Evaluation Questions

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

The media product my group have created uses, develops and challenges forms and conventions of real media products. We have used the forms and conventions by considering the genre of our song and used other media products as examples to generate ideas for our video. A specific example we used to fulfil this was ‘Loick Essien – Me Without You’ as in the video it used the same effect using green screen that we wanted in ours so we used this as an almost guide to how we should frame our shots to give it the best effect with the software we had to edit the Chroma Key with.

               

We have also developed the forms and conventions of our video by using inspiration from music videos from artists such as Rihanna and the content in them and made it a simpler format which allowed us to create a video that really fits the genre conventions. We also looked at the way that the videos were structured in an almost narrative to it and we developed this idea into our video, using the picture montage as a reflection almost at the end over the progression of the song.

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

The combination of our main product and ancillary texts is quite good. This is down to the way we have represented the artist in both the video and digipak and magazine advert, in a way that shoes the vulnerability posed in the song. We also chose to name the digipak and magazine advert after Lady Gaga’s real name Stefani, as we thought this would show how she was before her eccentric side came out in her songs. This also fits with the genre of the song as it’s a lot different from the genre type Gaga is famed for today with its R’n’B tone to it.

The whole concept for the project was finding a way of representing Gaga how she is today and how she was when “Second Time Around” was demoed so finding a balance between the two was imperative and I think especially in the digipak and advert, we managed to do this. 

3. What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

From our audience feedback given to us about our music video, we were alerted to a few things in the video that we should've picked up during the making. A big problem was with the Lady Gaga style sunglasses we had bought to add the bit of Gaga - esque feel to it, which was the main part to concept as we wanted to include her eccentricity, and we found that it stopped the interaction between the audience and the artist in the video so a big thing we have learnt from that is that its a really important point in the video to make sure that the artists eyes are visible as it gives that personal connection to the viewer. 

Another point that was bought up during our feedback was the way that, in some places, the lip syncing wasn't quite matching up to the music and this did affect the quality of the video so making sure that the artist in the video knows the words is really imperative and can affect how people view the video. 

A positive point we were given aswell during feedback was that the picture montages that we included in the video during the last section worked well in the video. We mainly used them to get over the emotion in the song and to make it more real and work with the genre so for people to connect to this part, it showed that the concept for it worked well. 

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

During our music video project, we have used many new media technologies. In the construction of the video, we used a Sony HD Handycam to gain our footage. I found this quite easy to use and I liked the clear, HD image we were left with after filming, which especially benfitted in our white rom shots due to the image quality being incredibly clear leaving us with a shot that look professionally lit and ended up being one of our best shots out of the lot.

                

Another technology we used for our research was Youtube. We mainly used Youtube as a source for examples of professional plus student music videos we could use to analyse and take some inspiration from but also we used it for uploading test shots we have conducted and also for our rough cut which we used to show the progress in our work and also to get feedback on. I find it an easier way of sharing work with the simple embedding process which, as another technology we have used, can be uploaded on to our blogs on blogger. Blogger is used in our projects as a way of showing research and all the different steps of the whole process during the music video. It’s a helpful way of keeping all of our research and planning in one area but can be quite time consuming writing and uploading. 

                

Furthermore, for the editing process, we have used Final Cut Express Pro which is a professional editing programme. Its helped us create the effect during the green screening that we wanted, the scenes where the background is the main street in Cambridge and also where we have our main character in the video almost overlapping in the same frame, and this enabled us to get the right sort of video connecting to the genre. 

Finally, Blogger has been a main part to our project during the planning, construction, editing and evaluating of our music video. I have found it a very helpful way to keep all of our ideas and the important planning information we have needed in the project in one place. However, sometimes it would have been helpful to have had some of the information in our hands, for example during the filming of the commentary it would have been easier to have had the scripts written out before it was put on the blog but its a very useful tool in the project. 

Music Videos That Have Influenced Us (3)

To include a bit of Lady Gaga's personality and style in our video, we have looked at some of her earlier videos when she was a bit less extreme and eccentric, in a way that eased her style into to the mainstream eye and catch the essence of the video. To represent this in our video we are hoping to use the subtlety with costuming and makeup so that, even though the song was pre The Fame, we have an accurate video to the artist.

Music Videos That Have Influenced Us (2)

We also looked at JoJo's video for "Too Little Too Late" as it is also about a breakup and some of the scenes involved in the video, especially the shot where she is sitting by the window almost contemplating what happened, are like what we wanted to do for our video. Except we plan to have the singer walking and singing and gazing thoughtfully off into the distance.

