Travis Kerslake discusses how he used various media technologies throughout the creation of his music video portfolio project. He explains how he used a Facebook group to communicate with his group members. He also discusses the cameras, tripods, and lighting equipment used during filming to achieve the desired aesthetic and professional quality. Kerslake emphasizes the importance of color in his projects and how he matched the color schemes across his music video, website, and packaging design.

1. How To Slip Away
Travis Kerslake

2. In what ways does your media product use, develop or
challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
In our music video, we largely tried to stick to contemporary editing techniques such as the
three second rule, as we believed it was possible for our video to become boring and this
editing technique enabled the video to be more upbeat and interesting. Our video also
displays similarities to a typical music video, as it includes both a narrative story line which
creates something the audience can follow and a performance aspect which portrays the
artist in a stylized way. We ensured that the relationship between the lyrics are amplified, we
show a young couple arguing with one another, whilst displaying signs of emotions such as
confusion, happiness and sadness to match the lyrics. Our video shows the audience what
effects jumping into a relationship whilst you are young. We tried to make the colors we
chose in both side of our video to match to the genre of our song, as our song was in the
indie genre, we decided to use bright and soft colors such as blue and pink.

3. Another video in which we took inspiration from is Work by Rihanna, as we believe that the use of light red creates an
intense and intimate atmosphere which is what we wanted to instill into our music video. Send My Love by Adele is another
video in which we gathered inspiration from, as we all thought the use of layers within the video as it gives the viewer a
feeling that the video is about something that means more to the artist. Another video in which helped us create an idea
about the sort of lighting we wanted to create in our music video is The Walls by Kings of Leon. We all agreed that the
lighting and color used within the video created an intense atmosphere not in the story side of the video, but in the
performance aspect. I tried very hard to create synergy and make sure that both my digipak and website follow the vibrant
color scheme of our music video. I decided to stick with these colors and not use binary oppositions as when I had created
some possible designs for my digipak the feedback I received said that my music video opposed the colors of the digipak
and my website, so I decided to match the colors.

4. How effective is the combination of your main product and
ancillary texts?
I tried to connect all of my products by using the same shades of light blue and light
pink, but I also differentiated the two as in my main product, there are a lot of close
ups of different actors faces and you can really get a feeling of the emotion they are
feeling, whereas I included no individuality within my digipak and website. The
colors used within my work is important as I believed this created a connection
with all of my coursework but also created a link to the pop genre, as the colors
used are commonly bright but soft.

5. In my digipak, I made sure the colors I used were matching and
followed those of the ones I used in both my main product and
website. When designing my website I wanted it to be as aesthetically
pleasing as possible by including soft and relaxing colors. When
creating my website, I only gathered a small amount or research from
other websites as I had a clear idea of how I wanted it to look before
we had started making our websites. I included hyperlinks to social
networking sites such as Twitter and Instagram on my website so the
fans could have a more personal relationship with the artist.

6. What have you learned from your audience feedback?
Whilst in the editing phase of our video, we hosted numerous audience
feedback session with several different focus group who has not seen the
video before. This was extremely beneficial as it gave us immediate feedback
during this stage, which enabled us to edit our music video in ways other
people thought would change our video positively. Once we had chosen our
song it did not take us very long to come up with our target audience, which
would be preferably 16-25 year olds. To start receiving feedback, we created
a list of simple questions which would help us understand both the positive
and negative things in our music video, once we had created the questions,
we found a group of students aged 17-18 and asked them to answer these.
The feedback we received was primarily positive but it was suggested that
our video may be a bit ‘boring’.

7. How did you use media technologies in the construction and
research, planning and evaluation stages?
Throughout every stage of the creation of our music video, we used a
numerous amount of technological techniques. For example when our
group was first formed, we knew it would be vital in creating a
successful portfolio for us to be able to communicate easily and quickly
with one another, so we created a Facebook group which enabled us to
smoothly contact one another if there were any dates that needed
planning or if we wanted to share any ideas. For our editing, we used
Final Cut Pro which everyone in our group was familiar with, which
meant that at the start of the course we did not take extra time getting
to grips with how to use the software.

8. During the filming of our video, we used a wide range of different equipment to
really ensure that our music video would look as professional as we could make it.
We used two different sets of camera equipment for both our narrative and
performance side of the video as we did not have to bring equipment to the studio
where we filmed our performance because they already had stuff for us to use
there. We used a Manfroto tripod while filming our narrative aspect of the music
video in Louis’ house to make sure all our shots were stable and there were none
which looked shaky at all. This tripod is very big and heavy and was not easy to
transport around while filming our video. In the narrative side of the video we used
the DSLR 7D as we believed this would create a homemade theme to our footage,
we also used this camera when filming our pickups to once again create the sense
that our footage was homemade and more personal than that shot with a tripod.
One of the main pieces of equipment that we used and was influential in both the
studio and Louis’ house to getting the right effect we aimed for was the gels.

9. Prior to filming our music video our whole group agreed that the colour
was something we thought was very important and we had a clear
ideas of what we wanted it to look like. We used coloured gels, a dedo
light kit and portable Manfroto LED Light colour to achieve this. In the
studio we used the cannon c300 as our main camera with a Canon EF
50mm prime lens. This resulted in our footage being very high quality
and professional.