Harry Carter's Evaluation

Music Video Evaluation – Harry Carter

1. In which ways does your media product us, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Our media product uses, develops and challenge’s forms and conventions of real media products in various ways. Our song is called ‘La Nuit’, which translates to The Night in French. We made our video very dark to reflect the song title. Some of the lyrics in our video were portrayed in our visuals for examples they talk about having a party so we made our video very lively and have a party like atmosphere. After researching Andrew Goodwins book ‘Dancing in the Distraction Factory’ he mentions that there is a relationship between music and visuals (either illustrative, amplifying or contradicting). This is what we have tried to do in our music video. The band are represented as a very unique and out-there group and we tried to make our video like this with the use of UV paints and many special effects. These effects also represent our music genre Dance, for example there is very upbeat and fast dancing and special effects have been used to speed up some footage. We took influence from other music videos to make our music video. The black eyes peas ‘I gotta Feeling’ video was used for the idea of UV paint and Friendly Fires ‘Skeleton Boy’ was used for the ideas with our dark lighting and the style in which our faces are painted. In the Friendly Fires video hey use black body suits to give a good effect and we used dark lighting and bright UV paint to create a strong contrast in our video and make it stand out. We also slowed down parts of our video like in the music video Floating by Jape. They use slow motion almost through out the video and this effect gave the video a great visual style in this video. All these were forms of intertextual references as we took these ideas and manipulated them for our music video.
We left the camera in one fixed place for most of the video, this gives the audience a clear view of the performers and enables them to see everything in the shot, it also gave the performers a large area to perform in. We also put the camera at a high angle and cut from these points making the video look more exciting and fast paced cuts.
2. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
We used UV light behind the camera as our only light source to make he UV paint show up. We also used glow sticks to create a party scene and give another good effect. This also gives a good contrast along with the UV paint. We have created a bright and striking visual style using UV paint, energetic dancing, special effects, glow sticks, photographic enlargers and different shot types such as close ups on lips and high angle shots.
Overall our project fits together well and each stage of the media product represents the style of the band and the genre of the song. The digipack shows neon images of the band and the magazine advert is very dark with a bright neon outline. This refers to the UV paint we used in our video and also makes the advert stand out as it is very contrasting. The digipack is very bright and striking which does not conform and relate to the lyrics ‘la nuit’ but represents the bands bright and energetic style. When we planned our digipack and magazine advert we had certain ideas that were not very representitive of the bands style. For example I had an idea of using an image of the band and cutting out around it and adding different colours. This effect looked had took much block colouring and looked completely different to the digipack style so I changed this idea and added special effects to the original picture to uit the style of the band and the digipack. I think this idea was better because it isn’t completely the same as the digipack but still conforms to the main style we were going for. We had a design concept for the digipack and I think after looking at our initial ideas we have successfully created a visually good digipack. It stands out. There isn’t many colours but the white background and the strong bright outlines of the subjects is very striking and contrasting.
3. What have you learned from your audience feedback?
From feedback we have changed and manipulated the video to make it better, for example during peer feedback we were told that there was not enough lip syncing and it was very dark so changed our video accordingly. We added a lot of lip-syncing. After adding the lip-syncing we received no bad feedback about lip syncing. We were also told that the music video was ‘Well planned out and organised’. We also received feedback after we finished the video on facebook and via peers. This feedback was a lot better than the original rough cut feedback and we think we have succeeded in making it better
4. How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
To construct our vieo we used many different technologies such as final cut express to upload and edit our video. We also used this to add special effects. We researched other videos on the internet on youtube to get influence. We took these videos and ideas from them to create our video. We planned our music video by making a timeline and brainstorming ideas. At the beginning of the project we made a pitch for our music video. In this music video we said we would have stop motion in our video, since then we decided not to have this effect and instead use speeded up footage and slowed down footage. We changed this idea because stop motion in the dark whilst using the UV light and UV paint would be very difficult and time consuming, due to the small amount of time that we had we chose to not use this idea and I think it came out better. We did stick to some things in our pitch such as we said we would use a UV light and have two main characters and some secondary characters. If we were to do anything different I think we would have planned the dance moves and choreographed the routine more. We would have also spent more time blogging.