Media Studies Evaluation
Media Studies Evaluation
1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
To keep my music video as real as possible I used many different ideas that are used within real music videos, a lot of my initial ideas were inspired from
Different music videos that I had watched prior to the planning of my music video, I studied many different music genres to allow for me to use all typical conventions of my selected genre, studying what conventions pop/rock bands usually use within their music videos allowed me to decide upon some initial ideas in which I could build upon and grow my own ideas to add on to these until a decision on an idea had been made.
After building up an array of ideas that I could use for my music video I finally decided upon a scenario in which a race would take place, the song Papillion by The Editors influenced this idea; the video for this song depicts a large group of people running through the streets. The race originally was going to involve a lot of people but as my resources were sparse I had to settle with only having 4 people in the race. Developing on this Idea I used a technique I had seen in music videos before in which all the characters are shown at the beginning of the music video and a sort of brief introduction of their personality is shown. The race was to start with all four characters but would split off and cut between the different characters as they run different places and tackle objects that come in their way, to add a twist to the story I decided upon that one of the characters would become tired and phone a friend for to pick him up, this scene would tie in with another at the end of the video in which the character would end up coming from nowhere and winning the race. With this character cheating within the race and winning, this adds a sense of irony with the name of the song being We Are The Good Guy’s. I looked into other music videos of this genre and the majority of the videos were based around a storyline, this meant that my music video did not need any performance shots but would need some sort of lip-syncing. I took this into account whilst planning the video and decided upon a few lip-syncing shots throughout the video. The original plan was to have a variety of action shots of the characters doing various things mixed with shots of another character lip-syncing to different sections of the song.
After finally deciding on the final idea and creating a plan in a form of a storyboard, I moved onto begin shooting of the video. The shooting commenced over a weekend when all of the actors were available; the shooting took a total of about a month to capture all the footage but only a few hours to edit the video together. During the shooting of the video many aspects of the original plans which were on the storyboard changed either due to limitations or because of new ideas being made. An example of this was when the character who cheated in the race was originally going to be the cause of one of the falls at the end of the video, I changed this idea due to discussion with the actors who came up with a different idea, this was when the scene in which the characters push each other over and then one of them collides with a lamp post was created. This is one of a few ways in which the actual video varied from the storyboard and these changes were mainly due to new ideas being generated.
When editing the video I needed to keep the story logical and allow the viewer to understand what was happening in each shot, I used a variety of different camera angles throughout my video so I had to make sure that these changed positions when editing the video. Continuity is a big thing to think about when filming any sort of video as this stops the viewer from understanding what is happening properly, I had to let this slide a little due to some of my actors not having the same attire available every time I wanted to shoot. Because of this one characters jacket changes during the video for one shot but because of the angle and the jacket being dark you cant tell by just watching it, the characters shoes on the other hand changes in various different scenes from a white plimsoll to a white and black skate shoe.
2. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
With my music video being my main product I had to tie my ancillary products in with the video, to do this I decided that with the genre of the song being indie/pop/rock that the color scheme for the band would have to be bright but at the same time keeping its indie feel. Keeping this in mind I decided that a checkerboard of yellow and blue with a black border worked well as it kept the brightness with the yellow, but with the black and blue it also kept it feeling indie. My CD digital pack was originally going to be built up of images from the music video all around a wire square frame, this idea changed because the CD did not tie in with my other product my web page. The web page followed my original design with navigational buttons at the top and a comment box and news updates on the main body of the page, the whole layout of the site changed slightly this was mainly due to my idea changing whilst creating the home page, this caused me to add the actual music video at the bottom of the page, among with this I changed the color scheme of the page to match the CD/DVD Digipack.
3. What have you learned from your audience feedback?
From audience feedback given from my class members as well as friends outside of college I have learned that my music video fitted to the genre of the song with the mise en scene, characters and props but the variety and pace of shots could have been faster to keep up with the beat of the song.
The editing that had been done was sufficient for the song as certain shots were cut to the beat of the song along with lip-syncing taking place, the different effects used were slow motion on some shots with a split screen taking place during another shot.
The understanding of the narrative was shown fairly clear within the video but elliptical editing had been used to suggest that the characters had traveled different locations without actually showing this. A few shots were commented on and said to be explained clearer than they had been, some examples of these shots were at the end where the character came from nowhere and ends up winning the race, previously within the video a scene showed this character cheating within the race and getting a car to pick him up, this was the link to why the character had came from nowhere and won.
Another area of improvement that was suggested was that the lip-syncing be more on time and used more throughout the video, this could have been achieved easily with more effort on my part.
4. How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
Throughout the construction of my music video I used a Sony digital camcorder to capture my footage, this was not a particularly good camcorder for all lighting set ups and because of this the darker shots in my video lacked quality and was not as clear as originally anticipated, as well as the darker shots various other shots lacked high quality detail but this was a minor thing. Having the availability of Sony Vegas Pro 8.0 at home I decided this was a good choice for the software I would use to edit my video, as well as the availability of this software I also have experience using the software as I have previously edited videos before. Bringing my laptop into college became a regular thing as this allowed me the most possible time to edit and teak my video. For my ancillary tasks I used a mix of Photoshop Elements and Adobe Dreamweaver, Photoshop was used for editing together the CD DVD Digipack this was used as I used a variety of different layers within the software to enable me to add a background as well as various different text and labels on the front of it. Dreamweaver was used to create the home page of the website, I was not familiar with the software myself and this lacked what I could do the page.
