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Thats it, the blog is closed! I've enjoyed making the music video and hope it looks good. Ciao.

Evaluation question 1

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

I will be using the following nine frames to show how typical or not my music video is, comparing them to conventions of real media products in other music videos of the same genre.

First off, I will look at the use of titles in my work. I stuck to typical conventions of music videos here, as they normally display the name of the band, song title and album title at the beginning or all the way through the song. My titles are white to stand out against the background, and are a plain font to fit into any companys network such as 4music and MTV. As you can see from the above picture some TV music channels have their own font, so my titles would have to be changed to fit into these.

When looking at setting I found Bombay Bicycle Club liked to use similarly large locations as mine in one of their videos. These large open spaces are interesting and make the videos look richer, typical music video conventions of wanting to be rich and own a lot of land. In my video however the characters are seen destroying these once nice buildings, adding to the rock and roll feeling of smashing things up, but with more of a story behind it. The location in our video is key to the whole video, as is Bombay Bicycle Club's, and really establishes the whole concept of being a Fraud and destroying things, fighting back from society. Both videos have an element of mystery to them, due to location. The places could be anywhere, hidden away in the countryside, and this relates to places the viewer have found that they think are secret from everyone else.

Costumes and props in our video challenge typical conventions of music videos, throught the use of theme and use of masks. The closest example of a video similar to ours in this context is Arctic Monkeys, who film a video of clowns fighting gangsters, all in typical outfits. In our video we use masks to hide the identity of the people smashing up the housing estate, to show that this could be anyone, however other music videos use outfits to establish a certain type of person, for example clowns. We use props such as poles and a car, but cars are usually used in music videos in the indie genre to show characters travelling, instead of how rich they are.

When using camera angles and editing we kept very much within conventions of a typical indie music video. Editing was straight cuts to keep the video flowing, as are most other music videos, instead we decided to use special effects in the actual clips and not on transitions. Camerawork was also similar to other videos we studied, and we used a lot of shots such as over the shoulder and close ups. We stuck to typical conventions when using camerawork and editing as the target audience are already used to this style of filming, and the actions in the video suit the music played.

When looking at narrative/story and the opening of the video I think ourvideo has a good narrative and opening that reflects that. The opening encourages the viewer to keep looking as the characters identity is originally kept secret, and the use of him walking on a journey again encourages the viewer to keep watching. This same technique is used in Bombay Bicycle Clubs videos, and a chase keeps the viewer entertained, as does the journey in ours. The narrative and story in my video is strong I think, however this is not typical of music videos to include such a strong storyline, but I think this attracts the audience to keep watching.

The genre of our music is Indie, due to our choice of song - Frauds by Scarlet Harlots. Indie videos from other famous bands vary in content, but lots of examples in my research and planning contained elaborate masks, costumes and outfits. These bands include Arctic Monkeys and Bombay Bicycle Club, and these artists had the most successful videos. We stuck to these typical conventions and made crude masks, however one convention we didn't stick to was showing the band playing instruments. We wanted the music video to be separate from the band in the way of it being a separate story, just like in the Flourescent Adolescents by Arctic Monkeys.

As in all videos we needed a key character/characters to base the video around; so chose five masked people that could represent anyone, that would gradually enter the video and become a group before smashing up the derelict village. Typical indie videos focus on one main character, but in order for us to show that the "Frauds" concept was spreading we needed a lot more annoymous characters. The star image of our video would be the guy in the red mask on the left, the iconic roughly made mask hiding the mans true identity. This is something no other video in this genre has done so far.

 The main representation in my video is that of teenagers/youths. Our video presents young people as dangerous, violent and all as part of a gang, although we know this is all to do with feeling out of place. This loss of identity promotes the video as being aimed at teenagers, particularly as we present them as powerful using worm eye view shots. These representations are typical of the media, to display youths as dangerous, however we do this as part of our storyline to show how frustrated young people are with their boring everyday lifes.

Finally the relationship between lyrics and visuals were very important. The song Frauds is all about people looking the same, but everyone feeling different. Our video shows this rebellion and difference people feel about themselves by them coming together and letting out their anger and frustration. The costumes reflect their annoymity and unity, and certain shots and actoins reflect the exact lyrics. For example, in the third verse the shot on the left is shown whilst the words "I'm sick of all your name dropping" plays. This type of refection of lyrics is typically in indie videos, to reinforce certain bits of the song to the audience. 

Evaluation question 2

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

There are many similarities between my main product and ancillary tasks, all of these intentional. To start off with the people in the video are wearing rugged masks, a common theme that runs throughout the video, digipak and webpage. These masks are essential to the song and video, as it encapsulates the concept of being a 'Fraud' and hiding from society and what they are, and this is such a strong image we decided to use it for the ancillary tasks.

