Final Music Video

One Side Of The Story, Jack Simmons

Final Digipak and Advert

Evaluation Q4: How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Evaluation Q3: What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Evaluation Q2: How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

We have tried to make the music video and the ancillary products so that they share similar imagery, making it clear that they all relate to our artist. We have done this is several ways; the location, the props and the proxemics.

Location:

We have used the same location for our ancillary products as the one in the music video. Therefore there is an immediate connection between the song and the album.

Props:

The main icon of Jack is his guitar. Therefore we felt it appropriate to include it in the ancillary products. He is seen on the advert and the album cover holding his guitar up high and inside the digipak there is a picture of his guitar that goes across the three panels. By making this one guitar an icon of Jack it means that the audience will recognise this being related to Jack when they see it. Using it in both the video and the ancillary products ties the three products together with the artist.

Proxemics:

Most of the video is just Jack as we wanted to make sure that he was the focus as an emerging artist. Therefore, we did the same thing for the digipak and advert by having just him in the photo. As an extreme long shot, it shows Jack's isolation and how the music he performs is his and no one else's. We tried to make it so that this would be connoted in both the video and the ancillary products.

We tried to follow the general conventions to make sure that our products did relate to one another. Coldplay is a good example of this. On the left is the album cover for Mylo Xyloto and on the right a magazine advert for the said album. These clearly are part of the same campaign as shown by the font and the bright colours. We did this with our digipak and advert by having the same image used on the front of the digipak and advert. We also used the same font and colour, so like the Coldplay example we have closely linked our two ancillary products together which is crucial from a marketing perspective.

This is the video for Coldplay's song Charlie Brown, a song off of the Mylo Xyloto record. There is clear resemblance between the ancillary products and the video. Firstly, they have stuck with the bright, neon colours that have become an icon for Coldplay throughout this album cycle. This is shown through the lighting of the video the costumes and the props (instruments and neon paint). At the very beginning of the video there is opening credits, one of which is the bands name. They have used the same font as that used for the album and the advert which links the video to the other products and this particular album.

Although colour is not something we could really use as away of tying our products together we have done it through using the same location for the video and ancillary products and also having the same icon, Jack's guitar.  We've also used the theme of flying in all three products. In the video there is a shot of toy planes in the sky and there is also one in the advert and album cover image in the background. The album name, Taking Off, also connects with the idea of planes and flying. As Jack is a new artist starting out we felt that this would be something good show throughout the products as it is a metaphor for his career taking off.

Evaluation Q1: In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Use:

• Performance based with little narrative
• Features the artist - particularly important for new artists to get recognition which is why we chose to focus on performance.
• Variety of shots - to keep the audience interested.
• Lip syncing
• Props (guitar)

Develop:

• Focused on performance
• Experimented with edits - speeding up (the last shot), slow motion (first shot), extended video over song (beginning and end). This is done in some videos, but not considered a main convention. Usually they are kept the same length as the song, particularly if it is likely to be shown on music channels. Longer videos tend to get cut for TV anyway to the length of the song. People will only get to see the full video online in a lot of cases, Youtube being the prime site.

Challenge:

• Little narrative which could also be seen as challenging conventions
• Only the artist in the video, because of the amount performance and he is the only one in the narrative.

This question is mainly answered through this powerpoint:

                         

Evaluation Q1 from Rachel1234

Evaluation of Project

Things we would improve:

If we were doing this project again I think we would have to be prepared for the amount of filming we actually need. When we did our rough cut and showed it to our audience, the main criticism was that our shots were too long. When we came to reedit we cut in others parts that we had already filmed. One of the problems of filming outside is that it is very difficult to anticipate weather conditions, therefore we could only really do the filming in one day, because otherwise the continuity would be out. Thus, if we could go back and do this again, I think we would definitely have to plan more shots to film, especially considering the length of the song and how much editing there is in real music videos. 

Another thing to improve would be the lip-syncing. One of the problems we had was getting the clip to match up exactly to the music when we came to editing. This was down to both ourselves and the artist. Sometimes we would have shots that on some parts of it would look like he was out of sync, but towards the end of the shot we would be in time. This was very hard to fix when we struggled to find enough good footage to use. Some of the lip syncing issues were probably down to us not matching it up quite right of Final Cut. 

By doing this project and especially during the editing process, it definitely shows us how challenging music videos can be, despite most of them only being 3 to 4 minutes long.

The opportunism of filming:
Some of the things we ended up with were down to chance, for example the shots at the beginning with the couple in the distance wasn't planned and just happened to be something we caught on camera. Also the weather conditions that we experienced meant we could experiment with silhouette shots and have the sunset at the end. The original day we planned to film was very cloudy and so had we managed to film that day, our end result would be very different to the one we have now.