Final Music Video

{Evaluation} Question 4

What have you learned from your audience feedback?


Here's just a couple of clips of audience responses to our video, after watching our music video i asked Toby and Nora (both in our target audience bracket) what they thought was good about our video and what they weren't so keen on:





Good to know that the animations did stand out as we intended and didn't look to poor, as i was nervous as to their quality. This viewer felt that we didn't use enough variety of camera shots and i feel she has a good point, i don't think it was so much that we didn't use enough different camera shots i just feel that perhaps the ones we did use weren't so interesting. If i was to make the video again i would probably think about using more extreme angles and carrying particularly interesting shots throughout the video.





It was really important we got the lip syncing spot-on! So i'm glad this viewer thought it was perfect i don't think we could've done any better in that area. The viewer also pointed out something she didn't think worked to well, the costume, which i think is a shame since we spent a lot of time thinking about artist identity and sourced that outfit specifically, however now that she mentions it i do entirely see her point! The white and dark navy don't compliment the cheery upbeat nature we took through into everything and while i think we got away with it i do think that perhaps that it's a pretty big flaw that would be addressed if this were a professional production.




A different kind of interview below. Taken with a friend, someone entirely unfamiliar with our media course so as to get a genuine unbiased response.










Finally i took the time to show my advert to Nora, above. I chose to question her about it because she fits the bill as our target audience very well so her impression of it was perhaps the most important. I was really please with the comments, she really enjoyed the colour scheme and said it wasn't something she saw working very often which means my advert will really stand out in her mind and she thought the image of coco worked well too. I don't think there's much i would want to change about my advert as the response to it has been really positive. Overall I'm please with the work i've produced.

{Evaluation} Question 3

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


I really feel i have alot to say about the technical work involved, so to save the examiner from a huge wall of text i've decided to address this entirely in a couple of videos, The first below deals with the research, filming and and editing of our music video.





One of the things i feel i haven't covered enough above was technology used in the planning stage, So i'd just like to add a little about that, Mostly the planning consisted of good old fashioned brainstorming and lots of doodling on paper however to help us realise our film we created a simplistic "animatic storyboard" to help us get an idea of the sort of short types we wanted. We did this with a still digital camera and strung together the clips, it's a really handy we to get everyone visualising the same thing.


Next i wanted to look at the technology used in the production of the Advert and digipak, I suggest you view this video in full screen to see clearly what i'm doing but that really is up to you :)







Finally I'd just like to link you to a post i did specifically about using blogs, please consider it as part of this evaluation as i wouldn't want to repeat many things that i have already written about there, Thank you!

{Evaluation} Question 2

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



To look at the effectiveness of my product combinations I put together a video where i just draw attention to a few commonalities between my ancillary texts ad my video (as i feel that's really where an effective result is achieved). My analysis will no doubt be far more thourough in my exam however i feel this will suffice as a demonstration of skills used successfully, We will also get a look at how effective my ancillary media was when i come to answer question 4 of this evaluation concerning audience feedback.



To sum up, I feel i really made the most of using common elements throughout my products to create a brand-wide identity of a sort. My design will not only appeal to our target audience but will be immediately recogniseable to them, even if someone where to know what just one of the artists products look like they would have no problem finding the other. I feel that all my ancillary products looks professional and promotes the artist well.

Evaluation

2. How effective is the combination of your main product (video) and ancillary texts (digipak and advertisement)?


Overall, think that i done very well on my promotional packages. They have a very clear visual link between them.

I made a clear visual link between the video which is the screen shot above and my digipak. And i linked the digipak to my advertisement, by using the same background. I used the same background for my digipak and advertisement because i wanted it to keep to one theme, because using different backgrounds will look unprofessional and unorganised. Which makes it more clear to my audience. I also made a clear link between my digipak and advertisement by using the same font. "PEACHES AND CREAM" is the font on my digipak and "Coco blu" is the font i used on my advertisement. I think the ancillary texts turned out to be a success, because they were already on Photoshop and it is noticeable and easy to read.   I made a clear visual link between the front of my digipak and the video, by using the animatic plane, i feel this is the most vivid link, because the the animations are unique and that's what the audience will notice.  I think my target audience will by attracted to them because, it has clear visual links. The video, digipak and advertisement are very colourful, vibrant and exciting. The most important of all, is our artist, as she is wearing the same costume in the video along with the digipak and advertisement. There images of the artist costume below.