 

The text we used for the webpage and digipak is going to be unique every time, as I have shown in the two ancillary tasks, and this is another similarity. The font for each letter will always be different, as it is the messy effect we desired, but unfortunately this meant we couldn't have a distinct logo or title for the band.

 

 The only major difference across the three media I created is the use of animals in the digipak, and the paper birds in the picture on my webpage. We used animals to show a sense of danger that the 'Frauds' are in, and we thought they looked good against the crumbled paper background that runs throughout our digipak and webpage.

As you can see the use of simlarities such as masks, text and animals, that link my three media, make them each look professional and create a brand identity for Scarlet Harlots. This brand identity/or logo is summarised by the image of the characters in shabby masks, and messy titles that use lots of different fonts.

Evaluation question 3

3. What have you learned from your audience feedback?

During the process of making my music video I used lots of audience feedback. Peoples opinions and feedback greatly influenced the way my final piece looked, proving that this process was worth doing.

The first audience feedback I got was when I voiced my ideas to the group for initial ideas for our music video. Our ideas were discussed in detail in terms of what would and wouldn't work well, and the feedback from each other eventually helped us decide on our final idea of using masks and the 'Frauds' concept. 

Next we needed feedback for what people wanted in and from our music video, so decided to make a questionnaire. This questionnaire influenced nearly all of the choices we made when picking a song, storyline and genre; and was proved effective as our video was a success, and should appeal to our target audience as it contains everything they wanted. The elements of the video this questionnaire influences include the visual reinforcement of lyrics, the speed of the edits, and that the band don't have to be in the video to make it successful.

Once we had completed our rough cut we needed a lot of feedback in order to turn this into our final product, so we used facebook, and asked our teacher as well as family and other media students. On facebook the feedback was mostly positive, with people commenting that our "editing in the chorus was good, etc" but this feedback was not constructive. Our friends were more critical, with them picking up on audio issues such as sound in the background, and minor editing mistakes that were easily corrected. Feedback from our teacher was valuable as he commented on the effectiveness of the use of masks across all three media, and also on audio problems we had already established. Family feedback helped establish the general shots which people found most interesting, so we extended these in our final video. This also helped us recognise that we needed more special effects such as mirroring and brush strokes, to keep our audiences attention.

As you can see feedback was an essential part of making our video, particularly as the audience influenced what went into it, so hopefully they will enjoy it and think it is appropriate for the song.

Evaluation question 4

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

At a basic level we used the camera, tripod, blogging and editing software in our research, planning and evaluation stages. We used the camera and tripod to film lots of shots, which was straight forward to use and uploaded these onto our documents; but had to encode these files using a program we have called 'rename my files'. This program changed the files from a MPEG into one Abode Premiere Pro could read, and uploaded them quickly.

When editing we used Abode Premiere Pro CS4, which was easy to use as we used it for our final project last year too. This year however we needed more effects as we wanted to fit into our indie music video genre, so after searching through lists of effects we found appropriate ones that fit in with our video such as 'brush strokes' and 'mirroring'.

Blogging was also easy as we had already used blogger.com last year, so as soon as the year started I knew what to do and started blogging posts to make sure all my progress was recorded. The only problem we had with the blogger this year was posting up videos. The files were so large they wouldn't originally fit onto a post, so the IT technicians at shcool cut the size of the files without losing any of the quality in order to fit into my blog.

New programs we used this year included Photoshop, youtube and weebly.com. Photoshop was used for creating the album covers, which was fairly easy to use after testing out drafts first. The only problems we had with this program were the background, and resizing pictures of animals from google. For the background of the CD covers I wanted a crumpled paper effect to keep in theme with the other media we were creating, and tried making one from scratch before eventually deciding the most efffective looking technique was to use a picture from google images. Also, the animal images at first would not be shrunk down to fit the covers, so I had to open them up in paint in order to resize them, but these were just minor problems in an easy to use program.

Finally, online programs included youtube and weebly.com. Youtube was utilised to put our rough cut and final production online, and more specifically so we could put it on facebook to get audience feedback. At first these files were too large to put on, so we contacted our IT department and they managed to shrink the size of the files without losing any quality. Weebly.com was used to create our website for Scarlet Harlots to promote their new single, that we have made a video for. I had never tried to make a website before, but this site was extremely simple to use and just about showed us through the whole process. Pictures and blogs were easy to create and upload, and the layout was simply picked, however I feel that all the elements worked well, and although easy and quick to make looks effective. 

Final production and analysis

 

Above is our finished music video for the song Frauds by Scarlet Harlots.

Looking through the marking criteria for my media text I can see i need to show a lot of technical skills that I included in my media, and below is a few more interesting examples of these.

