Evaluation Question 4 - How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

When making this mass media music video we used many resources that were all open to us to help us achieve a wider understanding and knowledge upon music video and on how to create the best piece we could. The first piece of technology that we were again introduced to from previous years was Blogger. Blogger has always helped when completing the research and planning stage, it gives us a platform in which we can store our work and able to update and add to at any time, this technology has always helped me personally in able to keep up with the kind of things I need to be looking for when creating a project. In this case it helped me analyse music videos and create a better experience when coming to the construction stage of our music video.

Another piece of equipment we used and are used to is the camera that becomes provided for us. These HD cameras are very userful when getting the job done. They shoot in 720p which has a nice high definition which looks good on Youtube and easy to render. We have used these cameras before and were used to them so it allowed us to experiment with more things that we could do with them, such as the focus pull shot that we used in our final product, this was a creative shot that we had never tried before and learnt about on a trip to New York. We found this camera to be very efficient when creating a piece like we did, it helped us create entertaining and inventive shots that we did not know we could do before we filmed this project.

Another camera we used was a DSLR camera when taking pictures for our digipak and magazine advert. This camera had a high quality lens and camera itself which provided us with great quality pictures and variety of angles and zoom which we felt happy with. These kind of quality angles and pictures allowed us to create a almost expertly created image with the editing software we also used, which was adobe photoshop. The photoshop looked professional and had an impact when shown to our audience because it had this feel which made them want to buy the digipak.
Another piece of technology we used was editing software. We used software such as iMovie and Adobe Photoshop. We used iMovie to edit our movie as we felt our music video did not need a professional software to make it look nice, however we did want to put it onto something like sony vegas pro to provide a high definition colour correction. This is a reason why when looking at our  digipak when compared to our music video it has a lot better colour correction because it was edited on adobe photoshop which is a professional software used when editing photos, this is why it ha
s a larger impact upon our audience.

Evaluation Question 3 - What have you learned from your audience feedback?

When creating our first rough cut for our music video we did not know what to expect but wanted to see what our audience thougth about what we had created. The comments were impressed by what we had already achieved but at the same time had some issues with a lot of things that we knew we needed to change. With this first rough cut we had a lot of good comments like "The storyline is clear" or "I liked the focus pull shot"  which helped us learn what our audience wanted to see like more creative shots really appealed to them and making the storyline clear also really helped the impact. This being said they also mentioned that "The camera man can be seen in the guitar" this became a main issue for us because we really didn't want to break continuity so we immediatley went back to editing and changed it so he could not bee seen in the reflection. Another comment was about jump cuts on the female walking out of the house, they felt like "this was confusing to the rest of the narrative" we knew that we needed to cut this if it confused our audience, so we again learnt that our audience enjoyed a clear storyline so the narrative was something we really wanted to focus on for rough cut 2.

For our rough cut 2 we had made changes upon mainly our narrative as this is where we felt most of the problems were and the feedback showed this. This time the comments were a lot more focused upon the performance and the artist, saying that the timing was out and not in sync, this helped us learn that we needed to focus on both areas not just one, the commentss helped us see what we didn't before and gave us an in depth analysis which we needed to focus more upon, so when reaching our rough cut 3 we really wanted to make it as close as we could to our final product to see what kind of comments our audience would give us. When reaching our final rough cut before our final product we really wanted to clench it down to the best we could but at the same time try some things. In our previous rough cut we heard a lot of feedback upon the artist so this was our main focus in this final rough cut, we sorted out all syncing issues firstly and made sure it looked all good and professional but at the same time we looked at some of Josh Records videos and were looking for what we could add, we added this black and white effect upon the artist which Josh Record used in his other music video for 'Bones'. We again showed this to our audience to see how they would react, surprisingly they did not like the colour correction at all, so we had to scrap it and move to one which would more suit our narrative, this showed to us that we made the right decision when trying to create Josh Record in this different style than he is currently placed in.

All in all our audience feedback allowed us to gain a deeper knowledge and conclusion of our rough cuts which ultimately led to the creation of the best final piece that we felt we could of made. The audience feedback helped us so much throughout our editing process when we did not know what more needed to be added and how much better we could make it.

Evaluation Question 2 - How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

When we created our main music video we had a clear idea upon where we were going to go with it and what we wanted to create but for our ancillary we did not know what we were going to create. When we look back at our music video we see it has an underlying war theme upon it as seen in the picture. We wanted to take this theme and put it into our ancillary task. We wanted to base our ancillary task upon our music video and link it together, so we focused more on our ancillary after we had created our music video or at least had the material shot.