Analysis Of Student Music Videos - Mayday

 

Song : Tenbucks - Mayday


The video demonstrates obvious traits of Indie and Rock videos; shown by simple costuming, the minimalistic guitar and spray can props and the baron locations, as well as the stage performance and general natural outdoors vibe.

The relationship between the lyrics and visuals are amplifying, there is only one obvious character, a girlfriend is implied but never specified, and as for the title no one seems to be dying enough to qualify use of the term "Mayday"

The relationship between the music and visuals are much more illustrative; the pace of both is slow and the guitar in the song matches the movements of the player in the video.

There are plenty of close ups and costume changes to suit the demands of the record label, also the vandalism of the heart adds to the sense of heartbreak and Indie people doing crazy things in love, also the rock star life allows them to get away with it.

Music Video Evaluation

Final Finished Video

Magazine Advert

Digipack

Script For Video Commentary

Conventions of the R&B Genre


- We mimicked the likes of Rihanna and Loick Essien's music video styles - green screening, plain backgrounds and single artist narrative and visuals

- We hoped to create an emotive atmosphere through the sparseness of some the backgrounds and lack of Gaga-esk dance number; though we tried to conform a little to a sense of Gaga style through our Sci -fi glasses prop choice.
-through stripping back we've developed the idea in such a way that challenges the commercial cinematic music video; intending to make the final product purely abot how the artist feels and the isolation, sorrow and regret that that entails.

- We chose to make our video quite basic because we believed in the case of this song simplictiy is key to create and effective and coherent narrative and also that because this specific track was written before Gaga's 2008 debut album 'The Fame' ;
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We hoped to symbolize this sense of nature and class through using conventionally British green screen backgrounds of places in and around cambridge; to the mass media this would create a feel of other worldly-ness and the unknown

- It is also with these decisions to that we challenge the conventions of all other Gaga videos. Even our ancillary dvd cover we dubbed 'Stefani' links back to the artists real name; Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta.

-Unlike regular R&B videos; our lacks the conventional jump-cuts, instead we used complicated greenscreen overlapping fades because of the nature of the song. Also our lack of voyuerism, because we have a female artists, were caused by our tight-framed shots and 'in vogue' clothing.

Effect of the combination of our Main Product and Ancillary Texts


- We feel the combination of main product and ancillary texts is fairly strong; it fits well with the conventions of advertising the artist in manner that creates depth and reflects our goals of stripping back the glamour.

- Because the ancillary texts focus strongly on the artist; the tight framed, minimalism of the visuals can be directly affiliated with our video, even though we purposefully avoided taking images from the video for the digipak and magazine ad, we did however keep to a sense of strict tight framed visual structures.


Audience Feedback

 - we were told our choices of camera angle and visuals went well with the themes of the song, the photo stills were effective, that we could have made a better connection with the artist had we seen more of her eyes and that our lip syncing could have gone better.

- had we the chance to go back we could include a transition of some sort to include the eyes, maybe the actress putting on the glasses or taking them off; putting up a shield or revealing her vulnerability.

- unfortunately some of our lip syncing did go awry during conversion to Quicktime.

New Technologies

-We used blogger, we used this to document what we had done and the processes we used it throughout the process of producing a video and advertising it.

- Photoshop was used to make the digipack and magazine advert. This was good to use as it enabled us to create the ancillary texts exactly how we wanted to, focussing on the artist and edited to be something that would stand out but fit with the conventions.

-We used final cut for all our editing, it was quick and easy to use to help us get all our editing done in time. We did get our lip-syncing done and to good standard but when we transferred it to quick time the lip-syncing went out half way through.

-The HD cameras were used for filming, they were good to use because they made the video look more professional.

Montage Stills

Using stills images, we plan to make clips of montage of the characters relationship which will be in the video at relevant points. This emphasises the point of the song and gets across the emotions in the video.

Research Into Transition Types

Dissolve - Fade In/Fade Out

Dissolve is the most frequently used transition type that people use in videos as it's commonly used especially for the change of scenes or opening and closing the video using Fade In/Fade Out. For our video we hope to use it for changes of scene and also at the beginning and end of the video.

Iris - Point

Iris is one of our possible options for our video which we may or may not use depending on how it will fit into the video. If we were to use the Iris transition, it would be during one of the green screen sections where we have the background as the city street because if we shot an almost birds eye view of our  lead against the green screen and added the iris point in editing.

Research Into Filters and Special Effects

Green screen is used for layering two images together it is done by making the top layer transparent showing the other image below to create one image.
The process of chroma key (green screen)is to film the person or object against the green or blue screen. The blue or green screen is then, in editing, made transparent and replaced with the footage that has been filmed before or after this footage.

We are going to use this process by filming our main character in our music video in front of the green screen. Then after doing so, we will go out after filming this to get the footage to replace the green screen which will be sped up during editing to give it the effect we want.