• Framing a shot,including and excluding elements as appropriate:

• Using a variety of shot distances as appropriate:

• Selecting mise-en-scene including colour, figure, lighting, objects and setting:

• Using sound with images and editing appropriately for the task ("name dropping"):

Re-shooting, re-editing

Once we had shown the rough cut and got our feedback, the next step was to update our video using criticisms and postitive feedback we were given.

No one commented on individual clips they disliked, instead giving positive feedback on select clips such as close ups on the masks whilst infront of the garages, and the chorus. This influenced us to not go and film anymore clips, especially as we have a lot of scenery and other smashing shots on our computers ready to fill any gaps in the video. Instead we decided to focus more on the editing.

Again the editing recieved a lot of positive reviews, as people were fond of the quick pace and special effects. We decided to use more effects such as 'solarise' to keep the video varied (seen above), as well as adding in more of the popular effects including 'mirroring'. We also sorted out the audio issues quickly, simply clicking on the speaker off button for the whole of audio layer 1 and keeping the second, as you can see below:

     

As you can see the editing and alterations I have made to my video are not very big problems, which leads me to believe that all previous work on things such as storyboards and shooting were effective, and have made the process of re-editing much easier than I first thought.

Rough cut feedback

Once we managed to put our video onto the blogger and youtube we also put it on facebook, as you can see from the screenshot below. We used facebook to get feedback from people online we knew that did media studies, from here and different schools.

As you can see from the above screenshot we did get a bit of feedback on Facebook, most of it positive online mentioning that the editing for the chorus was good, and the music matched the video well. Feedback from my family and girlfriend was also positive. They liked the way the story was structured, the way the masks left the characters annoymous, the use of effects and certain camera angles shown to the left. Negative feedback was a lot more constructive however, as we showed the video to a lot of media students at school who were very critical. Most of their issues with the video was about the audio heard in the background that is non-diagetic to the video. This will be easily corrected, however we still want the sound of the television smashing at the end of the second verse, so will have to work around that. There are a couple of editing errors that also need to be corrected, and most feedback was about including more effects, as music videos feature a lot of special effects to make the video more interesting to the audience. Apart from these few corrections though I am proud of how our video looks so far. 

Rough cut

Below is the rough cut of our final product. We found several things wrong with it when watching back such as other sounds apart from the audio tune in the background, and missing ut on some effects in the chorus. The next step will be to get feedback and corret our mistakes for the final product:

Editing and description of process

We started editing the footage we got from Upwood a while ago on Premiere Pro CS4, gradually filling in bits as we got more film. The biggest problem that arose was actually syncing the footage to the track. The first verse is a build up, as reflected in our rough cut, then the second verse is more explosive, before the third verse is calmer before the last chorus. Our original storyboard didn't take this into account, so when we started editing the second and third verses were originally the other way round. We easily corrected this, whilst filling in the other verses; however the timing of each verse/chorus was more difficult to sync to the track. The opening and closing credits were made easily on Premiere Pro, as was adding the dissolving effect used at the beginning and end. Our other effects include a mirroring, which shows the same clip four times on the screen, and a brush stroke effect. These two effects fit in with the music video style, and the brush stroke perfectly ties in with our brand for Scarlet Harlots. For the chorus we wanted something fast and continuous, such as other artists artists tracks we looked at in research and planning. We filmed one continous shot of us moving around the TV before cutting it up, and then speeding up the clips, as we did with much of the other footage in our video to fit it in and create a sense of speed that the song does.

Description of days filming

Looking back over my blog it is hard to distinguish when we went filming and what we achieved so have decided to summarise our filming here.

The first time we went down to Upwood was obviously a location scout, where we took lots of pictures and made a mental map of the place so we could draw up a shot list. We took the bat incase we wanted to film anything, but a member of the cast broke it so we had to replace it with a metal pole we found through the video.

The second time we filmed the middle of the video, as well as some of the shots from the last verse including the long corridor one. This day of filming was difficult as just before we left we established the content of the storyboard for this verse would not fit in with the music, as the last verse is slower than the second. We decided to improvise and film the characters smashing everything up in the second verse, before then having the third verse slow as the characters run to escape what they have done.

The third time we went to Upwood we filmed the first verse and last shots. This went a lot smoother and the storyboard and shot list made this day so easy we were done in about an hour. We continued to get more shots that wern't on the storyboard incase we needed anymore footage, but whilst editing we found we already had tons of shots. Below is some pictures of us filming during this filming session:

Filming the chorus yesterday was also easy. I had a clear idea how the chorus should look thanks to the use of effects we found on Premiere Pro CS4, so the shots were easy to create, especially in school, and didn't take too long either.