We did this when going out to take pictures for our magazine and digipak by bringing a commonly known war item a gun, this gun was fake of course for safety issues but it looked realistic and when brought out onto our photos made it seem more war themed because this key item was there. we also used run down and rural areas which were very empty to again keep this theme of war as this has a key connotation to war. As you can see we kept this theme of war between the two photos tasks to make it have some kind of link between them, we did want them to be different but for our audience to understand the theme and to still keep it connected to Josh Record.

Another theme was love in our piece. We showed a connection between our two narrative characters well when creating our music video by making them hug and kiss to instantly show that they are a couple and in love to our audience, we showed intensity in the artist in our ancillary but this does not necessarily link to love. This is a kind of difference we had between them

When comparing our ancillary and main task together we see a combination of material which we wanted to make look professional and well thought through. The images we used for our ancillary were all scouted out location wise and thought through thoroughly into what we wanted our artist to be doing. The same applies to our music video, we thought extensively upon how to create it and make it look as professional as possible. The colour corrections and editing for our ancillary were all done on professional software to really hit that main focus and trying to make it effective to our audience by making the professionality allow it to be want to be bought and used.

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

For our music video we wanted to take ideas from music videos also released by our artist however we had a very limited amount and the ones we did see from our artist Josh Record was really not the kind of style we pictured him in. Due to this we wanted to create Josh Record in a new image which we felt would appeal to a wider audience. The first idea we had is we wanted to make him a singer songwriter genre, to do this we focused on other singer songwriters like Ed Sheeran and Passenger. We looked at specific videos by these artists and see what we could do with them.

The first thing we came across was artist shots that we really liked in the music video by Passenger is the artist shots in the field, we really liked these kind of shots being hidden behind grass and weed, which is what we mimicked in our music video, almost copying this technique allowed us to reach extensive and professional shots. Some more shots that we really liked from this video is the close ups of the guitar, again we copied these onto our music video  because we found them impacting and different than usual expectations, we tried to create different angles however looking down the guitar rather than up in the Passenger video because we found this angle more affective at seeing what is being played.




Another video we looked at extensively this time for our narrative would be "Wake me up when september ends" by Green Day, this video is about a couple where the boy goes to war, which is very similar to our music video, we looked towards this piece for inspiration to our video, in how they created the couples relationship and how they showed him going to war. After analysing this video a lot we felt like it again isn't the kind of route we wanted to create as the montage of there relationship we found to be too difficult to recreate and found to be too common amongst videos so we wanted to get a connection to the audience instantly by using verisimilartude which is a theory about making the piece seem similar to real life, we did this by making it start with a disruption rather than happiness but the disruption gets repaired quickly, this links into the lyrics making it have references that the audience can pick up upon.

Our Final Magazine Advert

Our Final Digipak

Our Final Music Video

Digipak Analysis

This is a digipak by the well known pop artist Rihanna, she uses certain colours and text to appeal to her audience of late teens to early 20 year olds. She firstly does this by the text, it looks professional and more mature when in comparison to s teen star like Jessie J, this kind of style of font looks like it could be used at proffessional events this is how she appeals to her later classy teens, which is a different kind of audience for Rihanna as she is known as a "sex" idol. Breaking on to the point of her being a sex idol she does do this through the colour of red in this piece, the colour red is everywhere and this connotes danger as most commonly seen as this kind of connotation so maybe she is trying to promote herself as kind of an antagonist who goes against the rules which links in to her appealing to late teens as rebellion is most commonly linked to teens.

The roses also have a huge connotation to the artist of Rihanna because there is a well known saying whihc goes "every rose has a thorn" this is commonly used when speaking about a good looking individual in this case it would be Rihanna and it means that there is always some bad in anyone, in this case Rihanna is saying that although she may seem sweet and nice on the outside she has some hidden dark side that she is hiding away.

Other Students Music Video

Genre - The genre of this piece is clear pop, we can tell this by the fast paced cuts and transitions that make it appealing to a younger audience. We can also tell it is pop through the use of many artist shots and the artist being the main part of the narrative which is commenly found in most pop videos as it makes the audience connect with the artist more. Finally the use of close ups make it pop genre as well because pop is all about promoting the artist by doing this through close ups really helps.

Narrative -The narrative although hard to understand sometimes is about a relationship where in which the girl cheats on the main protagonist guy, they showed this through the texts with all the kisses and asking to meet up.

Representation - This video has limited representation as it wasn't clearly thought through and doesn't make sense in areas however the black and white effect has connotations to the past and what has come of their relationship, how it has turned to darkness.

Audience - The audience for this piece is clearly teenagers through the sue of teenage outfits and the whole teenage love and fighting going on. This appeals to this audience because they fele like they can relate to the characters in this piece, mainly the protagonist, if anyone has cheated on them, they feel like they know the pain.

