Reflective Evaluation Question 4 - Sophie

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

This is a video I created, in this video i talk about the stages of creating our digipak, website and music video.

Other feedback sheets - Sophie

These are the other feedback sheets we collected from are audience, overall they are positive comments. 

Reflective Evaluation - Sophie-Question three

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

To get a greater understanding of what people thought of our music video we got our peers from our media class to watch our music video and fill in a questionnaire form about what they thought about the video.

This feedback sheet showed how a male & female both aged 18 thought our music video looked professional, it held their attention and liked our mise-en-scene, locations & costume as they related to the artist and genre conventions. They enjoyed the performance aspect of our music video as it was upbeat, confident & believable. However they didn’t like the fact Miles Kane stole another man’s partner! They thought there was a wide variety of well thought out shots and that it fits the pace & tone of the song.

They gave it 33/40 marks

This feedback sheet showed how a female aged 17 thought our music video looked suitable and it held their attention.  She thought that some of the drumming sections were out of time but besides that she thought it looked like a professional music video that was suitable for the artist. She thought the lip syncing was good and the performance shots were also good. However she didn’t like the facial expressions sections as they didn’t look believable and that the effects were over the top/not suitable for the type of music video. 

She gave us 30/40 marks.

This feedback sheet showed us what two males one 17 & one 18 thought of our music video.

They thought it was suitable and that it held their attention  they thought that the instruments didn’t look like they were being played and that it didn’t look professional, however it suited the artist type and style of music and this is because it showed a lot of the band & the performance.  However they also thought that the narrative needed to be better developed to make the music video look complete. They thought the shots looked good but that there wasn’t enough variety. On the other hand they liked the special effects we did making the video turn from greyscale to colour.

They gave us 27/40 marks.

I created a wordle of the key words and phrases that have been repeated throughout all the feedback sheets, I feel that is a good way of representing the overall view of our music video. the words  that are larger were the ones most repeated. 

Issues were raised about the narrative some people viewed as having good potential but they thought that it wasn’t as good as some of the other elements of our music video thus making it a weak link. the drumming being out of time with the beat of the song was something else people picked up upon and looking back we could have put more time and effort into looking at the instruments to make sure they were properly in time with the beat of the song. During the editing process peer members suggested ways in which we could make our film better, for example one member of another group noticed how some of our lip syncing was out of time. We then were able to change the length of the clip to make sure it fitted into the video. I believe this help is invaluable as i believe we wouldn't have noticed this fault if it wasn't pointed out by the person.


Some of the audience feedback is things that we ourselves had no control over. One person didn’t like the song or type of music we had chosen and therefore didn’t like our song or video, we realised then that our video or the choice of music won’t be to everyone’s taste. 

We had a lot of problems throughout our filming and I believe we have done the best we could with what little opportunity we had to shot our video I believe that some comments were unfair such as one person saying our lip-syncing was out of time and another few people saying it was in time. Certain things I wish we could have changed in the editing and filming process such as getting a better camera to hire out so the images weren’t as great as we wish they could have been.

 
However I believe we have done very well in creating our music video and I think the overall comments were positive.

Reflective Evaluation - Sophie- Question two

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

Throughout are campaign are intentions have been clear of what kind of image and style we have chosen to create, we decided as a group that the decision to add a basic narration to the music video would help make our video more interesting. When done in the Miles Kane video narration is basic and revolves directly around Miles Kane himself, in our video we had to main characters, Chris who is our singer gets more involved into the narration thus overlapping the narration and performance aspect of our piece. The style of how we want to portray Miles Kane has been very clear, the location, stylistic intentions and the outcome has maintained the same throughout are planning and creating process.

All three products have the same interconnecting style, the website, the CD cover & music video. for example the same colour schemes are used in the wesbite and the CD cover. An idea we have taken from miles kanes most recent and only album. I believe that this androgynous colour scheme is something that makes this artist stand out compared to other artists of the indie genre,appealing to both a male and female audience. 

The purpose of digipacks and webpage is to support the video in what it shows. This artist has a formal tone to his performances as well as a smart clean cut image the basic colour schemes and the  spacious webpage  show this the webpage is organised and not chaotic unlike many other webpage’s of indie bands/singers. 

The friendly fires webpage set out like a blog has few links to other areas of the site and focuses mainly on the homepage where a lot of random information of the band is put up in only a time related order e.g. tour dates uploaded followed by a behind the scene video. I think this shows clearly that the band has a connection with there fan base, making there webpage similar to a social networking site brings them closer to there audience as we are lead to believe that they are in control of there website and its something personal to them as it looks like they themsleves upload the content.

We chose not to create our webpage like this as we realised that the Miles Kane as an artist is on the other end of the indie spectrum compared to friendly fires and this organised clean cut smart layout is a running theme we kept throughout the creation of webpage, the digipak and the video itself.  The friendly fires digipak is also different from Miles Kane, the imagery of a bird doesn’t relate to the band, it’s a singular image of representation.

This is very different from Miles Kane as he is on the front cover of his digipak, with his name in bold white lettering contrasting from the black background and greyscale image of himself. This presentation of his image maybe due to the fact that Miles Kane is a lone artist and not part of a band thus making the audience perceive him in a different way to friendly fires, he needs to promote himself more to be noticed as there isn’t many singer lone artists in the indie scene.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

New Shooting Date

We are reshooting on Thursday 22nd December at the same location, this means we can get improved footage and also give us enough time to edit well after the holidays!

Our website on IWEB

This is our website put into IWEB with links put in.

Completed outside of digipak

Completed inside of Digipak

This is the inside of our digipak. We have used pictures of our singer to promote the fact that he is a single artist rather than part of a band.

Completed Photoshop Website

This is the finished version of our website, created in PhotoShop. All we need to do now is upload it to Iweb

"Completed" Website

This is our website in its completed state as far as we can get it, without the images we need to get from our shoots.

We will be editing our actual images into the website once we have them

Website progress

This is our website so far. It is almost completed: