The document discusses conventions in music videos and how the student's media product compares to examples from Green Day and Paramore. The student analyzes technical, symbolic, and audiovisual conventions as well as relationships between visuals and lyrics/music. Their music video uses some conventions like a red coat symbolizing love and danger but struggles to clearly portray the male character as imaginary. Feedback would help the student improve clarity and matching visuals to lyrics/music.

1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and convention of real media products?<br />To start off with, what is a convention? They can be split into three categories:<br />-Technical (camera techniques & shots)- Symbolic (ie clothing, colours)- Written and audio (music etc).<br />These can be a set of signs that give off a meaning, like a colour in the background. Say a music video was being shot with a red painted wall behind the actors; this could mean either a love scene or perhaps some sort of danger.<br />Music Video<br />Andrew Goodwin came up with a theory that identified a number of key features in music videos. They are:- A relationship between the lyrics and the visuals, with the visuals illustrating, amplifying or contradicting the lyrics.- A relationship between the music and the visuals, with the visuals illustrating, amplifying or contradicting the music.- Genre-related style and iconography present.- Multiple close-ups of the main artist or vocalist.- Voyeurism often plays a major part, especially in relation to females.- Intertextual references to other media texts may be present.He says that music videos are often constructed by the link between the visuals and the song plus the artist. Relationships are built between these in the video.<br />Our video contains some simple conventions, for instance our actress wears a red coat, now this symbolises two things. One that she is in love with the male actor and this is backed up by her search for him when he disappears. She expresses her emotions through facial indications that give us clues to how she’s feeling.<br />And second linking both the visuals to the lyrics you’ll know the song is about the loss of someone through the means of drugs. The redness of the coat secondly indicates danger. Danger that she’s lost her mind and that the male actor isn’t actually real at all, only a picture/memory of her past.<br />Our music video can be compared to similar artists like Greenday and Paramore. The song I’ve chosen from Greenday is called “When September ends” and from Paramore “The only exception”.<br />What’s similar in “When September Ends”?<br />Greenday follows similar conventions to most music videos about loss and love, they have one male character and one main female character who are or were part of a couple then the separation leads to some kind of sadness, depression, a longness for company and even anger. Our two characters are together at the beginning but then become separated, both videos then have scenes of confusion and realisation of the lost one This then leads to the female character looking for the male character through different stages. There are similar shots such as facial close ups. One scene at the end of the Greenday video where she’s looking to the sky, confused is similar to the one in our video when she’s realises he’s disappeared.<br />What’s different in “When September Ends”?<br />The male character is actually real in this video where as in ours he isn’t he’s only a figment of imagination though drugs after his death. So the emotion of the video can be more easily understood by the audience who watch their video. We’ve had to try our hardest to express this emotion but it’s been very hard and I’m not 100 per cent sure if it comes across solidly and it would be something I’d change if I had to do it again. Also our video has the use of drugs in the lyrics whereas Green Day has no mention of any kind of drugs. So again the audience could become easily confused as what’s actually happening in the video with the two characters.<br />What’s similar in “The Only Exception”<br />Again there’s one male character one main female character but this time you’re not so sure what or who the guy is, just like in ours. Is he a partner or just a friend? Again there is the separation, sadness and depression but this one has clue of a search for a partner after the breakup. She’s goes looking for something, you’re not quite sure what it is and this is exactly like in ours. You see the actress goes looking for something but you’re not sure if it’s the male character or something else, this is when you begin to think; “Is the male character even real?”<br />Differences with paramour: Female is the lead character she is the one in control of the situation and is the one who runs away. Although in our video the female is also the lead character, she’s not a strong one and she comes across as being very confused. This can put the audience in an uneasy place as they’re not sure what’s going on. Also it has a much happier theme, and there is a resolution when they get back together at the end. Our music has no happy resolution only the fading away of the male character.