Rachel Monaghan's Evaluation

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

Our music video uses, develops and challenges conventions of real media products. In any music video, not necessarily just of the dance genre, the audience would expect to see some kind of performance involving lip syncing by the artist. We included many performance shots. Throughout these we insured we included many different shot types such as an extreme close up, an above angle shot, a below angle shot and a long shot. This is so the audience would stay interested in the video, also the use of occasional jump cuts between shots is conventional of the dance genre as it fits with the jumpy beat of the music. In any music video, the audience would expect there to be some sort of story line or acting from the artist. As our lyrics tell a story for themselves, we had to make sure Charlotte was acting slightly as she was singing to make the video more believable.

As for mise-en-scene, the use of a graffiti wall as our main location is very conventional of the dance genre. For example, in many M.I.A music video’s she uses graffiti or other gang related images as backgrounds to emphasise the attitude of her songs. As the perceived attitude of the artist plays a main role in making most music video’s believable, the clothing of our singer was very important. Our artist, Charlotte, was wearing a bandana in the video, this again relates to a sort of modern gang culture making it very conventional of the genre. In the long shots of charlotte she is sitting on an amplifier, as dance music is often about being played as loud as possible this is again following conventions.

The use of green screen in our music video both uses and challenges conventions of the dance genre. Whilst some older music videos such as “pump the jam” by Technotronic, made in the 80’s, use this same effect, modern dance video’s have become more about looking into the future than the past. While the retro style has become very popular amongst the teen age group, this is more related to the indie style genre. For example, the music video by the mystery Jets, “Two Doors Down”, uses a lot of green screen with patterned backgrounds to create the retro effect. However, modern dance videos such as “Paris to Berlin” by Infernal use a lot of futuristic props and colours, like bright neon pinks and blues. We challenged this convention by using green screen in our dance video. This makes it different from what the audience might expect to see in our video, however we have included modern twists such as the image of the iphone.

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

We had produced products; the music video, the poster and the DVD cover. The poster is supposed to attract the audience and make them buy the DVD, once they have bought the DVD they will then watch the video. The audience would need to recognise these products instantly as being by M.I.A if they were to easily do all 3 of these things. Firstly we had to create a brand that would be recognisable to the audience as being related to the artist.

We decided that our target audience would be teenagers. To attract this audience we used bright colours and a young main artist. We tried to incorporate bright colours on all three of our products. In the music video our bright colours were part of the setting, the graffiti wall, and the props, the bright blue pompoms. The DVD cover and the poster share the same background, this is a bright, colourful, stripy pattern. This combination makes the product very eye catching to the audience, and recognisable as a package. These two products also have the same “M.I.A” logo on them. Many albums’ are released and advertised using images of the artist as the focus point. For example, Leona Lewis’ new album cover is simply an image of her on the front cover. We used a similar style as our DVD cover and our poster have a big picture of charlotte on the front, as charlotte is also the main focus of our music video it makes sense to have her advertising the product as well.

In the video, Charlotte is seen to be dancing and telling a story through lyrics. Often the teenage market wants to relate to situations portrayed in the video, especially events to do with relationships. Our video provides for these needs of the audience as it is telling a story of two girls fighting over one boy.

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

As our target audience was teenagers, getting feedback from fellow students in our college was the perfect opportunity for us. From our audience feedback I have learnt that it was effective to use bright colours on all three products and the M.I.A logo. I have also learnt that promoting Charlotte as the main star in all the products projects an effective image to the audience, as one person said “conscious effort to promote Charlotte as the star.” The effects we used on Charlotte also make her stand out as the star even amongst the bright colours we used as the background. The bright colours also fit in with the retro feel we have tried to create in the video. We found our one weakness of the advert and the DVD cover was the lack of information about what was included in the DVD, it was also suggested we could have made the extra information font a little more interesting on the back of the DVD as it fails to stand out against the bright colours of the background.
From our video feedback we learnt that we achieved the desired effect of creating a retro style video, as someone left feedback saying “It's a lot like the late eighties videos such as Technocronic” in the early stages of planning we used this video as inspiration. We originally had struggled to come up with an effective opening and ending to our video, we eventually decided to use zooming in and out of an iphone, we were also left feedback saying this was very effective. The only negative feedback we received was that we could have included one more performance scene to make the shots “snappier”. Overall we are very pleased with our audience feedback as we now know that our products are appealing to our intended audience of teenagers.-“Great music video, good lip syncing and the style, backgrounds, clothes and characters all work really well with the music.”

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

Throughout the research and planning stages, our main media resource was youtube.com. On this website we researched and analysed many existing music videos such as “pump the jam”, technotronic, and “gangalang”, M.I.A. Analysing these video’s using Goodwin’s theory helped us to decide what features we wanted to include in our own music video, also to discover what conventions we should include. Looking at other music video’s showed us how to relate lyrics to visuals through props and acting and also how to incorporate certain techniques such as the green screen.
Our first idea for the construction of our music video was to use the green screen. To do this we set up big sheets of green paper on a plain wall. We filmed our footage, which were shots of Will dancing, in front of this screen. We then uploaded this onto final cut and began editing. We needed to make a brightly coloured background to have behind Will while he was dancing, to do this we filmed a short clip of some glow sticks shining in UV light. We then used the “kaleidoscope” tool on final cut to turn this image into a moving brightly coloured background. Then using the green screen tool we inserted this background behind Will.
For the rest of our footage we filmed multiple shots of performance scenes, we then had to edit these together carefully so lip syncing was in time with the music and the shots blended together nicely. To make sure the lip syncing was in time, we placed the footage onto final cut above the track. We marked the track using the marker tool whenever a significant point of the music appeared, such as the point of the lyrics “U.R.A.Q.T” we then marked the footage at the point where Charlotte was lip syncing these same lyrics and lined them up. To make sure the clips didn’t jump as they cut from one to another we used the blend tool. To do this we made the clips overlap slightly and had one slowly fading out as the other faded in. Finally, to fit in with the retro style of the video, we placed a filter over each clip in which we edited the colours to make them a bit brighter than they were on the original footage.
To make our DVD cover and advert, our main tool was Photoshop. We took a still image of charlotte posing and placed this onto Photoshop. As many artists do, we airbrushed this picture using different layers and the “surface blur” tool to make her look flawless. We then produced a bright coloured background and a bright logo.
To evaluate our work, we filmed ourselves talking about the project. Using final cut we created a commentary style video as seen on many DVD extras. To show what we were talking about in the commentary we inserted clips from ours and others video’s, also still images of our ancillary products to provide a visual image to the audience.