Evaluation

4. What have you learned from your audience feedback?


I received good audience feedback for both the music video and ancillary products. I was not able to get videos of the audience in the cinema. Here are some videos of our target audience, as our audience were older teenagers aged 16 and above talking, about the links between the music video and ancillary products :

Overall, I have pleased my target audience with my final product. Which is very good and i am proud of.  They were able to make clear visual links between the music video and the ancillary products

What i could have improved from my target audience : 

• I noticed that from my audience feedback, that i my images on my digipak and advertisement, were cut out quite roughly. But overall, they were able to make clear visual links between the music video and the ancillary products.
• One of my target audience,  mentioned that on my advertisement, i could have put on a shadow effect on the texts to make it look more effective.

I feel that in our music video at about 2.13, we could have put an effect on the smiles, maybe added colour to make them funky looking and bright. I feel very confident with my advertisement and digipak. Overall, i think that our music video was great, and i had a wonderful time filming and editing.

In my opinion i think that my target audience, gave me honest feedback, i think it was very positive.

Evaluation

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

Through my construction and research, i have used various media technologies, in order to progess to where i am now such as;

 In order to conduct my research. I used google, to search artist names, to copy and paste images such as; the record label symbol to put on to my digipak and advertisement and to go to other websites like blogger. I have used google throughout, from my planning to evaluation stages.

In order to conduct my research, i used youtube, to search different artist, genres and ideas that inspired our group to make our successful video. I also used youtube to embed videos onto my blog.

Blogger, was what i used throughout my planning to evaluation. The use of blogger was in order to keep up to date with what i am currently doing during my process. Blogger was very easy to use. Expect it had a lot of problems, such as uploading videos and not playing them, inserting images and not being able to put them where you want them to go. It was very useful as it like a diary.

We used this brand new state of the art camera, to record our music videos on. With the camera we were able to do as many shots as we wanted, and we were able to watch the little clips and delete them if we did not want them. Using the memory cards to store our footage on, this way it does not get lost. The memory card was very large in it was around 16GB, which i thought was enough for filming our music video. After filming we inserted our memory cards into a usb. Then we copied all our footage onto the video drive, this is where everything is stored. With the video drive, everything is bound to be safe.

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Using final cut pro was one of the main part in making our music video, enabling us to put our video together, so it was very useful. With final cut pro, we were able to crop use cross fades, effects and we were also able to put on animation using a drawing tablet, which was a vital part to our final video. With these special effects, it made the video look professional, as this software is used by a lot of media companies today. My group used time lapsed, when editing for this, you have to chop up the clip and make the size smaller, in order for final cut pro to handle it. Although it took time and a lot of work, it became successful. Final cut pro allowed us to insert our soundtrack at the bottom which was locked, so that it would not move. With the soundtrack there, you are able to do the lip syncing in time. At the top left hand corner we selected the specific clip we wanted to use, then we dragged it down to the time line. We marked the specific clip we wanted for the soundtrack, making sure that it was in line and time with the soundtrack. This way the soundtrack would be in link with the video. I think that final cut pro, was easy to use once you got used to it and if you followed instructions.

To produce my digipak and advertisemnt i used Photoshop Element. As we had a choice. I was not too keen on using Quark as i was not familiar with it. As you can see below, you can see my editing process making my digipak. Photoshop Elements allowed me to edit images and make it into my own original one. For example, for the sky and the grass, i got an image from google, opened it up in Photoshop and added an effect on it to make it look cartoonized. And it was successful. Photoshop makes things easier, for example, i used the same background throughout my digipak, so what i did was copy the layers, that way i did not have to open the original image again and start over. I was able to cut around an image, that way it fits onto the background. I was also able to add texts, as you can see on the bakc the track listing. The font that i wanted to use was already on Photoshop, so it made life much easier for me. I was able to change the contrast and lighting of images. And i was able to resize images without stretching them by holding down the shift key at the same time. As you can see on the top, you can see my advertisement. Overall, I think that both my digipak and advertisement go very well together, i managed to keep the colour rule.

Here is a video of me talking about the different technologies ive used.

Evaluation

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

Before deciding and finalising the song choice for our music video, we had to look at various types of british pop music videos, to inspire and to give us ideas. The Verve - Bittersweet symphony influenced me, as this music videos storyline compared to ours was similar. However, bittersweet symphony has a more simple storyline, which was just a man walking down the streets ignoring all of the distractions. I would not say our music video had a complex storyline because it did not, it was simple. However, compared to bittersweet symphony it had a bit more to it. Our artist Coco Blu was chasing after the man of her dreams (Happy go lucky). The aspects of bittersweet symphony that influenced me was the camerawork. We managed to use most of the camera shots used in the video that influenced me. Such as ; point of view, over the shoulder, long shots, mid shots etc. I think that we did not challenge the conventions of the genre of the video, because our storyline was very simple but at the same time effective. And we made our own new original artist. Here are some screen shots of bittersweet symphony that inspired me, and the shots we used in our video.

         

           

              

            

Katy Perry - California girls and Mary Popins influenced me, through the use of mise en scene. As you can see i was inspired through the use of animation. As a group, we thought that using animation would be unique, as no other groups thought of the idea and we had not seen this idea in the years before us. I think that it made our music video very effective and vivid, it brings out that vibrant, exciting feel towards it.
<<<<<<< Our animation from our music video

    I was also inspired by the bright vibrant colours used in Katy Perry's music video, so as a group we decided to use  the colourful door to add some light and spark.

I was also influenced by Lily Allen herself, as we picked her song "Mr Blue Sky" as our final choice. However, the song "Mr Blue Sky" was not originally sang by herself it was by the Electic Light Orchestra. Electric Light Orchestra were also a pop group, but Lily Allen made her own modernised version of which    we were inspired by.  I was also influenced by her CD cover for "Mr Blue Sky" The blue sky with the clouds is the exact images i used, however, i made it into my own original image, by adding the grass and by making  it look animatic.                                                                                                                       

Katy Perry's album cover inspired me because, as seen she has a blue sky on her album cover, which i was aiming for, and i managed to achieve it. I was also aiming for my digipak to be colourful, and for it to stand out. I noticed that the font of Katy Perry's digipak and mine are quite similar, it is curly and it has that quirky theme towards it. The colours that are also used on both digipak's are similar. The colours are bright and they stand out. I was also influenced by Katy Perry as she is a modern artist, aimed at older teenagers, which is our target audience.

As a group we were all inspired by kate nash - pumpkin soup, because of the use of animation. 

We were also inspired by joss stone, because of the use of the time lapsed. We used this in our music video as well, which turned out to be a success.         

Here is a video of myself talking about what i was influeced by.

Evaluation

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

When creating our media products we knew as a group we wanted everything to pop out from the crowd. Coco blu to me is not just any typical pop artist, yes she does have some normal conventions of any other female pop singer. But when developing her in our head we envisage something different from the rest but still relateable to her fans. we always knew we would keep our story line basic but wanted to breathe life into it with clever editing and animation.

I thought animation would be a creative and interesting element to include to our video. We spent many hours trying to come up with a way of how we could achieve this. In the end after experimenting with the software available, we processed individual drawings with transparent backgrounds and placed them on top of our own recorded video images. Even though we all had a go at drawing each frame by hand. Only my fellow group member holly was the most successful in doing so. Before we found the right song for our video we watched a range of different style's of videos which we drew inspiration from which influenced our own production.


