Jamie's Evaluation

For our media coursework we had to create a music video that we had to accompany with two ancillary products a magazine advert and a DVD cover or Digipak. We chose the song A long time ago – David Ford which was quite a slow indie song as we came up with very good ideas the first time that we listened to it.
Our media product contains many different conventions that are either widely used in music videos or are not as common. This gives our products the certain familiarities associated with these products but also adds a twist that most people might not have seen before. The genre of our music was Indie we researched these types of videos and artist on the internet and we saw a common factor between them all, they all contained some form of animation or something that was out of the ordinary, for example, the song Upside Down by Jack Johnson you see an animated monkey dancing around with the artist. We felt that this would be the right way to go with our video so we decided to develop this common convention and we ended up creating a video using mostly plasticine and toys. This was also common in our magazine advert and our digipak we either use the back drop made out of plasticine or the foreground made out of plasticine. The other convention that we noticed in the various indie music videos that we watched was that they often had a performance in them for example a lot of Jack Johnson videos have him in playing the guitar and actually performing the song. We developed this by not either having one or the other but combining the two. This we thought would give a bigger impact on our audience as we are challenging the conventions that they are expecting to see and therefore making it more memorable and creating more of an impact. This is very common on magazine adverts as the producers want to forge a visual link between the video and the adverts advertising it. Another typical convention of any music video is to create a good image of the artist, we did this by making them perform in casual clothes as if they were just like any of the people watching the video and therefore the audience could hopefully relate to this.
I feel that the our ancillary products worked well with our music video as we followed the typical convention of tying in all of our products together with one common image. We did this by having two of the same images but changed slightly for example one is a model of a man made out of plasticine on real life photography of real trees and bushes etc. The second is the complete opposite, it contains a real person on a totally created back drop made of colourful card and plasticine. We felt that this would be affective as it was not a common idea that people have used and it may therefore help draw the attention of people that have watched the video and then wondered past our advert, by having such a strong bond between the two, people will stop and it will remind them and maybe, they will take in some of the information and maybe go out to buy the DVD. Also I feel that the link between the two other products and the DVD cover are very affective as they contain the same colour range anyone that happens to be looking around a music shop may notice the bright colours and the models and instantly make a link between the video and the DVD.
Our audience feedback helped us a lot when finishing our although we were aware of what we had to change we didn’t know how vital it was and how many people noticed. The majority of our feedback consisted of people commenting on the fact that our music and visuals were out of time so therefore we made this our main priority. Other feedback from our sample audience mentioned that the visuals reminded them of a children’s television programme called The Magic Roundabout this was very good as this was the theme that we were aiming for and the fact that people picked up on this reassured us that we were going in the right direction. Another essential piece of feedback that we received from one of our teachers was the fact that the end instrumental was very simple and plain and it was pointed out to us that the audience may get bored of the same shot for one and a half minutes. To improve this we went out and filmed a few more varied shots of the performer to intertwine with the original steady mid shot. This we felt made the video a lot more varied and maintained the interest of the audience better.
We used new media technologies constantly throughout the entirety of the creation of our music video. First of all and most importantly was the use of our blog, everything that we did we recorded on our blog so that we had something to show for all the work that we put into the project and we could display to our peers what we have done. This also enabled us to work from home or wherever we were as long as we had access to an internet we could add to and edit our work. The blog was also a good way to consolidate all of our ideas so that we had one place where all our work would be and this lowered the chance that we had of losing it. Another way that we used new media technologies in the production of our products was we used the social networking site MySpace to contact the artist and to ask if he had any ideas that he had for his own video. Throughout the whole process of creating our music video and the ancillary products that went with it we used the software Photoshop CS3 and Final Cut Express these are very modern editing software and by using these we felt that we got the most out of our video that we could. At first there were a few aspects of the software that we weren’t sure about and that we didn’t really understand but after a few tutorials from our teachers we got the hang of it in no time. Another new media technology that we used in the planning stages of our video was the digital cameras we decided to draw a storyboard so that in the complicated process or animating our video we knew exactly what we had to create and when. We decided so that we could view them easily and we didn’t have to carry around many different pieces of paper that could become damaged or lost in the transport, we would take pictures of them individually and post them on our blog. This proved to be a good idea as then we knew which props we needed for each lesson from home as we could just log on and be able to view our schedule.