As a group we aimed to apply Goodwin’s six points to our media product. Goodwin’s six points were shown in our music video for example, the genre characteristics of our song ‘Jainy’ is a very mellow, slow paced ballad this reflected on how we constructed our music video therefore we simply filmed the artist the artist playing the piano with a spotlightand added animation of our artist and his love interest.. To apply to Goodwin’s points about needing to sell the artist, we showed variety of close up shots of our artist also he is feature in all of the video; we also used tracking shots which then zoomed in to make a close up shot. In some aspects we challenged forms of real media products by adding pencil animation to parts of the music video to give it a unique yet sophiscated style, doing this could attract various types of the audience like adults to teenagers. Also adding this style of animation to our music video, is challenging the conventions of this genre of music, we hoped by doing this has connotations of the auteur theory which is a notion that directors have a specific signature that we can recognise their work from. Hopefully our style can feature in other music videos and be recognised. We recreated a modern version of Romeo and Juliet’s balcony scene due to the fact that everyone knows this famous scene, therefore doing this; our music video can appeal to all types of audience. Also with our song being a love story we thought that we would incorporate the most famous story of all time, again appealing to all fans of the book/film and to all fans of music.
As part of research we all as a group gathered ideas for our Digi-Pack, we looked at CD covers with the same genre as ours, and we found that the artist is always sitting down and with them, is their signature instrument like In Jack Johnson’s ‘On and On’ album. Our first idea was to incorporate a notebook style for our DVD cover; we did make a rough copy of the DVD cover however we felt that it didn’t have continuity between our main product and our Digi-Pack. Due to the fact that one of our original idea for our music video is to have zoomed onto a book full memories between the main character and his lover this led to the animation. However we discarded this idea later on as we thought we couldn’t complete the book full of drawn pictures by the deadline which was set therefore we done animation on Photoshop we all agreed that doing this way would save us a lot of time and it still looks professional. We finally decided to go with a mixture of animation and real life images for our Digi-Pack; with the back of the DVD cover it features a piano which is a running theme throughout our main product and our ancillary tasks. On the front we used a shot from our music video of the artist playing the piano; we then animated it to keep it with the concept of animation and real life. This is because we first aimed to zoom in a notebook. The continuity from our music video to our Digi-pack is shown through the images we put on our video. The artist on our DVD cover is in the same animation as shown in the video and transformation of real life to animation. The main focus of both the DVD cover and the poster is the artist; this is due to sell the artist as much as possible conforming to Goodwin’s six points. We used the same font for both the DVD cover and the poster to show continuity between the 2, also so that Five For Fighting can be recognised as a band from that logo. We received good feedback from our peers on our Digi-Pack they said how they liked the continuity between both pieces with the image, font and the simple colour of black and white really reflected the genre characteristics.
The feedback we had from our peers on the blog has been extremely useful for us as a group this is because they pointed out things that we had to improve for example they pointed out that on our rough cut of our music video the animation in our music video pointed out that on our rough cut of our music video the animation in our music video wasn’t very clear and was difficult to see. Therefore we researched many ways on how to improve this firstly we tried to use a parchment over lay on it to make it look like it was old paper but as a group we decided that it didn’t look as good as the pencil effect. The second option was to use a charcoal effect however that was too dark and didn’t look right as well. Finally we found out that the setting of our rough cut was low, so we increased it and that improved the clarity of the animation doing this the audience could now see the narrative in our video. Also they commented how the performance was ‘Boring’ as it was one similar shot form the side so for our final version we used the dolly to take some tracking shots to have a variety of shots for our music video. As a group we feel that the feedback we received from our music video was very positive, as they like the continuity between the animation and the live performance. They also felt that our music video demonstrated the genre characteristics of our song with them commenting the simple lighting used and the performance consisting of the singer and the piano. Overall I feel that feedback is useful to every aspect of making a music video from the initial idea to planning to making and the final product as we can see what the audience opinion on our concept of our music video.
New media technologies was shown throughout every single process of our media product starting with the internet where this was the key of researching the characteristics of our genre. We found various artists which fitted our genre and we researched their songs on YouTube like for example Elton John’s circle of life.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8ZnCT14nRc
The use of internet enabled us to research a way for our animation; Jon found a website which was a action command prompt which transformed a large amount of pictures with a pencil effect in a matter of minutes. We could’ve wasted valuable time doing the photos into animation one by one if we didn’t find out about the action command prompt. Photoshop was the programme we used for our digi pack and animation, using this programme was extremely useful as it has all the fonts, effects and style needed to make our media product professional. The overall construction of our music video was used on Final Cut Express The pre-millary tasks were extremely useful for me as I’m not as advanced with the Mac, this helped me understand how to lip sync audio with a bit of film as before I wouldn’t be able to do that, overall I am very pleased with the final outcome of our media product.
This commentary is extremely thorough on the editing stages.. It appears to be very detailed but, does seem to drag a little, possibly being too long.. The length of the commentary makes it easier to get distracted when watching. Possibly more of the two Jacks talking would benefit the video as the majority of the video is of John and Bobby. But other than that it was great! Well done! :) xxx
Good idea of letting your audience know who is who in your group by having their name come up whilst their talking. Linking to other videos which inspired your and ideas was good showing your thinking. Good commentary explaining ideas, planning, etc. and each group member is loud and clear & can be heard.