<br />Mise en Scene:<br />The Mise en scene in the Greenday video that can be compared to our video is, the outside scenery contrasted with inside scenery, similar sorts of clothes. The summery type scenery of fields and grass lands. This instantly gives the audience a good feeling because most people enjoy the summer weather. However our music video already contradicts that with an underlying problem that begins with the lyrics. However not all the lyrics match up with visuals, and transitions don’t always change on the beat which is defiantly something I would change next time round, it’s vitally important they do to keep the interest of the audience and make it appealing, Greendays video does this very well in the narrative parts of the video.<br />With the Paramore song we have similar Mise en Scene such has, casual clothing which can set the attitude of the song quite quickly, if there’s casual clothes you know the story is going to be one that people may be able to relate to on a daily basis. However we never got to implant our idea of the male character being in a formal suit at the end fading away and not recognising the female character, but she calls his name as if she already knows him. Then the shot fades into someone completely different. I think this shot would have been extremely effective to give the audience that sense of insanity. Due to time constrictions and prop usage we were unable to capture the shot. Also the camera is always following the female character in the video and that’s what we did in ours too, our music video has the potential to be very confusing and sticking to one character makes it easier for the audience to understand the story before they listen to the lyrics. Their music video also has a slow editing pace, which helps to set the mood for the audience.<br />Ancillary Productions:<br />Digipak Design:<br />It’s very hard to find and compare an album cover that’s similar to mine, however I can do a complete contrast of the two. I’ve chosen to compare my Album cover with Muse’s Resistance cover. However there are still some similarities.<br />Muse’s cover uses a wide range of clours and this is deffinatly and excilent way of grabbing the attenstion of shop browsers. One of my main aims was to do something very similar however I decided to only use one colour that would stand out from the rest. Looking at the Muse cover, I’d deffiently change my cover around to use more colours so it’s a less flat image. However I do feel my colours are effective enough to catch the eye. This is backup by the use of a green against the blue and a purple glow around the edges of the grass blades to show some sort of progression into a darker colour. Also the postioniong of the text on Muse’s ablum is very effective.<br /> They have the band name in the top left corner and the album name in the bottom right corner, have it symertical like this apeals much more to the eye than the standard text along the top of the page. I feel that my text is positioned well but the text it’s easy to read, one thing I’d change again if I had the chance. Also with cover it’s hard to get an understanding of what it means, with Muse’s cover you can tell it’s some sort of alien/planet looking sphere and that could indicate the type of music the album has. Whereas mine only gives off a mysterious feel and although the song it’s self is sad and mysterious it wasn’t the orignal feel I was looking for. Muse’s cover is simple and very effective. I often see the cover and know exactly who it is by the colours and shape, with my cover it’s all one solid colour with some special brushes applied through photoshop and a texture layered underdneath. This does however make the picture less flat but still, it’s not as appealing as muse.<br />Advertisement Design:<br />Having given more time and planned my work rate a lot better this is the outcome I’d have liked to achieve of my piece:<br />My idea is so much simpler than this design however I do prefer my text style and find it easier to read. I wanted to give my piece more energy and I started to do that in a much similar form by using the black curved lines against the white glow. I wanted to give the band an aura like this one on the compared poster. But I wouldn’t have been able to have the skill to do it as good as this example plus I didn’t allow myself enough time to try it out myself. But I find my poster is slightly flat with the black background. It’s a simple design and I think it works but it could have been a lot better with some simple patterns, perhaps engraved into the black via a light grey theme or to make them stand out with a brighter colour like purple. I wanted continue the mysterious theme from my digipack to my advertisement. If you look carefully I have used the same wavy lines in both productions to link the two together and also the same picture of the band, just slightly re arranged. In conclusion I didn’t give myself enough time to produce a filly effective advertisement piece and believe that it could have been a lot better if I’d allowed myself the time. This piece is probably the one I believe I can improve the most however, I do still like it and think that it’s effective enough to be band advertisement. It’s simply, easy to read and get the audience wondering what the music is like.