My Music Video Presentation

By Fiona Joy Howe

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

media products?

I don’t think my video challenges any real media products because there are a few popular music videos which have been my main influences in the structure of the final video.

The three music videos are Down With The Trumpets by Rizzle Kicks, Chasing Pavements by Adele and 99 Problems by Jay-Z.

Adele

Jay-Z

Rizzle Kicks

With the change of musicians and there being a complete contrast between the genres of both songs pushed me to looking at music videos of the indie music genre. I discovered indie duo “Tegan and Sara” and watched their music videos. I discovered that their videos were simplistic and bold coloured but calmly flowing throughout. They still however had a sense of beat in the music with the editing. The editing beat was influenced it by Jay-Z’s music video, even though it is a completely different genre of music, it helped me to establish the music within the video. The influence taken from Adele’s Chasing Pavements was its use of slow and long shots that helped to establish a habitat and scene. I love Rizzle Kicks use of focussed shots in Down With The Trumpets and their transitions to different locations. I wanted to use their idea of falling in my video to give a sense of “falling through time” so the audience could see the transition between the past and present. Due to a foot injury Peter established between the two filming shoots, I had to work around that and work with what I had. In the end I added a Sepia colour effect to the past shots to hopefully give the audience an idea of what was happening.

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

• I think that overall my combination of music video, digipak and poster is good. I think they all compliment each other in that the digipak and poster all have screenshots of the music video as a reference point. This gives the audience an image to associate with the song, so with those members of the audience who are confused by the song and believe that the meaning of the song is ambiguous, they can have an idea on the message within in the song, which is what I tried to capture in the video.

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

I asked twenty people of male and female with an age range from 17 – 52, after showing them the video for feedback on their initial reactions. I learned from the majority of the people I asked, that they didn’t like the song or the style of the song. They thought that the video itself complimented the song and that they were able to listen to the song all the way through accompanied with the music video. The popular genres of music that they enjoyed, overall, were Classical, Rock, Jazz and Pop. I felt from their reactions that they felt very obscure by the song, having never really experienced the genre before. Overall, I got the feedback which I thought be the main outcome but I am pleased that I was also complimented in making a video to accompany a song bearable to listen to.

How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation

stages?

• I first used www.cambridgebands.com to find local unsigned artists with good music I wanted to produce a video for.

• I then went onto YouTube to research my chosen artist’s genre of music and look at the styles within that genre’s music videos.

• I contacted Holden Girls via the social media network ‘Facebook’.

• I also used Google search engine to find out all their contacts so I could publish them on my digipak and poster.

• I published my research and progress on the whole project onto a blog generated by www.wordpress.com

•With all my planning done and schedule ready, I looked onto filming. I used three cameras, one on each shoot and one for my vlog (video blog).

•I used the ‘Kodak Playfull’ attached to a ‘Jessops’ tripod TP327 on The Spinney shoot which shoots in high quality 1080p, which is very good for a small little camcorder. It gave me great coverage as The Spinney shoot were the shots that dominated the video.

•For the second shoot in the city centre of Cambridge, I used A Sony HDR-CX570E attached to a Jessops Basic Monopod for steadiness when walking and when fully extended to achieve the high angle 360° shot at the beginning of the video. I was very happy with its performance on the shoot and the quality it gave me but it caused a problem when editing.

•For my vlog, I used a basic Flip Camera 2nd generation 4GB. The quality of image itself wasn’t that good but its primary use was for its good sound quality which was the main focus of the vlog.

• For Editing, I used the software programme, Final Cut Express. I am used to this software so I was able to do a lot of effects and twitching with the images but the version of this software at the school is an old version and it didn’t support many good quality videos.

•This is where the problem lied with the Sony HDR-CX570E. I knew that the software didn’t support HD (high definition) video so I deliberately on the second shoot filmed in SD (standard definition). However, the format outcome of the video filmed on the Sony was .MPG. Final Cut Express did not support that format, so I had to convert it.

•I used the converter Freemake Video Converter which you install on your computer. I found it to be a very reliable software and I would recommend it. I converted the footage to .MP4, which Final Cut accepted but it still took hours to render, even with a few simple edits.

• Finally I used YouTube to upload the video worldwide. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nHNYkymFqs

• My Blog: https://tofionaedit.wordpress.com

•I used Adobe Photoshop to create my digipak template and poster.