Jacob Fordham's Music Video Evaluation

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

The forms and conventions of a slow country style music video are usually that of a performance of the lead singer, usually with some relation to nature or the countryside. I feel that we have challenged some of the forms and conventions of a music video because in the narrative the lead singer isn’t present, as we were trying to have it that she was singing about him having a relationship, with another women, which was the other person in the narrative. Our music video on the whole uses the forms and conventions of a real music video the look that we were trying to convey to the audience was that of a calming ambient atmosphere, I believe that most of the video has done this well, which include parts like the sky scene at the start, which links in very well with the green screening transition and then through the green screening. The green screening gave the effect that we were after which was so that the lead singer would stand out as she was in colour and the rest was in black and white. But what I feel didn’t work was the lighting when we shot the green screen, the bottom was not lit enough, therefore when we went to edit it, we struggled to delete all of the green from the background, therefore you can still slightly see some of the green, if we were to do it again I would use a different room so that the light throughout the background would be consistent, and that it was all lit the same. The next part of our video where we had the narrative, I feel could’ve been made better if we were to have had more time, as we encountered many problems when shooting our video, as we had people that were away, so we then had to re-think what we were going to have in our video, that is when we decided to add a narrative, looking back I think this was a good decision, and that it would’ve even worked with our original ideas. I feel the narrative was quite boring to watch, as nothing much really happened. This is one thing if we had more time we could’ve changed or added to, also the location was not the best as it was in college, and would’ve been better at night in the middle of a town, as they didn’t really look like they were going to meet up. But on the other hand parts of the narrative worked effectively, like the transition when Tom is walking down the stairs and Alicia is walking up the path, this works well as they are both on the screen at the same time, and it is now made clear about what is happening between the two of them. Overall I feel that it uses the forms and conventions because the transitions are slow pace, and it gives a very ambient feel, also there is a love interest going on which slightly challenges the forms and conventions of folk music, as it is mainly just the artist being filmed.
2. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

Our ancillary texts and our music video have a different look from each other, they were both designed to advertise and sell the song, "Wicked Game". The digipack was designed around two main factors, the genre and the lyrics. Which we felt was an abstract way that our artist could sell the song rather than a literal one, for example having a picture from the video on the front cover. These both influenced the final product. Taking these both into account, we decided to play around with different ideas for the final product. We did some research into other types of digipack and magazine adverts that other bands had. The other bands that we researched had mostly neutral colours on the front cover, which at a glance we felt they were boring; this is why we decided to make ours stand out and challenge the conventions of our genre. As a group we did this because we wanted our digipack to stand out from all of the others in that genre in the shops on the shelves, but at the same time still fit the ambient fell that we were trying to convey, I feel we have met this because, the background itself is very plain and simple but has bright colours to stand out, the top row, we have made it by cropping one pixel column of our sky scene from our music video and stretching it so that it was the width of our digipack. Then on the bottom we have made a rainbow gradient, so that it keeps to the simple but colourful image that we are trying to express. We have also got a still from our music video of Danni and one in white and another in black. This played along with the band’s name “The Girl in the Mirror”. We felt as a group that we needed to make the digi-pack and the magazine advert look similar so that if they were in a shop the audience would recognise that they were both from the same artist.

3. What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

When we got our audience feedback back we read though it, and mostly what they said I agreed with, this is what one “feedbacker” said “Really good effects over the fast moving street and the backgrounds also fit really well. Nice use of colours. Performance pieces are really good and use good effects. The narrative seems to appear a little suddenly with not much set up, slightly confusing. First phone shot is too long. Which I agree to, because we did not have time the narrative became a little bit confusing at times, therefore as a media product, it is unsuccessful, as the audience will not want to watch again if they do not understand it. Someone else commented and said “There's an obvious attempt to include effects and a manipulation of time. The soft transitions during the performance work well with the nature of the song and the focus on a love story are also appropriate.” We also agreed with this comment strongly as we tried to use time as a symbol, therefore we used fast forwarding and slowing down footage to good effect I feel, for example the sky scene at the start we fast forwarded so that it is like time is moving faster than it is. Also we fast forwarded the green screening, we did this so that the lead singer would be the focal point of the shot. I feel the feedback help our production because it made us be reassured that the use of time worked to a good effect. We also got comments from people saying that they thought it worked well with the music and that it was appropriate. The reaction to the advert and the digi-pack was mixed between people thinking that it didn’t work with the genre that our music video was, but on the other hand we had people saying it didn’t go with it but it is abstract and it would stand out on the shelves in shops therefore it worked out how we thought it would.

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

Throughout the process of making the media product, the ancillary texts, research, planning and evaluation stages, there has been a wide variety of different media technologies been used, in the planning and research stage we mainly used the Internet to do a selection of different things, we started off by researching into the band that we had chosen, and also what music videos fit the same genre, and different ideas that we had that were in other music videos, we also used the Internet to present our ideas. On a website called www.blogger.com, and throughout the whole process, we recorded our ideas, tests and final pieces onto this. On the whole I found using the Internet for the research easy, as I have done this mostly all before. So there weren’t any problems that I encountered. As a group we encountered many problems with the planning stage, as throughout there were many absences due to different reasons, we had to re-think our storyboard half way through filming, as it was just not going to get done. This led to us not getting in some of the effects that we had planned and I feel this would’ve made it a better product because I would’ve been much more abstract; which include the idea that we got from blink 182’s song always, where there are three different shots but make it look like the same shot, but got three different people talking to the same person. We had also planned to zoom into Danni’s eye to then go into a different shot, if we were to do it again these would definitely be something that I would try and add to our music video. When we constructed the music video it didn’t all go according to plan. Therefore some of us had to stay behind after college as we ran out of time for construction. If we were to do it again the main thing that would need to be improved on would be that of planning our time efficiently. We also used Final Cut to edit the Evaluation, which we came across many problems that include people not coming to lesson so they did not get filmed to be in the commentary it has been overcome by hard work and the rest of the group saying more so that we still had a full length video.