Final Music Video

Charlotte's - Evaluation Question 1

Charlotte's - Evaluation Question 2

Evaluation Question Two
by: Charlottej22

Charlotte's - Evaluation Question 3

Charlotte's - Evaluation Question 4

Re-filming

Today we re-filmed our music video. We used Patrick as our male role as he was available and well-suited to the role we needed him to convey. We managed to get all the shots re-filmed that we had planned which now means we can get on with editing the new footage tomorrow.

This week...

This week we are working on writing up our evaluations. We need to use different formats to present each question so we both plan to use the bamboo tablet for the technology question as this is a new piece of technology which we feel is really effective for presenting our ideas. For the other questions, we need to ensure we chose a format which will be interesting for others to view.

Charlotte's - Evaluation Question 4 (Picture)

Here is an image I created using Photoshop and drawing with a Bamboo tablet. It illustrates all the technology myself and Shannon used to create our video and ancillary products. I will later do a voice over across the image on order to elaborate on the icons portrayed and form my third evaluation question.

New Feedback

After recieving feedback on our second draft video, we have decided to refilm more of our shots. Below is a shot list of everything we plan to refilm. Our previous male role now has other commitments therefore we will be using Christian as his replacement.

Charlotte's - Evaluation Question 3 (Draft)

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Evaluation Question 3

Charlotte's - Evaluation Question 2 (Draft)

How Effective is the Combination of Your Main Product and Ancillary Texts?

The key link between my music video, Digipak and poster, is the focus on the star image of our artist Verity. On my Digipak the cover image was of a close up of artist and I used a subsequent three facial shots of her, highlighting her beauty and youth. In our video we also had lots of close-ups shots of our artist and she was present in 90% of the video meaning there is a clear focus on her being a young solo artist. 

Our artist is of a pop/country genre and we aimed to target a audience of primarily females aged 13-21. Taking this into consideration we aimed to make our video appealing to this market with the use of a simply narrative that wasn't too in depth or explicit. This was achieved by ensuring that throughout the video our make and female actor never did anymore than simply holding hands, to maintain a sense of innocents.The costumes of our artist are tame, with nude colours and floral patterns that would be worn by this target audience and don't appear too grown-up or formal. It was important for our products to present Verity in a manner that she could be related to by this young age group, but still admired, for her beauty and talent. I tried to continue presenting Verity in this manner within my ancillary products, with the use of simple editing making images black and white, to reduce the impact of a busy colour scheme deterring from Verity's look. The aim of this colour scheme was also to reflect the innocents and demure side of our artist, by stripping our images back to be very natural and pure. Black and white photos also have the connotations of being old fashioned and from the past. I liked introducing this concept to my album as the nature of our artist being country/pop, is based on music that is far more traditional and not a common aspect of today's loud and bold pop names. Although we attempted to remain in keeping with the conventions of modern pop videos,this theme of a demure and youthful artist, presented with a simple look to all our products, is what we tried to maintain.

Within the video and my Digipak there was also the continuity of a theme of love, and heartbreak. This was present in the lyrics of the song, the narrative we depicted and the red colour scheme of my ancillary texts. I also used the teddy bear and rose from the video and incorporated this into my Digipak to act as a memorable symbol of love that would be recognisable to viewers across the products. 

Chralotte's - Evaluation Question 4 (Draft)

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

For all elements of the development of our products, we used Blogger, to account what we were doing, monitor progress, detail any plans we had, and form a complete record of our work. A benefit of using Blogger was that both myself and partner Shannon were able to upload and share our work in one area. Whilst each of our posts is accredited to us personally, the overall Blog forms our work as a team, and was a perfect way to share ideas and represent us together. I've found that the use of our Blog has really aided our evaluation, as we have been able to refer to our previous work with ease, as everything is date ordered and arranged into our labelled categories. Keeping our work on a digital platform has also allowed us to connect all of our products from multiple mediums together. Including the presentation of our final video, website links, and embedded documents. Without our Blog we would have really struggled to organise our work in such a precise manner, the representation of our work would be far less varied and we wouldn't have been able to as easily monitor each other. Meaning tasks may have been repeated or missed out completely.

