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