1 In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
In our group we stuck to the norms of the conventions of a music video. We did this by have performing shots and a narrative. The narrative shot included a story line of the drama that is taking place in the main characters life while the performing shot has the main character singing directly into a microphone and a video camera. We have two different locations for our filming which is quite realistic and can been seen in many music video such a Robin Thicke song longest love. As the camera man i tried to show alcohol abuse without using any words. I was able to do this successfully in the open scene where the camera is in focus of the bottle of alcohol then the camera focuses on Matthew. Props were very important to us especially when it came to the narrative and performing shots. Our use of props helped us to tell our story and show the audiences that Matthew was a singer as well.
Lighting was also use as another music video convention as well. We used the colour blue and red to show the two different paths ahead of our character. As he was in the performing show the light would change between these two colours. This help to link the narrative shot and the performing shot together as it showed that our character is facing a battle between good and evil. This also make our video interesting as well since the audience have questions going through their head about what causes this make to start drinking in the first place.
2. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
I would personally say I did this in a effective way. I used a performances shot as a picture for my magazine front cover and a poster prompting the artist concert. People in my group used a selection of pictures taken on the performances shot to make them appealing and use them for the digi-pack. By doing this we had a consist theme that the customer could relate to. This is because the same pictures are being used for the front cover, inside the digi-pack and the magazine. For my poster I used the picture with Matthew staring into the sky. This has connotation as he is looking to Haven. It is as he is looking into the sky for guidance. If I could change my poster I would make Matthew wear all black clothing and i would have a white spot light on him. This would reinforce the connotations of heaven and hell.
3. What have you learnt from your audience feedback?
I asked these questions to my peers and it provided me with important information. I asked 15 people these 3 questions and this is the results they gave me.
My first question was “do you believe narrative are more important then the performances?”. 7 people didn’t know while 3 said yes and 5 said no. The majority people who answered this question didn’t have a strong opinion. The strongest answer was no for this question. this sggest that narratives don’t play an important part in a music video. This can be reflected in my group video as the performances shot are stronger then the narrative shot.
Question 2 “how important is a album cover design?”73% of people didn’t deem an album cover as important. It seems that people buy the music because of the music no how the front cover looks. This answer could have been bios as theses question were asked using new media: facebook. Cd designs play a important part in marketing the artist as it is another way the artist is promoted. The design of the artist cd could relate the artist e.g pink album was called “Fun House”, on the front cover of the cd it had a picture of Pink ridding a madrigal ride houses. This picture is something that you would find at a carnival as well as a fun house. As a group we didn’t argue with the audience responses and we decided to go against this and we chose to make a front cover that was important. We didn’t this by using picture from the performances shots from the song.
Question 3 “what type of things do you enjoy seeing in a music video”. I asked this question to see what type of genre in the narrative do the audiences prefer. Majority of the people said they like dancing in a video. Since we didn’t have any dancers or knew anybody willing to do any dancing this wasn’t possible. The second choice was comedy but as a group we didn’t know how to approach the situation when it came to making our song laughable so we choose to make a video that follows the narrative of the song. We chose to make a video that related to the lyrics of the songs as it made our video more effective and interesting as the lyric developed so does the video.
How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
We used new media in the planning of our video. We looked at how other artist used background and narrative to tell a simple story e.g. Robin Thick – sweetest Love. In his video he was play the piano a while sing as a performances shot, we adapted this idea and made our artist sing into a microphone to show he was a singer. We used web site such as YouTube to gain access to many different artist music to show to produce an effect music video. As a group we decided on Justin Timberlake because we were all family with his work both released and unreleased. We conducted research into r n b on similar research such as Robin Thick and Usher. To look at theses artist i used web site such as YouTube to conduct research into their music video since their music comes under the same genre. While conducting my interviews I asked people who would be interested in r n b music video.
Due to the fact we didn’t have a big budget we went able to do thing as effectively as we would have wanted e.g the type of camera that we was using weren’t powerful enough to shot Matthews face clear enough under dark colours so we tried our hardest to use the colours red and blue in our video but under editing looked like bad lighting. If I could change this i would try and use a softer blue and red that would look good while editing. Media technology was the reason why we were able to cut from scene to scene without any problem we used Final Cut Pro on the Mac computers. This enabled us to create a music video that was had no technique fault and helped us to sync all the shots together. We placed all our film scene on a time line to make to make our scene make scenes to the audiences. In our original project we had issue while editing due to the fact that our artist was wearing a green with green on it so while editing it would change colour as well.
Adobe photo shop CS4 was used to create our dig pack covers. This helps us to add special effects and fonts to the pictures. For example we made the lights on one picture as to say the artist was under the spot light. We downloaded different tools from the internet so we had a wide variety of choice when editing the digi-pack and magazine poster.
In conclusion I feel that our music video developed more on existing music video convention and this make it look realistic. Our main fault would be a lack of shots which we try to cover through editing but overall we as a group have produced something to be prude of.
