Music Video Final

Our finished video

Planning our evaluation

With final completion of our music video today we decided to start work on our evaluation.
Here is a rough draft of my thoughts to answer the questions

Point 1

During the planning of our music video we had to agree what to base our music video on since there music videos are based around either performance, concept and narrative.

After studying Taylor Swift videos we found most of her videos were either narrative or performance.

Therefore, as we were targeting the same demographic as her we used performance and narrative.

Point 2

We studied a theorist called Vernallis, she stared that music video’s include “Quick cutting and editing to the beat”

From the music videos we analysed we found this to be the case therefore during out editing process we followed these conventions by never leaving an edit lasting longer than a few seconds and we always cut to the beat.
 

Point 3

We also kept to the conventions of camera angles and shots.

For example during the performance we use  low angle shots; this was used as a code to the adience that the artist was important and also to give the impression she was performing to an audience.

Point 4

We also used numerous dolly shots in our video however they were hand heeld due to the fact we couldn’t get ahold of a camera dolly.

The theorist Verallis said that “More music video’s make such extensive use of the dolly that a  static shot seems anomalous”

Dolly shots are used to sustain a songs momentun which is why we decided to feature them.

Point 5

We used jumpcuts, conventions of music videos, it makes the audience its aware of a ext which is a postmodern technique. Its used because we dont want the audience to become lost in the narrative because after all we are supposed to be advertising the song, and jump cuts break the realism of the narrative.

  Point 6 

We also used another example of postmodernism, intertexuality.

After researching Taylor Swift we found things that were associated with her. For example the she wears number 13 on her hand, as this her lucky number. We made a direct allusion to her as she wears this in her videos so Emma wore the number on her hand in the text too

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

Point 1 For our album cover we stuck to the conventions.

To decide on our album art we first of all researched typical Taylor Swift Album covers.

For example we noticed she was always the main focus on her album art is her. So this is what we did.

However we did slightly challenge her conventions as this song is a contrast to her usual songs, she’s portrayed as a typical teenage sweetheart however this song reflects a darker side to her.

Therefore when usually her albums are bare apart from her with light coloured background to symbolize her innocence instead we opted for a black background with red lights to portray the eviler emotions of anger and hate to parallel the mood and lyrics of the song .

Point 2 Another key feature of album covers is featuring the artist name, this is what Taylor Swift adheres to therefore us to.

We featured our Artist name across the front album cover in big bold graphics so that the audience would familiarize themselves with the artist name. We also kept the lettering white to still portray the innocence that she has, that she’s not completely dark.

We also, like typical album covers, featured the music single name, for the audiences benefit for reorganization of what there looking for.

As our demographic is young girls we decided to advertise on the internet to create a larger fanbase, so in the future we have developed a loyal audience which will always buy her music and go to her shows, buy her merchandise etc.

Point 3 For example we set up a MySpace page for Emma lang. MySpace is a social networking sight that also holds a strong connection to the music industry as part of its site is dedicated to music. The sites main demographic is women under the age of 24 ( our target audience) which consists of 44.4 % of the sites users so hopefully this should prove an effective method of expanding her fanbase.

To take this further we would continually join other social networking sites, possibly even have the artist to have a personal blog to update her fans on her life creating a closer bond between audience and artist thus forming a strong loyalty to her.

As our demogrpahic mostly uses the internet we would then most likely sell our products online, using itunes, napster etc. We’d create our own youtube channel, hopefully being featured on Vevo  as they have massive audience views, for example justin Bieber who targets the same demographic as us collecting 509 million views! We’d hope to achieve the same success.

Point 4 - We also used the myspace to create a bigger buzz about the upcoming single and album by uploading stills from the video creating excitement and anticipation for it which in turn would hopefully increase sales.

Question 3  What have you learned from your audience feedback?

When we showcased our video we had mostly positive feedback.

