EVALUATION

In what ways does your video use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media

products?

Our video Actual Video

One technique that we used, that is also used in a lot of other music videos is the time lapse. The image above (right) is from Bedouin Soundclash’s official video for ‘When The Night Feels My Song’. The time lapse shown in this video is very similar to ours, with the sky being the main indicator of the faster time, with an empty looking area (trees/buildings) standing still in the middle of the shot, to emphasise how the time is flying by.

Originally I thought that our idea of constant costume changing was original and didn’t conform to the normal media conventions. However, after viewing some similar genre videos to Bedouin Soundclash I realised that it was more common then I thought. For example the images above (right) shows Bombay Bicycle Club’s video – Evening/Morning, which shows the band spontaneously changing costumes whilst playing their instruments. This is very similar to our idea of having our character constantly changing clothes as he is walking along. I think that it is an effective idea, which keeps the audience entertained, constantly refreshing their attention and interest in the video, which is why it is so popular in real music videos.

One convention that most music videos have is a strong relationship between the lyrics and the visuals. We have tried to build a relationship between our lyrics and our visuals, supported by the example shown in the screenshot above which shows our character walking in a wooded area, whilst the lyrics go “Into the undergrowth”. The image to the right shows another of Bedouin Soundclash’s videos ‘Until we Burn’, which shows the artist standing in a scorching desert with the fiery sun on him, whilst the lyrics go “until we burn”. Matching the lyrics to the visuals helps portray the narrative of the video to the audience.

One way in which our video opposes typical music video conventions is by our idea of a whole video composed of a character walking. The typical music video is normally split into parts, with the band playing for some, and the rest compose of a narrative related to the song.

The Image above (left) shows our video, denoting the mid-shot that we have used for the majority, with no shots of the artists playing. Whereas the image to the right is from the Artic Monkeys – Brainstorm which is an good example of the typical band shots used in most modern day music videos.

We chose to do this because the whole concept of our video was to portray a journey, and we felt that having shots of the band would interrupt the flow of the journey.

Overall I think that our video does conform to many of the typical music video conventions. For example our video contains all of the key shots, close ups, mid shots, long shots, establishing shots, crane shots, and time lapses. We have also assured that our video contained a visual and lyric relationship, whilst also thinking about the importance of costume relevance to the song. These are all conventions that we decided to include to assure that our video look as professional as possible.

However, we did decide to challenge some music video conventions such as including shots of the band, as we felt that it would interrupt the flow of our journey, and didn’t fit with the feel of our music video.

In the future if I were to carry out this project again I think I would chose a different song that has a different genre, as there are little examples of reggae music videos compared to other genres. Therefore it is hard to find, compare our music video with the typical conventions of others from that genre.

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

I have chosen Lee Perry’s – ‘The Black Arc Years’ as I feel that it has many aspects that are similar to mine, and is also from the reggae genre. For example both the font I have used and the one used in ‘The Black Arc Years’ has a graffiti, worn away effect which works well as it appeals to the young, urban audience. Another way in which my cover is similar to ‘The Black Arc Years’ is by the use of bold abstract colours. The use of the bold blue, strongly contrasting the white background on my cover is very similar to the strong orange against the much lighter coloured background used in ‘The Black Arc Years’. This design is very effective in making something stand out (the view from the window in mine, and the artist/DJ in ‘The Black Arc Years’.)One way in which my Digipak contrasts ‘ The Black Arc Years’ is that my digipak has little musical references in it, whereas ‘The Black Arc Years’ shows a DJ using decks and other musical equipment, which covers about a third of the overall cover, showing its importance and relevance. I think that this is one aspect I could have improved on with my digipak, as a lot of digipaks from the reggae genre have some sort of reggae related musical aspect on the cover, such as a speaker, deck, DJ etc. Therefore, by adding this to my cover would help with the audiences recognition of the genre from my digipak.

The Peter Tosh advert gave me a lot of inspiration for my advert, and therefore shares many similar reggae conventions with my advert. For example Both adverts show the artist themselves as the main focus of the image, either being centralised or covering about a third of the image. This shows the importance of the artist and idolised them. Both of The adverts also show the artist looking away, not making direct contact with the audience. This gives a heroic, important look to the artist and will give them a greater appeal to the target audience.Again, both adverts use a bold font, coloured so that it contrasts heavily against its background to assure that it stands out and catches the audiences eye, drawing their attention to the rest of the advert. There is a large military link with reggae, due to the origins of reggae and its revolutionary historical background and involvement with the military. Peter Tosh’s advert shows this with its very bold, organised sans serif font, along with the artist wearing a beret, and having a statue like pose. Similarly, my advert’s dominant colour is green, which is also the colour that is largely associated with the military. However, I did not include any more military signifiers as I didn’t want to portray any hostile concepts for my ‘happy walking video’.

