Evaluation Questions

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

Our finalised music video successfully fits the conventions of a typical love song for many reasons. The narrative takes the form of a love sequence and makes references to well known love films e.g 'The Notebook', bike riding scene. We did, however make it evident that it was a music video by establishing the artist and distinguishing the difference between him and his lady. One factor we were happy with was how we managed to link the lyrics with the visuals and music, making it more meaningful and believable through characters, concluding in a very sensitive love piece to attract our intended target audience. Our direct notion has been achieved through our camerawork, as we used POV shots to represent happy montages between the couple. As they are looking directly into the camera it gets the audience comfortably involved in the full extent of the relationship, not as if they are intruding. Again, the editing conforms to the conventions of the theme of love, mainly through our colour scheme. We converted the the lonely, sad times into black and white, whereas the happy montages where we used a warm summers day end colour. It allows the audience to adopt the characters emotions and understand their thoughts and feelings throughout. The only way in which we could have challenged our product would be by subverting from the typical 'happy ending' and followed an alternative ending. An example of this would be killing off the female character at the point of climax where the audience are led to believe she will return to the male character. We considered this as a potential ending, however due to lack of time and props we decided against the idea.

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

The combination of our main product and our ancillary texts are very effective in establishing the artist to suit our intended female audience through the romance displayed. All three products follow a similar colour scheme, contrasting between light and dark colours, allowing them to appear iconic to the artist, as opposed to just one of his songs. It is representative of an album makes the artist more recognizable to an audience. We also include an iconic symbol of a rose in both the magazine advertisement and our digipak. Through the close up effect of portraying the artist it successfully attracts our intended target audience as it shows the artist in positive light, therefore presenting as a person that the audience can relate to, as well as his music.

3.) What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

We learnt a lot of the audience feedback process. Initially the pitch we performed was a success capturing people's attention and generally being thought of as a good idea for a love song. Our only real criticism was the curiosity and concern that it may portrayed more as a film scene than a music video and that we may be pushing boundaries. We bared this in mind and successfully avoided that hurdle as we distinguished the artist very clearly through many different elements, particularly camerawork and editing. After completing the rough cut it was given very positive feedback. The chosen colour scheme and emotive skills by Alannah and myself were regularly commented on. Our only negative feedback was given towards our editing process. We were told to shorten certain shots as they were too uncomfortably for the audience to watch and didn't fit the tempo of the music. We were also told to neaten up the montages with an effect to make it feel more like a home movie. We took this advice into consideration and fixed the changes. The longer shots were cut down, which proved to fit much nicer with the music allowing the video to flow more. We also decided to add a vignette effect to the montage clips which visually made it appear more from the perspective of the character through a video camera and worked beautifully. Overall the feedback we were given through the process was great, allowing us to develop and create a fantastic music video.

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

There were a range of media technologies we had to use in order to develop our final product. To construct our video we had to use Final Cut, which was good as every member of our group was familiar with the programme from the previous year, therefore allowing us to work faster and more efficiently. To develop our magazine advertisement and digipak we had to use Photoshop. This was another programme we were happy to use as three members of our group were used to using it from their photography work. Again this allowed to us to work faster and develop a better product. the advanced level of the programme's we were using allowed us to be extremely creative with our work, particularly the editing processes. This is because we were able to add effects to our products to make them look more professional than we expected, and only on rare occasion would it slow us down.

Homework - Director's commentary

Director's commentary can be presented as a video insert on a separate channel on the DVD. This commentary is a standard procedure when presenting additional media on a programmed DVD. In some cases you may see an interviewer and in other cases you will only see the director answering questions. Questions from interviewers could be, "What were your inspirations?" "Some critics say...what is your answer to these comments?" The directors usually give quite long, detailed answers.

The director usually talks about where the music video was shot and when, and why the director decided on these places and shots. The commentary also usually includes clips from the film/music video to demonstrate the director's points.

