filming 2

The second time filming Sarah was the only person to be there, this was due to Alex being at work and I was on holiday.The venue was a hall in Eltham , we chose it because it was cheap and easy to use.The filming was better then the first time with the correct movement but the lighting was not good and the scenery did not look right.So we would have to arrange another film shoot.

Final cut

Final Cut from Sarah Chamberlain on Vimeo.

Evaluation Question 1

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

Performance music videos pre-date the 1980s. Before MTV, performance music videos were exactly as the term suggested, music performances captured on video. These were used solely as promotion and often called "the promo clips." The rise of MTV started a creative fervor to explore the medium further. Armond White in a New York Press article wrote "The popularity of music video derived from the new thrill of putting imagery to music, the surprise of making graphics out of the beat."

Our music video uses a variety of music video conventions throughout, which is what we were aiming to do with our task, but also challenges any of them along with the production of it aswell.

Performance videos Are mostly used by bands.This type of video is used for bands because this makes the viewer absorbed in the energy of the performance.Our group decided this was the best type of video to create , firstly because as a consumer we enjoy watching these types of music videos and secondly we believed we could create an authentic performance videos by using the conventions of a music video.The group at first was thinking of maybe using a narrative for the video but we all agreed the style and genre of the band was best suited a video focuses on them performing.

To make the video realistic to our target viewer we had to use the conventions of a performance video such as

- Quick cuts
- A variety of camera shots
- A combination of camera angles used
- A well lit set
- The correct camera movement

HTML scrollbox

Firstly we used a lot of the usual conventions of media products by using a lot of the ordinary, basic shots that can be found in many famous music videos, this makes the music video easily viewable for our audience and easily accessible.The shots we aimed (and succeeded) in using the singers face shot,

this seems to hold some importance as it lets the audience quickly develop an unspoken connection with the singer in the video, as if he (the singer) is singing to the audience himself, it also identifies them to the audience letting them know who it is, and making it easily recognizable for later on,a very usual convention of music videos. The shots in the video use are mainly close ups , focusing on the performers eyes , mouth and face to connect the emotion of the performance between the audience and the band.This is also to make sure that the viewer can identify who the lead singer is in the band.

In our video we have a lot of guitar solos , so Alex ,Sarah and I thought i was necessary to put close ups of the solos in the video so that when the viewer watches the video they need to know where the sounds are coming from.The close ups were used to see finger work and to get the viewer involved with the song and beat.In a performance video close ups of different parts of the drum are used to give the sense of rhythm to the viewer.

I feel the group and I have successfully utilized typical conventions in media through our shot choices, using classic and recognizable methods of shooting our band for example switching between the instruments and vocals.The Editing was synchronized with the pace of the music which matches the convention of a performance video giving the viewer a video easy on the eye to watch.
above you can see the drummer in the foo fighters video "pretender" and the one in ours, the shots and camera movements are exactly the same.Music videos give a voyeur impression on the viewer so i believe our video looks professional because our camera movement makes the viewer seem like they are there on the stage with the group.The combination of shots and angles makes the video look professional just like a real media product, below is more comparisons on conventional shots in a performance video which we have used.

evaluation question 2

Final film shoot

Filming 3

The final time we filmed was the first time we all filmed together, this proved very usual hence why the footage was good enough because we communicated well and worked good as a team.We would swap with each other on filming so that each member of the group participated in the filming.While one person filmed the other two would talk about the next shots to film making the filming process run very smoothly.

Filming 1

The first filming took place during december when it snowed , because of the snow i was the only person able to get to london to film the video.I got there two hours late leaving me with only two hours to film.This made it very hard to film good quality footage.The venue also had a problem the lighting which i was guaranteed had broke meaning i had to gather as many lamps candles as possible which still was not enough.When i came to school the next day Mrs told me the camera movement was not right for the video which was correct (it was to still).So this meant the group would have to film another day.

Stages for the Ancillary task

Creating The Digipak Cover

View more presentations from abee1.

Pitch 1

The first pitch was to rent a music studios in london .This idea was presented to Mrs Mc Cluckie and after telling her the idea of a band performing in a studio she agreed it was a good idea.The venue would supply any instruments we needed and also had lighting. But things never go to plan click here to see what happened i went to film at this place.

The video above is the venue of another band and it convinced us that we could make a video just like it .

Band photos

The original idea for our front cover was to use the band members , but due the time of year we ended up having limited time to take the pictures therefore making us rush . You can see we rushed by looking at the two pictures showing bad positioning , blurry and one of the members has been cut out of the frame. These pictures were taken on the same day as the filming outside the location , now looking back if we planned a separate date to take pictures we could have focused on them a lot more because on that day the filming was the main focus.

Another problem was the band itself , they were easily distracted and were not good at taking instruction .As you can see 3 of them are looking different ways and only the guy on the left listened to instruction to look at the camera .So if we had people who were good to work with the task would of been a lot easier .

Ancillary task

Poster advertisement

Digipak

Evalution question 3

What have you learned from your audience feedback ?

The way we got the audience feedback was a screening in class our rough cut , this was important because it showed us the viewers perception on our early stages of the video. This screening would tell us what is good or bad about the music video. Each individual watching had a small piece of paper to put down their thoughts,It was key to get the feedback on the early development of the editing so that is the feedback was bad the editing process of the video can be started again to save crucial time . Fortunately our target market was late teens and young adults meaning to get the people for the feedback was easy because it was our age group at school .

Audience Feedback from Sarah Chamberlain on Vimeo.

The first bit of feedback we got was from our rough cut, the class had a screening and wrote down their opinions.We got good strong feedback on how the video could be improved such as

- Quick cuts

- Guitar solo out of syn

-More obvious when guitar is playing solo

After receiving the criticism for the rough cut we used facebook to get feed back to see if improvement was made and whether our final cut was good enough.Facebook was the best way to get feedback because our target market was our age group and my friends on the website were in that age group.The comment we got was really positive meaning our final product was good enough for out audience.

The comments overall were great telling us that no more work was reqjjjjjuired to make this a successful video .

I am happy with the way we used the feedback to get to our finished result looking at the rough cut to the final cut , i can happily say the feedback helped us make the end product more cleaner in places and made it look much more professional.

Evaluation question 4

Question 4

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

Right from the start of the year when we found out about what our project was for our A2 coursework we have used many different media technologies to prepare ourselves for it as well as when we were constructing the coursework. The very first thing that we did was to design our header for our media blog. This was done using the program photoshop. This program wasn't new to us because we used it for our year 12 coursework so we just had to remind ourselves of how to use the program. The program photoshop became very important throughout the whole project as it was needed to edit photos that we wanted to use for our Digipack and pictures for our website.





Final Cut Pro Mozilla Firefox Photoshop CS4 Video CameraYouTubeVimeoGrab Tool




The big help definitely came in the construction stages of our work.Without the aid of tools like Final Cut being able to edit down our video, it would be very difficult to piece together seperate pieces of footage and be extremely time consuming on the day of filming, and thusly by using programmes like Final Cut it made the process significantly easier.At the end of year 12 Mrs Mcluckie gaves us time to practice making a video and editing it , this was a big help to me but i still struggled.Luckily Alex was a quick learner on using final cut , so he was the main person in the group editing the video ,with Sarah and I giving him ideas on the construction of the video.The editing of the video was the longest process because while editing the video the group as a whole was still learning for example we learnt towards the end how to do colour correction to make the video look more professional.





Another technology we used throughout the project was the Internet using firefox. This was a major part of our planning stage as we had to research things such as, costumes and ideas for our video, settings for our video, also different fonts we could use for our Digipack and Website.Below is a link to the website Dafont which became very helpful to me and my group throughout the project. This gave us a variety and choice when it came to Designing our ancillary tasks.

http://www.dafont.com/


To help us in the research for target audience Uk Tribes was used.This website gives you information on trends, behavior and general likes/dislikes of different groups of people.UK Tribes was born in 2005, when Channel 4 commissioned crowd DNA (then called Ramp Industry) to run a project called TV Glue, which looked to measure how TV could remain a unifying force in the midst of media fragmentation.