Institution - The institution for this piece is a mass industry as it is quite clear to be a pop video and appeal to a huge audience however the kind of camera and shots use make it seem very low budget and niche although this is something which was not intentional.

Todorovs Theory

Todorov devised a theory upon music videos, focusing upon the narrative of the music video, he believed music video went through 5 stages of a narrative, these are:

Equilibrium - This is when the introduction of the characters and the main themes are shown.
Disruption - This is when some kind of disturbance or a break from the equilibrium norm happens, this is usually when a antagonist is introduced, if there is one.
Recognition - This is when the protagonist or other characters notice the disruption and start to device some kind of way to fix this disruption.
Repair - This is when the execution of the fix happens and nearly always successeds but leads on to everything having some sort of norm.
Equilibrium - This is when it rotates back to the start and has some sort of norm again.

In this video we see the equlibrium being them winning all these medals and being some of the best figure skaters in the world. The disruption would be the guy hurting his ankle and not being able to compete which leads on to the repair being Robbie Williams stepping in and trying to skate really well to win the competition. Then the equilibrium would be them winning the competition and it being back to normal. The protagonist is also the antagonist in this piece being Robbie Williams because he is horrible to his co worker which is the guy skater because Robbie is in love with the girl in this video.

Lyric Analysis and Their Importance

Lyrics are a key component when creating a music video, as they are the whole basis for the video and the meaning, if the video has no meaning to the lyrics then the music video can seem pointless and disinterest audiences. So this being considered for our music video we will need to analyse lyrics and see what kind of connotations we can take from it or literal narrative we can use for our music video. These are the lyrics for my music video:

And so our sun may set, we've been in winter for so long

Don't give up on me yet, I will give you what you deserve

Though our arguments are many, and your eyes are always sore

I promise you we'll get there, this war is almost won

This war is almost won

And lose if you have to

Oh lose if you have to

Cause I've been putting you through this hell for so long

As long this stands your choice my dear, don't lose or we have won

Don't let your heart grow cold, when you go to sleep upset

Grow with me till we're old, we will find a way to heal

The bruises that will appear, from choices long ago

Hold on to our love my dear, don't think it's dead and done

When this war is almost won

And lose if you have to

Oh lose if you have to

Cause I've been putting you this hell for so long

As long this stands your choice my dear, don't lose or we have won

I'm running round in circles drinking whiskey and your wine

To drown the sound of endless questions in your mind

Forget the way I treated you and trust that I will love you better

Give me all your patience, give me time

Give me all your patience, give me time

Give me all your patience, give me time

From the start of the song we see a hidden meaning from the first line "And so our sun may set, we've been in winter for so long" this has a hidden meaning to their relationship it means that the sun setting connotes the spark in their relationship is diminishing and he doesnt her to give up on him as the second line connotes that even though they have had some bad times previously they the good times will come soon is what he is trying to say. "This war is almost won" this connotes the war of their relationship and how he is saying that the that the bad is almost done and it will be good again. "Oh lose if you have to" this connotes the relationship again and he is saying that if you can't do it then you can leave if you must.

Lip Syncing Importance

Lip syncing is extremely important when creating a music video because errors in music videos are a lot more noticeable than on films, so if the song is out of time to the music say if the beat is off or the singing to the camera is off then it can be noticed much easier than anything else because you have the music to show.
A bad example of lip syncing would be this music video: 
In this music video we see the whole lip syncing completely out of time, notice how because of this it distracts away from the video and makes you notice only the bad lip syncing. When we compare a video like that to something that has perfect lip syncing we notice a massive difference. Notice in the song by Pharrell the lip syncing is in time and because of this you do not feel distracted by that and can watch the video and enjoy it. This shows how important lip syncing can be so when I come to making my music video we will make sure in post production to get all the lip syncing, synced up correctly to not let the audience be distracted from our work upon the narrative as well as the artist.

Magazine advert analysis 2

This is a magazine advert for the artist Jessie J. Its target audience is early to mid teens, we can tell this by the kind of 'rebellious' look she portrays in the dark colours and clothing she has on her, these kind of darker colours connote bad and rebel from a teenage perspective, this makes is easy for the artist to connect with her audience if she looks like them, this way it creates this image that the audience know and will follow because of there favourate artist is doing so.

The font is tinted and has a sort of signature style this connotes the signature to the audience making them believe they have some kind of autographed special magazine advert, this makes it seem personal to the audience making it more likely for them to buy it. Another stand out feature is the use of black and white, these two colours are very definable and show two different contrats maybe this connotes her personality and it means that you can either love or hate Jessie J, this is a kind of iconography that the artist wants to portray.