I have tried to link my digipak and my advert as much as possible o create a coherent promo pack. For example the font used for the artists name is the same in both the digipak and the advert, as this will help the audience associate the advert with the digipak. Also the other font I have used on the rest of the advert reflects the font used for the track listings on my digipak, as again this will cause recognition with in the audience and mean that they associate the advert and the digipak together, increasing the impact and influence that the promo pack has on them, and therefore increasing their chances of buying the CD.Also the images used in both the advert and the digipak are very similar as they are from the same shoot. This is a typical relationship between the digipak and the advert as the image is the main bulk of both, so matching the image on the advert to a similar one on the digipak will again enable the audience to easily recognise the digipak and associate it with the advert, increasing the impact that the promo pack has.The inside cover of my digipak has the same fonts used throughout my advert to show relevance, however I decided to differentiate the look of the inside cover with more colours, and a different image as I wanted to keep the user enticed when they look inside, rather than finding more of the same. I chose to do this on the inside cover as it would have no effect on the initial advert-digipak relationship that is important for the promotion among the target audience.

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Whilst looking at our audience feedback we realised that our video’s narrative was a bit weak. The shot on the left is from our video and shows our opening shot, an unknown character walking in an unknown location, along with the rest of the video which doesn’t portray a distinct narrative. On the right is one of the opening shots from Michael Jacksons ‘Thriller’ which is a video that has a very strong narrative, by the mise-en-scene it is clear that there is a man taking a women to the cinema.Narrative in a music video is important as it gives meaning to the video and helps the audience relate to the themes being portrayed. I think that I would agree with our audiences feedback that our video lacks narrative and that any story behind our video is ambiguous. I think that this could be amended by having an opening sequence which introduces our character and sets up a specific story (which we did plan to have, but due to lack of time we were unable to film) as this would familiarise the audience with the story behind our character.

One technique I used to gather my audience feedback was by sending out questionnaires, which I distributed to people who I felt were likely to be in Bedouin Soundclash’s target audience, 16-24, with a like of reggae or similar genres. This technique gave me a very narrow, unspecific set of results as many of the answers were closed Yes or No answers or multiple choice which means the audiences answers were restricted to the bias of my set questions. This means that the feedback I received is only partly representative of Bedouin Soundclash’s target audience.Another way in which I collected feedback was by posting the video on Facebook for people to openly comment on it. I felt that this was the most effective way as the video was visible to many people that me and my group knew, who were around our age and therefore fit into the target audience of Bedouin Soundclash. Also the fact that they could watch our video as many times as they wanted on Facebook and then say what ever they wanted about it meant that we received a true reflection of what they thought. The fact that there was many people that commented on our video, and that they were all around the same age (similar to BS’s target audience) means that this method was probably the most representative of Bedouin Soundclash’s target audience.

How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages of all your products?

Photoshop

PhotoshopI used Photoshop a lot throughout the production of my promo pack, which consists of my digipak and my advert. Photoshop was useful as it enabled me to quickly and easily open and edit images to have the desired effect, where I could then easily upload them to my blog. The two images on the previous slide show how I created the ‘photocopied’ effect, and how I produced a flipped version of my image to go on the back cover. Using Photoshop for this project has enhanced my Photoshop skills as I used it for both my digipak and my advert, which had to be similar but distinctively different at the same time. It was the effects that I learned such as the two shown on the previous slide, and others like colour correction that enabled me to create two similar but different items for the promo pack. Also the use of Photoshop helped me better my general editing skills such as cropping, resizing, stamp tool (which I used to create the image in the window) etc. CameraWhen trying to portray a certain idea in our video it was crucial that we had the camera set up properly so that the footage captured properly as well. The use of a tripod enabled us to have a steady camera when we needed it, and the portability of the cameras meant that we were easily able to film hand held, which we used a lot of to create the home made walking effect. From using the camera I would probably say that I have learnt most about zooms and focuses as we used a lot of long zooms, whilst also trying to include both shallow and deep depth of fields which enabled us to put the focus on key points or objects to add effect.

BloggerBlogger has let me store all of the images of my products in one place, whilst also enabling me to analyse and evaluate them in one place. This is useful as, I was able to compare and evaluate all of my designs easily, therefore giving me the best possible understanding of which designs where most appropriate and suited my target audience best.

Final Cut Final Cut Express was the program that we used to edit all of our footage on as it is easy to use, yet gives good results. For example we put a slightly orangey/yellow tint over our footage to give it a slightly aged effect and to give it a more ‘sunshine reggae’ feel. On Final Cut this was easily done using the colour corrector tool, which enabled us to mix and pick the exact colour we wanted. The easy to use time line and editing tools on Final Cut also enabled us to assemble our footage correctly, with smooth, meaningful cuts and transitions, something that is important to the flow of our journey in our video.From Final Cut I have furthered my basic editing skills, whilst also learning how to edit more complex parts of the footage such as colour, precise speed changes, and other effects that it enabled us to create such as our character ‘popping’ to different places on the screen, shown in our choruses.