Here’s some of the feedback we received

Love the baseball reaction

- Not sure about "fight"-

 The syncing was mostly perfect- Matches the style-

 It's INTERESTING

 you keep the variety going (which is great because we wanted to stick to Vernallis’s theory “"...the editing in a music video works hard to ensure that no single element ( the narrative, the setting, the performance, the star, the lyrics, the song) gains no upper hand"  ) this lets us know we’ve achieved this.

 Seems that the style matches Taylor Swift

Performance is really good and convincing- Lighting on the dart board is perfect!

The spinning looks like perfect space

 Did people get your narrative?

Emma does evil/disgust well.. !

Like the red lighting when singing into the camera

Most of our faults laid in our acting as our preferred reading wasn’t met as we weren’t convincing enough. However after receiving this we re-filmed some of the scenes to create a better perception.

Question 4

Point 1 The most important technology in our planning was the use of Sony mini DV handycam, when we were filming our preliminary  this we had many problems with the quality, it was hard to get a clear image, the images were quite fuzz, it didn’t look very professional. Therefore in our real music video we instead used HD camera’s this was a massive improvement and helped greatly to create a realistic music video otherwise it would look a lot more amateur.

Point 2 Internet was a massive component of our research. Without it we wouldn’t of been able to  analyse as many videos on youtube we did or learn certain conventions. Also it’s a key feature in our marketing by using Myspace, and probably any artist these days uses the internet which is the reason you get so many independent labels and artists these days. You don’t need the help of a record company to produce and distribute products.

 Point 3 Social networking sites like blogger and facebook were a great aid to our planning.

Blogger was a great use to our planning as we had all our research in one place which was easily accessible between all of us, it probably shortened our planning process by quite a bit instead of hours of us fumbling through pieces of paper.

We used facebook to plan and arrange meetings and filming dates and brainstorm our ideas which was great because It increased the time we had to speak about the project instead of wasting time we could be together in physical form.

Point 4 For our editing process we used final cut express. This was all our first experience at using editing equipment so it took time to get used to it. This helped us with using some of the conventions of music videos for examples jump cuts so we could edit our scenes to achieve them.

We also used the colour correction a lot to help create effects like increasing the saturation on our film because we wanted a more summer time/flashback feeling.

We also experimented with the fast forwarding and slowing down clips. This helped us to fit everything in to the beats so we could cut it at the right time, We also used it to create so the audience could receive the information effectively and to highlight certain actions like drinking the vodka because we wanted to highlight to the audience that she was drinking.

Final Filming session

Today we've planned to film our very last scene. The "prom" scene.
We wanted a day with good weather, however it wasn't very nice at all. But actually rethinking it we decided it was a good thing as the gray clouds and winds represented the mood of the character, all dark and gloomy, unplanned pathetic fallacy.
In this shot we used close ups, long shots and mid shots. We wanted to use the close up to portray the emotions of the characters, Emma had obviously been upset which the audience could tell as part of her costume was the make up all down her face due to crying. Amy was shown as annoyed and Rhys was shown as confused.
We only have to finish the editing for this final thing that we will do tomorrow, and then our film is finished!

Art

Music video Showcase

Today we held a class showcase so that we could receive feedback for our videos.
We hadn't fully completed our video yet but this was what we showed them :

When we compressed to a lower quality for just the purpose of showing our class its ruined the timing and the quality, thankfully however for a real coursework to be sent off we're keeping it as the same file so that wont be a problem.
Over all we received positive feed back, our teacher seemed to be overall positive about what we had done, heres some of her comments

- Love the baseball reaction
- Not sure about "fight"
- The syncing was mostly perfect
- Matches the style
- It's INTERESTING - you keep the variety going
- Seems that the style matches Taylor Swift
- Performance is really good and convincing
- Lighting on the dart board is perfect!
- The spinning looks like perfect space
- Did people get your narrative?
- Emma does evil/disgust well.. !
- Like the red lighting when singing into the camera

Its all really great feedback, but we do take the fight comment in to consideration, we've been told before that the perception of it doesnt work well as it looks like Amy's laughing. We will probably resolve this by refilming this particular scene as this opinion was also confirmed by a comment from the audience

"Amy laughs when I push her face in the dirt".

