attracted to them due to the idealisation of romantic relationships through fanciful love songs and clean good looks. So the target audience for my artist “Danny T” is females because of the nature of the song and the pop industry itself. The way I targeted the male audience is through clothing and the way he acts and looks in the video, young males have idols and copy trends with fashion and hair that they see in the media. Another audience theory that links is two step flow, where one person sees something and then tells another - word of mouth advertising . Convergence plays a big part in this, as technology grows, access to downloads becomes easier and consumers can now swap songs using internet sites such as myspace and facebook. That is why I showed my album cover on an itunes page to show it fits in with other albums and that that it could easily be a professional cover. These are the results that I got from my questionnaire: Question 1, On a scale from 1 to 5,- how convincing is the music video? 30% of my research group rated the video at 3 out of 5, I can understand this figure because it is not a professional piece of work and is done with basic technology and they will have compared it to music videos on music channels such as MTV. 50% of my feedback group rated the music video at 4 out of 5 and 20% rated it at 5 out of 5 which I am happy with but I can not fully justify the rating of 5 out of 5 as I would have liked to improve aspects of my video. Question 2, how effective did you find the performance? 30% of the feedback group rated the performance aspect of the video at 3 out of 5 which is surprising because 50% audience rated of the video at 5 out of 5. I agree with the higher rating because I believe my artist really connected with the song and portrayed his emotions across to the audience. Possibly the lower rating was affected by an external factor such as comparing it to professional acting in music videos. Question 3, how well do you think the green screen clips worked with the rest of the video? This was the performance part of the video and again it gained some mixed reception with 10% rating it at 2 out of 5 and 30% rated it at 3 out of 5. In my opinion this was because of the stationary image in the background. If I was to do it again I would have a different image chroma keyed in and maybe a moving video. I believe the image I used worked with the video though and this was illustrated with a further 50% rating it at 5 out of 5. Question 4, I covered within the first bit of my evaluation. Question 5, How effective did you find the video poster and digipack? 20% rated it at 2 out of 5 and 60% at 3 out of 5, because these figures were much lower than I had expected them I asked for an explanation and the main feedback was that “the back cover, front cover and poster were all very good but it lost its way inside the digipack”. I can agree with this but I wanted to keep it simple and make sure the continuity ran throughout my products. 20% rated them at 4 which is more what I was expecting so I was disappointed that my audience felt that it did not work throughout my products. Question 6, Do you think that the song and video worked well together? With the audience feedback from this question I can see that overall my audience can understand and connect with my video and ad campaign. This is backed up with 30% rating it at 5 out of 5 and 60% rating it at 4 out of 5 which are positive figures and demonstrates that I connected the video well to the song. The production of my music video and advertisement campaign has been a relatively new experience especially using the adobe editing software. At the end of last year we had to create a perfume campaign using the editing suite which gave us some experience of it. However it was very different when it came to producing the music video as it required a more complex editing and is longer with it being over 3 and half minutes. In the production of the video I was quite confident with digital cameras but the difficult thing was getting the framing right when it was a moving image so I would take more than one take to get it right. After uploading the material on to the editing suite it was then working out how to use the tools and what worked with my video and what did not. In my video I used the green screen to record the performance shots this meant that we had to learn about lighting, this is very important because if the green screen gets a shadow on when it comes to matroxing and chroma keying there would be grainy patches from the shadow. I had this problem in some clips and had to re-shoot, but I had to re shoot and shoot new material a lot as my ideas evolved and changed throughout the project. To put in the background behind green screen, clips had to be matroxed which took away the green screen and left my performer, then it had to be chroma keyed which allowed the background to be put in underneath the film and matroxing makes it transparent. I then chose my clip and this goes on the work row below the green screen clip which is how I got the performance over the top of my background. Black and white is simple to do because it is in video effects and in colour corrections, which allowed you to choose the colour and I had a play about with some others such as ‘warm summer day’ but it was too yellow. The black and white looked more professional and it also fitted with the narrative and theme. Other tools allowed me to slow down clips by extending them and quicken clips by shortening them - I used this within my video when the song was slowed down. I had chosen to do a poster and digipack, I created both of these on adobe Photoshop which I am relatively competent and I believe this shows in my poster and didipack as all the image I used had to be cropped down and the background rubbed out to leave just the artist. To get it to that point I used the erase tool and the magic wand which allows you to select patches of the same colour to be deleted. I had a yellow background throughout providing continuity and a running theme. My idea for the poster relates to the video in that it has colour images which fade to the black, present