Music Video

Evaluation // Question 2: How effective is the combination of your main product (video) and ancillary texts (digipak and advertisement)?

Personally, I don't think the connection between my main product and my ancillary products is very strong. 

I think some elements work well but some do not.

The use of pictures of the boys show the connection between the three products but in some places I don't think I've added enough to make the connection stronger.

I realise now, after creating them, that there's a lot to understand when making ancillary products, and that you really have to know your main product to create strong connection between them.

http://vimeo.com/32960645 
The video

Evaluation // Question 1: In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

For the genre of our music video, we chose Indie. This particular genre doesn't really have a fixed video style, although they do tend to be mainly performance based, with other elements added.

With our video, we didn't challenge the conventions of the genre and we didn't exactly stray from them either, we just added our own twist to it. In my opinion, I think we used far more cuts and costume/location changes than most videos of this genre.

We had quite a few influences for our video, the main ones being You Me At Six and Two Door Cinema Club (the band we used as a base).

We chose You Me At Six because we loved their camera work. I think they use a wide variety and it works well with the lyrics and the overall genre 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=na7dwYv0Y-I

Throughout this video, there are constant changes in the camera, with close ups of the lead singer and of the instruments (like ours).

With Two Door Cinema Club, I think we used elements from most of their videos because they work so well with the genre. In particular we used this one:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PorW3y5n1w

We used the element of rapid cuts, but tones them down slightly, although there were small sections where we did use rapid cuts.

We also took the element of wearing suits from The Wombats video 'Techno Fan'

With my ancillary products, I personally don't think they match as well as what they should do, but that is purely down to lack of proper in depth research, though they do work well.

Evaluation // Question 3: How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages? (part 2)

Other pieces of technologies I used were video cameras, memory cards and flip cameras.

Without these vital pieces of technology, we wouldn't of been able to create the music video. 

Without the memory cards all our footage would have been lost and, actually, we wouldn't have been able to film without them. Also with the memory cards, if footage was lost from our hard drive, we would always be able to find it on there (as we advised not to deleted stuff off them in case we needed to go back to it).

It's always handy to have a spare!  

Without the video cameras, we would never have been able to film in the same high quality as what we did. Also, these particular cameras allowed us to view our footage on a small screen so would could focus clearly on the shots and know right then and there what changes we had to make.

These cameras make you feel all professional!

The film cameras we used allowed us to film quick documentaries and conduct small interviews for feedback. We also used a flip camera to film our short animatic at the beginning of the process.

You can literally stick these in your pocket...

Evaluation // Question 4: What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

Evaluation q 4 on Prezi

Evaluation 3

                                            How did we use media technologies? on Prezi

We also used final cut pro in the production to make the whole of our music video. It worked really well for us when we wanted to make short fast jump cuts. The picture above is of all the cuts we used in the clip above the picture. The cuts are around 0.3seconds long each and it was really simple in final cut to make them this short. This edit was also cut to the beat which is Andrew Godwin's theory of cutting to the beat, we used this because we thought it went well with our very fast paced song. 

This is a video of us in the editing our music video in the construction stage.  We used worked on apple macs because it is a lot easier to take screen shots and edit videos using final cut.



This is our finished video in final cut.












The Pictures below shows how we used the push effect to slide between our different shots, we were influenced by Franz Ferdinand music video and decided we want to use the pushing effect, final cut was really simple to add these sort of effects and helped us a great deal in our construction process when wanting to make special effects.

We also used photoshop elements to construct our ancillary products. 

This is our animatic story board, our idea was not totally the same as what we planned but  i am still happy with how it turned out. 

Evaluation: Question 2

I believe that the combination of my main product and ancillary texts are very effective in what I was trying to deliver. Both products hit the main denotations and connotations of an indie band, as both products fit into the indie genre.

For an indie band the video is normally all about performance, you don't normally have fancy special effects or story lines. So from the outset we knew that performance was going to be the main basis for our video and i believe we delivered the performance quite well. The reason that our audience would be able to link our to products is because we are in both of them, this may seem a simple answer, but for an indie band it mostly about what you look like and the style that you are. So in the video we wear different styles of clothing to contrast genres in different locations, however on my ancillary product we wear clothes that are truly us, that is what we look like on a daily basis, because we portray that we are cool, and just guys who write and perform music. Indie bands do not need to make themselves try to look special like lady gaga by wearing a fish, indie bands relate to their audience by just being normal everyday people, and we show this by the clothes we wear in our ancillary products. 

Another thing that links our music video with ancillary product is one of our costumes. In the video we do wear indie clothes, however it is not a main focus point because we were trying to contrast costume with location so the indie costume did not stand out so much. But it is still there, so the audience would still see that costume and as we sing indie music they would assume that is our regular attire, then when they would look at our ancillary product they would see us in similar clothing to one of our costumes, and be able to confirm their thoughts on the indie style that we were trying to portray. 

I believe our target audience would be attracted to both of our products as they would like the quirkiness about it, they would find it a bit more interesting to look at than just a normal performance video as their is another aspect to concentrate on which is the changing of costume and location, I believe they would find this quite enjoyable to see an indie band contradicting different genres with their clothes as it can be quite comical and enjoyable. Moreover the ancillary products would attract them because they would be able to see us in our true style, they would see us as being quite cool and be able to relate to us as a band because we are just normally people. 

The pictures on the left is a comparison between my music video and front panel of my album. As you can see the two costumes are similar in style, they both are something that and indie band would wear to show what genre of music they belong to. The indie attire was only one of our costumes in the video so that the audience could see what we truly are and what you would expect the band to be wearing when performing the song we performed. This is why i think they work well together, because even though our video is a performance video in loads of different costumes, you can still relate the two by one of the costumes we wear.




These two pictures are a comparison between my advert and a scene in our music video. In this particular scene we were wearing pyjamas, this is where we  contradicted what a indie band would actually wear, contrasting the mise en scene with our location, because you do not normally see an indie band playing their guitars in pyjamas next to a fountain. They do not link on first site but the wearing pyjamas was part of doing something different that indie bands do to make their video for interesting to watch. It was us making fun of ourselves and being able to laugh at ourselves, and you can relate the two enough from other costumes we wear.