Vicky Pearce Evaluation Music Video

Evaluation for music video:

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

When we first got the track to create our music video, we wanted to put our own intake on to what we can create and have something different and unique. The type of band we chose was a very hippy and Indy, which would use the conventions of bright lights, unusual settings, and strange props, fun and closes ups of an artist or band. Where a stereotypical hippy indie boy band is bands such as ‘Weatus’ and ‘ JLS’, we didn’t want to create an image of this we wanted to break the usual conventions of having strobe lighting and good looking males. We went against voyeuristic where we decided not to use beautiful ladies dancing half naked or on the other hand males showing off their bodies and figures, videos such as ‘JLS –Beat Again’ and ‘Alex Gaudino Feat. Christal Waters - Destination Calabria’. We wanted to chanallage conventions and as it would use a very strange scenario into a normal everyday situation, and for it to be a unique and fun music video compared to others.
By looking at previous work of Harvey Danger we decided that we didn’t want to do a boy band performance, they hardly ever do a boy band performance but they do like to have shots of them performing as a band, you can see this in their video ‘Harvey Danger - Sad Sweetheart of the Rodeo’.So we have decided to stick to simple and classic shots of the artist.
Too balance out how we broke conventions we have decided to create a strong relationship between visuals and lyrics as shown in Goodwin’s Analysis. For example in our music video we have used “looking into the mirror” and we have then used the artist and the bear both looking into the mirror to begin with, we also used another pay on word where they say “cz i am in hell” and there is the bear sitting and relaxing in a punting boat, which obviously suggests that he is not in hell. This example also pays on the idea of that the artist/bear is crazy and mad.
We have tried to meet all the demands of the record label, by having a variety of shot ranging from extreme close ups to panning shots to show the location. We also after our rough cut added a lot more of the male artist singing to make sure he had enough coverage of the music video.
We have also used a lot of intertextuality by trying to refer some props and locations to very well known movies such as ‘Forest Gump’, ‘Star Wars’ ‘Toy Story’ and ‘ Singing in the rain’. We did this by using the superman cape on the artist, the light saber, eye patch, sword and then the stop motion toy soldiers. We created similar clips to relate to ‘Forest Gump’ by having the bear sitting on the bench meeting new people, and to relate to ‘Singing in the rain’ we had the bear swinging on a lamppost as gene Kelly does. One main intertextuality we have tried to link it to is ‘Peep Show’ they use comedy and fun elements throughout their series, and we have tried to create that in our video, and now they use the song as its theme tune.
I think by purposely breaking some of the conventions it really helped us to create a unique and fun music video that would suit most of the audiences.



2. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

When creating our ancillary tasks we tried not to create an obvious link from the products to our music video, because we didn’t want to just focus on the track but we wanted to sell the whole album to the target audience. On the other hand we wanted to use strong links to integrate the two products together, such as the hippy flower which is very bright and colourful and eye catching to stand out for the audience. In each of the products we also used footprints on the ancillary products, which we thought would create a simple link to the song “flagpole sitter” by how we used the bear in the song. The text we decided to use we tried to connect it to the style of genre of the song, i think it brings a slight rock element to it which links it towards the music video. We also used silhouettes in the poster to show that there is a band in place but because the broke up we didn’t want to add in any faces, and didn’t want to focus on just the main singer. The title “Problems and bigger ones” gives a small link to why we have the road and why it is bending behind and with the sign saying “bend ahead”, we thought that it gives the audience a link to the problems that they have had as a band, by splitting up etc and they have more to come. When looking for research on the band we found that NME found the band “indivuall and fresh” which gives us a good insight to the band and that they were very well known and unique. I think we have created a very unique and memorable style for the band, and that the audience would easily remember it, i think we did this by using very basic and bold colours and also having the element of black and white. When doing further research we found that our digi pack relates to Harvey Dangers actual old products that they have created, very simple and unique, which suggest that we were on the same idea link of what they wanted to create the band. If i had to go back and create the poster or digi packs, i think i would either add some more cartoon style imagery or do a more direct link to the products and music video.


3. What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

We were extremely lucky to get excellent feedback on our music video, by taking a risk by breaking conventions was a success. Doing upbeat changes throughout the video kept the viewers attention and worked well and linked together. The only criticism that we got from the rest of our peer group was that in our rough cut we had a lot of the bear, and not enough of a band performance. So having a discussion with the rest of my group we decided to do some extra filming of the main artist on a different location lip syncing. A very hard element we had to think about is how to please all ages of audience. As an example our peer groups so under 20 they all really enjoyed it and thought it was fun and exciting but people over 20 had different feelings some didn’t understand why we had gone down this route of breaking conventions, but on the other hand they enjoyed it. The only other criticism we got from our peers was that there some people thought there was no storyline and that they couldn’t understand certain aspects of the video, so by changing the start of the music video and having more lip syncing at the start and taking alot of the bear journey out we decided to focus on the main artist, so they had alot of coverage for the record company. Other points that we got good comments on was the stop motion, they said it gave the music video a new and different element, they also liked the bold simple text on top of the video, it was very affective and have just the right amount of it. The simple mise en scene was very affective and works well, for example the PJs, Chicken and duvet cover shows the element of the video being crazy and hippy which links it all back to the ancillary products and what we wanted to create.

4. How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

For creating and developing our music video and all the research that we did before creating the video. We used a lot of new media technologies in constructing it. The main and obvious products we used were the camera, tripods and still SLR cameras to capture images for the ancillary products. Before we even started on making the music video we first had to do was research on the band and what other artist could we link it back to and get some idea of what we wanted to create. Every bit of research we did we posted on to a website called “Blogger” which was to show everything we had thought about and created through this project. We had very successful and positive feedback from peers and students about our blog, saying that we had a wide range of variety of posts and research. The internet was a major part of where our research we did, we went onto website such as “YouTube” where we were able to research other artist and videos to help us illustrate what sort of style we were trying to aim for. It also had videos of how to do Green screen which we were planning to do, but we didn’t have enough time or the right equipment. “Wikipedia”, “Google”, “Google Images” all of these were used for general research and finding out what the original band was like, and how they went out by their success to then breaking up. “ITunes”, “QuickTime” these two programmes were used for finding the track we wanted to create our music video and QuickTime was for us to be able to show what we had created. Finally we used a website called “MySpace”; this was how we got in contact with the band, to ask for permission to use their song. All of these websites helped us so much in finding out about the band and what sort out image they were portraying in what they wanted to achieve this gave us a stepping stone in what to create and trying to stick to the conventions.
To create the ancillary products we used a programme called Photoshop, this was very useful to create the image we wanted to do. It helped us to experiment with different textures and colours we could use to get the best look, we also used this programme to create mood boards at the beginning of the project. But the main programme we used to create the music was Final cut; there would be no way we could have created what we have without it. It introduced new elements we could use in the music video such as the writing on the video, the speed of the clip and the lighting. It was a very helpful programme to make sure we got the right clip and could edit it to the best of our ability.