Our music video generally follows the forms and conventions of a typical music video, we have our artist in the music video singing the only, but we’ve also blended performance with a narrative. The main reason behind making a music video is for advertisement of the song and/or the artist, and from our audience feedback I can say that our primary target was achieved because, a few people have said that the song we chose is such a great song and from watching my video they have ended up downloading the song itself from iTunes.
In terms of challenging the conventions of a music video the lyrics in the song don’t particularly match perfectly with what is going on in the scenes. We chose to change the way the lyrics are perceived because the lines ‘It’s us against the world’ would imply a happy togetherness, yet we chose to subvert the viewer’s expectations and make them ‘together’ in the afterlife rather than being ‘against the world’ in reality.
The pace of the editing complemented the song because the pace of the song increased the pace of the editing became very quick, like in the lead up to the ‘suicide’ where we see the artist storm into his room, slamming his door and then throwing his jacket on the floor. This scene builds up to the climax of the video and as this happens the song is ultimately building up to its finish as well, so we had to get the timing just right for it to evoke the right sort of emotion from our audience.
We also used the typical, tracking shot where the artist is walking towards the camera and singing the song, we liked this shot because it not only looked visually exciting, it showed our audience that this character was continuing a journey in which he will inevitably lose via suicide. This backward tracking shot is very typical of music videos as it appears quite often like for example in Lily Allen’s ‘Smile’ , this is where we got the idea for the shot, but instead of the shot showing the beginning of someone’s journey like in ‘Smile’ we made it to show the characters path, but in a sad way, and the human-like, shaky camera shot was to represent the character’s mindset as he’s walking, he’s lost the love of his life and he’s not thinking straight and we think that this shot helps emphasise the pain he’s feeling.
The Mise-En-Scene was very important within our video, but the primary image we wanted to portray is the constant image of ‘doors’ helps to emphasise the afterlife which is a re-occurring theme throughout.
Amplification is when the video builds on the song, adding something to it and I believe this is what our music video accomplishes. Some of the lyrics of the song match the action on screen but not necessarily in the literal sense. The line ‘How was I suppose to know that this is our last embrace?’ at this point in the video the flashback of the main character and his girlfriend enjoying some couple-y time together and then as that line is sung the girlfriend disappears and we’re then back to colour representing the present, this was the only section of the video where we used any special effects, this is not uncommon in music videos and I think we executed it quite well, because the moment she disappears on screen is the moment the lyrics imply that she’s gone forever ‘our last embrace’.
We also tried developing the conventions of our digipack by taking inspiration from the video itself, and the theory that the re-occurring ‘doors’ and ‘afterlife’ theme seemed to work effectively. Our front cover is a lovely framed photo of our lead actor in a position against a nice calm background, singing. We made the covers all grey-scale on Photoshop as the contrast in colours from one shot to the next didn’t work well together. All the shots we chose for our digipack were still images from the video itself. We added a lyric sheet which is a convention of a CD or digipack on the inside of the front cover for people who enjoy learning the lyrics and people have commented on the fact that they thought it was a good idea.
How effective is the combination of your main product (video) and ancillary texts (digipack and magazine article)?
As a group we decided that our magazine article and digipack should directly compliment our video, so we decided that the best way of doing so was to take still images from our video and use them to promote the digipack and the video itself in a sort of self-promotion. The front cover of our digipack is a picture of our artist in ‘action’ in the video, and we thought, when brainstorming our ideas for our digipack, that we wanted to have our artists face on the front because Chris Phillips, our leading actor, has a very commercial face and I think people will buy the album with an attractive guy on the front of it. The theme continued throughout the digipack as we then went on to take more still images from the video, yet this time, to appeal further to our female audience, having our lyrics page complemented with pictures of the couple in the video to show that their ending may have been sad, yet there is still hope for the couple and that they are, metaphorically ‘still together’ in the afterlife.
The black and white theme throughout our digipack was something we decided after making a colour one, we thought that it would have a better connection with our video if it was all in black and white, signifying life and death and also complementing the flashbacks that are present in our video.