The attention to detail was good, but you did include way too much information about the pencil effect. I think the overall feel is that you had explained this well enough and continued to talk about it. The overall video answers the questions well, and the adding of clips from your music video backed up your points and gave good examples.
I like how you just film two people talking at once as it breaks down the questions. However this also means that the video is longer.... I like how the name of the speaker comes up at the bottom, and also showing pictures throughout showing what they are describing.
We use the convention of our gene, soft or piano rock, with out challenging them or developing them much at all. We focused a lot on the artist, with the live solo performance, as well as this we have also used a separate narrative to the solo performance in the form of animation showing ‘Jainy’ who is the subject of the song. This is not uncommon with in the genre of music, by showing the animation as memories and having them merge at the end of the video with the live performance. There is also a small relationship between lyrics and music with the animations separate narratives and the relationship between the visuals and the music it the fades we used instead of cuts to slow the editing pace down to be in keeping with the genre. We have some intertextual links with the JCB song and take on me with the drawn animation. To promote the artist we used the animations to show him as caring and loving and this gives him a very approachable friendly image and this is indicative to artist with in the soft rock genre.
We showed a solid link between them and real life which lends its self to the way we have split the images on our advert and DVD cover between live performance stills and animation, also on the back of the DVD cover we have shown a piano this is because in all the research we did into covers with in the same genre all the artists are shown with or near there instruments. The other thing we found in our research is that the artist is always sitting down so when we were choosing the stills for our advert and DVD cover we only used images from the solo performance as this shows both the artist with his piano and him sitting down. Our to products work well together as there are consistent themes between both the advert and DVD cover and between them and out music video, the use of the purple light is used for the products this show continuity but also represent the artist as a calm person as that is often associated with the colour as this in turn will help make he appeal more to the audience, also we used the same font thought out our work, the font is quite a professional font to help give the impression of quietly work with also portrays the artist as people professional both of these help show the audience what the genre of the music video as these are themes used through out the genre. The magazine advert also clearly shows the institution that will be selling the DVD as the HMV logo is shown twice on the advert and also the record label is clearly shown at the bottom of the advert this is because that is were the logo is normally shown so it is in plain view.
We got feed back form our peers with in our class from the feed back we got for our pitch pointed out the time constraints of doing animation for our music video so this made us think about other ways of doing it as well that they also said that drawing could be an issue as none of our group could draw to well so this was an other reason to think of another way of do the animation. The feed back from our rough cut gave us further concern about the animation as we changed from drawing to filming the animation peaces and than giving them the affect on Photoshop but this meant that some of the animations where unclear also we needed more shots in our video as it was boring to watch similar shots over and over. So we decided to re-film some of the animation as to affect the light as therefore the clarity of the animation also to re-film parts of our solo performance to make it more interesting. For the feed back of our final peace people said they liked to links between the animation and the live solo performance also the way at the end when the animation bleeds into the live performance. The feed back on our secondary tack was also positive as people said that the to tasks we consistent and had clear links and that our lay out was good and that both peaces looked professionally done.
We used a lot of different media products for the construction of our music video and secondary task, we used Final Cut Express, for the editing, this was useful as it is simple to use and has all the necessary functions to speed up the editing process and it is relatively easy to lip synch on the program. Also with Final Cut we learnt about changing the frames per minute setting so the animation were not to jumpy but not affecting the rest of the video also the different way the fade toll can be applied to get different affects on the video. For the animations we filmed the sequence and then using Photoshop we converted all the stills into pencil like drawings this was sped up on the program using a tool that remembers the commands given and automates the process which gave us more time to complete the video. We also use Photoshop of our DVD cover and magazine advert this was because it allowed us to convert parts of the still images in to the animation style using opacity masks and this linked to our video also by using Photoshop we could insert all the necessary information, text, logos and images we needed to make it look professional and it aloud us to do this with relative ease. From the pre-lim task I did last year I had learnt about the lip synching techniques that helped with the completion of our video, since to first year my skills have advanced drastically as at the beginning I could not use any editing programme and I improved my skills on Photoshop and to processes involved with do the research before the task and the organising of the filming to make it run as smoothly as possible. The use of the blogs was invaluable as it meant we could easy interact with the rest of the class and get the feed back to help improve our video on secondary tasks and the use of the internet in the research was also useful as it meant we could find video from which to draw inspiration and we could also find out a lot about the genre convention for our peace of music.
Rob: The original idea for our Jainy song by Five For Fighting was we wanted to put a spotlight and use a piano and use an artist like using an Elton John concept and like Jack Johnson. That later evolved into giving it raw emotion and trying to make the music video memorable, we used a pencil effect which is used in like-
Jon: Like in the take on me song by aha song and a similar effect used in the JCB song by nizlopi where you project the real footage that you film on to a wall and then trace round and it and take pictures and that makes your animation, like the JCB song was all animated around sort of like a scrap book type thing, so we wanted to like incorporate things like that as though it was like opening up memories of the artist and that with his time with the girl who he sings about in the song so we then can basically bring out more emotion and things like that. Our original idea was to film the footage and then cut between bits of real performance of the artist and then we would like pencil draw all of the
Rob: Yeah show pictures of the time, that later evolved into actual animation which we used and like for instance we have a Romeo and Juliet balcony scene giving intertextuality to Romeo and Juliet shown with a pencil effect, she's walking down the stairs which she meets the artist in this scene.
