Question 1

We have created a music video in which we have both performance and narrative, the video switches between both of the conventions like most music promotional videos that we have seen. Our music video was called ‘I never get lost except by your side’ and was written and performed by 4 Kicks who are based in Scunthorpe Lincolnshire. We had to pick a song from an unsigned band, we found a band on unsigned.com and they were fairly local to our location still in Lincolnshire, we also had to create a DigiPak ad also a magazine advert which linked into the bands image. They do not have a promotional video for their piece of music and so we had to analyse the lyrics and all come up with idea that we could use to create a video for this soundtrack.  We all thought that it sounded like the girl had cheated on the man several times and that that she had not treated him like he treated her and also that he was looking at her life like he was a ghost watching over her with these ideas we started to plan our storyboard.

 The point of the promotional video, the DigiPak and the advertisement is to promote the band and for them to be recognised, we would need to promote the band as they are going to need their target market to recognise them and to listen to their music and buy the songs. The music promotional video gives the audience a perspective of the artist or band and it shows their interpretation of the lyrics and what it means to them as it they can have different meaning to each individual. A promotional video gives the audience an aesthetical value as well as enjoyment for the ears, the point of one is for this purpose, in a music video you expect to see a variety of shots of both the band/ instruments and the storey it is portraying or just different shots of each if it only focuses on 1 aspect of a music video. The music video depending the style and beat should move accordingly, if it is a fast paced rap song the video should be fast paced but a slow country song should be slow and steady, with long time length shots with slow transitions. The mis- en-scene also is key to a successful music video; the distance of the shot also depends on what style the song is.

The narrative is important in a video to show what the lyrics suggest and the interpretations of the band or artist.  There are 3 types of narrative, illustration, amplification and disjuncture. Illustration is when the lyrics and the narrative tie in with each other exactly, amplifications is where key areas of the lyrics relate to the narrative and disjuncture is where it doesn’t relate to the lyrics at all and is very abstract an unusual.

This is a disjuncture video which means that the lyric don't have anything to do with what is going on in the screen play the mise-en-scene is wrong and they don't have anything to do with each other, prodigy do this with their videos a lot like Radio Head and Pink Floyd.

This video is by Kate Bush and it is called Hound of love, it is a amplification video as it does have some correlation to the lyric like when they are running through the woods, it is a good video to show this as not everything that is mentioned on the lyrics is seen on the video but there are links to certain parts of it. Everything in the shots is right with the mise-en-scene but it does miss certain parts out

This Video is by Chris Rea and it is called Road to Hell, it is a good song for the illustration as what he is singing about is what is shown on screen with the traffic jams and the soldiers bit of paper. This video is odd as it shows like a projection screen with the video on with Chris stood in front of it from time to time playing the guitar, This is a conventions video and the video itself has something to do with the lyrics.

Our music promo conforms with the typical format of that of a professional music promo, we wanted to make sure that it conformed with what was expected as we wanted to show that we knew what we creating. To show the highest possible improvement we used all of the styles that applied to our Indie pop genre.  We challenged the convention by adding in a ghost, this is not something that you would tend to see in a typical music video. We thought this would give it a twist and that is would be something out of the ordinary. We filmed our performance in a warehouse which we thought was quite conventional as quite a few of the bands in out genre film the performance in a club or in a warehouse this is very similar to the music video from foo fighter and hall of fame by the script

This shot shows the warehouse with the generator behind, this is the typical warehouse setting that you would expect to see in an indie video, you can see the singer and the guitar player in the shot here, the shot is a medium as you can see part of his body and you can also see some of the background but the main focus is on the singer. The angle of the shot is at head height there isn’t a great gradient on the angle.

This shot is a good shot and we have also used this type of shot in our video, this is an unusual shot as it is concentrating on the guitar and what it is doing and not on the face or expression, you can also see the drum kit in the back. This is a mid-shot but not a conventional one as it concentrates on the guitar and not the player. This is a low angle shot but it is not looking up but the camera is just lowered.

This is a high angle shot with all of the band members shown, we attempted this shot as we thought it looked effective. We wanted to get all of the band members in and the open space around them. This was a good shot as it varied our types and this being a high shot we liked it and though it looked better than having just normal height shots. This shot shows that they are in a warehouse and it works with the mis-en-scene.

This is a very good shot of the drummer as it has to cymbals and the drummer in-between and the face of concentration but also the cool look. This is a lowered shot where the camera is lowered put still at the same angle, it is peering through the drums to give the audience a sense of being there with them.

 This shot shows all of the band and the lead singer, we used this shot like the drummer shot above. You can see the warehouse here, the lighting is good for the lights above them but we can infer that they have more high powered light behind the cameras to make sure the whole area is well lit up.

