Evaluation Question 1

Evaluation question 1:

In this question I will look at how my media product uses, challenges or develops forms and conventions of real media products. I will be looking at elements that we  have taken from other videos, and used the exact same technique, alongside how our video does things completely differently to other acoustic music videos. I will also be looking at how we have taken certain ideas and adapted and changed them to suit our own video. In this evaluation I will be looking at different elements such as titles, camera, work ect, and evaluating how we've used each element compared to other videos in the same genre.

Titles:

As you can see from the first frame on the picture above, we have titles at the start of the video., which include song name and artist. This can be common in music videos as a whole, often in pop videos. But after looking into several different acoustic artist (such as Ed Sheeran and some of Taylor swifts old songs) it is quite uncommon for this style of song to include titles. Music videos that tend to have titles want to create more of “film” image, acoustic songs tend to be a bit more low key and hence not have titles. Here we have challenged a typical convention.

Setting/Location:

Settings for music videos are so varied. In pop songs its normally on a stage, and rock songs tend to be set in abandoned warehouses or a darker setting. In the acoustic genre it’s a lot harder to pinpoint a particular location that’s used widely. In this style of music the setting normally runs parallel to the narrative. In Taylor swifts video for “You belong with me” it’s about a girl who falls for her neighbour, hence its set between the two houses. The narrative of our song features a lot of lyrics outside and by lakes, so in that sense we have met the typical codes and conventions for setting. 


Above is a screen cap from Taylor Swifts video "You belong with me" and Taylor (who plays the main female lead in the video) looking out of her bedroom window across to the boy in his room.

Costumes and Props:

This is something we felt very strongly about keeping to the codes and conventions for. In acoustic videos the outfits worn are very nondescript, as it isn't a key part of the genre. In most acoustic videos I have studied the actors and artists have all worn “average” clothing. They just wear everyday things, not like the ridiculous dresses lady gaga would wear in a pop video, or the torn and ripped jeans a metal band would wear. Costumes aren't such a big part of acoustic videos as they don’t really add anything to it. Props are once again, strongly narrative. In the video for Ed Sheerans “Drunk”, a lot of alcohol is featured because the song is about drinking. Our song doesn't really have anything like that, so we stayed away from it. One thing we did notice in almost every acoustic video was the use of the acoustic guitar. In most videos it will display the artist or the character playing along to the song, something which we included, simply because (if filmed correctly) it can look really good. For props and costumes we once again tried to using these codes and conventions. 



Above is a shot of Rupert Grint (whom guest starred) in the video for Ed Sheerans "Lego House". As you can see his hooded jumper isn't dissimilar from the one that our main character Jordon wears. 

Technical aspects (Camera work and editing):

We really tried to vary our technical ability in this music video since acoustic songs are often slow, we tried to make it look as nice as possible with editing and camera work. We did a lot of research into this and found that often songs that have a sad/depressing tone are filmed in black and white (such as Ed Sheerans A team). The second half of our song happens to be a lot sadder than the first half, after the couple in the story have broken up. In the second half we decided to go with the black and white filter. A lot of acoustic videos also have quite long shots, like in Ed Sheerans "Small bump" video. The majority of that video is shot in a hospital waiting room and the shots are about 25-30 seconds long at a time. We tried to make our shots no longer than 10 seconds long as it can look quite boring if it goes on for too long. We developed the typical codes and conventions for our technical aspects.



Above is a shot from Ed Sheerans "A-Team" video. The narrative of the video is about a prostitute that struggles with drug problems. The black and white filter adds to the depressing tone of the video. 

Narrative/Story: 
Narrative is probably the most important thing about acoustic music videos, and there aren't many codes and conventions for it. The general rule that I found is that acoustic videos are nine times out of ten narrative. They almost always are completely linked to the lyrics as it allows the audience to hear and see the same thing at the same time. Our video starts with Jordon drawing Lauren sat on a bench, and setting the scene for the first half of the video of them as a couple. As you can see the first 5 frames are of them together. Acoustic videos really inspire creativity and every artist will want to start their video differently. The reason we chose the drawing and the playing of the guitar is because we wanted to put emphasis on how much Lauren meant to Jordon, and how much of an impact it have when he lost her. We stuck very strongly to the narrative, like most acoustic videos do, and once again kept within the codes and conventions.



