Evaluation

At the start of the school year, our teacher gave us the task of creating a media product. The teacher chose for us to do a music video, and two ancillary products.
The ancillary products that would go along with the music video are the digipak, and the magazine advert.

The purpose of a music video is to portray and express emotions in which an audience is supposed to feel due to the suggestions and expression a certain video is making. For example, if a music video is full of low key lighting, and is slow, with a depressing narrative, then it is very obvious that the music video is therefore meant to make you feel sad, unless it is diverse to its conventions. For example, that style music video that I just described may be put to an upbeat dance soundtrack, going completely against whatever a person may think when they see the video; therefore this would be breaking convention, and showing diversity within that chosen music genre.

The importance early on during our year 13 A2 look at Media was placed on things such as the way in which music videos are consumed or advertised.  This would thereby help us later when discussing these things and relating it back to our own video and ancillary products. We wrote blogs on different genres, and different ways in which they can be consumed i.e. different music channels and Youtube etc. We then chose our groups of 4 in which we would create our videos and ancillary texts. I worked with Lauren Vale, Jagoda Jasion and Dipika Sharma. We chose this group, as given all our success separately at AS, we figured it would be good to bring the same sort of ideas together as one, to hopefully come out with top marks on our video and ancillary products.

At the start of the production, I was the performer, and would also take part in the narrative. I would then also help witht the editing, however with so little free time to film, I soon became just the performer, and assisted with editing, as the amount of filming we still needed to do on the narrative couldn’t fit in with my already busy weekly schedules. As a result of this, our narrative has changed several times, with several different actors/actresses attempting to fill a role that we find has no emotional expression, and doesn’t connect with the audience in the way the we originally hoped they would.

The big positive that came from the performance part of this video, is the isolated locations. Firstly, the performance seen is set in a dark room, and is slowly lit directly on the performance, and none of the surroundings. This shows complete focus on the performance that is currently taking place, and also shows connotations of loneliness, with complies with the sad theme that the song appears to follow. The other location that we feel works well is on top of the White Cliffs of Dover. The only problems we encountered here were:

a)      Did we get enough shots?

b)      The wind was too strong for some clips

Despite these problems, we feel happy with the performance, and although we have struggled completely with narrative, the performance aspect has worked as a sort of anchor/platoon in which to work around when modifying or adapting a new narrative.

We started changing our minds after the first day of planning the video. Our group originally decided to do an indy song by a girl artists, but were faced witht the fact we couldn’t find a girl that would be the performer, and we also couldn’t find any songs that we felt had the slow emotional aspect, as well as a powerful finish. This is when we agreed that going for the indy male artist would be much easier. We looked through different songs by people such as James Morrison and Kris Allen. We finally decided that we  would use the most recent winner of the X Factor ‘James Arthur’. This seemed quite fitting, as we chose to do his version of ‘Impossible’ originally recorded by Shontelle, but appeared to be much more successful by the young talent show winner.

Immediately we all had ideas of what we wanted in the video, but the problem soon became that all the ideas were too conflicting, let alone much more complex than we seemed to understand.

We decided that our target audience should be 18-25 years old, as these are the ages in which they are most likely to watch music videos on the television, and youtube, so therefore they should also be able to connect more with the themes and representations that we hope to express throughout our media production.

Something that hasn’t been focused on too greatly within our video is the ability to represent other products within the video that may help fans/viewers connect with the artist, as they can see things that may be a part of their lifestyle.
One item that is very evident throughout the performance is the performers’ superdry jacket. Things like these can then represent either the style of the artist, and maybe the genre in which they hope their music pursues, and also giving a guideline to fans on what he wears, in case they want to follow suit. This is known as an intertextual reference.

Originally we agreed that our music video would be split into 70% Narrative, and 30% performance, and there would be no use of concept in the production. However it is unclear whether these percentages will be stuck to, as it is hard to measure with all the narrative problems we have encountered that I mentioned earlier.

When looking at creating the ancillary texts, we struggled to find any great examples, as we wanted an indy/urban theme to them, but when looking for some of these that James Arthur released, we soon realised that he hasn’t released any, as his new album had only just finished being produced, and therefore we couldn’t find the digipak. We found similar types of artists for inspirations such as the male artists I mentioned earlier, but we still found that they did not help as much as we hoped, and found ourselves trying to create a new genre of digipak that appeared to have not been produced before.
One of the most challenging things with this was being able to get suitable images that we could edit, and then adapt them through 6 different boxes/slides that would all link and keep the same style. After having a brief photo shoot, we had some images that we thought we could use, but when it came to editing, the other 3 in the group felt that they were too hard to edit, so had to get me to have new photos taken.

The positive behind the new photos was that we could also have a change of scenery, and we decided to use a brick wall on the outside of a London underground station. This definitely gave us the urban look that we desired, and I feel the clothes on the artist represented the indy edge to then mix genres, and combine two different music cultures, to create the images that we found so hard to find when looking through professional examples of different ancillary texts.

Originally when I started creating a digipak I assumed that there would only be 4 slides, as when you get a CD, the only faces to note will be on the front, back, CD and inside cover. I never assumed that we would have to use two additional images to complete a digipak which requires 6 slides. I think our most successful slide on the digipak is the back cover/track list, as Lauren Vale originally came up with the idea of using a picture of a guitar, and putting the names of the tracks in between the strings. She then made the picture black and white, and although the colouring may not seem to fit our indy genre, it did correlate, as there was a guitar, and the mood set by the picture also fits witht the emotions we are attempting to express from our music video. I certainly feel that we have done a good job at making sure our digipak and magazine advert relates to each other, and also more importantly to our music video. There are certain aspects that  we originally used that have now been put to the side, but with our original idea for the video, we planned to use a house of cards, and set them alight. We then found a good way of linking this theme in a magazine advert, as Jagoda Jasionowska used fire in the background of the image, and blurred it with smoke. Firstly this gave away the obvious link between music video and advert, but I feel that by blurring it, and then adding a smoke effect, it also correlated with the video, as it created that air of mysteriousness, that works with the lyrics of the song, as our song can often be misconstrued to mean many different things, therefore the shroud of smoke represents that mystery.

We originally tried using the shots we had from the first photoshoot in the digipak, but this proved a challenging task, and therefore we decided to shoot again in a different setting (brick wall). We have used the shots from this photoshoot in our digipak, as again we feel this portrays the image we hope to send, and fits well with our genre.
The images from the first shoot were in an organised photo studio, so these could work well when using a magazine advert, as the shots look well produced, and are purposely not cluttered or focused on a setting.