For our research the internet sites like youtube and vimeo helped us to analyze music videos and see what conventions music videos have.

















The camera we used to film the music video was a Sony DCR-HC62 .This camera was ideal for us to use because it was easy to move round the stage and because we was making a performance video it easy to hold since we wanted natural camera movement for the video.The picture quality could of been better but this is due to the camera being out dated , the negatives in technology is it is always updating .
The last bit of important equipment was the Mac computers in the classroom.As a student i realized i was lucky to use these computer for course work because they are the best media based computers.Final cut can only be used on a mac based platform meaning, if these computers were not in our possession we could end up having to use a cheaper less quality software to produce our coursework.

123

Final Cut Pro Mozilla Firefox Photoshop CS4 Video CameraYouTubeVimeoGrab Tool

Poster

Album cover research

Originally for the digipak front cover , the idea was to use pictures of the band on the front cover , but after researching the band digipaks we noticed that they dont require the actual band on them .The majority use symbolism, logos or different concepts so after realizing this we chose to design an album which has a concept .

digipak

Digipak ideas

Band names

The band we filmed were not an actual band and the song was not done by an unknown artist, so we had to get a name for the band.This was very hard and took us a while because we couldnt think of a name which suited the image of the band.

But we finally came up with some names and they are the following :

The Riot
Revolt
Revolution
Rampage
Rage
Destruction
Disturbance
Deranged

Red Lion

The Reverb

Animatic process

The animatic took us longer then expected to do ,Most the drawings were done in lesson time but sarah accidently lost most of them which delayed us. But she then replaced them with a new set of drawings she had done herself .After the pictures was done sarah took photos of the pictures and we transferred them onto the macs to put in finalcut. The animatic was a good exercise for editing because we found it hard to get use to keeping the pictures in sync with the song .Plus we were dealing with drawings, so we would have to get better to deal with moving image .

Animatic

Here is our animatic, sarah did the drawings and Alex did the editing .The animatic helped us to list angles and shots for the video , because our video is a performance video we needed to work out when it was right to use CU on the instruments and singer.

Animatic from Sarah Chamberlain on Vimeo.

Music Video Feedback

Feedback

One of the lessons i missed the classed viewed each others videos . They then wrote notes while viewing to give each other constructive criticism on how the rough cuts could be improved. The feedback we got was mainly positive and we was very happy with the comments we got back. Using the viewing was a good way for us and everybody else to improve their videos because it will tell you if the viewer can understand the image your trying to put across.

Our Feedback

Music and instruments are in time
short frames?
quicker cuts?
overall-good

Good opening

not sure about 1.44

really nicely edited

3.00 guitar solo should be more obvious

better ending needed

Good start of filming before guitars

guitar solo slightly out of time

like close-ups of singer

like camera movements when its handheld

shots of drummer above look wicked

its all really exciting

so well timed

SO GOOD

Start good in time with music

singing at start a bit out of sync

close ups are good

setting suits song

its so good!

Handheld camera is I think a bit too shakey at the beginning

the miming is bang on time :)

The close up when he is singing is very good

the handheld camera makes i very personal

can be a bit repetitive of guitar close ups

think the editing could be tighter at the end as it gets faster

love the angles of singers face

The most positve note we got was the video has a good use of angles and cuts making the video flow, the video was perfectly timed with the song which can be hard to do. Things which needed to be worked on were a cleaner end to the song , quicker cuts and more variety of close ups.

locations

The 3rd location was a hall in Eltham which Sarah rented out and filmed at .The place was cheap to rent but the problem was when looking at the footage the lighting was wrong and it just didn't fit the song.

The final location choice was a pub in Gravesend called The Red Lion , this place i believe was the best place to film because we had lights already installed and we had a fully functional stage to use for our video.The best part about this location was the fact it was cheap to hire compared to the first two ideas (Resident studios and a car park ) and it has the best band performance facilities.