Evaluation

Marta Zurek

Q1: In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

I have researched into conventions of existing music videos and I did general research around that topic itself(evidence of this can be found on my blog posts) to help me understand the conventions within music videos that I could later on apply in my music video. The track for the music video came from the R&B genre and so for this I made sure to research more into it by creating a mind map that analyses its features specifically for that targeted genre and the music video for the background track which we used in our final media product.

One convention that we looked into from music videos which featured the theme of ‘love’ , was the mise en scene which we applied into our media product, we came across these when gathering the pictures for the moodboard which really helped with finalising the idea for the storyline and visuals. We saw that many R&B music videos which feature the theme of love between a man and a woman from the recent years wear casual clothing , because the lyrics of R&B songs typically relate to the person singing it , they attempt to portray themselves and therefore through wearing casual clothing they maintain the idea of being themselves. I also looked at the moodboard to have a visual representation for ideas of the setting, many contained visuals of the city at night time which I feel looked very appealing and enhanced the look of the end product and therefore as a group we decided to incorporate this feature into the shots by filming in central London near sky scrapers and modern buildings made out of glass to gain that modern R&B music video feeling, of course we wanted to develop this idea so we filmed in different locations, externally and internally something more interesting .

More on, our product develops main conventions through the use of reference to a break up that results in alcohol abuse. Amy whinehouse has some R&B songs even though her main genre is Jazz , and she sings emotional songs about love. She was influenced by heavy drinking caused by the experience of her relationship with her boyfriend, so I looked at some of her music videos to see what conventions she uses since the link between her situation and her music related to the idea of our media product. She used dark lighting so we decided to incorporate this into our video.

In my moodboard I have taken pictures from existing R&B music videos to observe the R&B theme in a visual format. I knew that Keisha Cole has some very emotive visuals in her music where she sings about her relationships of love. I watched her ‘ Trust and Believe me’ music video where the storyline talked about her boyfriend cheating on her with her best friend , I thought that this related to our idea a lot so I started looking at her emotional side and how she features this in the video. I saw her drop onto the floor with her head bowed down and her arms up in a manner to imply that she had given up with her relationship , I really liked the idea of this so I added an image of this to my moodboard. We ended up featuring this action in our video in two different scenes.

Q4:How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?I used many different programmes when researching and planning for the music video. When gathering research I used YouTube and vevo to view music videos such as Lady Gaga’s Telephone video when searching for postmodern features to help me adapt postmodernism into my music video. This helped me understand postmodern conventions in more depth as I had visual representations to look at as an example . At this point I was more aware of how postmodernism works and how it could be featured into the visuals of the music video and so I came up with the idea of adding a scene where the main male character ( the first boyfriend of the young female) watches a film clip on his cell phone that shows a man violently abusing his girlfriend to create the impression that he is influenced by this and that’s where his abusive side came from in the reality of the music video

After using Netflix to watch Inception , I created a presentation which looked into the film’s postmodern features. I talked about the ‘Hall of Mirrors’ effect and analysed its main idea , my pear Mohrail suggested on using it in one of our scenes with the female character looking at herself in a ‘Hall of Mirrors’ effect. I came up with an impression that when applying this idea into our media product, it created a meaning to it , different from the dream in a dream as represented in inception. Having the female look at herself in a mirror with multiple versions of her image in front of her eyes, represents the idea of her looking at all her emotions that built up inside of her character , each split image of her represents a different emotion, the real image of her looks at the mirror and watches each emotion as she is portrayed talking over the phone.

Another website that helped with research, planning as well as the evaluation stages was the use of Blogger where we individually posted our work on our own personal Blogs. This was a very effective technological source as it kept our work organised and up-to-date which made it very easy to look back on documents that would help us with inspiration and maintenance of the whole purpose and idea of the music video as we could constantly remind ourselves on what we need to do and what we need to add to out video .

