Transcript of Evaluation

Hi I’m Alex, I’m Emily, I’m Sam and I’m Jamie and we’re the production team for David Ford’s ‘A Long Time Ago’.
From the beginning we were given the task of making a promotional package, this consisted of a music video and 2 ancillary products which were a magazine advert and a digipak cover. We chose the song David Ford ‘A Long Time Ago’ but to start with we had to pitch for the song so we had to come up with all our ideas to start with and then pitch it to the rest of our group. We got good feedback, so we decided to keep with that song. We used Goodwin’s theory to analyse several music videos that related to the indie genre. We looked at the music video directors Hammer & Tongs which influenced our childlike and playful theme. One of the videos we looked at by them was ‘Pumping on your stereo’ by Supergrass which we were quite heavily influenced by as we noticed it had a really strong and artistic feel to it, and it was quite abstract and surreal just like what we wanted to show in our video. We found that that was something that really stemmed in all the videos in the indie genre. One thing we did include also is real life which is quite unconventional for this type of genre. However, he was alone playing the guitar like you would see in many music videos. We thought we’d mix the two together, mix it up a bit. Jazz it up.
We begun using a blog online to put in all our ideas and start researching different things that would influence our final products. It was quite good using the blog as it was online so we could all access it at home and see where we all were with our ideas and stuff. The next thing that you can see on our blog is the storyboard which we had to start working on to really collate all our ideas so we knew where we were at each part of the song. Obviously, before in previous projects we haven’t had to thing so much about keeping to the timing of something, so the music video was quite a new task to think about and we had to really make sure that the story board was spot on. As our video and lyrics are quite complementary as well the footage had to link with lyrics exactly at each point so we knew what was going on second by second.
We had to suddenly start creating props and costumes really quickly because we had to start filming as soon as possible really. They were quite detailed props as well. We also looked at what sort of costumes and props they use in indie videos, and tried to conform to the conventions. So let’s have a look at the box…
This is the night-time scene; we’ve got little fairly lights at the back there. We tried to make as much as we good out of plasticine but there were some issues, we couldn’t make the floor out of plasticine as if to much light got onto it would just melt. This is our little man, David. He’s got a bit dirty now. As Emily said before, we made sure that his costume was quite typical of the indie genre. So he’s wearing a hat and tight jeans, and he’s wearing the same in the real life footage as well just to keep in with continuity throughout the video. We also used different toys to keep the child-like theme going, like the toy car, and different props from dollhouses.
So this is our finished video...
At the beginning of our video it starts off with real life footage, it is then going into animation. As we said before (weird sound)

This is where we brought in the animation. Our lyrics and visuals had to be really complementary so therefore you can see the video compliments the lyrics here. After our rough-cut feedback, we got a lot of feedback saying that these really needed to be in time so we made sure we focused on that a lot when editing the final thing, making sure that everything was really in time with the lyrics.
With the demands of the record label, we tried to portray David as just being a really genuine guy and that anyone can relate to. He just wears a simple red top and jeans like anyone else would, as you can see in the close-up here.
For all of us this is probably our favourite part of the video because it was where continuity (weird sound)

This is one of our ancillary products, the magazine ad. As you can see it uses the same setting as our actual video just to forge a link between the two.
As you can see here there’s a lack of continuity with the lighting. This is because we couldn’t rely on spotlights as they kept melting the plasticine so instead we had to rely on the normal lighting in the classroom. It was really important that we kept all of our plasticine figures at room temperature because they were quite fragile and would soon melt if they got a bit too hot.
Originally here we were going to have it so the WORD’s changed into NOISE’s but we found it too difficult to make a smooth changeover between them so we just stuck them on the back of each other. This was due to timing issues as well, as we didn’t have much time to record and thought that this would be the best solution. We had another lighting issue here because the white card reflects the light quite a lot in these shots; if we did it again we probably wouldn’t use quite such a strong colour.
Goodwin’s Theory says that you have to have a good representation of the artist so here we just show him as a normal person that you just might pass on the street. He is wearing normal/casual clothes and just sitting on a bench somewhere. And here we’ve just made the link between the plasticine him and the real him by just merging the two shots together. The plasticine man has always got a friendly little smile, we really wanted the audience to look on at him and think ‘aww, look at him’. We wanted the audience to connect with our character. We wanted them to empathise with our character and with the lyrics as well.
A common convention of music videos is that you see the artist performing. We took this into account and showed the artist on a bench playing his guitar along with the music.
Just like our magazine advert, our digipak cover also uses the same setting as our video. It’s just the antithesis, so you can see the real life setting with the plasticine figure there. We really wanted people to recognize elements from our video, and create a real sense of continuity throughout our 3 products. We thought this was really important to encourage the audience to relate to our character, and where he was etc.
This is our second setting, which was the bar scene. From our audience feedback we saw that it was a really positive thing that introduced a third setting as it made our video a lot more varied and interesting. It was quite unexpected people said, as beforehand they were just expecting that it would go back to the same setting again. They thought that this was quite typical of music videos to have 2 or 3 settings.
We apologise for the muscley woman and her rejection as well, as found that quite funny. Bless David. We found that it was quite tricky to make real-life looking figures than we initially anticipated. It’s surprising how difficult it was to make her not look as muscley.
Originally here we were going to repeat the shots that we used in the beginning for these lyrics as they are the same. We found that it looked too obvious that the shots had been repeated so we decided in the end to re-film them. Also it zooms into his face at the end of the first shots so it wouldn’t have worked here anyway.
Here you can see a lovely smooth transition of shots. This really relates to Goodwin’s theory about the link between music and visuals as it goes along with the fluent slow-pace of the music. This zoom we had to create in final cut as we forgot to film it when we were out so that is why the guitar is of low quality when it zooms out.
Initially we were going to have this shot of Jamie playing the guitar throughout the whole instrumental. Feedback told us that it was a little boring, and when watching it through ourselves we noticed it as well so decided to vary the shots. We included loads of close-ups of me playing the guitar, hand going up the fret and things like that.

Looking back over our brief we think that we’ve come out with a really positive outcome. We really enjoyed doing this project and coming up with ideas and trying something new with the music video task. We really think it’s helped us use new media technologies in a different way. Before, I didn’t really know how to use final cut, but we were given a tutorial of how to use colour filters so we could make the colours a bit more abstract. We also used the internet a lot for our researching and contacting the band/artist. We used social networking site MySpace to contact the artist, which was thought was an innovative way of approaching them and looking at how they represent themselves. We’re really pleased with how our three ancillary products link together as well. Bye!