Evaluation by Ryan Goodrum

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Our music video uses, develops and challenges form of conventions of real media products because we had such a variety of different artist and performances. Even from the beginning with David Bowie, which you could say it challenges the genre of the music because it’s quite a techno track and Bowie isn’t really the type of artist that is know for his techno. The David Bowie section that we have, we got the inspiration from his music video “life on mars”. So we had to get our artist playing Bowie, and put them in loads of bright make-up and costume to get the same image from his original video. I feel that after the editing it came out really well and looks and feels just like his, and this is how we stuck to conventions of his video, but then broke conventions by putting it in to our track and other footage. This fitted really so this is how it developed from his original “life on mars” in to our video. The video has quite a lot of extreme close up, and we didn’t want this big striking face to just appear on the screen so we had a small gradual fade in to the Bowie section at the beginning.
For “the Beatles” section we took it right back to their first gigs at the “Cavern club” using green screens. We kept it close to the conventions on there own music videos but the complete other for our music which is very techno. We made sure that we had the right costume (suit), and that we had the chance to use instalments. So that we could get the best footage first time. (Good plan because we weren’t given the opportunity to use the instalments again). Unfortunately when it got to the editing we didn’t have any guitar footage so we had to fill the section with just drumming witch fitted ok but would have look much better with a small guitar section in the middle. We had green screened the whole of this section, and we had got a still image of the cavern club from “Google” and imported that behind the drummer, but we had middle shots and close up and only the drummer was moving and the background stayed the same and for a performance it didn’t look right, so we had to go back a change the scale of the image to the right proportions of the artist.
The next artist to follow was “Elton John”, and the inspiration was from his “Crocodile Rock” video. I think that the way that we have edited it and the costume that I wore was much more modern that in his video, this wasn’t intentional but I think that it looks much better because it fits much better with the conventions and genre of the music. The pink hue that we put over modernises it and also make it look like the old style of his video. I think that the bit that give the artist away is definitely the pink heart shaped glasses and the ginger hair, the audience can really see the intertextual reference. We didn’t gather enough footage in this bit so we had to use the same bit of footage at the end twice, you can also see where we have done this because it has a small jump. The only way around it was to re-shoot it, but unfortunately we didn’t have enough time. The low shot of my feet is the same shot as in his video, but the costumes has nothing to play on, unlike in his video, where he is wearing giant platform silver shoes.
“Vanilla Ice” was a very difficult section the shoot because there was dancing and green screening all going on, so it took us quite abit of time in the editing stages. We tried to get the same kind of feel from the setting as he did in the warehouse because it really set the scene for the dancing. We got our inspiration from there “Ice Ice baby” video. I choreographed a small section of dancing the rest of the group to do in the performance, but unfortunately the footages looked really bad because the dancing was off time and it didn’t look right. So we went back and decided to do key frame editing (which is where you shoot just the setting for the duration that you want and then shot what you want, like the dancing, and then back in the editing you can layer them so I am dancing in the setting, it is all done with layers) and put just me dancing on there layered three time. It worked really well but because of the artificial lighting that we had it caused a small shadow to appear on one of the other layer, but you could see where it had been cropped. Also after the draft and feedback we decided that we need more footage of the “Vanilla Ice” section. We watch the “Ice ice baby” video again and thought of how we could make sure that the audience can see the intertextual reference, and came up with the idea of having a wall of graffiti behind the artist as the finishes the singing. We got the video from YouTube and then imported it in to our sequence and then speeded it up. We also took the edit of saturating the artist and then zooming in on him to fade in the next artist.
The next artist to follow was “Westlife” (or any other stereotypical boy band). Boy bands have a very clear stereotypical image and feel to there video, so we tried to keep ourselves very close to the conventions on them. We changed the video so it is black and white, with a small amount of a blue hue over the top. We also slowed it down so it was like a dreamy section that boy bands have. I think that we achieved the boy band look at the beginning, but then because we didn’t have enough footage we had to shot again, and we decided that we would go for the more up to date boy band, with the extreme close ups and the small amount of dancing. We didn’t really have a dance routine for this section but we thought that after following the “Vanilla Ice” section which had a dance routine, that it would be enough. We also tried to put a small amount of voyeuristic view toward them, being a boy band. We also put this slow part in where the music drops so there is a relationship between music and visuals and you can really pick it up and it completely changes the feel to the video. We had the slow walk toward the camera at the beginning of the section, so we had gone from a long shot to a extreme close up and we had to fade this out fast so that the audience had enough time to see the footage underneath and that the extreme close up would disappear before it got to extreme.
Then we had a section that featured all artists together, so that the audience had the time to remember and see all the artists again.
Then we had a small section of “Madonna” because we didn’t have any female artist. We didn’t want to take this part to serious because we want the audience to find it funny but for it to still fit with the feel and the paces of the video. There was a small amount of inspiration and intertextual reference form her “Like a Virgin” video. It was shoot as a close up of her singing and also shaking her head as if she were dancing.
The final artist that we covered was “Rick Astley” in “Never gunna give it up” we watched this video very carefully so that we could get the way he moved and the convention of his videos right. We shot in outside in the courts because that was the location on the video. The camera angles and the way he moved was just like his video. We lighting wasn’t quite the same because it had just rain in our video and it is in the middle of summer in there video. We tried to correct this in the editing by making it brighter and putting a very small white hue over the top and very slightly saturating it. It finished with a fade and the video very slightly slowed down.