Above is a picture from the video "The man who cant be moved" by soft rock band The Script. This song is a lot lighter than the bands other songs and uses acoustic guitars. Danny (the lead singer) plays the man in the narrative. The songs about a couple that break up, and the guy stays on a street corner until he attracts the press so that the girl can see him on the news, and see how much she means to him. This is a good example of a strong narrative video.

Genre: 
Our music video is a love story, with a slight twist. Most acoustic songs tend to be based around relationships, as the previous videos ive mentioned in this answer are. typical endings for love themed videos are either the couple getting back together, or the person singing the song moving on. From the videos I have looked at that's the outcome almost every time. We have taken the traditional Genre and developed it further. We decided that since our video at the end gets quite depressing, we would end it in a dramatic way. We went along with a lot of typical codes and conventions in other areas so we wanted something to set our video apart from others. Our video actually ends with the main male lead played by Jordon, killing himself.

Character/Star image:

Its incredibly common for The artist to star in their own music videos. Taylor swift plays herself in all her narrative videos, As does Ed sheeran  And the same with Danny from the script. We obviously didn't have the singer of our song to be in the video, so we used Jordon and modelled a character around him. As I said earlier in the "Costume and props" section, we really didn't want our character to be anything special at all. The key to a good acoustic song and video is about the audience being able to relate to the song and the characters. Star image isn't something we considered to be too important, so in this aspect we have challenged the typical conventions.

Above is another Taylor swift video of which she stars in, further showing star image in music videos.

Representation:
Like many other acoustic videos our representation focuses on couples, both together and after breaking up. There are often very few characters in acoustic videos, mainly just 2 or 3. We chose to focus more on Jordon as the male character to show how males deal with break up situations, as a lot of the time the media (in general) focus on how women find break ups very difficult. Acoustic videos as a whole don't really have a particular group in mind when they think about representation. These types of videos normally represent a situation, and make it a lot more personal to themselves. In that sense we met the codes and conventions, we kept it down to two characters, whilst keeping the narrative personal.

Relationship between lyrics and video:
I think this is the most important aspect for any good music video, within any genre. The lyrics tell a story and we tried our best to show that story on screen. Some videos take the lyrics quite literally and show every single thing the song is about in detail, where others will be more general with it. We tried to generalise a little bit, keeping the main theme of the lyrics and carrying that throughout. The main difference is at the end of the video. For our song there is no set ending, it doesn't actually say that the character killed himself, but that's how we interpreted it. A lot of songs have ambiguous lyrics, and its down to the people creating the video decide exactly what those lyrics mean. This is an area where we developed typical codes and conventions, we kept a strong narrative to the lyrics, then made the ending our own to create a more moving and emotional piece.

Digipak:

      
This is the final digipak we made. We really strongly followed the codes and conventions for this, we had 6 panels  allowing for a front and back cover, as well as inside covers and a spine. Most digipaks are themed according to the album itself  something else we did here. Since the album has 2 halves, empty days and sleepless nights (as can be seen on the back cover) we designed it with that in mind. We made half of the design bright, with the sun and sky as a focal point, and the rest gloomy and dull. Not only did this match with the title but also the video we had made. We also had the same logo on the digipak as we used at the start of the video. Dikipaks are often themed around a specific characteristic of the album, in our case it was the fact its in two halves.

Website:
We strictly followed the codes and conventions for our website. Not only acoustic artists but all artists have  the same things on their websites. Tours, Merch, Band bio, Music, News are all tabs that can be found on a bands website. Also when an artist releases new material in the form of a song or video, that's normally on the homepage of their website too. Our website homepage has our video on it, along with logo and tabs to everything you'd expect to find on a bands page.

Evaluation question 4

Camera in action

Tripod in action

Camera

Presentation been given using the Projector

Editing our music video in Premiere Pro

Digipak creation in Fireworks

Polishing the digipak using Photoshop

Lyrics to shots and movements on a Word document

Creating our ideas presentation using Powerpoint

Editing audio in audacity

Blogger site being used to document the project.

Google search engine

Researching Premiere Pro on YouTube

Evaluation Question 2

2. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

For our band's digipak, we used most of our own designed products and designs for our media film and digipak.

Logos and Digipak:

For the digipak, we designed a new album cover for the album "Empty Days and Sleepless Nights" using our ownimages and also a newly designed band logo, including screencaps from our own video onto the different panels of the digipak. Our logo also features on the opening of our music video to signify the band. Considering we asked the record label if we could use the song, to which they happily agreed, we thought it would be best to use their record label's (Bridge Nine Records) real logo. This features on the front, spine and back of the digipak.