<br />What you have learned from audience feedback<br />Our first rough edit we screen to an audience had a slight technical problem, we think as we exported the video something in the process botched up the playback when it was screened. The clip was continuously jumpy however, the audience thought that this was a deliberate effect and the feedback we obtained told us that the effect would have been appreciated if it was only used in smaller sections rather that throughout the whole clip. So this gave us ideas of how to use the effect (deliberate this time) in the actual final piece. Thirty seconds into the video the clip begins of our actress, Maisie, walking down the side of 062484000the barn we see the use of this effect, the clips were swapped round so Maisie jolted backwards a few steps and then proceeded to walk normally again but further up the track. 88533511817351.001.1367790127762000This boded well with our audience as it also 174356514935202.002.1057275138239500skipped on the beat and was appealing to the eye and ears. <br />What I learned from my Digipak feedback: The initial designs people found the text hard to read and that it didn’t go well against the background. I didn’t want to change the texts to much because it went along with my colour theme so what I decided to do was keep part of the colour. I changed the text colour to black which goes well against most colours but then added a dark blue glow around the text to give it an edge. Also the initial designs feedback said that the image of the band was too flat and boring, so what I did was literally raise it from the background. I get it a bevelled edge and embossed it so like with my advertisement it gave it an almost 3D look.<br />What I learned from my advertisement feedback: The feedback I received for my poster was, in a way, not extremely useful. The ratings people gave me didn’t give me much reason to change the design around. It’s a simple poster and if I had more time I would have made more complicated designs but as I’ve said before I didn’t plan my timing as well as I should have. However I did change come things, the sharp dark spikes coming from the spotlight for instance was an added addition after the feedback because it just looked to bland. It needed something else at the top of the picture to give it more interest and I tried out different patterns to use in the spot light but I thought that the spikey pattern added what looked like a shadowy effect and a meaning of the darkness and mystery crawling in and taking over the poster.<br />How effective is the combination of your main product with ancillary texts?<br />There are many different links between my music video and my ancillary texts, I’ve tried to keep a continuous mystery theme throughout all the productions. Mainly the two ancillary texts. I’ve had to use the band on both ancillary texts because they’re situated in Ireland and the only way to get them recognised is to use their band picture in the two texts. The music video was then shot based around a narrative. Which I didn’t think was going to be as hard as it was to then developed that narrative into the two different texts.<br />They all link up together, whether it’s through themes, colours and patterns. My two ancillary texts link better together than they do to the music video because it was very hard to plan a cover around a narrative based music video. For instance in both texts I used the same brush pattern in photoshop to create a theme of long curved lines, if the audience have seen the advertisement poster and then look for the CD in the shop they’ll pick out these lines and can relate back the poster and know that the CD they’re looking at is The Riot Tapes. However, there is the picture of the band on the back of the Digipak which in most cases would be better situated on the front of the design, this way they could see the band members on the poster and then see them on the digipak and make a much easier correlation between the two than just picking out the theme of long curved lines.<br />-127044767500Also I’ve tried to stick with darker visuals throughout all three productions to once again keep the mysterious theme flowing all the way through. This is best seen on the poster advertisement. The white fading spotlights against the solid black background not only compares to opposites on a visual scale but I’ve also made it look as if the band is actually under a spot light and that light is then projected onto the floor beneath their feet. Giving this poster a new dimension of almost 3D. This will defiantly work in my favour for attracting people to look at the poster as the walk by, I know I’d want to stop and look to see what was going on in poster.<br />-1416053098800001587549847500Again with the two similarities of the ancillary texts, in the spot light of the poster I’ve used a black brush tool of spikes to relate to the blades of grass following the spines on the digipak. The reason I wanted to use these sharp points is because I wanted to exaggerate the differences with this band compared to others. I classed their genre as Alternative Rock, it is rock for sure but there’s a little edge of metal in there that comes through the lyrics and the way the instruments are played. This can also be linked into our main production of the music video. I established that this song had a slight grunge feel before we started to film so picking a location like the barn we used was ideal. The collapsing and broken down barn was full of rusted corrugated iron and fallen bricks walls and run down cattle feeders, all symbolising mystery, corruption and again the with sharp edges of metal and broken walls this theme is carried on throughout the two texts.