Reflection Evaluation- Charlie

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

I feel that we have mostly maintained a clear image and theme throughout our campaign from the start. The only thing that has changed through our campaign is the use of more narrative in the video as our teachers advised that if we wanted a narrative in the video it had to be more obvious so the audience can understand it so it can be followed but not make it dominate the video. Apart from that, the idea of location and layout of it what we were going to include, the general outcome of what we wanted the music video to look like and the main singer as Miles Kane have been the same throughout.

When looking at the website, CD cover and the music product itself, I think that they are all interrealaed as they all have the same ideas behind them, both the CD cover and website have similar layouts, colour text and theme behind them and the video shows the characteristics of Miles Kane and the indie genre really well. I also feel they all give off the same impression of Miles Kane with everything being simple yet effective, smart yet laid back and appeals to the indie genre and his fans.

The relationship and purpose between our music video, the website and the CD cover are all formed to sell the music and the artist and achieve what the audience want as a consumer. The relationship and connection between our products is visible as the CD cover is advertised and shown on the website along with the music video itself and some of the images of the band and Miles Kane promoting him. Also images of Miles Kane are on the CD cover to promote him as a artist and images of instruments as well which can be expected on indie CD covers.

Here is a image of a digipak from Katy Perry and her album California Gurls:
 By looking at this digipak it is evident that Katy Perry has used images and ideas that will promote her album and her to a wide range of audiences. The use of candy floss and sweet things with pink clouds appeal to children and young girls as sweets are appealing at that age and looking at giant lolly pops as kids love sweets . This is also connected with her video California Gurls as she is transported to a sweety world with candy floss, gummy bears, jelly and sweets everywhere which shows the connection and relation to the video and album cover. However it also appeals to the male audience also and the shots of Katy Perry herself are of her under the impression that she isn't wearing any clothes and is posing on the front and inside cover which is very provocative and appeals to the male audience as a sexual image .

There are a few similarities between this digipak and ours. The use of having the artist on the front and inside cover to promote him and his music. Although the portrayal of his is smart and a laid back image whereas these images are more seductive and appeal more to the male audience.

Front and Back cover


Inside cover and CD



Website
 

Evaluations

After showing our music video to the rest of our class, they gave us feedback on what they liked about the video, whether they felt the product sold the artist to them, whether it fitted with the conventions of the genre and artist and anything that could have been improved:

Important photos and shots

Here are some shots we think are important that are in our video and screen grabs of our website and digi pack :

Finished video

We have finally finished our music video. After enormous amount of stress due to lack of location, actors availablitly and re shooting we have uploaded our clips, put it all together, cut it down and edit it to create our 3 minute video.

Editing in progress

We decided that we wanted to keep the black and white idea in our video so when we looked through our video and the effects available we decided to use the Old B&W effect and made it so the effect finished halfway though this clip. The clip before are all B&W so its as though colour comes into being when the dancing couple enter the dance hall.

Reflective Evaluation - Sophie - Question one

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

Our music videos the form and conventions of the indie genre, this specific indie genre is focused to British Indie its similar to Miles Kane’s ‘come closer’  video,  using a style of dress which  focuses on previous trends in the last century and not current trends  in the fashion scene. Miles Kane fits this genre by using 1950’s & 1960’s stylistic influences. 

This is shown in the come closer video by the 1950’s style clothes, the fur coat and the dress Daisy Lowe wears are both from the 1950’s genre the mise-en-scene is also from the time period. When creating are music video we decided to follow the stylistic influences from this music video, this is why Charlie (our main dancer) is dressed in genre appropriate clothing for the 1950’s era,  and the males wore suits similar to the style Miles Kane wore in the video.  We tried to find a band that were similar to the instruments Miles Kane has in his videos, this we found very hard are keyboardist dropped out on us and so did our drummer, thankfully we managed to find another drum kit and drummer.

Are location of a theatre/ hall to film in also was developed from the come closer video, in this video Miles Kane is in a pool hall/working mans club. Thus taking into account the socio cultural aspect for a location, we then did a similar thing and chose to use a dance hall in Beeston Rylands, the building is now used as a school.  Its old 1940’s architecture and design fitted perfectly for the type of music video we believed Miles Kane would create in a stylistic sense. However, it was hard to stick to these conventions, by doing this we limited the style of music video we could do. For example if we had chosen to Skeleton boy by friendly Fires it would have been easier to do a video that was very abstract and that didn’t necessarily needed to follow typical norms and conventions. By doing Miles Kane and sticking to the stylistic forms and conventions we lost a lot of versatility in the content of what we could create.

Editing ideas

We have looked at the brightness and contrast effect and found that it worked quite well. We have also looked at other effects that might improve the quality of our footage. Some of the effects we've looked at are;

Soft focus,
Sharpen,
ss adjust colours, shadows
ss adjust colours highlights.