The main artist that stood out to me personally was Kate Nash- pumpkin soup video. I feel her as an artist is a great comparison to what Coco blu style would reflect. I also felt the video had a Disney like feel to it. The opening of the video includes types of animation which we wanted to have in ours. The bubbles which appear in her video is somewhat the same of what we had near Coco blu head in our video

 We used these speech bubbles as a fun interesting way to insulate speech without taking the attention away from the song.

Another video that influenced me was the Joss stone - super love.



In this video again the background is so interesting and captivating, The moving sky is somewhat of a time lapse which is similar to what we include in our video .This drew our attention straight away as our song 'Mr blue sky' had a lot of long instrumentals parts to it that we thought our time lapse along with animation would cleverly fill the gaps.

Here is one of Lily Allen's 1st ever song released by her, as an artist i find her extremely talented and unique  which i think helped us in the end pick a song covered by her. Mr blue sky which she didn't release a video for. As there was no original video for the song we choose it meant we could start from scratch and not have the pressure of a comparison.  In Lily Allen's - smile video we drew influence for an interaction scene, where she is in the cafe kind of day dreaming while her boyfriend is trying to tell her a story of his day. 

We include a scene similar but in an outside environment. I particularly liked the camera work of this clip as it has nice over the shoulder camerawork and point of view shots. which i feel are very important when filming a conversation between two people.

A close up of feet shot that we included in our video.

When it comes to our video i felt we didn't really challenge many music conventions which isn't a bad thing. Our story line is a simple and effective for a fun light hearted pop song. Girl spots guy, Guy spots girl, Guy and girl meet and then live happy ever after. But the one thing i did think we did differently is that unlike pop artist today especial, black female UK pop stars is with her clothing. These days stars like Rhianna or Alexandra Burke are all dressed borderline half naked in there latest videos. But with Coco we wanted her costumes to be well styled sexy but classy. We challenge what most people expect from an artist and gave them something much more liberating and empowering.

When it came to design my digipak and advertisement i wanted it to reflect  our artist, i wanted it to be fun and inviting.

I found the Glee soundtrack cover very interesting. As its got that fun feel to it. The colour scheme is some what similar to mines. Also even though the images are small still are very attention grabbing. 

2) How effective is the combination of your main product (video) and ancillary texts (digipak and advertisements)


When creating my music video and ancillary products I always tried to have a conscious thought of how they will all connect together. For example our video was filmed in bright and sunshine weather and I knew I wanted my digipak to be  bright vibrant colours.  As I feel showing a clear link between  both products hugely important for a professional look

When creating my digi pak I had many inspirations, in the video below I show examples of a few and briefly explain the things I loved about them .

When creating my digipak and advertisement I knew I needed it to be attention grabbing. That’s why I purposely put a clear happy image of Coco blu at the front of my CD and advertisement. Even though my mock up and final choice differ a little I am ultimately happy with the outcome.  The album is called peaches and  cream , I cleverly placed the album name text through Coco Blu’s arm which at 1^st I was worried about but the use of the right colour made it look rather  attractive. When it came to my CD I wanted to have a countious theme throughout, so that’s why i choose the same background colour and the blue diagonal line between each pannel. At first I did consider having a picture of coco blu’s shoes in the CD holding pannel as I thought this would again show another visual link to our video, especially the opening. But I deiced against it as I thought the broader looked much superior with the album title.

Throughout my production of my ancillary products I made sure there were some clear visual links between them. I feel I have done this well enough for my audience to recognize them and also be attracted to them. The visual links i made are the images of our animations, as a group we created these ourselves so they are unique which is a bonus.  Also i kept the Coco Blu in the same outfit throughout all my products which i consciously did so my target audience would notice.



My advertisement with a small image of the Coco Blu album cover from my Digipak.

My album cover from my Digipak with again the Coco Blu banner from my music video

My album cover from my Digipak 'Peaches & Cream' album title is the same font on my advertisement.

My album cover has the same image of the sunshine which is from our animation in our music video.

