1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Our music video follows many conventions of the rock music genre, it incorporates many sections of performance from the band themselves and from the lead singer. We developed these conventions, usually the band is all together performing as a group however we only pictured the individuals by themselves performing separately, although we weren’t originally aiming for this it did give an extra sense of separation and isolation in the video making the lead singer seem even more lonely. Our style of video was fairly similar to the verve’s- bittersweet symphony, with lots a lot of close up front on shots of the lead singer performing through the streets. Our colour scheme was also very similar to this video’s as they chose a very dull and emotional colour scheme. I like the blue effect that they have done with this video and I think that maybe with more time we could have done something like this to more sections of our video, rather than just the guitar solo section where we added a green tint to the video. If we had more time we could of done some group performance, if we had done this without including the lead singer this would have enhanced the main singers solitude in the video. We took a lot of inspiration from some videos one video was ‘thousand miles’ by Vanessa Carlton, which gave us inspiration for the piano close ups, as well as following the main singer throughout the video. We also took inspiration from an Elvis Costello song from an Austin powers movie, this gave us the idea for putting the drumkit in the street as though it’s an everyday happening.
2. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
The combination of our main product and ancillary texts has been very effective, they include a lot of screen grabs from our media product promoting the video and the singer, and also giving the viewer a slight insight to what the product includes without giving away too much. The ancillary products also carried through the dark dingy style of our video, giving the effect that the bands style of music is quite sad and lonely The reason we chose the shot we did for the main cover of the digipack was to encapsulate the relationship between the city and the lead singer in one shot. The colour scheme we chose was black and white this was because the song is fairly dull and sad. We felt that a black and white colour scheme would enhance the emotion of the magazine advert and digipack aswell as create a relationship between our main media product and our ancillary texts. We thought that the song had a rock feel to it and this would be shown with ease through the text that we chose. We chose a fairly gothic style of text to elaborate on this and we kept the continuity through our ancillary texts by using this text style throughout. This allowed the viewer to gain some idea of what the music genre is before listening to the song. We constructed our magazine advert and digipack the way we did after researching professional magazine adverts and digipack’s, we felt that we layout we chose would get all the information we needed to get to the audience in the cleanest format, such as the bands name and pictures of the band.
3. What have you learnt from your audience feedback?
The feedback we have received about our products has been really constructive, the audience feels that our ancillary texts match the style of our video well and the products compliment each other, there was a mixed opinion on our text choice for the ancillary products, some of our audience felt it was a bit gothic whereas others felt it enhanced the product. Although it was a fairly gothic style of text we feel it suits the style of our band, as it makes them look slightly more rock. We also received feedback about half way through the creation of our main product on piece of feedback we received was about the length of the clips towards the end of the video, the audience felt that they were off the pace of he song, to counteract this went out and did some more filming and captured more shots and edited the clips in making the pace of the video faster and more interesting, this received positive feedback after we had made these changes. If we were given more time for our media product we would of re-shot some of the scenes again such as when the lead singer is pictured on a bench, and we zoom out to reveal the drummer, this could be improved because the zoom out is not as smooth as we would have liked, it has a few jolts which spoils the running of the video. The feedback we have received has been extremely important because it has helped us to improve areas of our products that we have not realised needed improving and has helped us provide the audience with what they want.
4. How did you use new media technology in the construction, research, planning and evaluation stages?
We used various mew media technology, in our research, planning, construction and evaluation stages. We did a lot of blogging to help us with our planning stages, to create what appears as almost a timeline showing how our product developed through all the stages of its creation. We used the internet for our research frequently as this allowed us to view other music videos and view other media products with ease, and review them using techniques such as Goodwins music video analysis. During the construction of our products we used final cut and Photoshop a lot, these were the perfect tools to organise and fit together all of our raw materials for our media product and ancillary texts as well as edit and cut shots to make the video flow with the music. The programmes we used are readily available to almost anybody with access to the Internet as you can download Photoshop and final cut. This means anybody has the means to make a music video. I feel that we used all our media technology very well we managed to edit our video with a lot of different styles and techniques, which had an effective result. Also the use of Photoshop for our magazine ad and digipack turned out looking professional and believable as we had managed to import lots of screen grabs from our main product via final cut into PhotoShop and merge them well with text. If we were to improve our use of one of the programmes we used it would be the blog. I feel we could have added more research such as pictures and other media relations, which could have improved our knowledge and understanding of music videos on the whole.
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