Of the ones we have looked at we decided that soft focus didn't work very well and neither did the sharpen as they drew attention to the poor quality rather than away from it.

Soft focus

Sharpen

We have also compared two clips, one with the brightness and contrast and the other without.

Effect added

no effect

We found that the adjust colours shadows and highlights effects both made the video look better. We also noticed that the highlights would allow us to put a more subtle blue filter over our footage if we used it.

Shadows

Highlights

Editing ideas

We have re-watched our video and have considered some other effects we might use.

Since we wanted a blue filter over parts of our video, we have looked at the Colour monochrome, ss response curve blue extreme, ss Extract blue. We have looked through all of these but have found that they are too bright, as we wanted something that would be more subtle in its filtering.

When we were thinking about doing this, we thought about using light filters when shooting but found that it didn't give the effect that we wanted and so though it best to leave it to editing. So far we haven't found anything suitable for the blue effect and have decided that if we can't find anything appropriate we will have to scrap the idea completely.

Colour monochrome

ss Extract Blue

ss Response curve extreme blue.

Video progress

We have completed the sequencing of our video, and now all we have to do is add effects. We have spent some time thinking about what we want to do with our video, and found that we will have to use effects to minimise the poor quality of some of the footage, where the camera wouldn't focus properly. We feel the most appropriate effect would be the brightness and contrast as it would make the colours brighter and the graininess of the footage less noticeable.

By using this effect we can also make all the lighting in our video look more alike, since there are a few shots that are much brighter than the others.

We are also considering whether or not our footage would still work with the black and white effect we were originally wanted for our video.

Video Progress

We have almost completed our video, and only have a few more seconds of time to fill, before we can start adding our effects to it, and finishing it completely.

We have had to re-film some parts because the footage was either too poor quality or missing. We also had to revert a few of our clips to the original, to find footage that was mistakenly deleted.

Reflection Evaluation- Charlie

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

Our music video

Miles Kane- Inhaler

I feel that our music video uses forms and conventions related to indie genre. The aspect commonly found in indie music videos is live performance which is used throughout our performance. Both the Miles Kane and the Kasabian videos underneath included live performance in them also. The reason behind this is that the music emphasizes on guitars and drums so when you can hear a drum or guitar playing the audience expect that in the music video the instrument playing will be seen. This is why the ratio of performance to narrative is a lot higher in indie videos.

                                                                                                           

                    

                    Kasabian- Underdog

Throughout all of his music videos so far, MilesKane has worn a traditional  

suit with tie, which makes him appear smart, yet a sense of him being laid back. In his other video Come Closer, there is a dancer that he seems to like and then runs off with her and with the words in our song such as "Tango Foxtrot" we decided to use a dancer in our as well and in a dance hall. Although the girl dancer has a lot more revealing outfit in the other video. We decided because the song is a lot more lively that we would dress her up in a more traditional ballroom dress to fit with the song. There were no bright colours worn by the band members to show that they were everyday, smart, casual people which can relate to the audience.

                                                                                                                                                          

One thing hat has challenged the forms and conventions of our genre is having a little more inclusion of the narrative. We felt we had to included more narrative because we changed some of our storyboard and we thought the story had to have more meaning as the audience may not have understood what was going on in the music video.

Amber's Evalutation Question One

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

I have uploaded three videos, one is our music video, another is a Miles Kane video and the last is a video by Noah and the whale.

Mile Kane and Noah and the whale both follow the conventions of indie quite closely, with very simple locations, the Mise-en-scene very basic, minimalistic and plain.

So when we created our music video having decided that the best way to attract our target audience was to follow convention, it came out very similar to these two examples.

Some rather more noticeable similarities between the three videos are the chosen locations. Come closer uses a ‘working mans pub/club’ type of location, and give it all back has many locations that look sort of tacky, homey and everyday, like a child’s bedroom and a stage at an old school. The location we used was a school hall with a stage, empty apart from the instruments used by the band.

As with the other two videos our music video featured many shots of the artist playing their own instruments and performing as is expected from an indie band.

We developed this idea in our own video, making the Artist performing, part of our narrative, drawing the two video types together in an attempt to make our video more interesting.

The narrative we chose was one that features in a lot of music videos. And since Performance is the most important aspect of an indie video, we chose one we could merge with the performance.

Although we did challenge the conventions slightly by using more narrative than is common in Miles Kane videos, because the skeleton narrative we had needed to be fleshed out in order for the audience to make sense of it, and we felt that by increasing the amount of narrative in our video, it might appeal more to the audience, by giving them an interesting story to follow as well as the track to listen too.

The only postmodern idea that we have used in our music video is referencing dance shows like Strictly come dancing, when the band members judge the dancers on their performance.