We also used this shot of the guitarist this is a low angled shot looking up at the guitarist playing his guitar. The shot also shows the drummer in the background but the main focus is on the guitarist. We liked this shot and so we decide that it would look good in our music video.

Question 2

This is a video of differant screen shots our all of our work Our DigiPak, Magazine Advert and Music Prmotiona video the script is as follows.

Welcome to my video on our Digipak Magazine and promotional video. We will look at the magazine advert first.

This was the advert we settled on, we liked the design and the way in which it was set, this is the typical stance for the 4 kicks, we made the outside black to give it more effect on the audience, we added a release day of the album and the album name, we also added the 4 kicks official website address and also 2 reviews from typical people who would rate and listen to our music. We chose MTV and Q as they would be the most likely candidates to promote our band through.

This is another advert we liked but perhaps it was a little too dark but it was still eye catching and it also has the red writing which is a signature of the 4 kicks. We will now move on to some screen grabs from our promo.

This first shot is of our lead singer and this shot was taken from the side slightly, the shot was head height and showed the typical background of them in the back, the light on his face is very similar to what you may see from a professional video.

The second shot is part of the narrative as our other shot was performance. This is an effect we found on the program final cut. We liked this as it shows back in tie when they were so happy together and they loved each other. This was a hand held shot from Kingston but it gave it the home video effect the type of shot you would get from a home video. This also says memory 1 which he is looking back on a memory her and he had together.

This shot is on the lead singer with a ghost of the guitarist over him, we created this shot with final cut as well and we used the opacity on this to help us with what we was trying to accomplish. This is the type of shot transition that you would get in a professional video. These two shot on is from head height looking at the lead singer and the other bit of a low shot concentrating on the guitarist playing and what he is doing with his figures.

This shot shows the whole band playing and singing together and working their magic with the music, this shot is a high angle looking down the band playing this shot was created with the use of a forklift and a cage in which we send the tripod up and filmed the band playing. This shot did have it difficulties.

The shot here show 3 layers of film with the drummer in the back the guitarist 2^nd and then the lead singer in front it is sort of in a hierarchy order. This was a hard shot to compose and put together as all of the shots had to have the right opacity so you could see them all and in the right order.

This shot show a close up of the drums it is a close up on the drums with a low angle shot looking down onto them, the main focus of this shot is to see the drummer and the way he is playing the drums, we liked this shot as you go to see the really magic that the drummer does with the drums.

This shot here shows the guitar player, this shot concentrates on his hands and what he is playing in the guitar, the guitarist is playing, if you used the crosses on this image you would see that the hand and the strings are in the centre box and are the main focus, this shot was used as many professionals also use this shot.

This shot was from a scene where she just woke up and saw him standing in the corner, we used our fingers on the lens of the camera to simulate eyes opening and seeing him in the corner, we though this shot was effective as it showed, the contrast of him being there and her just imagining him there. This shot was from the bed and it went up and then over to the corner.

This next shot here is that you see he has gone and it is just an empty corner, this shows what was written above that really it was just a figure of her imagination. This shot was also from the bed and was a handheld shot.

We used another of the opacity and cross fades here as you can see the drummer and the lead singer together, so for we have had the guitar and the lead singer, all of them together and then finally the lead singer and the drummer. We do like cross fading as it shows skill and also it is a good way to cross from one clip or shot to another. This is a mixture of two shot one is shot at head height of the lead singer and the other the tripod was lowered to shoot the drummer but was still a straight shot with no angle.

This was one of the performance shots and it is of our female actress looking into the mirror sorting her makeup out and then he comes up behind her and she see him but he isn’t really there, she turns around and he is gone giving the impression that she misses him and thinks about him. This shot was taken from behind although it was hard to not get the camera in the mirror.

This shot here is when she can see him and she is squinting to see if he is really there, this shot was hard as our lead actor could not be seen before he entered and that the camera was not seen by the mirror also, this shot is similar and in the same position as before but with the male actor as well. The shot was composed by putting the camera in the tripod and then shooting from a head height, point of view shot form an overseer.

This shot is where she turns around to see if he is there and doesn’t see anyone and that she is just imagining him there, this was also hard to do as we had to get rid of the male actor without you seeing him leave. This shot here is an unusual choice of shot but we believed it worked. This was of the girl in the background throwing her ex-boyfriends clothes out and she is still thinking about him. Meanwhile he is stood in the foreground singing to us about how she cheated and lied to him. With this shot you have to imagine that she cannot see him and that he is a ghost from the past.

This shot here concentrated on the drummers hands and how he was playing the drums, this was a good shot as it shows the speed of the drummer’s hand that that it is that quick and precise that the camera cannot catch it and leaves this interesting blur.

