2. How do my products use, develop and challenge forms and
conventions of real media products.
3. My album cover [left] is both conventional and
unconventional. It is unconventional in the way that it
has no pictures on it. However, this is because I thought
if it were to be more simplistic it would reflect the
music video quite well. It could be seen as conventional
because of the bands name is the biggest text on the
cover, highlighting the band to their audience.
It could challenge forms of other media products
because it is plain yet still eye-catching.
My poster [right] could yet again follow conventional and
unconventional forms of media. My poster is quite similar to
my album cover which I feel is important in order to have a
constant link through all of my media products. Like my
album cover, it has no images, just text. Furthermore, some
posters I looked at whilst doing research were also quite
limited with what was on the poster.
4. I am going to challenge how conventional my music video is through
analysing it in terms of Andrew Goodwin’s music video theory. He believed
that all music videos should follow six key steps;
There is a relationship between the lyrics and the visuals, with the visuals
illustrating, amplifying or contradicting the lyrics.
There is a relationship between the music and the visuals, with them illustrating,
amplifying or contradicting each other.
That genres are complex and diverse in terms of music video style and
iconography.
That record companies will demand a lot of close-ups of the main artist/vocalist.
That there are likely to be intertextual to other forms of media within the music
video.
5. There is a relationship between the lyrics and the visuals, with them illustrating,
amplifying and contradicting each other.
Throughout the song the lyrics change from
“And there’ll be sun, sun, sun
All over our body's. And sun, sun, sun
I’ll die in next There’ll be sun, sun, sun
Within my music video, I have told the All over our faces And sun, sun, sun
story of a relationship in five years So, what the hell” To “ But it was fun, fun,
time. I have made clear the fun When we were drinking. It was fun,
relationship between the lyrics and fun, fun When we were drunk And it was
the visuals by having a character fun, fun, fun When we were laughing It was
having act out what the lyrics are fun, fun, fun Oh, it was fun.” To “And will
actually saying. For example… be love, love, love
Love throught our bodys. Love, love, love
All throught our minds And will be love,
love, love All over her face And love, love,
love All over our minds.”
I have interpreted this and portrayed it in
my music video and the visuals link with
the lyrics very well.
6. There is a relationship between the music and the visuals, with the visuals
illustrating, amplifying or contradicting the lyrics.
Within my music video I have tried to adjust the pace and timing of the video to
match the visuals. I think that this is important, especially in an animation video
because the characters or images need to match the lyrics. This creates emotion of
the characters for the audience.
7. Genres are complex and diverse in terms of music video style and iconography.
The genre of my chosen music video is indie/folk. The normal style of the video is
quite old fashioned, in the sense of what the people in the video are wearing yet it
is modern at the same time.
As I created an animation music video, it gives a totally different style then doing
an actual recorded video. However, I have carried a few things from the actual
music video to mine is the characters. For example, at the start of the song the guy
is playing a violin, I have interpreted this to my music video and created a stick
man playing the guitar. Furthermore, when the lyrics ‘sunsunsun’ play on the
music video, the lyrics are actually visible and this is also the case in my animation
video. Furthermore, the lyrics to the song explain the relationship between a man
and women and life in 5 years time. In the original music video there are shots of
male and female relating to the song, and I have took notice of this and created a
stick man and stick women so the audience can still easily relate the images to
lyrics of the song.
8. That record companies will demand a lot of close ups of the artist/vocalists.
Because my music video is obviously animation, I couldn’t show the artist of my
band, however it does still portray the artists from the band. And because my
video follows a particular storyline, there wasn’t much chance of being able to put
in close ups as its telling a story. However, I think that the shot that appears the
most in my music video is long shot, so the images to the lyrics are made clear to
the audience.
9. That there are likely to be intertextual references to other forms of media
within the music video.
There are not many intertextual references to other forms of media within my
music video, however, there is intertextuality within my video to my other
products that I produced as they are all based upon the same genre and theme.
This therefore, make my products seem more professional and realistic.
10. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
My music video and my products are a good combination. They don’t have a
continuous link between them, however, the fact that my music video is
animation, I wanted to make my texts quite plain and simple and I have done this
by using limited colour and no pictures, just text. This makes is accessible and
easily visible for people who wanted to buy the products.
I think I could have maybe made my video a little brighter however, but I think this
would take the animation theme from the video, which then wouldn’t have had a
great affect to the actual lyrics of the song.
11. What have you learnt from your audience feedback?
My feedback informed me to change a lot of things
that originally I thought was fine. I asked my target
audience for feedback such as positive criticisms
and negative criticism.
The main change that I did was the actual front
cover of the CD. I originally stared to do my CD
cover with a major animation theme going on,
however, as it progressed it became to look quite
childlike and wouldn’t fit my target audience very
well. So this made me realise that in order to catch
my target audiences attention, I just needed to
produce something very simplistic yet effective.
12. How did you use media technology in the construction, research, planning and
evaluation stages?
Construction:
I produced my products on fireworks, which is an image editing software, and the
actual music video I obviously hand drew in a stop-start motion way and took
pictures of each drawing to match the lyrics. Using fireworks, I found a lot easier
for A2 coursework as I had gained previous knowledge from doing AS coursework.
The hardest thing I found to do was matching the products with the genre of my
music video and making sure that it had a continuous link between them
somewhere.
I created my music video using iMovie on Apple Mac. I found it tricky to use at first
as I had no previous experience of using the programme. I found that the hardest
thing to do when using this was to get the timing right, especially with the amount
of shots I had to put in the video. It took along time to get the video right, but I am
happy with the result.
I also used Slideshare to upload PowerPoint’s and Vimeo to upload videos to get
an embedding code for my blog and to show images and text in a simple yet
efective way. You can upload videos using blogger, however I found that using
Vimeo was easier and quicker and more efficient.
Another programme that I obviously used was Blogger. Blogger is a useful website
that allows a blog to be kept, and acts almost like a diary.
13. How did you use media technology in the construction, research, planning and
evaluation stages?
Research:
For my research I mostly used different music video websites such as yahoo music
ton view the music videos and then finally evaluated them on my blog. One
problem I found through doing this though however, was the fact that youtube
doesn’t work on the school network and this therefore made it harder for me to
find music videos that I wanted to analyse.
14. How did you use media technology in the construction, research,
planning and evaluation stages?
Planning:
For my planning I used a number of different methods. I created a storyboard and
then put that into a PowerPoint as it made it easier to view on my blog. I also
planned which fonts I was going to use by using the website ‘DaFont’.