turning in to past or past turning in to present. This is done in my video by colour clips to represent present and black and white clips to represent the past. I faded this by duplicating layers and turning the bottom image to black and white and reducing the amount of red in the black. I then changed the opacity of the foreground image to have it fading to black. I had this theme carried through my digipack and also my poster. Blogger is a useful website as it can be accessed in college or at home, and when you do a piece of work you can upload it and then it is there to refer to. I did not take full advantage of blogger and I would if I did it again, where instead of uploading documents I would just leave them on my computer instead of uploading them. I would also have done an online poll if I was to do it again because this opens up the target audience and get feedback from a wider age range. The bright range of colours I used on my digipack is to entice the audience in yellow is an eye catching colour and with black writing it stands out on a shelf or in a magazine or on a billboard in the posters case. The font I chose was deliberate and wanted it to match the feel of my poster and digipack with my artist being dressed in retro jacket I chose to use 60’s style font, I believe this worked very well and suited the artist and also went with what he was wearing in the music video because it shows different character - you take of the jacket and it reveals a different style. I also included synergy in my digipack to link the album with the artist’s video, by having a page on the fold out of pictures from the production of my music video. I think this worked well as it helped to connect and produce continuity between my items. Overall I believe that the coursework has gone well and I have produced a quality product which works and has continuity, however if I was to change this I would have chosen a more upbeat song to express more performance than narrative but I enjoyed doing something different. Working in a group was difficult because it was finding the time to be able to do it together but I believe by the end me and my partner had good communication and worked together and individually well. The organisation of actors was also another issue that I found both for pictures for the poster and digipack but also for the filming for the video, but I believe that I found two actors/actresses that worked well more individually than together but performed well in front of the camera.
Also because of the target audience chosen, the i-pod gives implicit meaning that this album and single are on i-tunes. The increase in song downloads has increased massively over the past years and it has become easier to access music and music videos, now being able to use internet on mobile phones. This is convergence of technologies, so by advertising the sale of the song on i-tunes it lets the consumers know it’s there. It does this by have the artist start the song using his i-pod. In my market research I asked; How effective do you believe the costume, setting and location of clips were in the music video? I asked the audience to rate this out of 5. 30% of people asked rated it at a level 3 and when asked to elaborate the main reason was because of the background letting it down. I understand the downfall of having the still image but I believe it fitted in well with the narrative and theme of my music video. The other 70% rated it at 4 out of 5, explaining that the settings and costume were believable but location could have been more romantic such as crashing waves on the beach. Overall I believe it was a positive reception to the mise en scene I had incorporated within my music video. Another important aspect was the styling of the hair - hair has become a huge trend setter for consumers, for example when the premiership footballer David Beckham got a Mohican hairstyle, males of all ages copied it. Therefore the hair of all the characters had to be considered when making the music video. With the cinematography of my music video I had analysed music videos and found that one of the conventions of a music video is to use close ups to let the audience connect with the artist and watch them in every detail. I decided to break the conventions and use less close ups with the artist performance sections because I believe you lost the wider context which created more impact on the message of the lyrics. Also the close ups were not as aesthetically pleasing as medium close ups and medium shots in which I used more. I decided to use a fixed camera position in the performance because the music is not very fast paced I felt it did not warrant a lot of camera movement as the performer was acting out his emotions with gestures and allowed him to connect with the camera and therefore the audience. With the flash backs I used more hand held camera techniques it gives it a home video effect which I wanted because it produced a more authentic feeling to the photographic memories and flashbacks of the relationship. To find out what my target audience had thought about the techniques used I asked them the question; How effective do you believe camera angles of clips were in the music video? The response I got was good with 20% of my research group rating it 5 out of 5. This is positive feedback with cinematography being a main aspect of a music video. The other 80% rated the use of camera angles at 4 out of 5. If I was to change something about the camera angles I would add in more close ups and make them more aesthetically pleasing for the viewer, but when I was producing my video they stood out as a negative and drew focus away from the rest of the video. Narrative theory uses a gratifications model which argues that the audience are active and that they consume the media in relation to their social and cultural setting and needs. This is summarised by theorists Blumier and Katz in 1974, saying “media usage can be explained in that it provides gratifications (satisfying needs) related to the satisfaction of social and physiological needs.” Camera shots play a big part in satisfying the needs of the consumer so I tried to