Plan Of What Needs to Be Done For The Final Cut.

After completing our rough cut for the music video, we have found that we need to do a lot more filming that we had for the lip syncing because the bits that we found could not be used are some of the main parts of the song. To solve this, instead of filming parts of the song, we will film the whole song lip syncing numerous times at the different angles we want so that we have plenty of footage to edit from.

A big problem we have also encountered with our video is the fact that the person who we have used for the filming has recently dyed her hair during the process of all the filming so we are going to have to re-film the footage we already have.

Another problem that we need to consider whilst filming again that we found out during the first bit of editing, is that the fact that on the shots where we have the lead leaning against the green screen wall and are filming from the side, the reflection of light from the green wall onto our lead shows a large amount of green that cannot be removed when editing, so when we refilm everything we will try the shot again without the light in the room being on. If not we may have to ditch the idea of doing side shots when using the green screen.

Furthermore, we also need to complete the editing after we have finished our filming. This is a very crucial part to our video as we are relying heavily on green screen so if its not completed and not completed properly it will give our video a lesser quality.

Video Concepts - Green Screen

We decided to use green screen effects for most of our video to create the feeling of isolation; making the character seem separate from the rest of the world and time passing at irregular rates. In this video for Loick Essien 'Me Without You', green screen has been used in a similar way to what we want to use in ours but as the video has a lot bigger budget the chroma key effect has come out a lot better than it will for ours. However, it shows how well the green screening works with the genre of song, coincidentally the same genre as the song we are using for our video (Lady Gaga 'Second Time Around')

Rough Cut

This Rough Cut for our music video is a very short clip due to the fact that we have had problems with lost footage but using the footage that we have at the moment, we have shown the way that we have chosen to use the green screen effect. As we haven't ever done it before, it does need a bit more work to get it looking more realistic but we hope by the time we get to final cut that we will have more footage and have been able to spend more time concentrating on the editing and getting the chroma key to work as best as we can.

Magazine Ad Research

Magazine adverts are really good for promoting an artists new single or album as they are put in every magazine and the full page adverts are especially effective.

This ad used by Lady Gaga for "The Fame"(her début album) was featured in a lot of magazines and especially fashion magazines and its a very well known and recognizable advert. To make an advert successful it needs to be eye catching but also something that people would remember. For our advert for 'Lady Gaga - Second Time Around' we could use the Gaga style glasses we have included in the video and take a picture of our lead in the video our in the open in a grassy location or using the footage we have for green screen and have her behind that.

Alternatively we could have a background that we design a background that we use behind the lead to show a sort of graffiti style single cover almost. We have to make sure that we include the recognizable part of the advert which would hopefully be the glasses that we would use for this idea as well as the other idea above.

Filming Schedule 13/10/2011

Booked out the Green Room at the beginning of the week for 13/10/11 so we could film our green screen section of the video where we have the Cambridge centre in the background. 10/10/11

The shots we want to gain from this are some head-shots of "Lady Gaga" singing with the sunglasses (above) and also we want to get some mid shots which show the torso, or the whole of the body above the waist which can allow the body movements  and expression through the arms and position of the head show the emotion of the song. 13/10/11

Booked a camera for whole day 14/10/11; we plan to shoot around town of the general public just moving in and around drummer street, these shots, without the aid of any of our actors, will be used to fill up the background for the Green Room footage. Also booked the Dark room; here there will be the narrative shots, where "Gaga" will sing to her bf to break up with; we hope the plain background will help the emotion of the shot.

Attempt to contact Lady Gaga

Test footage

For our test footage for the music video, we only were able to test a few of the shots we were planning on getting. One was the walking shot down the road by the sports hall which we chose for one of the locations. We attempted this shot a few times and then decided that because of the road surface, it wouldnt work. To try and get a similar shot without taking away the location we tried to do it from just having the tripod on the pavement instead and have the camera follow the character. However in the end we decided that the shot wouldnt work too well so during filming we will substitute in another shot to replace it.

Digipak Research

A digipak consists not only of a CD case and album cover, but of a list of songs and their lyrics, band/ singer biographies and interviews, and also record company patenting details. The disc itself, in modern digipaks, include videos and special features accessible via computer or DVD player. Also downloadable content is available; music videos and tracks that are compatible with iTunes and Windows Media Player and can be copied onto portable devices such as Usb sticks, Mp3/4 players and iPods.

In our digipak for Lady Gaga - Second Time Around we hope to include lyrics and information on our singer and also all the information about the record company so it is all credited. We would love to put some extra content but this isnt particularly needed due to it being a single and the fact we are only making the video for it.