 

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

Miles Kane - Come Closer

Arctic Monkeys - Teddy Picker

Miles Kane - Quicksand (our video)


1) There are many similarities with our video and the videos I have chosen due to them containing the conventions of the Indie genre, mainly the playing live aspect which is frequently done in our music video, the Come Closer and is all what there is in Teddy Picker. We thought that by following the playing instruments convention it would make our video feel more realistic and fitting of Miles Kane than if there was a major story-line which consumed the entire video. Thats not to say there isn't a minor story-line like in Come Closer with Miles Kane being attracted to the dancer and in our video with our Miles Kane running off with the ballroom dancer. This focus on performance and minor story-line made shooting a lot easier due because we could take a wide variety of shots of each instrument and choose which shots looked best and use a variety of them.
The smartly dressed aspect of Come Closer was also applied to our video with all of the cast wearing smart clothes like shirts, blazers and nice dresses.
2) We developed the convention of Miles Kane looking smart with our actor playing him wearing a suit. Same goes for the rest of the band with the drummer wearing a shirt and smart trousers and the bassist wearing a smart pretty dress. None of the band wore bright colours either to make sure they didn't look stupid and so they looked normal and everyday which is a convention of the Indie genre as is also seen in the Teddy Picker video with none of the band wearing outlandish outfits that are iconic. We developed the playing instruments convention with multiple shots of each instrument being played and a lot of shots of Miles Kane singing the lyrics.
3) Our music video has challenged convention by having a little bit more focus on story than is normal from a Miles Kane video but not too much to dominate the music video. Our dancer is also wearing bright colours to make her stand out and go along with the lyric 'blue sequins' so she stands-out and is therefore not too indie.
4) The only post modernism intentionally used is to reference Miles Kane, this was done by what clothes he wears and what happens in his music videos, e.g. the dancing and the performance.

Editing in process

In our next lesson after our second shooting, we set about editing and cutting down our footage to fit in with the storyboard lengths and ofcourse with the music.

We first starting placing in the footage according to our storyboard and cutting it down to match, we then looked over it and decided that although we filmed the shots in order the amount of footage we had that were suppose to start before the music was too long. So we choose to start the music straight in with the footage and mix the beginning clips together instead of having long sections of narrative then performance as it fits better and attracts the audience.

So far we have done the first minute of the song and the last couple of shots at the end. With a little bit more done in our free time at college, it will definitely be done in time so long as we have the right, quality amount of shots throughout the song.

Here are some screen grabs of what we have done so far:

Shot by shot storyboard

as it was just me and amber filming all the shots due to George and Charlie being in the music video we were unsure about what exactly each shot meant.
for example,  'singer shakes head' instruction on shot 123 on the shot list gives no indication of what angle it needs to be at how it needs to be framed.  This is why in the holidays I wrote out and drew up each  frame for the 127 shots.
This is an example of one of the sheets.

I wrote out additional notes to go with some of the other shots  these gave details of angles, framing, type of movement. These detailed storyboards were well worth the time as we were able to film relatively quickly without having to discuss certain types of angles.

A successful re-shooting

Last Wednesday in our media lesson we found out that our singer Chris was stuck in Scotland due to winds and bad weather. Knowing that this would effect our filming greatly we came up with two ideas as we didn't want to waste a day of not filming to wait till Chris came back.

Luckily about two hours later Chris said that he was on his way back and would make the filming. This was a massive relief for us as it meant we could stick to our original storyboard but possibly include some idea that we came up with as we found our story to be quite repetitive.

After college we went and set up the hall by which time Chris had returned home and came to the school shortly after. The performers and myself got changed and we started to run through the storyboard.

When filming, we made sure that we did multiple shots of each section and from different angles in case we thought one of the shots didn't look quite right or another shot looked better.

It took us 5 hours to film all of our shots, but it was a massive relief when we had finished after all the bad luck that our group have had.

Hopefully now all we need to do it edit 32 minutes of footage down to 3 minutes without having to re shoot again.

Filming

Yesterday we set up our location to film, and then found out that our Singer was able to make it to the shoot. Because of this, we were able to film our changed story and we think we've managed to film everything.

We are now moving on to editing our music video.

Story changing issues

Because we can't film with our singer on today's shoot due to travel issues, we have decided that we are going to film the original script we made, and then if we can re-shoot, we'll film our alternative ending.

We plan to edit it in later. And If we find that we can't re-film with our singer, we have yet another choice of ending we can use that doesn't involve him.

Changes to our story

After looking over the shot list we decided that we might change some of the story as it is very repetitive in its original form.

We thought that we needed to clarify the narrative too and have discussed other possibilities, such as our lead singer dancing with our female dancer, showing her how to improve her dance.

Scottish Actor Problem

Our lead actor Chris who plays Miles Kane in the music video is stuck in Scotland and cannot travel due to extreme weather, therefore meaning he cannot make our filming date for today. This has caused major problems because there is not much time left to film and then edit before the deadline.

Still figuring out what to do about this major problem. The plan is that filming will still go ahead so we can complete every shot which Chris is not in, hopefully re shooting when Chris is available.