Filming and editing

Yesterday we filmed the bits missing from the verses and the end, and filming went very smoothly due to us using our storyboard and shot list effectively. All that is left now is the chorus, and we plan to film this tomorrow in order to get all our clips done. Today I started editing our piece together on Premiere Pro CS4 (shown below on the left), and already the music video is taking shape. Here we found an effect that would suit the chorus too called 'brush strokes' also fitting in with our brand identity. When editing I made a timeline to know what part clips need to go in different bits of the song, and this is very helpful as we have so much footage I would not know what clips go in at certain times. We got the track off a youtube to mp3 converter on the internet, and I am just putting the basics of the clips together at the moment before adding effects later on. Below on the right is the basic timeline I made.

Filming Again and shooting the ending

Yesterday the weather wasn't right and one of our cast members car had to go for it's MOT, so unfortunately filming didn't happen as we couldn't all fit into one car. We have re-scheduled filming again, and up to the time when we film our group will discuss more shots we could get and look over the shot list and storyboard to ensure filming goes as smooth and as quick as possible. I have been editing the footage we already have and have noticed gaps in the story, and more angles to get when filming. Below is a shot-list summary of clips we will be re-filming and adding in when we go back to RAF Upwood:

More specifically I have been thinking how to end the video, as there is a very strong storyline to it. I think an appropriate ending of the characters leaving their masks and sense of anarchy behind, would be fitting for the song, so I added this onto the end of the storyboard and will film it tomorrow.

Filming tomorrow

With the rough cut now finished tomorrow we will travel down to RAF Upwood, hopefully for the last time as the deadline looms closer. It is the only day this week when all of our cast are available to film, so we have discussed costumes again for continuity, props, and taking all appropriate parts of the storyboard and shot lists. We are hoping that shooting will not take long, and once this is done we can edit together our film for the final product. We will take more pictures of us filming tomorrow.

Rough cut not ready

After working all day on our rough cut it still wasn't ready for our teacher to see because we took so many clips, but instead we used the time to be finishing this film and established shots we needed to get next time we go filming. Hopefully we will only need to go back one more time to get the shots we need, then will have to find somewhere more local to film the chorus.

However, we showed the teacher our digipack, which he said was excellent, and commented that we had to make sure brand awareness linked all of our three tasks, in order to achieve a high grade we desire. So far we have the running theme of masks that link our medias:

How filming went

Tomorrow in lesson we will create a rough cut of the important smashing scenes of our video, and will show them to a teacher from another school coming in to help us. It will be good to fit the video in with the last verse of the section of music, to see if the video will look professional and fit in with brand awareness and knowledge. Feedback from another teacher will help us to see if anything is missing, but it is difficult as we do not have all the video to show him yet. We got permission from the farmer to use RAF Upwood once down there, and he told us that there was no danger in asbestos in certain buildings so we used these for the smashing scenes.

Organisation and explanation of cast, props and locations

This Friday we will go down to RAF Upwood and film the smashing sections of our music video, as all the cast have a day off from school that day. We will take two cars with the cast in, and will take all the props needed including costumes, bat, masks, and use the storyboard and shotlist to film the end of the video while we have everyone together. When getting to the location there should be no one there, but incase there is, we will ask the farmer permission to film. Everyone is bringing their own costume and I will bring the masks, and after shooting we will arrange the next time people can go down and film.

Risk assessment

• camera must be held out the window of car while filming the middle of the road - have to hold the camera very safely and get the minimum amount of film that we can in order to protect the schools resources.


• must use the bat appropriately for the film - when we started filming someone swung the bat around and broke it on a wall, so from then on we had to use a metal pole for the main character to carry around, this being more dangerous than a bat. I used the pole safely to make sure no one got hurt.


• when smashing things such as the TV and clock the camera man and person smashing the item have to be careful. We are lucky because the characters wear masks and hoods so are protected of a sort, but whoever is filming will also have to cover up, and stay as far away from the item being broke as possible.


• where we are filming is an abandoned RAF base, and the village is smashed up and wrecked already, giving us a perfect setting to smash our items up. Once the items are broke we need to clean it up and throw the TV and clock in the skip. We have to be careful were we stand as there is smashed glass all over the floor and rooms burnt out, but we can all wear thick shoes and big coats to protect ourselves.


• the masks themselves will restrict our vision, so we have to be careful when running and especially smahsing things. In some clips, where our backs are turned to the camera, we could not wear the masks as long as no one turns around.
  
  

Location and shot list

Below is the location and shot list I wrote up after visiting RAF Upwood on a location scout:

We will take these when we go to film as a reference to where we need to shoot, and will speed up the whole filming process hopefully.

New storyboard

With our new idea and location for our music video we needed a new storyboard. We wanted to get across the threat and danger of these people with masks on that are 'Frauds' and build tension that they could be capable of anything, before finally showing them losing the masks to return to normal everyday life. The storyboard took a couple of drafts as ideas for different angles kept coming into our heads, but I finally drew up this one which we will follow when filming: