COMMENTARY

This is our final commentary, we used clips from the music video and of the speakers as well as using the music in the intervals between clips.
Enjoy!

Final Commentary Video

Tom's evaluation

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

Our media product used a range of different conventions many of which we developed in our own ways to fit the music video and the effect we were looking for. Our song of choice Mcfly by Pinky Smooth gave us some trouble when we looked at what conventions we needed we found that the song and the band fitted two separate genres. While the band it’s self was heavy metal in genre the song’s genre is avant garde a much more experimental type of metal, so once we knew this we decided we would also have to try and give our video a much more experimental approach as well. However we still had to make sure we included recognisable conventions.
There isn’t a big well-established set of conventions for avant garde so if we really challenged them or not I cant say, however the idea of being experimental usually means trying to do something a bit different and unique and I feel we did accomplish this to the best of our abilities. We tried to use the lyrics of the song as a sort of guidepost to the video meaning we always had a link but in what way we took those lyrics was up to us. In the end we choose to carry a fairytale theme and spin it in a way we could work, this mainly transpired as a darker more comedic approach to red riding hood, one of the conventions we choose to avoid was the big aspect on band performance with out the resources we needed for this it would of caused us too much trouble and instead we decided a simple performance from the singer would be much more effective.

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

With our ancillary texts we took the story of little red riding hood and pushed to express a fairy tale theme as the main backbone to our project, this gave us a big cache of material we could look at and also plenty of room to take it in any direction we wanted. This was vitally important for expanding from the simple story of red riding hood into something much more unique to our music video, digipak and advert with such a strong concept it was easy to link them all together. Using the idea of a fairy tale book as the cover of our advert and digipak we had the notion that the content was our story/video and it all linked together effectively.

What did you learn from your audience feedback?

Our Audience feedback played an important role in the perfecting of our video as well as understanding the strong points of our work we also discovered what sections weren’t so good and for what reasons. While most of it was very positive with a lot of praise to the linking of the story to the lyrics, their was a few points noted on the editing especially that we needed to improve this mainly ended up being improvements to the cut rate and the timing of the clips. We later also decided we needed to make sure the timeline of the narrative was more clear so when we moved between the performance and narrative sections it was clear and remained well structured.


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

Music Video Evaluation - Laura

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

Our music video challenges the forms and conventions of a typical metal music video, although after researching the band further, we found that the band fits within a experimental form of heavy metal called 'Avant-garde metal', which challenges the heavy metal conventions. A typical metal music video would normally include a dark background with little lighting, dark clothing and normally includes a lot of shots of the singer/band performing the song. Our video challenges almost all these conventions as our video, although quite dark, is a more brighter video than a typical metal music video, as we used Little Red Riding Hood as our main theme. Thich brings a funner element towards the music video we wouldnt have had if we had stuck to the metal genre.


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


We used a story book theme for both our music video and our digipack and magazine advert. I feel this was effective as it looks like the band has got a style or 'niche' similar to artists in other genres, for example, Katy Perrys 'bubblegum' style which is consistent throughout her work. I feel that the story book theme also works within the genre of 'Avant-garde metal' as it challenges the metal genre, but also fits within the genre as well.


What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

Our audience feedback was very positive, alltough some members of the audience didn't understand the concept of the plot, for example, they didnt realise that we had tried to use past and present tense, between the verse and chours, we tried to change this after our rough cut feedback by putting title cards and footnotes within our clips however, some people still didn't understand after our final video.
The rest of our feed back was mainly positive saying the editing was professional and the lipsyncing was good.


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

We used new media technologies, such as Blogger, Final Cut, HD cameras, and Photoshop in all our construction stages. In our developing stage we Mainly used Blogger to plan and reaserch the video. We used HD camaras while we were filming the prelimanary videos and test shots, as well as the main video. During the evaluation and construction of the digipack and magazine advert we used Photoshop as well as Blogger.

Director's Commentary Planning

Questions

• What influences did we use and how did the genre of the music influence this?-Tom
• We used a fairy tale theme (Red Riding Hood) what was the plan for this and how did it change what sort of problems did we have adapting it? - Laura
• How did we come up with the concept?
• How effective and easy to use was the theme for the digipak material? - Tom

• How was our audience feed back what did it do to out video and ideas we had, did we stay with the same concept or did we feel we had to change things to achieve the effect we needed. - Laura
• What was the best bit of feed back we got?- Esther
• Talk about the shared images and style through both using fairy tale image while also keeping it abit darker- Tom
• Editing techniques and effects we wanted to use did use and stopped using.- Esther
• The different pieces of technology we used and how they effected what we wanted to achieve and any problems we had with them. (battery running out last moment)- Esther
• Costumes and props
• What parts played to the genre conventions and what parts were unique?

Presentation

• Voice over clips 
• Show test footage next to final film clips 
• Take turns talking/ maybe discussing with each other different points.
• Informal approach little scripted talking more expression of thoughts and ideas (more personal)

DigiPack

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.