For the research and planning of our product we really relied on the use of the Internet, primarily Google, to establish current artists and analyse their work. We used YouTube to watch current music videos and establish conventions, and were able to capture clips of inspiration from current videos with TubeChop. We used programmes such as PowerPoint to form slide shows of our findings and uploaded these through websites like Scribd and Slideshare. 

Through the development and planning of our work we made an animoto to present the pitch of our initial idea. Once we had story boarded the planned shots for our video we scanned them in from home and arranged them with our music to form an Animatic using Movie Maker. We took photos, using still cameras, of possible costumes and settings for our video. 

Using our Android mobiles Shannon and I were always able to text each other to arrange meetings for filming and quickly share new ideas or queries. We also messaged each other on Facebook to quickly share photos and other links.

For the production of my Digipak and poster I used Photoshop, as it provided the detail of editing needed to help my products look more professional. Within Photoshop I was able to adjust the lighting, exposure and brightness of my images as well as airbrush minor imperfections. I also was able to cut and manipulate images to fit on my product. I downloaded the free trial of Photoshop at home  and accessed the PicMonkey website for increased editing time out of class. Unfortunately the free version of Photoshop I downloaded was an older version to that of school's so transferring between the two altered the appearance of my work slightly and limited my choice of fonts when at home. However I used Dafont.com to access a wider range of fonts, so I could be selective about the particular font that would represent our artist best. We used Shannon's FinePix S6500 still camera to take the photos for our ancillary products.

When it came to filming our music video we initially used a simple Sony camcorder from school, and tripod. Although this camera was simple to use the quality of images was poor. Fortunately we then had access to a Canon HD camcorder, that had almost identical workings to the previous camcorder, but provided us we the definition we required. For some of our still shots taken to document our filming sessions we used Shannon's professional FinePix camera. Unfortunately we also had to use this camera for the filming of our final video footage, due to a flat battery of our borrowed HD camera. Although this camera produces excellent stills, it is not intended for professional video, and so did not provide the HD we were after, producing blurry zooming. 

 To edit our video we used Final Cut Pro on an Apple Mac computer.Seeing as neither of us had much experience using this software it proved rather challenging, and was difficult to re-create our ideas, however with a little guidance we gained in ability. With this software we able to remove the audio from our clips an overlay the original Taylor Swift version of the song. We also re-timed some of our clips to put them into slow motion, adding emphasis to the shot. Such our final candle scene and during our instrumental where our actress throws the teddy bear. Some of our shots did appear a little darker than we had hoped and so we were able to match lighting across other scenes to improve appearance. For our flash back shots of our actors together, we used stylise effects to soften the camera edges and even add old age sepia tones to our work.

Charlotte's - Evaluation Question 1 (Draft)

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

Our product is of a country/pop genre and our star is a young female solo artist. We therefore attempted to emulate the conventions of similar videos to that of our genre, with other artists such as Taylor Swift, Ellie Goulding, Birdie and Kate Nash. 

The conventions of a music music we have used for our product are;

• Focus on star image, with 90% of shots being of our artist and the frequent use of close-ups highlighting her youth and beauty. This can be scene in all the videos we ananlysing, especially in ones from artists such a Taylor Swift.
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• Lip syncing throughout, important to link audio with video and express emotion through artists expression.
• Cutting with the pace of the song. We tried edit our video to cut shots between lyrics, and on the beat with out fast paced instrumental sections.
• We used a variety of shot distances and positions of our star. 
• Our artists wore a few different outfits to show the change of time and increase variety and interest. In the the videos we evaluated this was also a common idea.
• We attempted to keep most of our shots moving at some level all the time, whether it was with the use of zoom or panning. We read about the importance of camera movement during our research and planning. 'In a typical music video, more than 95% of all shots are moving. Tracking shot, crab, pan, tilt, zoom in or out, character movement. Static singers are never shown, opening her mouth only, in a still shot. At least pan or zoom is used.' It is regarded as a vital convention of music videos, to maintain interest and keep it sleek.