Magazine Cover ideas

Our Digipak

Magazine advert draft

This is the draft for our magazine advert. We have layered an image of a 'love letter' behind and above an image of our artist. We did not want to use many effects and graphics as we feel our image is a very strong, emotional one which did not need much editing. By rubbing out the writing on our artist's face, we made his face stand out more, giving a 3D effect. We used  a slight sepia tone in the image to keep with our visual theme of sepia vs black and white, and we used the image of the love letter to also link with our other visual theme of letters/love.
We need to add a website and a kind of record label. We have also decided to change the layout slightly by moving the title as we feel it takes the eyes away from the artist too much. We also are going to change the date to 'out now' and remove the 'hmv.com' and the shadowing as it doesn't fit in with the image.

Visual Themes

The visual theme amongst our products (Music Video, Magazine Cover and Digipak) is the contrast of colours, interchanging between black and white, and the warm, golden, summers day effect.  Both effects resemble different emotions displayed by the characters with the black and white representing the sad times, and the warm colours taking the form of the characters happy times through montages.

For our digipak the front cover consist of an image revealing the artist. We intend on scheduling a photo-shoot so that we can use professional shots for our cover.

Another one of the main themes of our video is, obviously, 'love'. This is shown in our video through the narrative, and the whole idea of the album will be that it is a romantic, loving album. We want to tastefully convey the idea of love, and are thinking about using images such as love letters, roses and shots of our artist showing emotion to convey this theme. We also are going to use colours such as red/green and black to keep fitting in with this idea of love.

Font research for our magazine advert/digipak

We want to go for a soft, swirly font, like calligraphy. We looked at calligraphy on dafont.com and our favourites our these:

Analysis of magazine adverts

We have done some research on other student's and real examples of magazine adverts.

This is an example of a group of students' work from 2010.

We really like this image. The overlaying of images of swirls, music notes and the girl is extremely effective and creates a sensitive, romantic atmosphere. The colours, soft pinks and greys, also matches the romantic mood. The swirly, soft writing is effective, as well as the slight shadowing they used underneath it, reinforcing the band's name and song title.
As our video is a love song and is very romantic, we feel this kind of magazine advert would fit in well with our visual themes of colour/black and white, writing and love.
We have created a mood board with the kind of images we would like to use, and to test out our idea of overlaying images.

Our Final Music Video!

We feel our music video was a great success and turned out better than we had hoped it would. Our initial ideas did not happen the way we wanted due to timing issues and money, however we were able to successfully adapt our ideas to suit the deadlines and create a moving piece. One of our most successful ideas came by accident; Joe accidentally filmed Alannah in our test shots shakily and it was actually really effective, so we came up with the idea of using handheld cameras, like home videos, in our memory montage. We also thought of an alternative ending, which was that Alannah was running to Joe's house and was dramatically hit by a car, and the letter blew away, so Joe would never know she was going back to him. Unfortunately, we could not film this because of time constraints, and we also felt that this ending would over-dramatize the video and would be too obvious, as it would have included more running shots to build the tension.

Feedback for our rough cut

1. Goodwin: Good narrative and easy to understand; slow paced editing fits in with genre; lyrics+visuals - some lyrics could be highlighted more; good use of invisible camerawork
We are glad we have achieved the effect we wanted; for the video's narrative to be easy to understand and to fit in with the genre.
2. Editing: Pace fits music and editing is very natural; use of black and white works well; fade works well and could use more; doesn't need much more editing to keep natural style.
We're going to look into using effects such as fading and cross dissolves. We don't want to add too many effects as we would like to keep the video natural and not distracting.
3. Camerawork: shots steady with shaky hand held camera being a good contrast; could have a bigger variety of types but not a necessity; overall very good and clever shots.
We feel our shots have a good amount of variety, and any more would distract from the narrative. But we will look into our clips and see if we have any more different shots to use, to see how they'd fit in.
4. Mise en scene: Bikes were a good prop to match summer season and the happiness; costume was related and casual which matched feel of the song; location matched the music as well because the happy points were always outside
We are happy that the audience feel the location and props fit in well, as these were inspirations from the film The Notebook, one of the most romantic films of all time, and we are happy they worked well.
5. Creativity and Performance: very well lip synced, roles very convincing and adorable; story line suited the song and was very clear.
We wanted to convey a deep, meaningful emotion and glad this came across tastefully.

Overall, our feedback was really successful. We have a few more shots to add in and will use the feedback's ideas of using more effects such as fading/dissolving. We will also think about different styles of shots to use for which we'll need the emergency filming day.

Rough Cut