1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
The conventions of a genre, in a music video, are in place to create an image and persona of the artist, the conventions are vital to refer and gain ideas from in the process of creating you’re artist’s videos. As we were creating our video as a group we looked into the typical conventions of our genre, indie, and what conventions thy typically use in their music videos. The research and planning we undertook gave us a considerable amount of conventions linked to our genre, which we initially used as a guideline or inspiration when creating our own; although what we found was that some music videos from the indie genre used conventions of different genres such as pop and rock. We felt that as an indie artist it was more about the music that was created more than the music video itself, through this we aimed to create a simple but effective music video which was still fitting into the genre and was recognisable as an indie product. In my opinion, I feel that we succeeded what we want to do, which strongly shows in our final product that has been exclusively created for our chosen song, it is unique and effective, but focuses strongly on the music.
Used
Performance- Guitar
Our Video |
Inspiration |
Mise-En-Scene- Costume
Our Video |
Inspiration |
As you can see in our image from our video, our artist, Mike Dignam is dressed in black n chinos and a green parka jacket with desert boots; the colours he was wearing were casual, neutral and very appropriate to his located. The print screen below our image is of the band Two Door Cinema Club from the video for their song Sun, where we can see the artists are wearing monotone neutral clothing. Even though the main singer is wearing a jacket not a parka you can style see the trend they are trying to reflect and it still comes across as very casual and laid back. I believe that the use of costume has greatly helped our music video to be recognised as indie.
We stayed within these two conventions throughout our video although we decided to add in more guitar shots whilst story boarding, overall the decisions to use both were made early on in the planning stages.
Developed
Camera- POV
Our Video |
Inspiration |
Camera- Lighting
Our Video |
Inspiration |
We used the development of lighting throughout the natural shots of the surroundings that is the artist in his everyday life. The lighting develops as the song progresses due to the artist being surrounded by sun and brightness but he is unaware of this as he is heartbroken. All the lighting is natural as we felt that the nature convention of indie is very strong and when used well, can be perceived as being artistic and beautiful to the music video, this was also used in the other ancillary texts. The importance of the lighting was developed throughout as the print screen shows taken from our video managed to film popular shots of the sun peeping through the trees, this put the lyrics into your mind and realised what the narrative was and how it relates to his emotions now; it is also a key feature as Mike Dignam sings ‘if I could make it rain’ this is a contrast to the weather that we see, showing that he has no power when it comes to their relationship now, as she has left him. The other print screen is from The Maccabees’ music video for the band’s song Ayla, which shows a similar shot of the sun coming through the trees, and developing so he is unable to control what is going on. It additionally used natural lighting throughout, which is a convention that we also used.
Challenged
Editing- Overlay
Our Video |
Inspiration |
2.How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
I created this slideshow to show the variety of Media Technologies that I used and encountered during the planning, researching, production and post-production of my A2 Coursework. This has now been uploaded to YouTube for people to view it on another media platform. Technology was used greatly during the stages of creating the Music Package, as we used them we gained more and more knowledge of them which i am grateful to have now. These technologies all served the purpose of what they were meant to perfectly and really helped me to complete my coursework at best that I could.
3.How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
To answer this question we created a voice over video as a group in which we commented on the aspects of our music video, digi pack, and advert and the combination of the three. We made some general notes and recorded our audio answers to the question to then edit in final cut express with photos to link with what we were saying.
4. What have you learned from your audience feedback?
For our feedback we asked an audience of the ages between 16-19 to view our video then answer the five questions in their own opinion that we felt would be useful for us to gain some helpful audience feedback.
1. What do you think the story line is about in our video?
2. Would you say our video is an 'authentic' indie music video?
3. What do you think stands out in our music video?
4. Are there any alternate locations that you would have included in the music video?
5. How would you improve it?
What I have found from the audience’s feedback that we received is that if we were able start over and redo parts they would be very minor due to many of the audience members not having much criticism towards it. I felt overall the Music Video was not only effective in many ways but overall was perceived as an authentic indie video because of the use of costume, location, filters and simplicity within the camera styles and subjects. We then asked them how they would improve it as a whole; if we were able to take on their advice we would make sure that we did not include as many shots of the Artist with the guitar and included more ‘flashback’ love scenes as that is what the audience really seemed to connect with the most. I also felt that the suggestion about making the storyline more clear, and making sure it was obvious they broke up was really helpful as we would know what to do next time, showing they broke up would of set the story for the rest of the video while leaving the audience questioning the purpose until the lyrics and other flashbacks appeared. I am interested with the suggestion about the order of events as I felt that this ‘improvement’ or change may take away a lot of the feelings you feel when you see the flashbacks and they are no more, and seeing the artists reaction from losing her. The use of the flashbacks was one of the most commented on effect that was featured in our video though so if any changes were made if we redid the project this would not change and maybe to diversify the flashbacks a bit, have the narrative flashbacks in stop motion and the performance of the artist filmed normally. I was a relief and pleasure to see that the majority understood the narrative of our video, and they enjoyed the use of his memories alongside him and the contrasts of performing shots and the flashbacks.
This was a common thing the audience agreed on, and that the overall video was realistic and easy to relate to. Another common comment was the effectiveness of our use of different camera shots and angles as well as our use of editing.
I found all the audience feedback we received to be really useful and it was a great insight into how our video is perceived by other people than us.
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