Jon: But the main real effect for that was to bring out more emotion because obviously in Romeo and Juliet thats quite an emotional scene, so by adding that into our music video, again it adds more emotion to it and I think it did suit the song we chose with that sort of idea.
Jack: With the rough cut we did we had an underlining shot with just from the artist on the side, so we could then overlay other shots, but we didn't have enough time to do that with the rough cut so it looked a bit samey throughout the whole piece. We also looked at lighting, we tried to make it darker to fit more with the tone of the piece but again that was a bit of the same. Also the artist wasn't that visible with the darker light and then it meant that some of the shots didn't quite work.
Jack N: So from our feedback from our peers we found that they found that the performance was quite boring because there was similar shot all the time. So to improve that we did some tracking shots using the dolly which added various different shot to make it interesting.
Jack: With the preliminary filming we did, we filmed bits in chunks, mainly from the side of the artist, but we found that it made the actual footage a bit jumpy whenever we cut between them. Another way we got over the jumpiness of the preliminary filming, we did a single shot as like a base and then we put all the other varying shots over the top, kinda like as an overlay so it was more of a smooth transition into the change of shots rather then just a quick jump through.
Rob: The original concepts behind the production of it for instance the pencil effect for example we had difficulties getting art students together and the whole concept was going to take 600 traces of the same shots and it was going to get-
Jon: But also the actual time limit I mean we tested it on one shot just a normal image that we had but projecting that up and copying it, although it was one person doing it took half an hour to do one frame and in the end we turned out for the animation to have something like 800 or more images and I mean if you take half an hour for each one of those it's gonna take a hell of a long time to do anything and then you've obviously got not with having a whole group of people you gotta organize all of them all the time so we then started to look for other ways basically round I mean Rob you err-
Rob: Looked at the pencil effect, so we had the problem and over the weekend I looked up I thought "right what can we do?" so I thought "okay let's have a look at Photoshop" so I went on Google (as you do) and I looked for a pencil effect, typed it in and I found a relatively good one and then I showed Jon and Jon improved it and he added-
Jon: Yeah well I mean it was mainly the fact that Rob was using an old version of Photoshop at home and then we brought it in and used the version that we have here-
Rob: Cs3 isn't it?
Jon: Yeah it basically seemed to need more fine tuning because it didn't look anywhere near the same as what Rob had. So I just had a bit of a tweak using the curves adjustment on Photoshop which basically removes certain colours which with it being a gray scale image removes certain shades of gray and black that we then could incorporate the animation, but the main problem with even that is it was taking 10 minutes per image, so you got the best part of over 8000 minutes to do that. So we then had a quick look into the actions you can do on Photoshop very similar to sort like macros in Word or in something like that, where you can record a set of commands, execute them and then it did it in a couple of seconds it had applied all the filters and effects and everything that makes the pencil effect. Then the only thing we needed to do, how do we make a nice easy way of doing it on a mass of images, so we used an automated batch process that then went through every image one by one, added the filter, saved it and then we got the initial animation effect. But were going to try and change like the one where you look at where their sitting there at a lake area and the camera tilts up we were going to change that and include stars weren't we?
Bob: Yeah you were, you were thinking of. But the problem with that is that in the dark the pencil effect wouldn't work on the stars. We also faced others problems with the pencil effect for instance indoors, we tried to do a shot with the artist and the lady walking in to the piano and walking out and each time this happened the pencil effect got distorted because not enough lighting weren't it?
Jon: We were originally because obviously we were going to try and tie everything in with like the notebook effect. We were going to have the camera zooming in on the notebook in the performance and then a fade into the notebook effect. But the problem with that was the piano was an upright piano instead of a grand piano which really it wasn't easy to get the camera to zoom in effectively, so we then scrapped that idea and then the only other way to tie it in was which is in the end of the animation/performance where you have like an animated bit at the end which then fades into real life we used that idea which is obviously where we got the lighting problems because indoor if it was too dark then it just couldn'tcope, it would just remove most of the picture and it was more or less just a massive piece of white.
Rob: From our peer feedback we found out that our pencil effect that we did was a bit too white, a bit too vibrant on the eyes and so we thought "what can we do about it" and I thought of a parchment effect and the parchment effect worked a bit but it kinda distorted the colours because it was brown.
Jon: But what we did because of that it obviously made it washed out so with the parchment effect that Rob explained that we put an overlay over all of the images and changed the opacity so you could still see the animation. Problem that we had with that is that it looked like it was just a single piece of paper with a moving animation in the paper. So it was sort of a good idea but it kinda looked a bit old and didn't match the style that we were looking for. So then I looked into posturing and darkening it with a charcoal filter instead of the pencil brush because obviously it was obviously darker charcoals obviously darker then normal pencil, by doing that it was thicker and darker lines so it looked a bit better but we then decided to stay with the original idea because it was the one that looked the best when it was in full quality because with peer feedback it was still very much in a small window that people couldn't see very easily, once we do a full quality version of it we found that it looked fantastic so, we left it at that.
