Evaluation

When we selected the song, we wanted a song to build a strong narrative for it. Our media product develops on the idea of taking performance elements alongside narrative to create a visual representation of the music. We used my own personal camera to take images of the actors and different locations, we wanted a whole row of pictures so that we can use for our ancillary task, as the photos turned out so well, we then decided to use the camera to film our actual video. From the short film task in the summer we learned how camera angles close ups, extreme close ups, 360 degree shots can have connotations and present the video in a different way. We also looked at lots of other music videos for inspirations and developed on the idea of how to portray a love story. We challenged it by using a hand held camera and didn’t use a tripod so everything was in a cinéma vérité inspired way. Conventional formats of music videos take the genre of the song and adapt the music video accordingly, for example, our song “Vienna” could be classed as a ballad so we looked at the lyrics and decided to interpret a love story within it. Leona Lewis is a strong example of this in modern popular music. She sings ballads, with lyrics concerning love and heartbreak, and her music videos such as “Happy” explores these stories. For the performance she sings heartfelt into the camera and we wanted to depict Mimi in a vulnerable yet strong way to build the story for the audience. The character Dan plays, in contrast, is someone who is very protective of this girl that he loves and wants to take care of her. One particular moment where we wanted to represent this kind of relationship is when Mimi’s character run to the bay of the lake and breaks down in frustration only to be picked and reassured by Dan who sings the line, “You got your passion, you got your pride but don’t you know that only fools are satisfied”. He is holding onto her, initially she tries to struggle free but eventually they embrace after the key line, “Vienna waits for you” and this moment strongly connotes everything about their relationship.
2. More of our time was focused on the main task however when filming our video, I took pictures with my camera, in the locations with the actors in order to use these for my ancillary task. These were then edited and manipulated on photoshop to get a feel of the story that we were trying to present in the music video. As a result I think that the two ancillary tasks were effective in combination with our main product of a music video as they had the same settings and actors without being stills from the actual music video. Audience feedback was mainly positive. During our two days of filming we took the pictures that would be used for our music video ancillary tasks. We put all these images into a slideshow which we posted on youtube and facebook and asked people to comment with feedback which they did. They found the images to be very artistic and although they liked the candid ones, it was they ones that were not posed, taken from a moment between the two characters that they found most effective. The advert was based on Billy Joel. The images used for the ancillary task as well as the actual music video follow a certain colour scheme. This was maintained even after manipulating the images in photoshop. The location for the photo-shoot also followed this colour scheme of light blues and earthy tones yet was found by accident. We had actually never intended to film there but when we found it, we knew all our planning could be applied to this location. The actors costumes and make-up also contributed to the final creation of the ancillary tasks so overall I think the combination worked well.
3. Our audience feedback was varied. We posted a slideshow of pictures on youtube and facebook and asked people to comment on them in order to help us decided how we would build or album cover and advert. Most comments were extremely positive and the general thoughts from people were that they portrayed romance and sadness and the relationship between the actors and the passion they depicted was believable. They praised the cinematography and setting and thought it was in keeping with the song. Due to frustrating technical difficulties, we could only get audience feedback from our music video in class therefore our audience range was limited to our peers, however they also praised many of these things, however many noticed the lip-syncing was sometimes out of place and because we had to cut so much they were unable to follow the narrative too well. Another thing was the hand-held camera which they found to be, at times, noticeable. Despite this, overall they found the video to be romantic and passionate and a clear interpretation of the song with the actors being as engaging as possible. We were happy with this as these were the aims that we set out to achieve.


4. How did you use media technologies in the research, planning, construction and evaluation stages?
Initially we found our choice of song through the medium of an ipod which is the modern technology associated with the music industry. We started using media technology in the research stages when we looked at many music videos, to look for inspiration and new ideas for our own project. We had an idea in mind about what we wanted to depict but we wanted to keep our options open and go into this project with an open mind therefore looking at all types of music videos from all types of genres was essential in assessing the effectiveness of the content band ratio between performance and narrative elements. I used media technologies in research, by looking at other music videos, also looking at album covers. We looked at iconic and contemporary album covers and compared the two to see what tips we could consider when constructing our own. I also looked at music blogs and other peoples blogs to get an idea of how to present our blogs, with what to include etc. For the planning we also looked at other music video to get inspiration and to see how they were constructed. To test the actors out on camera, we did costume and make up test shots. The inspirations behind the costumes came from existing films and print mediums such as fashion magazines. For example the “binary opposites” look of Daniel in dark colours and Mimi is light colours was inspired by the immensely popular movie franchise Twilight and it’s two main actors. For make up, the mood boards on various websites gave us further inspiration for how to construct our music video. Then as it was a music video we tried got Daniel lip-syncing. For construction we took pictures of the actors on set as we filmed for the purpose of using them for our ancillary tasks. These pictures, as previously mentioned, were put into a slideshow and posted on youtube and social networking sites like facebook in order to get some feedback from our intended target audience. I presented my video in a form of a blog. I also presented my first question of the evaluation in form of a video, but then due to unfortunate circumstances of loosing footage, I decided I can explain things better within the writing as I was unable communicate everything I wanted to say because of my own shyness. Also blogger was used to document all the above stages.

Video Evaluation

Video Evaluation

Music Video

edited pictures