• We used some narrative within our video, which is a convention most common in pop videos and was very popular in the videos of the artists we evaluated such as Taylor Swift. This narrative attempted to follow the lyrics of the song in a Illustrative manner.
• We cut between different scenes and settings to add variety and interest.


• For our instrumental we took inspiartion form Kelly Clarkson's video from her song 'Since you've been gone.' We tried to re-capture the sense of distress and upset through the use of dramatic movements and the symbolism of destroying items from their relationship.

For my poster and Digipak I based the layout around the designs of similar products I analysed in my research and planning. From analysing these currents products of the same genre as mine, I was able to establish key similarities and conventions that I could use in my work. Some of the conventions I followed include;

• I used the same image on my poster as that of my Digipak, to maintain contiuity and advertise the appearence of the album being promoted.
• I used only a few fonts on the poster and Digipak so it wasn't too busy and there was consistency. On the other produsts I assessed the font of the artist's name was almost used as a logo to represent the genre of the artist and be repeated throughout future products to create a brand. I attempted to achieve this myself with the chosen font of my artists name, as it is distinct and recognisable from other artists. 
•  The cover image I chose for my album was a close up shot of our artists face. I chose this shot as it allows the target audience to establish what our artist looks like and it exempiflies her beauty and  youth. As our artist is a newly introduced artists it is especially important to present her appearence to the public, so she can become recognised and well known. When researching I also found that other digipaks of the same genre frequently used close ups on their covers, so I thought it was vital to follow this convention and in turn reflect our genre of pop too.

• For the back cover of my digipak I made sure I included the vital conventions I had identified on other products. This included the presents of a barcode, track list and copyright small print.
• Details on my poster that I had noticed across similar products were the details of the release date of the album, a wesite address or twitter page of the artist in the small print and reviews from magazines of the album's quality.
• In other genre's such as indie, album's can often be rather minimal and simple with panels of a single block colour. However I noticed that with the pop genre albums appear to have an image or pattern on every panel of the Digipak. I therefore followed this convention with the use of pictures covering all of my Digipak, or at least writing and objests on every page.

Final Video

Filming Session 5

Yesterday evening we carried out our final filming session. Unfortunately, the HD camera we borrowed from school did not work and the charger did not fit therefore we could not film in HD. Luckily, I had an alternative camera that we were able to use but the quality is very poor in comparison. As a result, we have a lot of out-of-focus shots. However, we did manage to re-film everything we intended to so we can edit these into our film in our lesson.

Editing

Today we continued to edit our film to ensure that all of our material was in sync and ready for the new shots to be fitted in next lesson. We wanted to make sure that all the shots we plan to keep are in time so that we can focus on the new footage when we have it.

Final Re-film

Our final re-filming session will take place Wednesday 28th November, again at my house. This will be our last chance to get the footage we want before Friday's deadline. We will  need to ensure we have the list of shots that we wrote out last week that we need to shoot.

Today...

In today's lesson, we finished editing our new footage into our video. After watching it through, there are still shots that we are not happy with and would like to change. Next week, we need to organise one last filming session before the deadline which will allow us to get the shots we want. The main issue seems to be the instrumental so we have looked at Kelly Clarkson's video for Since U Been Gone which has given us some inspiration.

Re-Filming

In today's lesson we also organised which of the scenes we still want to tweak and re-film. We found that with our new footage edited into the video, it merely highlighted the lower quality from other sessions, and so we have written up all the final scenes that must be improved slightly. 

Filming Session 4 Images