Rob: Charcoal didn't really do it justice anyway.
Jack N: Basically the original idea for our DVD and music cover was to incorporate a notebook. And within the notebook we were going to put lyrics to the song which has continuity because our original idea of our music video to put a notebook into the music video and zooms into our animation. Our continuity from our music video to our digi-pack is shown through the images that we put on our dvd cover and poster. This helps the audience to recognize our artist and the music video, the artist on our dvd cover is in the same animation as shown in the video and the back of the dvd cover.
Jack: Yeah we used the piano on the back.
Jack N: Yeah yeah we did.
Jack: And for the magazine advert we used an image from the video of the live performance and did kinda half and half in animation and the actual picture using opacity masks. Then we used that to show the continuity with the video and the animation at the end of the video when it goes from memory to real life, it flows from that to the magazine advert.
Jack N: The main focus of both the DVD cover and the poster is to sell the artist as much as possible and how we did that was to incorporate both the same pictures in both the DVD cover and the Poster.
In what ways does your media product use,develop, or challenfe forms and coventions of real media products As a group we aimed to apply Goodwin's six points to our media product. Goodwin's six points were shown in our music video for example, the genre characteristics of our song 'Jainy' is a very mellow, slow paced ballad this reflected on how we constructed our music video therefore we simply filmed the artist playing the piano with a spotlight and added animation of our artist and his love interest. To apply to Goodwin's points about needing to sell the artist,to do this we showed variety of close ups shots of our artist also he is featured in all of the video, we also used tracking shots which then zoomed in to make a close up shot. In some aspects we challenged forms of real media products by adding pencil animation to parts of the music video to give it a unique yet sophiscated style, doing this could attract various types of the audience like adults to teenagers. Also adding this style of animation to our music video is challening the conventions of this genre of music, we hoped by doing this has conotations of the auteur theory which is a notion that directors have a specific signature that we can recognise their work from. Hopefully our style can feature in other music videos and be recognised.
How effective is the combination of your main product and auxillary tasks As part of research we all as a group gathered ideas for our Digi-Pack, we looked at cd covers with the same genre as ours, and we found out that the artist is always sitting down and with them is their signature instrument. The continuity from our music video to our digi-pack is shown through the images we put on our dvd cover and poster. This helps the audience to recognise our artist and the music video. The artist on our Dvd cover is in the same animation as shown in the video and the back of the DVD cover is shown without any animation.we did this to show the transformation of real like to animation. The main focus of both the DVD cover and the poster is the artist, this is due to sell the artist as much as possible. We used the same font for both the DVD cover and the poster to show contiunity between the 2, also so that Five For Fighting can be recognised as band from that logo.
In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
At the outset we designed our work for the audience to be memorable, professional alike to the current music video industry and in its own way unique. To get an understanding for constructing our music video we decided to study into other successful examples.
We decided on Five For Fighting’s song called Jainy from the AmericaTown album release in year 2000. The emotion that was waiting to be drawn out of this piece to develop is what inspired us to choose it as our sound track. From this we looked into various successful music videos which followed the same genre to get an idea on how they compel their audience to appreciation. Elton John was a huge foundation on our minds for his music being renowned on piano with such songs like Your Song released in 1970, a classic that demonstrated good dolly shots, zooms, low angles and even setting ideas:
Another classic is Elton John’s “Sorry Seems To Be The Hardest Word” 1976. From this we gained a lot of our shots including a performance shot of our artist playing the piano alike in the video below. The interpretation of the words was something we wanted to replicate this relationship between the lyrics and the visuals for ours to show the true emotion behind each word. With the room really showing just Elton and his Grand Piano gives connotation to the production values that we wanted to use. Notice also there are no sudden jolts throughout the piece which allows the audience to listen to what the artist is singing:
From gaining a good ground of the medium we would be working on. We then decided on making our music video something memorable and unique and to gain credibility with an audience. Going back to one of my influences when I was young was how A-ha did their pencil drawings in their hit single “Take On Me” released in 1985. This concept I had not seen in the music industry since and thought it would be a good opportunity to replicate the idea for our music video, although this would challenge our genre characteristics slightly for being unconventional:
Our demands for the record label is to sell the artist as well as possible in the music video, from this we decided to make sure the artist was in if not all the shots to show to the audience the main character.
Voyeurism is captured in many shots showing flashback memories using the pencil effect of the artist with the female in this case, Jainy, shots such as on the lyrics ‘Jainy stares at stars every night’ shows the artist with Jainy without them giving impression of noticing the camera.
Intertextuality can be found on the first ‘and I love her more then I can tell’ which is a modern day Romeo and Juliet balcony scene to give the impression of waiting for him to come and then speaking from him whilst she is at a high distance from him. This draws into the audience’s heart to see the love that the artist has for Jainy compelling the audience to the emotion of the song.
We also decided to examine some of Five for Fighting’s previous music videos. One we looked at in great detail was “The Riddle” 2006. To our surprise, he has a similar effect to our original ideas! This eventually showed good continuity between our music video and the style he has for his authentic music videos:
How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
Throughout our work we aimed to make it look professional and emotional for the audience. Our first ideas for the poster were to use a diary book with the words Jainy inside and the lyrics on the next page. This did look effective and came out really well but the issue was it showed no correlation or continuity to our work piece. Learning from this we decided to use shots from the music video to show continuity this time, further more we evolved it to include our signature pencil effect which is useful for informing the audience of what to expect and of the directors.
The DVD cover uses this pencil effect as well on the front of the cover, whilst on the back is a shot denoting the performance area. This shot works well on the back because there isn’t too much going on and allows the text to be readable and understood as the first thing to see. By using a typical back cover layout with the band’s website on the back with also a bar code helps give the impression of our work being authentic and professional. The spine of the cover shows black and white piano keys denoting a mid point between the pencil white front and the dark back cover, the text also has a strobe white glow that was used on Photoshop so that the text could be readable.
What have you learnt from your audience feedback?
The feedback we received from our audiences has helped support us on achieving the correct emotion and reactions from them. Our first flow of questions spiralled on how we were going to do all the drawings for our music video when presenting our plan to the class. This made us realise our ambitions might be too high, their constructive criticism allowed us to construct our work better and more suited to the genre we were aiming for.
Another example of support is we got queried on having a lack of variety between shots for our rough cut. From listening to our feedback we went off and did some tracking shots, this synergy that the audience feedback gave us allowed to make our target audience less niche and more universal through improving.
Also, the feedback received allowed us to find ways to improve our product. Their was a few who criticised the use of a black and white pencil effect and suggested to make it a darker tone so it would be easier on the eyes. From this I looked into a parchment effect much like a scroll or tea stained paper, the idea for this was because it was what was used for old representation and would work well when referring to memories. Through using Photoshop 7, I went home and found on Google a necessary parchment image which I then used as a background for one of the images, I sent this off to Jon who assessed it and decided to have a go at it with the command action prompt process which allows him to do what I instructed with multiple images. Unfortunately, we decided this was a step too far, the image was distorting people off what was actually going on in the animation and hence, we decided to turn down the pencil effect to a darker tone instead.
How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
The technology that we had available for us was hugely beneficial, with also benefitting from having 5 years of experience with Photoshop between me and Jon allowed us to use a varied amount of software effectively as well as efficiently. We used Jon’s Panasonic HD Ready Video Camera for our performance shots and pre-animation shots so we could get a better quality resolution then what the college supported.
The internet without doubt was a huge influence on our work. Google specifically allowed us to search the World Wide Web for ideas we had to actually apply them to our project. The pencil effect I found was off the internet and searched on by Google’s search engine, this ended up being one of our most useful tools on making our music video unique.
Photoshop was a hugely useful tool as well. We had to create 800 images with a pencil effect to make our animation work, the possibilities that we could do with this was astounding. Another example of how it helped was the action command prompt that Jon found on the internet and then set it up to allow us to execute all those images efficiently. This enabled us to complete such a difficult piece of work that would take a minute or two for each within 15 minutes. Further more, our digi-packs were done using Photoshop so hats off to adobe for this software!
At college we used Mac’s to do our work. The media technologies available for these operating systems are second to none. We used a Final Cut Express on it which was the centre of the creation of our music video, allowing us to mix audio and videos and even 800 images to make a smooth and crisp sound and vision to the audience.
The college issued us with necessary equipment we might need during our performances, one of the very useful equipments we did use was the dolly. Without this, the tracking shots we did after our rough cut wouldn’t have been possible. We also used the dolly for still shots to keep the camera at a mid angle and on a stable, flat and straight shot so the performance didn’t look tilted in anyway.
In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Our media product develops various forms and conventions of other media products from the same genre. We initially looked into similar products to our initial ideas so that we had a good understanding and basis of the forms and conventions of that genre. The genre of our song is soft rock, so we went and investigated other artists of this genre. We looked at Elton John and specifically the music video for ‘Circle of life’ and ‘Can you feel the love tonight’ as these featured a typical soft rock song that involved Romance and Everyday life. The two music videos did however feature some animation from the Walt Disney film ‘The Lion King’. We felt that the combination of animation and real performance of the artist worked really well, and was extremely effective in portraying an emotional atmosphere. This was something that we wanted to incorporate into our music video, as our song is very emotional. The idea of the animation and performance was something that we felt worked really effectively and would be quite easy for us to create the desired effect. We also looked at music videos for other songs from our artist. Again a similar style had been used in ‘The Riddle’ were it featured a mixture of real and animation style footage, although it was at the same time. After researching into this we felt that it was important to have our music video use and develop the forms and conventions of the genre so that it conveyed the right message and atmosphere to the audience. Once we had decided that we were going to develop conventions for the genre we started to develop our ideas so that they matched the conventions of the genre.
The Circle of Life:
Can you feel the love tonight:
The Riddle:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrIGAidJEWM
The way in which we did this was to look at Andrew Goodwin’s points on ‘How to analyse a music video’ as this shows the conventions of most music videos which can be tailored to any genre.
The first point is that ‘Music videos should demonstrate Genre Characteristics’. We found that most music videos of the genre feature the artist playing the particular primary instrument in the song. For our artist this was a piano so we decided to develop our performance parts to be centred around the artist playing the piano with a large variety of shot types showing this. We also found that in terms of the mise-en-scene of the video the majority of performance related videos used the artist in a single room on there own, maybe with a few objects around, but mainly empty. This was something that we wanted to conform to, so we used a single spotlight to light up the piano and the artist in an otherwise black room. This would also allow us to focus on representing the emotion of the song easily as the focus of the audience is drawn towards the artist. This is very important when considering the idea of keeping the audience interested and wanting to watch the music video again, as Genre Characteristics are seen as a tried and tested method of attracting your audience.
Elton John - Your Song
Five for fighting - The Riddle
Our Music Video
The second point is that ‘There is a relationship between the lyrics and the visuals’. We incorporated this by illustrating the lyrics in the mini-narrative animation pieces that we included in certain points of the song. In the first narrative animation piece we developed the idea around the lyric ‘And I love her more than I can tell’. The idea that we came up with was a Romeo and Juliet style balcony scene as the Romeo and Juliet play is very romance oriented so suited our music video perfectly. For the line ‘Seems she’s found to find me just as well’ we used a running in the woods shot of the artist and ‘Jainy’. This again brings together an illustrative emotional scene of an emotional song. The third narrative animation part was based on the lines
‘Jainy stares at stars every night
Morning takes her eyes every time’ where we had the artist and ‘Jainy’ sitting side by side on a log style bench looking up at the sky. The original plan was to have the couple looking at stars in the sky but due to problems when creating the animation we decided to make the scene look more like morning, as the next line said about how morning takes her eyes every time. This makes the song stick in the target audiences mind, which allows us to grab the audiences attention and make them want to watch the video again and again.
Animation Narrative 1
Animation Narrative 2
Animation Narrative 3
The third point is that ‘There is a relationship between music and visuals’. In our song this mainly included the artist playing the piano as the song is a mainly piano based song. But just looking at someone playing the piano would appear quite boring so we developed this to incorporate actual pieces of our actor playing the piano with a close up of his hands and a combination of further away shots. This conforms to many music videos in this genre as they all feature the main artist playing the piano. This relationship means that we have a variety of different shots in our music video which also keeps the target audience interested.
Clips of Elton John, Five for Fighting and our music video all with people playing
The forth point is that ‘The demands of the record label will include the need for lots of close ups of the artist and the artist may develop motifs which recur across their work’. To make sure that our video was conventional we used many close-ups of the artist in our video, along with tracking shots that started out as long shots and then moved in to form close-ups. This is a conventional style that has featured in many videos of the same genre, such as Elton John and Five for Fighting. The idea of developing motifs that features in all of an artists work, is a similar idea to the Auteur Theory that a director imprints a unique feature of his work on all videos that he has produced. The particular animation style that we used is a similar effect in the way that its construction and style is truly unique for a music video but uses features that were based in other music videos. This allows for us to create motifs that could feature in all of the artists work. This would then allow for the audience to instantly identify that this style of video is related to our artist which is a huge benefit for the mass marketing that the record labels demand.
A Selection of Close Ups in our Video
The fifth point is that ‘There is frequently reference to notion of looking’. This was by far the most difficult of all of the points to incorporate into our music video so that it would match the forms and conventions of the genre. We decided that to do this would incorporate the animation narratives into a pencil style that matched the effect of drawn sketches in a notepad. This then referred to the idea that we were looking into the artists memories as opposed to it just being an animation piece added into the video. We tied this notion together at the end of the music video by having the final animation piece fade into the real footage. This unusual style of music video with the animation, makes the audience want to watch the music video again and again as it is quite memorable in terms of unique style.
The ending sequence fading from animation to real
The sixth and final point is that ‘There is often intertextual reference’. We added intertextuality in many ways. We based the style of the video on ‘Circle of Life’ and ‘Can you feel the love tonight’ by Elton John and ‘The Riddle’ by Five for Fighting, with the use of animation and performance. We got inspiration of the styling of the performance part of video from Elton John’s ‘Your Song’ as it features many different tracking and still shots of the artist and the piano. The animation style was a combination of intertextuality from A-Ha ‘Take on me’, which was an original idea of our animation with the use of rotoscoping with using animation and performance, ‘Fell in love with a girl’ by White Stripes, as this features a complete lego style animation, and Nizlopi’s JCB Song, which features a 2D animation in a school boy’s notebook. This makes the target audience want to watch the music video again and again, as it is in the style of many familiar videos which is shown to be a great hit with the viewers of the music video.
The songs which we took our inspiration from:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrIGAidJEWM - Five for Fighting 'The Riddle'
Our artist is represented in our music video as quite a mysterious character who is never seen totally even with the shots from the front in the performance parts. This is seen in some similar songs to our genre, for instance the Circle of Life by Elton John features a darker room with the artist in and he is quite mysterious in the shots of performance. This is important because it helps the target audience instantly recognise the genre of the music video.
How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
I believe that the combination of our main product and ancillary texts is extremely effective. This is due to the fact that we used a consistent style throughout all of the pieces and made sure that they met the conventions of the genre. The hardest part of the texts was to incorporate continuity throughout the pieces. Once we had finalised our video we then began to look at dvd covers, cd covers and magazine adverts for artists of the same genre. We also tried to incorporate some of our own ideas to try and create continuity throughout the pieces. When we looked at cd covers of Elton John and Jack Johnson a well as other artists we found that they incorporated a shot of the artist sitting down, either near their signature instrument, playing it or on their own. This led us to create some mock ups of our DVD cover incorporating our findings. We also developed an idea of the notebook for our DVD cover and then a library featuring the notebook in the magazine advert. We created a mock up of this, but decided that because the piano in the music video was the wrong sort for us to zoom into the book, we hadn’t made it clear that the animation parts were from a notebook, so this notebook dvd cover didn’t have continuity with the rest of it. We then went back to the idea of featuring the artist in the products as this also met the demands of the record label. We then decided to feature a mixture of the pencil animation and real performance just as in the music video. To do this we used Adobe Illustrator CS4 to create a single image for the magazine cover that featured a gradient transition through opacity masks to go between animated background and real artist to real background and animated artist playing the piano. This featured continuity between the style of the music video and the magazine advert. We also did a similar effect on the dvd cover where we feature a real image on the back cover and an animated image on the front cover. We used the same image on the front of the DVD cover to incorporate continuity between all of the products. The back of the dvd cover featured a piano which was a continued theme of our products with all of them featuring a piano. Then to tie the white animated front cover and the dark piano image on the back cover we placed piano keys on the spine of the DVD cover. These things enabled us to maintain continuity between the three products as we featured similar styles and images between them. We then incorporated the rule of thirds into the design of both the magazine advert and dvd cover. This meant that we incorporated the demands of the record label into the layout of the products just as we did with the music video. The rule of thirds states that the eyes move in a Z fashion over a product so we placed the content in this arrangement rather that outside of this so that the eyes were naturally drawn over the whole product. Also it states that logos, non-related text and age ratings appear in the terminal area at the bottom of the page rather than anywhere on the page. This again helped us to maintain continuity between the products which added to the effectiveness of the products on the audience. This allowed the audience to instantly recognise that the products were connected and from the same artist. Also the idea of continuity between the products is great in allowing identification of the ancillary tasks relating to the artist, which is important when trying to get the target audience to watch the video again and get it on DVD. This helps with the mass production that is demanded by the record label. Another way this is done is by having the artists website, interviews with the artists, etc. on the DVD cover and Magazine cover. This again helps promote the artist on an extremely large scale as the on every DVD cover is the artists website as well on adverts in magazines which are bought.
The music video shot used in the DigiPack The DVD Cover The Poster
What have you learnt from your audience feedback?
Our audience/peer feedback has really been important when developing our music video and digipack. The reason this has been so important is due to the fact that we used 17-18 year olds as our test audience as they are the age group that tend to watch the majority of music video, supplying them with the knowledge of what works and what doesn’t in terms of music videos. But also, because our video was aimed at a large Target Audience spanning many age brackets, it allowed us to test the music video on one of the more difficult to impress age brackets. We incorporated this feedback into almost every part of the development of our products from initial planning to final products and this has had a large effect on how our products have turned out. To start with once we had discussed our initial ideas as a group, we then created a pith with some mock up images, storyboard, time line and shot list to present to our peers so that we could get some feedback on the basic ideas. From this initial pitch that we made, our peers came up with the main concern of time. Because the video and additional products had to be created within a set time limit we then set about researching into reducing the time. The main worry came as we were planning on drawing around each frame of the animation, similar to the style of A-Ha ‘Take on Me’ Another key piece of feedback that we were given was that we had to find people who were willing to do the drawing and sketching for us as none of us in the group were able to draw all that well. This led us to go and look into our concept and see if it was able to be created in the time limit that we had. We went and tested out the animation style and found that for each frame it was going to take around 30 minutes for each frame. So because of this we decided to look into other ways of doing the animation effect. Once we had progressed further and looked into some possible ways of doing the animation as well as taking some test shots for the video we got our peers to look at our blog, and evaluate how they thought we were progressing. The general feedback that we got was that they were pleased with the decisions we had made so far but would have liked to have seen more images to illustrate the fresh ideas that we had come up with. Also they said that they would like to know some possible locations that we might use for our filming, specifically with regards to our Romeo and Juliet style balcony shot. From this we then incorporated many changes to our blog like some test footage of one of our locations, and test shots of the balcony scene. We then continued to progress and get to a stage where we had a rough cut of our product so that we could involve our peers into the feedback session of our rough cut. From the rough cut the general opinion was that the animation parts were a little hard to see, and that the shots of the artist were a bit boring as there were chunks of him playing from one angle. From this we decided to edit the effect for the animation by using different filters and overlays. We decided on two techniques that we thought were rather effective and could be replacements for the animation. One was by using a parchment overlay to make it look like the animation was on an old piece of paper and the other was using a charcoal filter instead of the pencil style. We found however that the parchment was a bit odd as it looked like it was one image that was moving rather than a series of images in a notebook, which was the original idea, and the charcoal effect looked a bit to dark, even on its lightest setting. We then tweaked around the conversions and found that the quality of the converted rough cut was very low which made it hard to see the pencil effect, and with upping the quality the pencil effect looked fantastic. For the performance we decided to film some additional shots of the artist so that we could have a variety of shots so that the music video wasn’t boring. Once we had implemented all of the changes and had finalised our video we then got our peers to view the video and give us their opinions about it. The overall opinion was that they liked the video but there were a few little parts that could have been improved like making the animation and performance link in better rather than waiting until the end to tie them in together. We also got some feedback on our final ancillary products. The main view of these were that they liked the continuity between the different pieces and felt that it matched the style achieved by the video. They also liked the contrast between real and animation, but feel the transition on the magazine cover could have been a little smoother.