The font for the logo is in a neat but handwritten font, somewhat similar to Defeater's actual logo. We thought this would be best to suit the theme of the video and also the whole album. Dom did it by hand and we scanned it onto the system, where we could use it in our digipak and the website etc. We feel it somewhat resembles the original logo (above) and gives off the same kind of theme to it. 

We also created a logo for our own Media Productions, called CLDB Productions. This is somewhat similar to the Bridge 9 Records logo, as it appears simple and suits the simplistic kind of genre of the music. This allows the audience to authenticate between our logo and the ones Defeater and Bridge Nine records already use.

The Video

In the video we have kept to the story of the album itself; I Don't Mind is a song the lead character singing about his wife, who unfortunately died. We have added our own modern twist to it, using modern day clothes etc despite the album itself being set around World War II. We have kept a similar location as to what the lyrics portrays, such as the lake. We also have a lot of black and white parts in the video, which represent the depression the lead character feels after the death of his girlfriend. 

The Digipak

Like the music video, we have added our own modern twist onto the album cover. The album cover is a photoshoppedpicture of the lake we filmed at, this again relates to the modern twist we put on the album. We have also included important aspects of the album and the music video, such as the train track and a much clearer shot of the lake, with the lead character looking out onto it. It repesents all of the main events not only in the album but in the music video for the song as well and we think they are the most significant parts. The main focus is the character and the events leading to his death which is why we fell it is much more important. In comparison to the old broken 1940's house on the original "Empty Days and Sleepless Nights" cover it is a much more modern aspect having the lake being photoshopped onto it as it represents a much more modern take on the album, which is more relatable to our target audience.

Evaluation Question 3

I have created a Prezi for my answer to the evaluation question: What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Final Video

Final Website

LINK TO WEBSITE CLICK HERE  

This is the link to our band page that we have created. I think the design works well and that the page fits with all the codes and conventions we have worked to follow although I think it can be a little too dark in places.


I have asked some of my friends over Skype what they thought of the website:

[14:43:32] Daniel: I really like the design, I like how you have made it original but it still looks professional.

[14:43:33] Katie: I think the colours really suit the bands genre :)

[14:43:33] Kieran: It's a little slow to load sometimes but other than that I think it looks great!

[14:43:35] Becky: although the band isn't one i'd listen to personally, i think it will appeal to people who like that music and i like that the buttons are clear.

Making the website

For the website we first decided that we needed to find a site to create  it on, this site needed to be accessable at school so our original plan to create it on Tumblr had to go, since although it was easily customisable with free themes it was unavailable at school and therefore we would not be able to edit it if we were in class.
After considering several websites (such as Weebly, Freewebs, webs) me and Ben decided to use Wix since it was available and unblocked at school, it was easy to edit and alter and it gave a good design.

Using images we had created for our digipak, including the cover and fonts we uploaded them onto the website, this is because when researching into other band websites we discovered that many of them did this as a marketing technique, using the same image so that it is a symbol of that band and retains in your memory. By using the same image it will help with sales and works to cross-sell products.

With creative suggestions, Ben organised the design of the website since he was most familiar with the website, and positioned the navigation bar, banners and positioned the background so that the light source of the photo-manip was in the centre of the page. He then positioned our created font/logo where it could be easily spotted and at the top with the navigation system, this was in keeping with similar codes and conventions from other sites. We decided to keep the colour scheme the same so that it looked smoother and so that everything complimented each other. This was important as other band websites I had looked at used similar palettes throughout their pages.

We felt that the video needed to be the most important aspect of our design so we placed it in the middle of the page so it immediately drew attention to viewers and so that it also was easily accessible. (this would help as a marketing technique to increase sales and views).

Overall I am pleased with the outcome of the design and think it works well to stick to similar codes and conventions of other band websites, but also includes our own original designs too.

Digipak

This is the Digipak that we have created after several designs were suggested, as a group we decided that the design would need several features that included both the band and the managers logo, obviously the album title and song titles. I wanted the album to contain a photo that we had taken so that it would link into and relate to out previous work.

Ben was the best at Photoshop out of our group, so with suggestions we both decided what would be best for the sides of the digipak and he edited it on Fireworks and Photoshop until we were both happy, this included altering the contrast, colour boosting or reducing saturation/opacity (transparacy) on images and also adding titles to the sections so that we could include a track-list.

To create the reflected effect the original image was cropped and then mirrored to get the final image.