make the video in keeping with the uses and gratifications theory. Editing is a massive part of music videos as editing creates the pace of a video, and this is a convention of music videos. This is done by cutting to the beat of the music which can create pace in a scene and it can also slow down the pace of video by using cross fades. This is something that I had to take into consideration as the track is not fast so I used cross fades which fade one clip over the top of another because it is more subtle than a straight cut and suited my clips. I introduced editing to the beat into the production in more fast parts with short fast sequence of shots. This is done by matching the editing with spike in the music track or using a tool that shows you where there is a beat in the music, and in turn this helps to follow the conventions of a music video and editing to the beat. I believe that my music video had a good range of edits with different pace, for example you can stretch the cross fade to make the transition from one clip to another longer this suited the chorus towards the end. I asked my audience research group; How effective do you believe the editing of clips were in the music video? 70% of my audience rated the editing at 4 out of 5 which is a large percentage and I am happy with this as it demonstrates that I kept within the conventions of a music video. A further 20% rated the editing of my video 5 out of 5, and 10% at 3 out of 5, this shows a difference in views which is good because negative feedback is constructive. If an opportunity arose to improve the video I could use more edits to the beat to quicken certain sections of my video allowing a change of camera angles; however when I was producing the music video I went with a different approach with a more mellow feel. I conducted my research on a group of people with an age range from 13 to 19 I believe this gave me a good idea of the opinions my target audience would have. I looked into the socio economic grouping that sets people into different groups depending on the age, gender, ethnicity or religion and educational backgrounds of customers and the geographical location in which they live. This is known as demographic segmentation. This all helps to determine in what bracket customers are put into; Group A is higher managerial, administrative or professional e.g. surgeon or company director. Group B is intermediate managerial, administrative or professional e.g. teachers solicitors. Group C1 is skilled non-manual e.g. sales assistants, shop floor supervisors. Group C2 is skilled manual e.g. electrician and plumber. Group D is semi-skilled e.g. assembly workers and cleaners. Group E is the unskilled unemployed and pensioners. The target audience for my product would be between the C2 and E bracket because between the age range I have targeted most would be in school, college, university and training in a job or unemployed. Also as they are not the wealthiest potential consumers and do not part with their money as easily, the product has to be appealing, suited to the audience but also accessible and advertised in places where they will be seen by the target audience. Therefore I chose to create a poster for a magazine that can be pulled out and put on the wall as the younger people in my target audience will decorate the walls with their favourite artists. Looking at artists like Justin Bieber and Chris Brown, one can see that they are targeting young teenagers (particularly girls) with catchy songs and modelling themselves as heart throbs. Young girls support the male artists because they are attracted to them due to the idealisation of romantic relationships through fanciful love songs and clean good looks. So the target audience for my artist “Danny T” is females because of the nature of the song and the pop industry itself. The way I targeted the male audience is through clothing and the way he acts and looks in the video, young males have idols and copy trends with fashion and hair that they see in the media. Another audience theory that links is two step flow, where one person sees something and then tells another - word of mouth advertising . Convergence plays a big part in this, as technology grows, access to downloads becomes easier and consumers can now swap songs using internet sites such as myspace and facebook. That is why I showed my album cover on an itunes page to show it fits in with other albums and that that it could easily be a professional cover. These are the results that I got from my questionnaire: Question 1, On a scale from 1 to 5,- how convincing is the music video? 30% of my research group rated the video at 3 out of 5, I can understand this figure because it is not a professional piece of work and is done with basic technology and they will have compared it to music videos on music channels such as MTV. 50% of my feedback group rated the music video at 4 out of 5 and 20% rated it at 5 out of 5 which I am happy with but I can not fully justify the rating of 5 out of 5 as I would have liked to improve aspects of my video. Question 2, how effective did you find the performance? 30% of the feedback group rated the performance aspect of the video at 3 out of 5 which is surprising because 50% audience rated of the video at 5 out of 5. I agree with the higher rating because I believe my artist really connected with the song and portrayed his emotions across to the audience. Possibly the lower rating was affected by an external factor such as comparing it to professional acting in music videos. Question 3, how well do you think the green screen clips worked with the rest of the video? This was the performance part of the video and again it gained some mixed reception with 10% rating it at 2 out of 5 and 30% rated it at 3 out of 5. In my opinion this was because of the stationary image in the background. If I was to do it again I would have a different image chroma keyed in and maybe a moving video. I believe the image I used worked with the video though and this was illustrated with a further 50% rating it at 5 out of 5. Question 4, I covered within the first bit of my evaluation. Question 5, How effective did you find the video poster and digipack? 