Evaluation

Media Evaluation for Music Video

In what ways does your Media product use, develop, or challenge forms of real media products?

Throughout our Music Video, Digi pack and Magazine advert our group has produced very serial productions and merchandise. Real media music productions which have really influenced our group have been the bands that show off a vibrant yet serial music video; Artists such as: Gorillaz, Example, and Kanye West, each of these bands have gone for a specific look which grabs the audience attention. Our main convention is having the band member’s faces covered up throughout most of the video, these heads being very different and heads that are well known and famous in the world to date, like Mickey Mouse, Spiderman and President Bush. Kidi Cudi ‘Day’N’Nite’video matches our conventions fairly well where there is a bunch of diverse heads throughout the video.
You can see the similarities between our music genres; we have gone for a similar establishing shot to establish the different characters.

Furthermore, as a group we went for an affect which will grab the audiences attention, by doing this we have gone for no ordinary typical convention, this making our genre very diverse, like no ordinary music genre such as: pop, rock, metal or R&B, these common genres follow a very stereotypical video for the genre, for e.g. R&B you will always get the rapper or DJ rapping/dancing to the song lyrics, (never leave you by Tinchy Styder shows a great example of this). Therefore our group went out the box to be different and make it eye catching for our specific target audience. In all videos the lyrics are sung by the artist, however in ours we have placed animation over the heads of our five band characters and are singing along to the lyrics through an animated head, on the other hand a few people in the band do not have their heads showing due them not being members of the band, they are just the public, this again enhances the fact how we want there to be a secret identity to who the band members are, so by doing this, this makes the audience attached to the band and video as this is a different way of producing a music video.

The Digi pack and magazine advert have evolved around the prospect and idea of their being heads on our bodies, we have gone for the band look with faces on the magazine advert, this promotes the band and its name. We wanted to keep the identity of the characters still similar to the music video also to grab the audience’s attention with our different serial media conventions.
This being our DVD cover it empathizes the fact that the band want to keep that secret identity to them, but also grab our target audience’s attention which this does.

Below shows our CD cover with a DVD CD involved. IT shows one of the most showed character heads the Viking within our music video, we have put up different shots from our production. What we have done for all the three productions is kept with our serial convention, we have kept the black and white technique and just added in the red which again makes it stand out from others.


The group wanted to create a strong image, which was going to be recognizable throughout all the media productions. The combination with the animation and real footage brought a gritty and quirky feel that we wanted to be consistent through the video, Digi pack and magazine advert. This is what we wanted to it gives the band an identity like Goriallaz, that matches the genre of music following video and publicity.

The variety and the number of the band members were crucial in our video, from the main artists to not so main artists. Each character highlighted a different animated character to them. Each character was introduced with each scene getting more serial for e.g. Tony Blair was riding a bicycle which isn’t to be seen everyday. This shows a media convention of the specific and similar videos we have influenced as seen through Example, and Kidi Cudi.

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

By watching the music video and glancing at the Digi pack and Magazine advert you can see the huge continuity link of visual style between all three products. All three of them link to an identity toward the band which is the animated head, black and white look and the fast pace. Had there have been more time the animation could have been improves, however getting up to scratch like we did was a target we were happy with. The ancillary texts do well to support our music video, the feeling of the bands look and uniqueness is ad what music genre they play.

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This is the video clip from the “try life in another language” music video, this shows a great shot to show another serial effect which makes a good flowing technique, which with this sought of filming the flow from scene to scene needs to be good.




This is our shot which is very similar; we used this shot so it could make the continuity better and make the flowing of the production work well which it did.












There is a correspondence between our main product and our ancillary texts; I believe as a group we did a very good job of making each one have a specific and distinctive look which is similar to each other. The show good combination together as the Magazine advert and Digi Pack shows the secret identity of the fiver bad members, they display the band members also they display some shots from the footage we took, so posing shots. Some of our serial genre elements are also obvious and pop up into our ancillary task but not too much as this will completely be portraying how serial and unlike normal media genres we aren’t. By showing normal and non specific clothing throughout the production again didn’t give out too much detail on what type of genre the band are trying to full fill. The composition of the Digi pack consists largely on similar photo set within a notion of looking such as camera film.









We have a split screen of the same thing happening just with diverse camera angles, this shows the name of the band as this could be there signature music video to represent the band. We have followed a lot of the music genres to show the best of all but we have put it all in to context and it has worked very well, our genres show a good resemblance to the ancillary texts.
The idea behind our final media product were very clear, this is what our group set out to achieve, we had planned well and our essential planning had initially come close to what we wanted it to be, therefore there being not as many changes between the product and ancillary texts. In relation to the audience, there is a combination between our main product and ancillary tasks, I feel that the Digi pack has a very formal yet bouncy style to it; where as our main video product would be targeted at a predominantly younger audience. I have mentioned the colour and style briefly however we had a set colour scheme through the ancillary texts and Digi Pack and Magazine advert, each being very similar to each other. We went for a black and white effect but had to really control how black or white it was due to the different sets of contrast. The very un-toned colour, which immediately doesn’t strike the audience, this is why we added the animated heads with black and white to make it all similar and work together. The whole package we have gone for portrays the band in a mature, natural yet bouncy effect, the effect that stands out.



This is on final cut express, the way the group made the contrast of the colour, a specific black and white.
What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

Throughout the production we have done on our music video, Digi Pak and Magazine Advert, our group has received a lot of feedback from many people within our class, Most of it has been constructive criticism, some has been positive and some has been negative, mainly towards our rough cut, therefore we had to make our final production better. On receiving both critical and constructive feedback from the rest of the group we were able to draw evaluations as to where the group went wrong and what worked well so we could have done more of. One of our main feedback negatives was that we didn’t match our lyrics with visuals, this is very clear in our video that we did not do this, we thought about points in the lyrics which would match well with out actions. However as our video was so serial, it was acceptable to go out of the box with the visuals and lyrics and have mini narrative stories, the audience felt this would work and also as there were so little lyrics to play with it was the perfect way to edit the video. One convention we directly put forward in our music video was a Goodwin point through Goodwins criteria, it was the showing and use of intertextual reference. We used this well and this was part of constructive comments, we used this to expand and improve our video. We had a variation of hard camera shots to put into production, such as some difficult tracking shots to work with, especially when the tracking shots had faces in them as each face had to be cut and slightly moved every second o this took a lot of time and everyone commented on the fact how this would have taken a very long time and if had more time it could have been a extreme master piece.



This is our final cut express and it shows how many times we had to cut the shots so they would get this sketchy and hard effect to work with.





This show shows how hard it was to cut all the time on final cut express, we had to make it as clean but also as quirky as possible to get the effect we wanted.





Feedback on the rough-cut was very important as it enabled our group to make alternations to improve our product, in terms of the camera work again, people said due to the amount of track shots you did it was good that there was no shakiness or wobbling with the camera, and you used a good number and variation of shots. By having ours shaky and wobbly made it acceptable though as when the animated heads moved it came up fairly wobbly and shaky so this worked well. The music video fitted the conventions of a serial music genre. These critics helped a lot for feedback from the group concerning our ancillary tasks. Firstly, the use of the band being covered with animated heads showed brilliant consistency through the Digi pack, magazine advert and music video. The feedback generated also made us stick to the black and white theme which we kept through all the productions. With the CD cover we were told the red was too much, however we decided to keep it as our band went for the look where it jumps to our target audience. We made a lot of changes on our colours especially, we essentially didn’t have the black and white effect and it was in colour; however we went to the black and white because it made the animated heads not look silly as you could see the outline as they had been cut on photo shop. We went for this black and white effect because the black and white looked far better with the animation.

4. How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

We used lots of media technology, within our planning also editing and evaluation, Photoshop was keen to out media production because we had to cut out all the animated faces. This was complicated as we used many pictures and cut many more photos on photo shop we used within our media video. We also used Final cut and websites and typical media equipment. Firstly, throughout the duration of our research stage, YouTube website was an important technology our group had to look into greatly, the element of research enabled our group to develop understanding of other music videos that corresponded with the serial and the diverse genre our music video consists of. We looked a great deal into bands that had specific ideas as we did like mentioned, Gorillaz, example and Kidi Cudi. We could embed the videos and research we did into our blog this enabled us to evaluate it and draw comparisons between its conventions and our conventions we would use in our product. During the making and construction of the media production, we used the final cut express which really helped our group especially with all the cutting we had to do with the animation. Especially with all the track shots as well this was good to use for final cut as it helped us enormously to cut down the shots. When doing the Digi pack and Magazine advert we used a range of filters and colours which had that secret identity the group wanted. We did a flick book which enabled us to make some of the faces move, e.g. in our video the eye being pulled out we had to do a small flick book so it looked like an electrical bolt was pulling the eye out.