1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
We created a lot of links between lyrics and visuals. Because the song is about the night and going out having a good time we used minimal lighting and using glow sticks and UV as a substitute to create a party feel to our video. I think that we represented the artists as fun loving people which are the way the record company might want them to be represented. We stayed clear of using visuals towards the drugs lifestyle the lyrics include because this could offend people. The genre of the song I would say is electro pop which the video links to very well, with a modern take on visuals.
Because of the euphoric lighting we have used, this could be linked to the drug references in the lyrics.
A lot of the time we have used a straight on camera shot, but we thought that the viewer may find this slightly boring, and so we also have used panning shots, aerial views and hand held shots, to maintain interesting views for the audience.
Lighting is very minimal in the video because we thought this would better fit with the music, we used a UV light for some of our footage which makes the detail we used very prominent. We also had some footage that is in complete darkness except the glow sticks that we used.
Our props included glow sticks, UV paint and a UV light, we kept props to a minimal in order to keep it easier to organise our footage. We also only used the college grounds as our set, mainly the photography department, in the dark rooms, which was the easiest place to find that we could have complete darkness.
We were influenced a lot by other music video’s such as the Black Eyed Peas video for ‘I Gotta Feeling’ where we chose the use of UV paint from, and the idea of having ‘a party’ as part of our video. Another video we looked at was ‘Floating’ by Jape; this included the idea of having slow motion, which made us decide to edit some footage to different speeds to go along with the music. One of the other videos which attributed to our ideas was ‘Anything Could Happen in the Next Half Hour’ by Enter Shikari, we liked this because it uses lighting at the beginning to set a scene, which we really like the idea of and wanted to include something similar in our video.
Our digipack isn’t particularly similar to any we’ve seen because we’ve edited photographs a lot to make them more electric and glowing to fit in with our video’s idea. The actual album cover has a photograph of the two artists unedited, which is simpler but is more like previous covers that they have done.
Our magazine advert uses the conventions of only having minimal important details, and having something that captures the viewers’ eye and stands out. I think we achieved this by editing the photograph like we had done for the digipack and then having the bands name in the centre and adding a glow around it to grab attention to the advert. We also included logos such as ‘blue ray’ and ‘EMI records’ to add a professional feel to it.
2. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
I definitely think that our product is very effective because they stand out from a lot of music videos you see these days, by taking a very modern artistic approach to this we have come out with a video that hasn’t been seen previously for any other music video. Our digipack and advert are very strong and eye catching because they make the audience wonder if the song/video is like them. An eye catching CD case is always a good way to draw in a viewer, and I think we have succeeded in making one which also links in with the video we have also created.
3. What have you learnt from your audience feedback?
The audience feedback was very helpful, our group took a lot of it into account, expecially when we had finished our rough cut, many people said that it would better if our final cut had more lip syncing, and so when we did more footage we took this into account and did a lot more filming with lip syncing. Our teacher was very happy with our work, but said that we would be better doing more blog work, and so we made sure that each of us went home each day and did at least one blog about something we’d been working on, or new ideas we could link in with our work. He also said that the video could do with more editing, and so he helped us to improve our editing skills in order to have more transitions, and effects. The class feedback was very positive, they enjoyed the video because it was different to everyone else’s, the main comments were because of the lip syncing. They also informed us that we could improve some of the editing, which we did after the teacher showed us a lot of different effects and transitions we didn’t already know. Some people also mentioned that parts didn’t quite link in with the music, which lead to us speeding up, and slowing down some shots so that it went with the beat and tempo of the music.
Our feedback on the final video came back very positively, they seemed to enjoy how the visuals went well with the music, but they did seem to think we should have had more choreographed dance routines, in order to look more professional. If we were to do more filming, I think we would next time take this into account.
4. How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
In the construction of our project we used websites such as MySpace and Wikipedia to learn more about the band, since they had their own page on MySpace we emailed them over the website to ask for permission to make our video, and also to find out more about them and the song we had chosen. We used YouTube to find videos for inspiration and ideas, which we found very useful. To keep up to date and organised we used Blogger to write down everything we had done and will do, we wrote everything that we had to do down as well, this website was very useful in order to show what work we had done. Final Cut was the editing program that we used, which was very good for doing all the editing we wanted to achieve, we also used Photoshop when coming to the digipiack and advertisement poster, because it is a very good way of achieving a very artistic approach to what we wanted. For our final cut feedback we used a website called Vimeo which we found was a really good way in sharing videos.
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