Our three products combined together try to communicate the realities of life, love and loss. Teenagers go through tough situations in life for the ones they love, and when it truly matters love does conquer all. Whether it be in life or death love is the primary winner. Many people who have watched our video have said that the ending was very ‘moving’ and a few of the girls that we showed cried whilst watching it. One person brought up the fact that we were ‘glamorising’ suicide, however, when we asked everyone else whether they agreed they dismissed the idea because they said that we executed the suicide part tastefully.
What have you learnt from your audience feedback?
The feedback we were given was mostly praise and constructive criticism, having one of my fellow students, Hannah Yates, telling us that she thought that we 'touched on a really emotional and controversial subject matter', but that we 'executed it well and that made the video so powerful'. The only thing that people didn't quite understand whilst watching our music video is the section with our other actor Mark Farrent came into it and Chris' character pushed him away, our audience said that they wished to see more of that scene to understand who exactly the guy was and why he was being pushed.
The 'pill roll' shot was a favourite amongst everyone who watched it as they thought that it was extremely effective and visually interesting yet they only thing they said to change was maybe to slow down the pill roll to make the impact of what actually happened much more 'hard-hitting'. People also commented on the fact that we used people our own age and that they thought it was a nice touch because they could relate with the characters in the video.
Our audience also enjoyed watching the girlfriend disappear to the lyrics, saying that it was very effective and made it easier for them to understand she had died. Someone commented that it was in the style of Romeo and Juliet which is what we wanted it to feel like from the beginning so I'm quite happy with the way the audience reacted to the narrative and compared it to a Romeo&Juliet-esque type death.
The only criticism we got on our digipack and magazine article was that our magazine was in colour and the digipack was in black and white, yet, we stick by our actions as we believed the colour to be big and bold so people would look at our poster and want to buy the CD, the digipack however, the black and white was symbolic to the narrative it represented an innocence and memories. Other than that we got all positive feedback saying that they liked the fact that we kept the pictures on our digipack and mag article that we took straight from our video
How did you use new media technologies in the construction, research, planning and evaluation stages?
Throughout the entire process of construction, research and planning we used a variety of new technologies, especially digital technologies. One of the most important new technologies that we used was Adobe Premier, we were introduced to non-linear editing software, and the advantages of non-linear software were extremely helpful when editing our video. The fact that we were able to cut up shots and move them around even when they were filmed in the wrong order made our jobs that much easier. As we had filmed them in the wrong order we then captured the shots we wanted to use when we wanted to and put them in the correct place on the time line and when we finished it if it wasn't right or some of the shots were too long we were able to cut them down to where we wanted them to end and if a certain shot was in the wrong place on the timeline we were able to move them to wherever they needed to be.
We used a variety of different tools on Adobe Premier, the one that we used consistently was the cross-fade to show different things in the narrative, like for example to show the passing of time, or to smoothen out our transitions. We also used grey-scale on some of our shots and this was to symbolise the transition between real life time and flashbacks. Using Adobe Premier we were able to make our special effects look quite fluid and interesting, especially when we made the girlfriend disappear. Our audience has said that when the girlfriend disappears it looks quite professional, even though that one shot/transition took me a long time to perfect because at first it looked very jumpy and unrealistic.
http://www.blogger.com/ was another form of new technology we used to keep everything we had planned and produced throughout this whole process. There have been many good qualities of using blogger that I think have been effective in this coursework, but also there have been some downsides to using blogger as a form of communication and in terms of time and effort.
Pros for blogs:
You can easily share ideas and thoughts with each other in your group, and through this you can communicate your own creative ideas.
It's a neat and tidy way of keeping all your work together.
You can access it easily from home.
Also, if you're struggling in any way you can easily contact your tutor via blogger.com
Cons:
Not everyone has Internet access at home, therefore they might struggle to complete work.
If Internet goes down, at home and or at college, you can't save your work and you will lose it.
The pictures tool is very restricting as you can't move pictures about without creating a mass of empty space between paragraphs.
There is no word processing tool on hand.
YouTube:
YouTube has been a massive influence on our group as we were able to watch and be inspired other music videos and YouTube provides us with the opportunity to watch all types of music videos and be inspired, it also allowed us to put our video on and get feedback from it.
Joe Brooks' myspace was a vital part in gaining access to the music of Joe Brooks:www.myspace.com/joebrooksmusic
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