A2 Music Video A2 Music Video EvaluationEvaluationRhiannon WhiteRhiannon White

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

The genre of the music featured in my music video is pop/rock style. Other music videos in this genre tend to have songs about a boy and a girl and the music video follows the storyline. For my music video I chose a song that is less well known by the band and is about getting older. Traditionally the music video would then be about the singer from the band acting out the storyline to the song. As I couldn’t use the lead singer or band members in my media products I had to think of a different way of approaching this. Whilst researching I noticed that often the best music videos were the most unusual such as All Time Low’s music video for Six Feet Under the Stars.

I wanted to create a music video that caught the viewers eye and made them want to watch more.

Instead of using people in my music video which is often the common thing for music videos in my genre to do, I wanted to do something different because very often some of the best and most remembered music videos are those such as Take On me that are different from most videos. I researched into ideas that other people had used for their A2 music videos using YouTube and found many different ideas. One that caught my eye was made by stop frame animation. The storyline of the video was a basic idea and yet the creator still received a good mark. I liked this idea and although would be time consuming I thought it would be a very effective way to create my own music video. I then began to search for ideas of how to create my own stop frame animation video. I was very interested by Western Spaghetti by PES.

My next idea was defiantly an idea that didn’t keep with the forms and conventions of a music video in particular genre. I was mind mapping ideas of characters when it was suggested to me that I used fruit as my characters. After experimenting with a lemon I created a possible character idea for my music video.

My original idea was to have 2 lemons and a lime but the song I had chosen, Made up Stories by Go:Audio was a difficult song to make a music video for without following the song lyrics exactly or copying the current music video.

After some consideration I decided to change the song. The song I chose instead isn’t a typical song of this genre that is used to make a music video. In the pop/rock genre the music videos tend to be about a boy and a girl. Save Me Now by Go:Audio, which was my new song chose was about someone getting older who did not what too. Putting that together with the idea of using a lemon and a lime as the main characters develops the forms conventions of the pop/rock genre and creates what I think is an effective music video which catches the viewers eye.

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

As my music video is set inside a house, I wanted there to be a house sort of theme between the main product and ancillary texts. I thought it was important that there was common theme between the three so that my audience will recognise this theme and anything that is following this theme would be recognised by my target audience. My album cover for the bands album Made up Stories already gave me an idea in the title. By using the front cover of a book, and placing the name of the album and the band logo onto the front of the book in the layout of a normal book, set the atmosphere of the cover.

I thought it was very important to use an image of the band on the album cover as they had not featured in the video as they normally would and so I edited an image of the band so that it looked as if part of it was missing. This fitted with the title of the album well also as it appears as they are half there and are still being drawn into the image.

My idea for my magazine advert I believe was very effective. I thought on the advert it was important to incorporate both images of the band and the lemon. I chose to advertise my album in a different form of media then the typical magazine. I decided to use an online magazine such as OurZone magazine. I felt this was the most appropriate place to advertise my advert as I think it is where I will gain the most interest from my target audience. The advert itself fits with the house theme that I have continued throughout my production.

Like my music video I wanted the advert to be different from other adverts I had looked at which were very simple. I experimented with many different ways of using an image of the band and a lemon. The most effective proved to be of a lemon watching television and on screen we can see the band. I then felt it was important that the band logo was visible and so I created a mini poster to go on the wall behind the TV showing another image of the band and the band logo. I also included the album title. My advert differs from others as mine includes a link at the bottom of the page that takes my target audience to a page where they can purchase the album. I felt this was a very effective idea because it means readers of the online magazine will see this link and can buy the album straight away.

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

By continuing to ask my target audience what they thought about my products and how they could be improved it meant that I could find out what they defiantly wanted from a media form such as mine. From my audience I learnt that it isn’t always necessary to include the band in the music video and that you can make a successful music video that will be enjoyed by the desired audience. I asked the opinion of my target audience on my album cover and music video on things that I wasn’t sure about. By doing this it meant I could produce products my target audience would be interested in. I also learnt that a common theme between each of my products helped my target audience recognise what was my work and that they are linked together.

 How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning

and evaluation stages?When planning my music video I very much relied

on the internet to carry out my research. By using websites such as Google to search for information about the genre and band I could gain the information I needed that wasn’t necessarily in many books that were available to me. I also used YouTube throughout planning. YouTube meant that I could analyse music videos and keep pausing the video which help me create a thorough analysis. I then recorded all my planning onto LiveJournal, an online blog.

During making my actual music video I used a digital camera to take the photos and then uploaded them onto and Apple Mac and used iTunes to edit the photos together. iTunes is easy to use, especially for such a production made in the way mine was. Before I made the final production I practised at home to see if the idea of stop frame animation was effective for me. At home I edited the imaged that I took using Windows Movie Maker as I didn’t have access to iTunes. Windows Movie Maker didn’t have as many effects as iTunes and also wouldn’t allow me to set each frame to the time I wanted and so the images were played too slowly and the effect of stop frame animation couldn’t be achieved. iTunes also offers a wide range of transitions and titles that made my music video much more interesting to my target audience.

During the process of making my music video, I realised that some of the images that I had included had my hand in the corner. To solve this I copied a corner of an image that didn’t have my hand and copied and pasted it over the top of the images with my hand visible. This worked well and although there is a slight colour change in some of the images, the images are played to quickly that it becomes unnoticeable. I also had an issue with the length of the song. When I made my story boards I didn’t think about the length of the song and after filming I realised that I only had 3 minutes worth of images for a 4 minute song. I considered filming another minute of the music video but after some thought, the video would have been very long and could begin to bore my audience. I also would have to create a whole minutes worth of storyline that was interesting and unique.

I then experimented with the audio clip using Garage Band. At the end of the song a sound effect could be heard. I cut the section of this song and pasted it to a point in the song where the music sounded as if it could be the end of the song. This worked well and to someone who had never heard the song it they wouldn’t realise this is what I had done.

Whilst creating my ancillary products I used a vast range of digital technology. Different digital technologies had different tools to each other and so by using Paint, Serif PagePlus and PhotoPlus I could created my advert and album cover. PhotoPlus allowed me to edit images and add effects to the images, I could also cut an image out from it’s background or cut a hole in an image, for example the TV and place a picture behind. I created the layering, such as adding the image of the band to the TV, using Serif PagePlus. I also used this when it came to adding text to the image as it allowed me to use a wide range of fonts that were available to me.

The problem with serif however is that it is a publication that you use to make forms of media such as posters and flyers and so it doesn’t mean I could save it as an image. To overcome this I print screened my product and cut out the image of the album or advert on paint and saved it as a JPG file. To gather the images of for my products I used images that I found from the internet and edited them slightly. This made them my own image and often they were joint together to create a larger image of itself without affecting the quality of the image. This is the technique I used for the wallpaper in the magazine advert.