evaluation music video

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


We tried to capture real forms and conventions of a real music video throughout our video. We did this by looking into a lot of other videos we felt was of a similar genre and style. The two videos that caught our attention the most where oasis- wonderwall and the horrors - sea within a sea. There where aspects and conventions in both these videos that really stood out to us and that we felt would suit the genre and sound of our track. From watching oasis - wonderwall we really liked the static performance that took place throughout the video. We thought the idea of static performances would really suit our genre. From watching the horrors - sea within a sea we where hugely inspired by the lighting and projection featured in the video. we felt this was a very creative and unique idea, not featured on many other videos.
We felt combining the concept of conventions from both these videos (lighting and static performance) would give a very interesting contrast but at the same time really suit and represent our indie rock genre. We really wanted static performance and thought by having this lighting and projection it would give the viewer something else to concentrate on. 
From watching a lot of other videos in all genres we noticed a high percentage of videos had a lot of close ups. we made sure to get in as many as we could without it becoming repetitive.
As well as getting inspiration from these two videos, we also watched another oasis music video "shakermaker" which featured both performance and a weak narative which just included shots of the band walking round together and doing everyday ordinary activities (playing football in parks, going round shops), giving the audiance an insight to what there life is like. we really liked the idea of this, as we felt it would break up our performance shots nicely, and prevent the audiance getting bored and tired of repetitive shots. we also like it as we didn't want to have a very detailed story line as we felt it wouldn't really suit or fit our genre. 


How effective is the combination of your main product and ancilliary texts?
Our 3 products relate to each other very well, and show clear representation of the same band, and album. we used shots from our music video for both the album cover and poster. Although we felt there was danger that this may give the impression the album is focused more towards the music video on its own rather than an album as a whole. Despite this issue we felt by doing this, we felt it would be good to give the album and songs on it a similar look. We didn't want our poster, album or video to be misleading and not show any resemblance between each other. we looked at alot of other artists and noticed that alot shared a similar idea by showing features and conventions from there videos on there album covers and posters. For example we looked artists such as plan b, who is wearing the same outfit on all videos from the album defamation of strickland banks. he continues the same theme on his video, and also his album cover, posters and other products relating to the album. by keeping the same image and theme the audience starts to relate this image to the band, therefore having strong publicity and advertising.


What have you learned from your feedback?
On the initial pitch the overall feedback gave us the idea there was not enough structure and general ideas for the plan of the video, that we were a bit lost and would end up filming footage that doesn't relate and work well together.
When it came to rough cut feedback it was clear to what the strengths and weaknesses where to our video. We were told the lighting was a very strong part of the video, and were advised to make the most of it. People were a bit confused to parts of our video, down to the whole piece lacking structure. People felt we needed more performance shots instead of the lighting shots, to break it up a bit. Some class members where also confused to why we had static band members ether side of the singers performance and didn't really felt it worked.


On the final cut class members felt we had taken earlier advice on bored from earlier advice. We added in other performance shots like we were recommended to do, of our singer performing in different locations. Overall we received positive feedback on the final cut, class members felt it was a well structured professional looking piece. Although some still felt the static band members did not work. 


4.
We used blogger throughout the whole process to keep record of everything we had done. It really helped us keep organzed and on top of everything we needed to do. Everything is saved and recorded with a time and date, which made it easy to go back to planning and find exactly what we wanted.
Photoshop came in very handy through the process, and was used on every stage. We used it for the development for our projection in the music video as well as our ancillary products. Photoshop aloud us to get the right image for our dvd cover. we added on affects to get the right look.
Final cut express was used to edit our music video. it aloud us to be very free with getting our music video to exact feel we wanted it. although we did have a few issues during the process. Due to the file format of our video it meant that every time we moved or changed a clip it would need rendering again. The time it would take to render clips was also extremely long. This dramatically slowed the down the whole editing process.