The animation: normal, parchment and charcoal
How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
In the process of our coursework we used a great variety of new media technologies. One of the biggest assets for this coursework was the internet. We found that the internet helped us greatly when it came to each section: research, planning, construction and evaluation. During the research section, certain websites such as wikipedia, youtube, etc enabled us to look, in great detail, into our genre, artists of that genre, existing music videos and how these music videos were made. This was an important starting point as we needed a basis of which we could work on to then begin to plan our ideas for our video. During the planning stage, the internet helped us in the way that we were able to look at new ways of doing things such as the animation effect. During the construction part we were able to use the internet, through searching google and watching tutorials on youtube, to expand our abilities in Photoshop, Final Cut and Illustrator to create a better effect rather than having to compromise. This include things like opacity masks for the digipack to remotely controlling the music on a laptop so that we don’t have to worry about someone being in the shot. And for the evaluation part the internet proved vital as we can use videos and images to illustrate our points a lot easier than if we had to just explain everything in text.
During the planning we also found that the use of the stills camera and video camera enabled us to capture some location ideas and test footage and then report back to the group with this. This allowed the group to split up, with some staying and working on additional parts of the planning stage while others go out and find the locations to report back with. Also the use of a projector that I had helped us to begin our planning and development of the animation idea, as I was able to trace round an image of myself to see if the time it took was realistic for our project. With regards to animation we also found that Adobe Photoshop 7, CS3 and CS4 were indispensable with Rob trying out an idea for the animation and then allowing me to edit the idea and improve it with the new algorithms in the newer version of photoshop that I had. This led us to believe that with a little tweaking we could create the whole animation in a realistic amount of time. The blog was another resource that benefitted us greatly when it came to planning, because it allowed a centralised storage of any ideas that the group might have, allowing others in our group to keep up to date at all times.
During construction the new media technologies that I found beneficial were: MacBook Pro, HD Video Camera, Final Cut Express and Adobe Master Collection CS4. Personally I found that using my MacBook gave us as a group greater flexibility as I kept a backup of everything from the college iMac on it so that should we need to look at something outside of lessons, we could easily get it. Also I was easily able to set up remote control so that we didn’t need someone near the piano pressing the play button during filming which eliminated the chance of having someone suddenly appear in the shot while trying to get away. My Panasonic HDC-SD9 High Definition video camera that we used was great as it allowed us more freedom when filming as the footage was stored on cards as opposed to tape, which meant that there was no risk of losing the footage as it was backed up with the college iMac, and no files can be overwritten. This meant that we didn’t have to worry if a clip got accidentally got deleted, as we still had a backup of it. Final Cut express is also a fantastic piece of software that we wouldn’t have been able to produce such a high quality output without it. It allows almost total freedom with the clips and we used it to create all of the images for the animation, synchronising the music and the music clips and editing the shots. Lastly Adobe Master Collection CS4 was a vital tool when it came to developing the animation as I made an action, containing the step by step instructions of making the animation, in Photoshop that allowed the pencil effect to be applied instantly, and by using Batch Automated Process we were able to set Photoshop applying the effect to every frame of the animation, which in total there was more than 800 frames. We also found that Illustrator CS4 was a great tool when it came to the design of the magazine advert as it enabled us to use opacity masks and blend 4 images together to create a transition between real artist and animated background to animated artist and real background. To make the animation itself we took the base image, duplicated the layer, turned it negative, grayscaled it, applied a gaussian blur at about 3%, change the layer style to colour dodge and then applied the curves image adjustment to remove some shades of grey. Other aspects that we used include spotlights in the drama studio which were controlled by the technicians booth, making it easier for us to put on the correct filter, such as the purple and white spotlight. A dolly was used to create some of the smooth tracking shots which added the variety of shots that we needed.
We also was able to have time to film a preliminary task for our music video. This preliminary task involved us creating a short music video just to see how we would get on and get some general ideas on how to make a music video. We found that our preliminary task was quite jumpy because we filmed each section individually. So when it came to filming our main product we used a single background shot and then layered our other clips over top of this. This made it so that we didn’t have any gaps in the video, leaving a smooth video with fades between the base layer and the intercut shots.
However with all of this new media technology that we used, we didn’t go without our fair share of problems. With regards to the animation, if there wasn’t enough lighting then we ended up with a mass of white where a nearly completely black image gets converted to negative it turns white. Also with one piece of animation narrative we tried to replace the background with stars but we couldn’t get them to look realistic enough. We also had problems with the lighting in the performance filming session, as we couldn’t get the light on without it interfering with where the camera was positioned at some points, so we ended up with a no go zone for the camera to avoid any problems with lighting creating purple lines on the footage.
All in all I believe that as a group we worked really well together and used our knowledge and got the most out of the technology to create a professional music video, DVD cover and Magazine Advert.
Elton John - Your Song
Five for fighting - The Riddle
Our Music Video
The music video shot used in the DigiPack
The DVD Cover
The Poster