<br />The shots were taken in a dimly lit barn just before the sun was going down, this gave us the perfect conditions to film and pass on the desired feeling and tension to the audience. Once we managed to obtain the correct lighting it was then easy enough to pass on these effects into the two ancillary texts, it was just a matter of using and utilising the correct colours and positioning of images. For instance the use of light blue against a dark texture background on my digipak but then overlaying tiny sparkles connoting little slithers of light just like those that passed through the open barn roof. <br />How did you use the media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?<br />165417541719500The hardware used to record all forms of data was the Apple Mac’s. The All-In-One systems as seen in the picture below. All came with the software installed through the school ready for us to use.<br />3873564643000The second form of technology I had to use in our construction of our music video was the website wohomusic.com, I used this website to scout out the band and find a song we could use for our project. This was because in the brief we had to find an unsigned band and neither Alex nor I knew a local one. After several forms of communications over the website mail system we exchanged emails for a more day to day personal form of communicating. This is when the well-known, popular mailing site came into play, Window’s Hotmail. We talked over the songs and which one I wanted to use and then using the mail system I managed to obtain the resources I needed such as the song mp3, the song lyrics and the pictures needed of the band.<br />-9525069723000Then in order to show this as research and planning I used the next form of media technology called Blogger. This was used to record every piece of work that we did in A2 Media, from both parts of the topics including G325. This was easily enough done through either two ways, the first way and the most simplest (but I feel not the best) way is to just write up you’re information in a new post or copy it from word once you’ve written it up. This way you can also separately upload images through URL’s or browsing the local disk for the pictures. The second way was to write up all the information in word (like I’m doing now) and upload the whole document into SlideShare (which I’ve done with this document) and then all you need to do is copy the embedding code from SlideShare and paste it into a new post on blogger and it will appear as a scrollable document which is so much easier to read and understand.<br />This brings me onto the next piece of technology used and that’s all the Microsoft Offices software such as Word and Excel, these are pretty self-explanatory because they are used in everyday life with the way technology is going in the world. These packages were used throughout the whole project, writing up planning and constructions notes, emails, analysis documents and this evaluation. I don’t have any problems using any of these forms of technology because I use most of them at least once every day of my life.<br />One of the most important pieces of technology we had to use was the camera. Without the camera there would be no final product, now we did use these camera’s in our AS thriller projects but I still found them a task to use. We hadn’t use them in a long while and it took time to get used to all the features again, for instance in a few of our shots on filing day we used the night vision shot feature. This gave the clips a green tinge but none of these clips were useable because they were just too different from the daylight shots and the transitions between the two look quite frankly dreadful. We then used the tripod to get steady shots and this was easy enough to use, just sliding the legs down and tightening them up when you obtain the desired height or off setting of the tripod.<br />This leads on to what we used to import and edit the video we obtained. All you need to do is connect the camera up to the Mac using a FireWire cable and then open FinalCut Express and import the clips into a designated folder created by the program.<br />121348554419500-4762550990500Once these clips are imported into finalcut express it’s simple enough to just drag the clips down into the timeline and begin shuffling and cutting the cips you captured on the camera!<br />There were a few problems with final cut express that I found, particularly fading Jordan out and in again when he sits next to Maisie. Even so that you can see there is a slight jolt in the clip where it wasn’t long enough and I had to copy and paste part of the clip and put it on the end. I had to do this so carefully and match the two clips up as well as possible otherwise it would have been noticeable but I feel that I pulled it off well. It did take a while to get back to grips with Final Cut because it had been a while before I used it.<br />With both print productions I used Photoshop, an extremely popular editing software that I was very comfortable with using. I have it at home and have several different pieces of work that I’ve done myself. So this posed no problem for me and how I made both productions because I knew most shortcuts and which tools did what.<br />