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.

Emma Lang joins Myspace!

http://www.myspace.com/565126799

We decided that this was a brilliant direction for us to go in as it really suited our demographic. Myspace is infamous for advertising artists, and if we were to progress our music career further we'd home to be featured on their homepage where millions of Myspace users would see.
We've even uploaded an album with stills from our upcoming music video to create continuity from our music video to the Myspace so create familiarity and hopefully sales as this is a cheap way of advertising as it creates interest and anticipation for our product.
On our page we not only advertise the new release but however a gig which will also help increase ticket sales as myspace can communicate to the audience upcoming events.
We feature her faces everywhere possible, her profile picture, the background, this will hopefully create recognition for our artist thus a fan base to increase sales on the web or in shops like HMV.

Filming Session Four

Today we decided to film our live performance, we planned to do our live performance in the drama studio as this gave us the opportunity to control the lighting in our video, which before we havn't had the chance as most of our scenes our outside and it all depends on how the weather is.
We still wanted to encode our performance scenes with the same emotions as during the narrative, hate, anger all  the different parts on the concept of revenge, the best way to do this was to use red filters for our lighting as the colour red is strongly connoted with these emotions.
We've been wanting to film in this location for a while now but due to drama exams the drama rooms have been in constant use.
We planned here to go through emma singing the entire song 5 times so we are able to use  5different camera shots so we had a variety of choice when it came to editing. One shot we had definitely in mind was the low angle shot for the performance as this highlights the importance of our artist, it also gave the effect that Emma was singing to an audience, we would of loved to have a real audience however we wouldnt of been able to get enough people in to make it look realistic.
Later on the day Emma also took the initiative to film further after school when she noticed the weather was sunny, however its quite difficult for me to film on short notice outside of school due to where i live. In this scene Emma used a prop, a diary , the diary was to show the plannings of her revenge and obsession with the person who had ruined her life, a little pyschopathic which is why we filmed it around the lines "she think's im pyscho cos i like to rhyme her name with things". Using the lyrics parallel to the video, a common convention of music videos.