Sams evaluation

For our A2 Project we where set the task of creating a music video and two ancillary products, a magazine advert and a digipack . Our group chose the song: A long time ago by David ford. When pitching our ideas for our song we decided that as well developing the conventions of the indie genre we would also challenge them. Our final idea for our video was to have an animated character with a cardboard/pasticine setting, we took inspiration for this from other artists in the acoustic indie genre such as jack Johnsons video for upside down. To challenge the conventions of a fully animated video we decided to add in real life footage to the animation as we weren’t to familiar with this concept in a music video. We decided to have a strong narrative to our music video. To tell the story we kept the visuals complimentary to the lyrics. Another way we challenged the conventions of typical music videos where the length of our shots, as most shots in our video contained various movements and animation the shot lengths were longer than typical 2/3 second shots in conventional music videos. When editing out real life footage we added in different types of shots in order for them to vary throughout the video. Our finished product had a good link to our story board and looked how we had originally planned. We had a few minor problems when filming, such as lighting as were not able to use a spot light as this melted the plasticine we had to use the light in the class room but as we had to film over numerous days we couldn’t not guarantee the lighting would be the same, we also had this same problem with the camera this resulted in some of shots being slightly wonky.
When planning and researching for our ancillary products we looked at magazine adverts and digipacks form other artists and noticed that all three products had a strong visual connection so we took this onto consideration when designing our own products we knew we needed to keep up the quirky childlike theme from our video. For our final magazine advert we decided to have a picture of our real life character placed on a cardboard/plasticine background. We included all the important information that a reader would need for example when the digipack is out and one of the many places that the digipack can be brought. I think this image worked well as it combined both elements of our music video. We also decided to use this concept for a digipack cover, but instead of using the same image we decided to put our animated character on a real life background. Although different images they still have a strong visual and recognisable link. On the back the digipack we included pictures of the music video, this also makes the visual links between the video and the product stronger.
Since starting the project we have got a lot of helpful feedback from our teacher and the class, the most useful feedback we got was in response to our rough cut. A lot of our peers noticed that our visuals weren’t exactly in time with our lyrics so we knew that we had to spend a lot of time getting the relationship between these perfect, this meant changing the speed of several shots and making sure the clips started at the right time. This took a lot of time and patience for our group as although using final cut last year, For this project we uses many different elements of final cut, such as different effects and transitions. Another useful comment we got was that our real life footage needed to be varied in order to keep up with the standard of our animation, we took this on board and went and filmed some more footage to add in.
When planning and researching for our project we looked at the directors Hammer and tongs, they gave us inspiration for our playful and abstract theme, our bright colours scheme was influenced by the song ‘Pumping on your stereo’ by supergrass which was directed by hammer and tongs. We used our blog to record all of our planning and research , as well as our blog we also used various other new media technologies such as you tube for looking up and watching other artists videos. We used social networking sites such as myspace in order to contact David ford to ask his permission and see if he had any creative input for us.
Overall i feel we have a strong link between our research planning and all final three products.