20% rated it at 2 out of 5 and 60% at 3 out of 5, because these figures were much lower than I had expected them I asked for an explanation and the main feedback was that “the back cover, front cover and poster were all very good but it lost its way inside the digipack”. I can agree with this but I wanted to keep it simple and make sure the continuity ran throughout my products. 20% rated them at 4 which is more what I was expecting so I was disappointed that my audience felt that it did not work throughout my products. Question 6, Do you think that the song and video worked well together? With the audience feedback from this question I can see that overall my audience can understand and connect with my video and ad campaign. This is backed up with 30% rating it at 5 out of 5 and 60% rating it at 4 out of 5 which are positive figures and demonstrates that I connected the video well to the song. The production of my music video and advertisement campaign has been a relatively new experience especially using the adobe editing software. At the end of last year we had to create a perfume campaign using the editing suite which gave us some experience of it. However it was very different when it came to producing the music video as it required a more complex editing and is longer with it being over 3 and half minutes. In the production of the video I was quite confident with digital cameras but the difficult thing was getting the framing right when it was a moving image so I would take more than one take to get it right. After uploading the material on to the editing suite it was then working out how to use the tools and what worked with my video and what did not. In my video I used the green screen to record the performance shots this meant that we had to learn about lighting, this is very important because if the green screen gets a shadow on when it comes to matroxing and chroma keying there would be grainy patches from the shadow. I had this problem in some clips and had to re-shoot, but I had to re shoot and shoot new material a lot as my ideas evolved and changed throughout the project. To put in the background behind green screen, clips had to be matroxed which took away the green screen and left my performer, then it had to be chroma keyed which allowed the background to be put in underneath the film and matroxing makes it transparent. I then chose my clip and this goes on the work row below the green screen clip which is how I got the performance over the top of my background. Black and white is simple to do because it is in video effects and in colour corrections, which allowed you to choose the colour and I had a play about with some others such as ‘warm summer day’ but it was too yellow. The black and white looked more professional and it also fitted with the narrative and theme. Other tools allowed me to slow down clips by extending them and quicken clips by shortening them - I used this within my video when the song was slowed down. I had chosen to do a poster and digipack, I created both of these on adobe Photoshop which I am relatively competent and I believe this shows in my poster and didipack as all the image I used had to be cropped down and the background rubbed out to leave just the artist. To get it to that point I used the erase tool and the magic wand which allows you to select patches of the same colour to be deleted. I had a yellow background throughout providing continuity and a running theme. My idea for the poster relates to the video in that it has colour images which fade to the black, present turning in to past or past turning in to present. This is done in my video by colour clips to represent present and black and white clips to represent the past. I faded this by duplicating layers and turning the bottom image to black and white and reducing the amount of red in the black. I then changed the opacity of the foreground image to have it fading to black. I had this theme carried through my digipack and also my poster. Blogger is a useful website as it can be accessed in college or at home, and when you do a piece of work you can upload it and then it is there to refer to. I did not take full advantage of blogger and I would if I did it again, where instead of uploading documents I would just leave them on my computer instead of uploading them. I would also have done an online poll if I was to do it again because this opens up the target audience and get feedback from a wider age range. The bright range of colours I used on my digipack is to entice the audience in yellow is an eye catching colour and with black writing it stands out on a shelf or in a magazine or on a billboard in the posters case. The font I chose was deliberate and wanted it to match the feel of my poster and digipack with my artist being dressed in retro jacket I chose to use 60’s style font, I believe this worked very well and suited the artist and also went with what he was wearing in the music video because it shows different character - you take of the jacket and it reveals a different style. I also included synergy in my digipack to link the album with the artist’s video, by having a page on the fold out of pictures from the production of my music video. I think this worked well as it helped to connect and produce continuity between my items. Overall I believe that the coursework has gone well and I have produced a quality product which works and has continuity, however if I was to change this I would have chosen a more upbeat song to express more performance than narrative but I enjoyed doing something different. Working in a group was difficult because it was finding the time to be able to do it together but I believe by the end me and my partner had good communication and worked together and individually well. The organisation of actors was also another issue that I found both for pictures for the poster and digipack but also for the filming for the video, but I believe that I found two actors/actresses that worked well more individually than together but performed well in front of the camera.
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