Other positive feedback we recieved was the high rating we got for the lighting, performance, costume as we had a wide variety , a balanced variation between performance and narrative, a strong narrative.

Also we're happy about that on each feedback sheet every person that that they would watch our video again because it was interesting/entertaining.

We did also recieve some constructive criticism aswell

- Some parts were out of sync
- "A form of revenge would be nice to see"
- "Didn't really get the fight"
- Amy laughs when I push her face in the dirt
- Brief black flashes
- Emma's face is a bit too comical at times!
- "wuh-ooh" - cut a bit shorter?
- Emma coming out of the car is odd
- Use more effects

The black flashes are mostly due to the fact we havn't completed it yet, and most of our out of sync errors were due to the compression of our file but we will go through the final finishing touches soon to cut away any of these errors.

We're not sure if we will use a real form of revenge, we think the build up is most important. We havnt finished our final scenes yet either, but we feel that Taylor Swift is portrayed as sweet and innocent, though this video does alternate from her usual conventions as it is quite a dark song, we think that an actual form of revenge would be to much of a diversion from the conventions that we want to stick to as its what the demographic is used to.

We also havn't gone through all the effects yet but we will be sure to explore more of them to create a more interesting piece.

Unexpected film session 5

Today whilst editing our footage me and Amy were trying to fill in parts of the video, we realised that we hadn't really gotten anything perfect for a certain line that goes "woah".
Therefore leaving Amy to edit some more me and Emma went downstairs to film this line, covering her school clothes with a sparkly scarf to hide our spontaneous actions . We used a close up on this part as we felt that we wanted the audience to recognize the emotions on her face, anger, it also worked well because it even further hid her costume. We filmed this about three times, and we did it once all the way through just in case there was another lipsync we didn't do correctly.
We then went back upstairs to upload the new footage, whilst waiting for the footage to convert we thought this would be a good time to make a Myspace for our artist.
We wanted to use Myspace for several reasons, it mostly focused on our targeted demographic, young women/girls. 44.4 % of Myspace users are women under the age of 24 fitting perfectly in with this. We also wanted to create a Myspace page as it allowed easy access to her and her music which is a great thing for fans, we hoped having a social networking site like Myspace would increase the fanbase and loyalty to secure future sales. Its also a great way to communicate about upcoming events to our audience, for example the new single release, we even uploaded an album dedicated to still's from the filming so the fan's can have a greater knowledge whats going on and a bigger part in the star's life.

Costume during our Production

Our  costume fits that of our demographic, young girls.
We don't clad out our artist in the narrative in designer glamorous clothes for a reason we wanted to relate with our audience.
Therefore for our narrative we decided on casual clothes that a young women would wear, for example jeans an a top. We particulary used checked shirts on Emma as we felt it was connotated with Taylor Swift genre, country, which is also why she was wearing the cowboy hat in some of the scenes as we were making a direct reference to the genre of the song (country pop) and Taylor Swift. Nothing that our artist in the narrative wore is particulary hard to come by and would be in a teenagers everyday wardrobe.
Another piece of costume to comment on is her makeup, we particularly focused on this in some scenes as we wanted to make her look like a mess and slightly mad with anger upset, so some scenes are the audience being shown that she's putting her make up on all over her face to reflect the emotional state she is in. When however she is shown during the flashbacks, whilst she was in a romantic relationship the make up is normal of what a teenage girl would wear, not to much.
The costume in the performance is a little different, this is slightly more glamorous as to make a clear contrast to her as a character in the narrative and her as an artist in the performance. We wanted a more glamorous image of her as here we want the audience to look up to her style, as musicians these days are often talked about for their fashion style.