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




From the very begining of this media project media technologies where used in many different ways. The most important part of this project to me was the planning and research process.  I used many different types of media technology resources to help me with this part of my project. One of the very first thing we did indivually was to research  different female singers and to suss out the main contenders in the music industry.  One of the main search engines i used was google which without it i would have struggled as this search engine just makes finding information much easier then any others.

One of the very first website i used was wikipedia, I used wikipedia to search for female British artists i came across a whole page dedicated to this.



From this page i selected artists that i thought were still current to my target audience, and also artists who music was at least vaguely acquainted with.

As soon as i created a shortlist of artist that i wanted to research in detail i used YouTube to find music videos. I could access a large range of different types of videos. I used this website for song ideas from different genrs also. I also used this site to generate some ideas for our music video once we sleeted our song.

another part of our planning and research process was recording some of the information we found. We did this by using the site Blogger.com. On my blog i recorded my findings in mostly text , image and video forms. I found that providing links to videos that we wanted to look at most useful as it saved us time by not having to search it all the time.  
Another reason why i found blogger website useful is that we could upload individually but our group could still access it in their own time.

I also used the blog to look a previous years blogs which i found useful.

when it came to the production of our music video we were lucky enough to have access to a brilliant brand new camera, which was state of the art . which used a great memory card storage system. Which allowed us to record digitally on to SD card.which was a very convenient way as we then would use the usb card reader to transfer the files to any computer we needed to use.

The camera had a small digital screen where we could view our footage and also delete any clips we thought we wouldn't need. You could also choose to attach a bigger microphone if the internal mic wasn't picking up enough sound. But we didn't need to use this function. It also had manual zoom which was a handy tool when our auto focus wouldn't work to our liking. As many shots needed this tool.

Another programme we used was Final cut pro. Final cut pro is one of the best editing tools in my opinon and it helped us create our own personal master piece. In final cut pro we uploaded our video footage from our camera. We named each clip so that we knew what was what, and also helped us organise what we didn't use.



Final cut pro has little browsers which shows the clips you select this was very useful in helping us access the clips we needed to view quickly. We could also use these little browsers to arrange our lip syncing perfectly.

We then dragged the clips we wanted to edited on to our timeline. This is an example of our time line. The green bar is our music soundtrack of our song. If you look closely the red markers is what we used to match our lipsynching.

The marker tool was very useful to us. As we used the makers as a guide where we used the razor tool, which enabled me to shorten the length of clips and also separate. This tool allowed us to do this in a very precise way. This tool was most handy when we had to cut our time lapse as it didn't look right. So we had to cut the clip into even smaller clips then had to change the clips speed individually so it would flow right. Final cut pro also gave us the opportunity to add special effects. Now we didn't use many special effects, but we did add a cross dissolve in our opening scene.
 Once our video was completed we converted the file into a quick time file and it was ready to upload. Below is a video of me briefly explaning some of the main tools i used on photoshop





This video is also our groups animantic storybord our group created back in the planning stages using final cut pro, pictures taken with a digital camera and our sound tract.




4) What have you learned from your audince feedback?

Overall i received very positive feedback from my audience especial target audience. Which i was pleased about as that was the most important thing. Below are a couple of clips from our target audience with their feedback .






I valued both of these audience feedback as its what an artist needs to learn from. I was very glad that my audience picked up on that fact that Coco blu was very different in the way she was dressed. which i think that made her stand out. I'm also glad that the audience enjoyed the short love story line and that the found it was illstrated very well. Im glad our animation came across well as we spent quiet awhile perfecting them.


Here is some more audience feedback where i asked the general question of what the audience think they would want to change if they had a chance






I also recored some audience feedback of my digipak and advertisment.




Im glad my audience like the images of Coco and also the bright colours. When it comes to my advert i wouldn't change anything as i really like the look of it. Maybe my digipak i would add a thank you panel Below is a video where i address the audience feedback and i also discuss what i have learned from the whole experience.