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
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:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrIGAidJEWM (Embedding disabled by request)
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 
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.
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