How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
The main product of the video to the ancillary text being the digi-pak and the magazine advert, I feel fit together very well. They fit together brilliantly because we use the first person you see in the video, David Bowie, on the front of both the digi-pak and magazine advert.
The digi-pak we decided was going to be a collector edition and we changed the layout of the template to having three sides so that you can fold one of the edges in. we had a photo of Bowie as the front and then quote, references, record labels and bar code. We took the photo during the filming of the section on a green screen and then took it to Photoshop and edited it by putting a different background and using brushes which we downloaded from other website, to further enhance the picture. We also made his eyes brighter and made his skin clearer with the clone tool. We also put bonus features on the back of the digi-pak so that it looked just like a real DVD. We did a very similar thing with the magazine advert, we took a picture while filming and then took it to Photoshop to be edited out. We made sure that we used the same colours and the same text in both of the ancillary texts, so that the audience can relate them.
We made sure that we were selling the artist as much as we could in all the tasks, from the digi-pak to the video and in the magazine advert. By using the same text in both of the DVD and the advert it came to be a kind of logo for the artist. We feel that the relation and the effectiveness of all products has a very clear and strong combination and correlation.

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?
After our rough-cut we got some really good feedback telling us that our video look good and the Bowie section look really professional, and then we had even more really good constructive crittersisum. This told us that we needed more footage in places and how we would edit the footage we had to make them look more like the original video. Some of the feedback told us that not many people could tell who the artist were like “Vanilla Ice”, so this helped us to go away and research are artists and work out what made there video distinctive and stand out. When we had finish out research we were able to go out and reshoot more footage and get the shots that we wanted to get. Also in the editing, it helped us go away and make the improvements that the video need to be able to show who the artist are and what they are known for in there performances. We wanted to get the stereotypical vues on artist. We learnt that to make a music video look right you need to get as much feedback as you can, so then you can get the comments from the people who matter, the audience. The feedback also gave us ideas on what we can shoot and how the shoot it. The boy band section was very minimal at the rough cut and the feedback we got told us that we needed more stereotypical boy band and also maybe a more up to date boy band and they also gave us idea on the camera angle and difference ideas of the mise-en-scene. They also told us how our lip syncing was looking. It was fairly positive though, which is good. We also got a comment about the narrative to the video and there not being one and also that the performance and the shots may drag on abit. So we took this on board and cut some of out footage up so that it cut on a faster beat and that the narrative on the video being the many different artist and there performances much more clear. Which is what we want to achieve in the first place, and without the feedback couldn’t.

How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
We had many different new media technologies used in the making of our music video. To start we had the green screening what was a very key part of our filming and went on throughout our video. Green screening is when you put a green sheet behind the artist and film the footage you need and then back in the editing you can edit the green out and put a completely different background behind them. It is all done in Final cut, and you do it by going to effect, video filters, key, then to chrome key or blue and green screen filter. Then you have to change the levels of the filter to get the right amount of green out. We did this quite a lot in our video, for example the David Bowie section is all green screened and then the background is plain saturated white.
We also had the flexibility of the Internet, which we used by going to YouTube and getting the research of all the artist we covered. Also getting the graffiti wall behind “Vanilla Ice”. We also got all our tutorials on how to green screen from YouTube, this is how we learnt the techniques to getting the right green screen and the different editing hints. The blog was also internet based, this is where all our ideas flouted and then came to life, in the filming and editing. We also put all of our planning on there so we know where we were up to. The Mac computers, they were the foundation of all the work that we have done. Final cut is an editing programme that is on the Macs, this is the programme that we used to cut and edit our footage together. We used different filter and effects in our video like the hue and saturations, also the speed and much more. Green screening used a lot of our time in the editing because it took a long time to get the right amount of green taken out of the footage, without taking to much out and cutting little part of the artist out.
We also had Photoshop, which is where we edited our photos for out ancillary text, digi-pak and magazine advert. We used many different tools on Photoshop from make the pictures brighter and putting hue over them and then making them saturated. We also downloaded new brushes from the internet so that we had a much larger range of ideas and capability to make a much better digi-pak and magazine advert. We also had digital cameras that we filmed all of out footage on to then put on the computers. We also used a few accessories for this like the tri-pod and dolly. We also used a digital camera to take the photos that we need to make are magazine advert and digi-pak, we then had to import them on to the Macs to start the editing stages. We also used quite a lot of artificial lighting in our video, so that we could get the right brightness and look from the artist. We many used it on David Bowie because he was our key artist and we also did a photo shoot with this artist.
We also used MySpace to contact are original song artist “The Whip” so that we could gather content and rights for the song. We also had PowerPoint so that we could show presentations of are director research, we research Michel Gondry. We had such a wide range of ne media technologies in our planning, research and evaluation stages.