More on, for the construction stages we used a Canon 320 camera to film the actual music video , at some points we used the tripod to keep the camera in place for better recording but some of our shots didn’t need the tripod for example when we filmed tracking shots of the female walking up the stairs because we needed the camera to record her moving and therefore using the tripod would have stopped us from achieving this. We then took out the SD card and uploaded the files onto the iMac computer where my pear started editing the footage using Adobe premier pro. We had a selection of videos which we recorded and we selected the best ones out of them all. When recording the scene where the female was abusing alcohol and smoking cigarettes whilst walking before dropping onto the floor, I found that it was slightly hard for me to capture her in that shot with out the camera shaking at any point and therefore we broke this part down into two different shots in the editing process to solve this issue. More on , when I was filming the scene where the female received text messages from the ex boyfriend and I had to take a recording od the phone in the shot , it was very hard to focus the camera so that the writing shows in the footage, it took a while but eventually I got it right.

Lastly, I used Adobe Photoshop to help me create the digipak. I used the software to create the album cover and back cover as well as the poster which I annotated separately on my blog. For the poster I initially used a different picture at the start than from the one that I ended up using, I realised that the picture I first featured made the poster look like it was advertising a rock music video and that was the wrong impression. To over come this, I ended up using a different picture that brought us back to the R&B genre and related to the actual media end product.

To edit the video the Software used was Premier Pro, a time-line based video editing software that supports many different plug-ins as well as editing cards. It lets you upload a list of clips that you can then use to build the timeline and work your way through into actually building up a whole new video out of multiple ones. You can cut videos short, add different effect to it and most importantly you can actually alter imperfections of the recordings. For example, if you find that a recording that you filmed didn’t have the right lighting and looked visually too dark , you could brighten it up so that more is visible.

All our external shots were filmed externally when it was dark because we wanted to create and focus on the sad atmosphere which came from the storyline. As we knew that we wanted to film during the night time we thought about the implications that could come along such as the quality of the video would be poor due to bad lighting, so we though about buying special lighting . However, we went outside to test the quality at night and realised that if we film in locations where a lot of light is coming through we wont have a problem with the lighting and so we decided to film in busy, city areas where light would come from streetlights and buildings.

Q4

Q4: How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

The ancillary texts relate to the final media product . The features found on the ancillary tasks relate to the music video and share similarities, creating a link between them as they relate to the same idea which is the ‘Take Care’ track. My end media product (The music video) was created first , with the end product I could then go onto creating the ancillary texts which was the poster and the CD album cover as I had something to work from and relate to which was the whole point.

As I described through out my evaluation and my work , our music video inherits the R&B genre. A lot of this is portrayed from the clothing all the way to the facial expressions that portray the emotion of the song and the theme. Emotion plays a big part of R&B music, the first 10 seconds of our music video portray the emotion , you can really tell from the dark lighting used at most times that the atmosphere in fact is a sad one, the only time that lighting was used was after the female character found out she is getting cheated on . I wanted to show this sad emotion portrayed in the music video in the ancillary tasks so I focused on the use of colour to compliment the idea.

For the poster I decided to use an image from one of the key scenes in the music video when the female identity was about to walk in on her surprise.( her boyfriend cheating on her with her female best friend, I also feel that we used a very stereotypical idea that actually worked well with out music video because of the music genre that we chose.) The shot featured her face , her eyes were closed which created an image and a sense of ‘pain’ , as if she was taking in something very deep with her thoughts, this again reflected and linked with the sad emotion that I attempted to portray in the ancillary texts, therefore using that image was very effective because of that strong link. Using an image from the actual video meant that I gave the audience a snippet of the product, something that they might capture their attention and make them want to watch the music video.

For the CD cover I once again used dark colours , this was because it created an atmosphere just like the lighting that was used in our media product. The dark colours complimented the idea of the sadness that came from the feeling of the female character living the after effects of an abusive relationship. The imagery that I featured on the front cover is the same as the image that I used on the poster as I wanted to create a link between the two pieces . The imagery on the back cover portrays the female identity , to this image I added a filter that turned the effect of the image from a HD quality one into a smudged and blurred effect. Adapting that filter into the image related to the idea of emotion once again ,( I remembered that the R&B genre is very soulful and focuses on emotion heavily )so through doing this I wanted to show the atmosphere that the female character lives in. The smudged and blurry filter focuses on her caved in, wonder-like , troubled mind that reflects off her relationship with the boy.

Overall I feel that the main product and the ancillary texts heavily relate to each o her , the characters are the same, colours and the titles on the ancillary texts relate to the music video. To create these I used Adobe Photoshop simply because I knew that the quality would come out better than If I used publisher or PowerPoint, simply because Photoshop is specifically designed for graphic pieces such as the ancillary texts.