Kristina Pascuzzi Music Video Evaluation

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

The song we chose was ‘Wicked Games’ by Bassboosa which is a slow, therapeutic song which we thought fitted under the genre of folk music. Bassboosa is a duet (Jasmine and Tim) who have released a couple of songs in America but they reached No.1 with the ‘Wicked Game’ cover of Chris Isaak’s original. Traditional folk music videos usually consist of the singer, a slight narrative and sometimes an instrument. Also the videos are generally filmed in a simple environment like a deserted street or plain lands because the music usually has a meaning to the artist so they want most of the audiences’ attention to be on them. The type of shots used are long shots and close ups with gradual panning. There aren’t many jolts either and this is also to maintain the audiences’ attention and rarely obvious editing. Our production is quite a contrast to this as we used a strong narrative of our singer who plays a the female lead and a love interest and also we shot most of our video in a busy street and then increased the speed of the people walking and edited in our main character over the top of this scene to emphasise her feelings of being in love and being stuck in her feelings with the rest of the world still carrying on. Also we put the background street scene in black and white and Dani (main character) in colour to again show her separation from the world. We included a few transitions like the sliding, split screen one when Alicia and Tom are walking to show both characters in different places and to help the narrative to proceed. We got the idea to include this transition from a Blink 182 song called ‘Always’. They use it horizontally though and split into three parts, it’s still as effective though. Other ones were fading transitions between shots. We were influenced by Craig David’s song ‘Walking Away’ to use the slow transitions as they work really well in his video and the song is a similar tempo to ours and so is the narrative. We tried to keep the use of transitions at a minimal to keep the audiences concentration on our narrative. We also challenged the traditional conventions with our magazine advert and digipak as the background and bold font is not what you would expect to see on a folk digipak. We did this to attract a wider audience to our music of younger people as well. However our opening shot uses conventions of our genre as it’s a shot of a sunrise. We included this as it sets the mood of the song well I think (which is feeling depressed, confused) with the heavy clouds and makes me imagine a heartbroken person gazing out a window. This was not intended though. We wanted a clear sky with a few clouds and I filmed the sunrise twice before I got this shot but we just needed the footage so it had to do. But now I think it worked quite well. I think our music video develops conventions of folk music by the strong narrative as I think it will attract a wider audience compared to quite boring, lifeless videos they usually have.


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

Overall I think the combination of our main product and ancillary texts is effective because if we were to literally be making a real music video, digipak and advert the way we have advertised and presented our music video would attract people to purchase our digipak and if not at least view our webpage. I believe this because the abstract colour of the background with black and white writing draws in attention. We also decided to use such a bright, colourful background on our digipak to help our audience associate seeing the digipak in HMV or Tescos to our video when it plays on the television or they hear it on the radio. Our general aim was to help the name of our band to be recognised and also to appeal to an audience of the younger generation or just people who have never liked the sound of folk music. The image we used for the background of our digipak is actually a still shot from our opening sunrise scene. We took the still and stretched out one of the pixels to create the image so there may also be an unconscious association made between the main product and ancillary. Also we put the same image on our magazine advert to again help create an association for the audience between our main product and ancillary. We decided to keep all information on the digipak and advert in either black or white as the background consisted of every other colour in the spectrum but it works anyway as the background stands out a lot and then the writing stands out even more. We were influenced by an advert in a magazine for Mika’s album release and from that we got our initial ideas. We used the information he included on his (release dates, name of most recent song, record company etc...) as an example of what ours should have. He also used bright colours but it is very different from ours. Also after seeing his advert we decided to put on ours where the album is available eg. HMV, Tesco, iTunes. However the combination of the two may not be so effective to an audience that likes and enjoys folk music and who appreciates the simplicity and naturalness of traditional folk videos and digipaks. They might feel that we have tainted the image of folk. And as there is no obvious imagery connection between the video and ancillary texts some people may not associate or recognise either part to the other.


3) What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

We haven’t received much feedback on our final piece but from what we have got it’s obvious that we need to plan more and to introduce the narrative gradually rather then all at once because this confuses the audience. I agree that our narrative does work well with our song but if it was introduced at a slower pace it would fit in with the tempo of the song as well which would guide the audience along. With the busy street scene when we edited Dani in using a green screen we realised that we should have given ourselves more time to practise doing this as it wasn’t as easy as we had expected. There are parts of her which are slightly transparent and there isn’t a definite outline of her body which makes it really obvious that we have edited her in and we didn’t want the look of the video to be surreal with a floating girl in the street but for her to look like she’s still in a moving street. Generally we should have started filming earlier to allow mistakes to be made and then to be overcome but like in the street scene this wasn’t able to happen. One piece of positive feedback I was pleased with was that the slow transitions fitted in well with the pace and feeling of the song because that is something we achieved on. We made a lot of changes throughout the making of our video and what we originally planned out on a storyboard didn’t end up being involved at all. Personally I think that the original idea would have worked out better overall thinking from an audience’s perspective and comparing the video we were going to create and the one which is out final piece. Still I am not quite sure why everything got changed but out group didn’t really cooperate well together so I think that affected what we could have achieved and what we did achieve with our music video.


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

In the construction and research part of our task we used various types of new media technologies. All of the different search engines and websites we used obviously were only available due to the internet. We took advantage of having Google and YouTube in order to research our artist to look at previous songs they had produced and to gain pictures to put on our blog to illustrate our ideas. We used YouTube again to look at videos in the same genre as our chosen song to get an idea of what typical folk music videos were like. Also we thought of music videos which we’d seen on the television that contained interesting and effective transitions that we could copy or attempt to recreate. The website we used the most though was blogger. We used this website throughout the whole task as a sort of running commentary of what we were doing, how we were going to do it and what difficulties we faced along the way. I think Blogger much better then doing it all on paper or in a folder as it’s easier to use and easy to keep track of what’s going on. Also you can compare your own groups’ progression with others. In the planning stage and when it came to creating the footage and images we needed for our video we used Final Cut to edit video footage and to merge our video with the song to help us with timing and when to cut and we used Illustrator, Photoshop and Fireworks to do the green screen photo of Dani and to try and make that look perfect and also to manipulate still shots from our video to create another image. (Our digipak cover.) Overall we used lots of different technologies in order to create our final piece and if it wasn’t for all the software available it wouldn’t have been possible.