Music Video Evaluation- Esther North

• In what way does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?- The genre of our music video song is classed as 'Avant- garde metal', also known as experimental metal. Its known to break the conventions of the typical metal genre, which is exactly what our video does. A typical metal music video would have a very dark and morbid atmosphere, usually with a fairly monochromatic and desaturated colour scheme, which link well with the lyrics, which also tend to be quite morbid and hell like. With our music video, we took this idea of a morbid storyline, but twisted it to turn into a fairytale setting. This goes well with  the avant garde metal conventions, as it takes a dark themed song, and twists it, mixing it with a fairy tale, a story for children which always has a 'happy ending'. Another convention of a metal video is the focus on the performance and the instruments from the band, rather than showing a storyline through the song. Again, we break this by having mainly storyline, although still some performance, but no instruments are shown. This also shows the conventions of an Avant-garde metal video.

• How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?- With our ancillary texts, we decided to express the theme of fairytales, as we had used the idea of Red Riding Hood within our music video. This furthermore expressed the avant-garde metal genre, through the large contrast in dark lyrics and the happy, fairytale theme. 

• What gave you learnt from your audience feedback?- Our feedback from the audience was very positive. They  thought our video was professionally put together and well edited. However, many of them were unclear of the plot. Our main aim was to have the performance shots as present tense, having the other scenes as flashbacks. However, we didn't portray this clearly as there wasn't any clear difference between the present and past tense shots.

• How did you use new media technologies in the construction, research, planning and evaluation stages? - Within the music video project, many different types of new media technologies were used. Throught the whole project, the internet, particularly blogger, was of high useage. We also used things such as google for research, lyric searching and ideas, facebook and myspace for contacting the artist, and youtube to upload our video and getting to know the song. Outside of the internet, other computer software was used such as final cut to edit our footage, and photoshop to create our ancillary products. We also

Music Video Evaluation - Paige

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

 The song we chose to do (McFly) is quite hard to attribute a genre too, but could be put under Avant-Garde Metal, although the band themselves (Pinkly Smooth) are a Heavy Metal band.

  Avant-Garde Metal is a subgenre of metal which is highly experimental which uses unconventional and unusual sounds, instruments and vocal techniques. 

  As such, when we created our music video we wanted it to have an unusual feel as well as being experimental and trying a project, that could potentially go very wrong. Luckily, it didn't.

  We set our music video to the lyrics of the song, taking inspiration from the words "Father" and "Wolf" which gave us the idea of Little Red Riding Hood. 

  Although we knew a childrens story wouldn't completely match the tone of the music and unusual vocal style, so we had to make our project seem a bit darker than a usual fairytale and get a performer who could live up to the rough vocal style.

  We used certain conventions with the lighting, e.g. we kept everything dark and moody to add to the atmosphere we wanted to create, and we used a performance alongside a narrative, which is often seen in Rock and Metal videos.

 How effective is the combination of the product and the ancillary texts (Magazine Advert and Digipak)?

 The Digipak and Magazine Advert uses is quite experimental due to it's colouring and styling which also conforms to the type of music video we created. The combination of the three items is interesting as they vary quite a lot in style. Our music video is very dark and moody whereas our Digipak and Magazine Advert are very colourful and almost Victorian in style, because of the font and background style. We chose this because it was quirky and Avant-Garde itself.

What have you learnt from the audience feedback?

  From the audience feedback we have learnt that though we created a good and very interesting music video, the plot of the story was lost on some of the audience.

  This is quite disappointing, as we tried to create markers and hold the story together through the use of titles at the beginning of the piece introducing the characters and photographs later on when the line "I'm still your father, child" is introduced to reinforce the relationship between Little Red Riding Hood and the Woodcutter.

  Although we did learn from the audience who watched our music video that they thought the story of Red Riding Hood was a good contextual choice and that it did indeed conform to the genre of music. They also believed our piece was very professionally done, as well as performed convincingly and edited well.

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

Blogger, search engines, photoshop, final cut express, HD camera.

 

 

This is the finished magazine ad, we used the same background as the digipak, but used a different colour scheme as to inkeep with the background.

We chose the pea green colour because of the album name, the pink because of the lions colour and the yellow because it stood out and framed the image.

The photo was placed slightly to the side to make people follow the eyeline of Charlie (the wolf) and look at the release date. The bottom 2 lines are the names of three of the songs on the album.

Magazine Ad Planning

 This is the list of notes we created to know what to put on our digipak and advert, the long list at the bottom is the song names we randomly chose, including McFly.

Pinkly Smooth
In a Pea Green Boat Under The Sea
Coming: 13/12/11
Bucktan Records
www.pinklysmooth.com
5 STARS
“Amazing, inventive and…interestingly titled!” Kerrang
“In a Pea Green Boat Under The Sea, is one of the best albums of this year. Pinkly Smooth have done it again!”  Rock Sound

Alice in Blunderland
The Boy who Ate Cats
Mcfly
Uninspired
The Tale of Little Brian
Bush Woman
No Shit, Sherlock
Iron Dragon
Dom
King Thrushbeard
Esther Chocolate And The Previous Comment
Solitude and the Everlasting Pain.

Digipack and magazine advert ideas

We came up with the idea that our digipack and magazine advert would revolve around the idea of fairy tales.  The image to the left was what we decided to base our design around, using the blue background and red border, but removing the design from the middle and replacing it with text and images relative to our album.

Logo for the magazine ad and digipak

I created this image from a photos and screenshots we took on the day of filming.
I used photoshop to merge the images together and edit them in a "Sumi-e" style, as to fit a 'fairytale' convention.

Made up track listings

Alice in Blunderland
The Boy who Ate Cats
Mcfly
Uninspired
The Tale of Little Brian
Bush Woman
No Shit, Sherlock
Iron Dragon
Dom
King Thrushbeard
Esther Chocolate And The Previous Comment
Solitude and the Everlasting Pain.

Costume Ideas - Websites for costumes

http://www.joke.co.uk/adult-deluxe-little-red-riding-hood-costume~22232.html

Music Video Final

Our final cut of our music video

Analysis Of Music Video

• filter is the same throughout all the clips to keep the same effect throughout the video. Fades are also used to make transitions smoother in some of the clips, as well as jump cuts to link with the fast, jumpy pace of the song.
   
•  Could of redone the text

•  Conforms well with the genre, by having half narrative, half performance.
• Shows an intertextual reference from having Red Riding Hood. 
• Performance is well done, but lip syncing could of been slightly more accurate
• could of done more covers of angles in shots, as some of the shots had to be sneakily edited due to  fingers being in shots, mistakes in actintg etc
• The original idea was to have the story of red riding hood as a memory of the wood cutter, showing it as a sort of 'old film' type thing in the past tense, however, this isn't particularly clear as the performance and the narrative don't have a clear difference to show different tenses.

Feedback from other groups on our video

-Good relationship between the lyrics and the visuals but is a bit confusing sometimes
-The story is entertaining
-Red Riding Hood was a good contextual choice
-Good narrative and performance
-Performed very well and convincingly
-Conforms to the genre
-Mysterious look and feel
-Professional look
-Perfect filters, not too dark or too light
-Didn't feel like a typical fairystory
-Good use of close-ups for performance.

Correspondance between Group and Max

These are the messages between the group and Maxim who played our woodcutter.
There was indeed cake.

Rough Cut - Group discusion

This is a collection of thoughts and ideas we have compiled on our rough cut, this is to help us work out what has worked what needs changing and where to go with it next. We have had some feedback from other groups which has also influenced some of the ideas we have here.

Editing:
             We have to make sure we keep our style of editing fluent for the whole video ~ This means       that filter effects use the same settings and cover all the clips ~ We also could use transition effects to move between the singing scenes and the acting scenes in a more interesting way this might mean using a fade or similar effect to transition smoother.

We also need to cut more and avoid staying with one camera shot for two long and to help create a sync between the song and the video by cutting on the beat and making sure both the audio and visual come together well.

Camera:
             Our camera work seems to cover most of the basics and has an alround good effect however there is a few parts that can still be worked on this mainly means that when we cut between shots we take in account the effect different shots can have and cut acordingly. This should make sure there is good flow and we dont break continuity or confuse the audience by suddenly cutting to a strange angle.


Performance:
                     Our performance focuses around the story of little red riding hood we need to make sure that this is obvious and make sure the links are clear, while its not the same its important that the audience notice it as if they dont then that defeats the point of using it as a background reference to the song. This means we must keep a clear coherent focus on the characters to make sure it noticeable, while the singing sections wont really inforce this so much if used in conjuction with the performance it should help make the 3 characters The Wolf, The Woodcutter and Red riding hood easily recognisable.

Genre conventions:~

Rough Cut feedback from Tanya

Although this is very short at the moment, your ideas are quite clearly expressed.
In terms of what you can do next:

Make sure that all of the shots have a consistency of filter and effect.
You need to cover the track a couple more times and have at least one of the performances include a direct address to camera.
Cut back and forth through the lines more ie rather than cut at the end of the line, cut in the middle of the line or multiple times.

Review of P1-02 rough cut

P1-02 Rough Cut Analysis

Editing:

Faster cuts

More cuts especially for the last chorus, could easily incorporate shots from earlier choruses.

2^nd walk at the end should be cut out, and go straight to bed shot for continuity.

Needs to fit music better, cuts on beats etc

Perhaps filters added, contrast etc because lighting is a bit dull.

Filter added to walking shots/memories?

Shots between present and flashback should have a special effect/transition.

Mise en Scene:

Worked well, good choice of locations and props.

Costumes also well chosen.

No complaints about this.

Camerawork:

Some really good long shots and close up shots.

Not much movement but fits in with the song.

Camerawork would work better if the shots were cut and changed more often.

Genre Elements:

A lot of focus on the lead singer.

Good use of flashbacks to give context to the song.

Very sort of boy-girl song.. typical of genre.

Use of makeup created a nice effect.

Performance:

Lip-synching was good, well timed, singer obviously learnt the words.

Acted performance was good, fitted the genre.

Could have benefitted from more movement.

Could have done with seeing male character more to make us understand why she’s singing the song.

What and how to improve:

Improve last chorus with extra cuts and faster shots.

Filters on flashbacks.

Shoot more footage of male character for backstory.

ROUGH CUT

 

This is the rough cut of our music video project. Overall we are happy with it, although some further editing is needed and obviously, it needs to be finished.

Because we had to export it on a small resolution it plays a bit slower than it should, but we will be exporting in HD for the final piece.