We wanted to keep the logo of the band in the image but since it was copyrighted we needed to design a new logo, Dominic created one that looked similar to the font which I think worked really well because they look comparative which is convincing to people viewing the logo.
Lastly, we created a logo for our group which is made up of the initials from each of our names. It was created on Photoshop with input from the whole group until we were all happy with the final design.

I then asked several people in our media class what they thought of the digipak, they said that it was "interesting and detailed and something that they would notice in a store since it stands out amongst plainer covers", the positive feedback settled the final design.

Before it was done however, we needed to fix some problems with the design since not every panel lined up accurately with clear spaces for the spine. We found this when we printed the digipak out and it was a little off, after some tweaking this was resolved however.
The canvas size on Photoshop that we also created was very large and when it printed out it took up too much paper since it did not re-size it in scale, this meant we had to alter the size of the design when printing.

Film and Audio post on band websites

I have recorded several band websites (Defeater, the band whose song we are creating a music video for, Paramore and another band called Nico Vega) and discussed common Codes and Conventions found on these and other band pages. These features will all go towards our final website design for our own band page.
I used an inbuilt sound-recorder that was installed into my computer and a headset with microphone to record my voice and I used a registered Hypercam 2 to record websites that I had chosen on my computer. This was all edited together using Windows Live Movie Maker to edit it all together, this included clipping and trimming clips to fit the audio and exporting the file into my documents.

25 of the Best Websites of Bands and Musicians

This is a link to an article I have found that rates the top 25 best websites of bands and musicians, this is particularly useful because it can help us with the design of our own website and it lists many of the conventions and features found in specifically band websites.

Extra Filming

These are images that we have taken during extra filming, this was when we developed our original idea and needed to shoot the extra clips needed for it, and also to fullfill the timeline of the song. We used the same camera to record so that there was no difference in quality of the clips and we had when filming near the railway we made sure we were in safe locations and that we were in no danger.

Editing video

 

This week we have started our editing on our video and putting it together, once we had imported the clips we had needed from the camera and sorted out which ones we needed (since we filmed extra to make sure) we uploaded the song into the editing timleline and started slowly putting the different clips together.
Once we were happy with the rough cut, we decided to test out effects and transitions that would improve the video. We decided on several 'fade' effects and since the song was quite sad we decided to include effects to match the narrative of the story.
Since many of the clips we had filmed were sad, we decided to use a 'Black and White' effect once the storyline in our film reached it's depressing plotline. This was so it was it would relate the audience, because they would see how it was affecting the character and would be empathic towards him.
To find the effects we had to go through video effects, at first we searched through colour correction but it wasn't located in that file and instead we found it under the folder 'image control'. The black and white effects worked well and was not too dark/light contrasting which was good.

 

 

 

 

For editing our music video we will be using the editing software programme Adobe Premier Pro, loading up the programme we immediatly tested the colour alteration and colour correction settings within the programme since it will be most likely that we will have to alter the appearance of the clips to fit with the narrative. We have also got the basic understanding of depth of field editing, motion blur and slow motion effects since we have discussed possible ideas for clips that could help improve our music video. Whilst we are editing and re-filming clips (if needed) and finding out information on things like Digipacks, Ben will develop the skills we have already produced to further our music video's performance.

This is the editing panel for colour schemes as stated above, this is also incase we need to emphasise the colour of the scenes since some of them were filmed when the weather made the natural lighting dim.

Above is the timeline that shows us editing the clips together and adding transitions such as "cross dissolve", "fade" and add titles to certain clips. The layout for editing on Adobe Premier Pro is fairly simple and combined with our knowledge from last year should be easy to handle. The programme tends to crash often so we will need to save regularly.

digipack codes and conventions

The snow has melted which means that if we need to go back and re-film anything then it will be possible to do so with more ease than before. We will need to check the forecast beforehand though since the weather is unpredictable at the moment and always changing.
Editing is coming along good and a rough cut of the film should be finished shortly.

Target Audience for our music video created on Prezi

Weather change

 This was early in the morning when the snow had just settled the first day and i walked down the the lake where we were filming, around 7am.

 These are a few days later after it continuously snowed and stayed the same conditions, this is later in the day around 3pm.

Although we have already filmed (hopefully) everything already, the weather these past few weeks has changed drastically to when we recorded our music video and this will therefore be a problem if we choose to redo anything. However, this should hopefully clear up over the next few weeks.