This shot was a high angle shot looking down. You can see that the main focus of this is the drummer and what he is doing. This shot here is an over the shoulder shot of the girl holding her ex-boyfriends watch and crying over him, sat on the bed think about what she has done. This was an effective shot as it extended our already vast shot range and also looked good in this particular piece as it was like looking into her life now that he has gone for good.

This shot was of her thinking about him in the kitchen and he is singer directly at her but she cannot see him because he is still a ghost. This shot did take a long time due to the actors finding it hard to concentrate when they were in such close proximity. We eventually got the shot although we did have to put the camera on the worktop and view this from the side as it was the only logical place where it could go, this could also be classed as a 2 shot was there was the 2 actors in the shot at the same time.

This was another of our video camera hand held shot that showed the times they were happy together and what they got up to ion the sofa, this was a good shot as it was looking back at the good times. This shot was a normal shot although we added a feature found on final cut to make it look like an old video camera that had all of the features on it.

This shot is the same setting as the over the shoulder watch, except we panned around her and looked directly at her crying and looking at the watch, while he was stood behind her looking at her crying over this watch. This was a good shot but it was hard to do the pan as we have a wheelie chair with very stiff wheels and it was a bit shuddery but we eventually got it right and it made an effective shot.

This shot was back to the performance with the focus on the drummer foot and the bass drum and him taping in time, we also used this shot in our preliminary task and we thought it looked effective and was a good shot to use, many professional also use this type of shot, this was a very low shot where we had to hold the camera very close to the warehouse floor.

We liked this shot as the steam was coming out of Kingston’s mouth and it looked very effective as the shot was taken in the cold warehouse and your breathe could be seen and we though it gave the shot another dimension. This shot was from the tripod at a normal head height, we though a close up work to really focus on this shot of the steam coming from within our lead singer. The items in the background show that it is a typical warehouse.

This was our finishing shot when they had finished the song, this was where Jamie threw his drum sticks in the air and Kingston and Joel threw their hands in the air and walked out of the shot, we liked this shot as it was conventional to an indie genre at the end they perform something like this. This shot is of the entire band together and then they walk out of shot.

 This is our DigiPak, this took quite a lot of work but as soon as we had the sizes of what was needed we set to work. We used images that were conventional to the band to show them off to their full potential, we used images that would be easy recognisable and would establish them so in years to come they would see that image and then recognise the band, this is like brand awareness e.g. if you see the yellow M you automatically think its McDonalds. We did use quite a lot of effects on the images to make them more appealing to the human eye, we did this by using Photoshop, there were many effects in which we could use for this by we decide to go for many of the same so the images were not too dissimilar from the others. On the back we had the song titles and we also added a little logo, catalogue number, barcode, website and when the cd was produced. This gave it a more professional look. On the other panels apart from the front we had images that were taken throughout the shooting of the promotional video.  Final on the front of the DigiPak we had the band name, the compact disc logo, the parental advisory logo and the album name, we felt that this also gave it a more authentic and professional look.

 

Question 3

 what do you expect in indie genre?

What people thought of our video and how it used the conventions

Our audience feedback was quite expected we thought that certain aspect of It would be different but we were fairly please with what we had gathered. We thought a questionnaire was the best way to get many results from people and they could answer the question in their own time rather than just jumping on them when they were not prepared with a sort of vox pop. We got quite a bit of inspiration from the video above from what a random selection of people thought about the indie genre when we asked them a few question on this genre of music. We thought that asking other what they thought were the main conventions worked well as we could make our promotion video better for everyone and not just what we thought was good.

We were lucky with this response with 50% of the people saying indie this was a good answer or us and it confirmed our decision to do an indie video. We were pleased that we got this result and we did give the questionnaires to people at complete random.

this was an unusual answer to our questionnaire we did not expect this we thought that the majority would go for the urban and pop art vibe, however they did want narrative and so we had both narrative and performance,

This was also not the answer that we were expecting but this question does relate to the 1^st question if they wanted a pop art effect then they would of gone for bright colours to fit in with the conventions of the pop art. We did however use monochrome which are gritty colours and we did use some bright colours as that were the second most popular answer.

we did not expect this answer either we were expecting outside, as we could not use a gig or create one we used the influences of Hall of Fame video and do it in a warehouse, there are also too many restrictions to film in a city and so we had to choose an urban location, this is why we chose a typical house.

We expected these results and we were pleased with the outcome of this answer. We did include this in our promo in the performance clips but not in the narrative as it wouldn’t not have fitted in. This does tie in with last question at a gig there will be lots of people and then it the smallest answer on this question, this is the only problem with doing a questionnaire.

We expected this result and we were very pleased and we included this in both our narrative and performance as we took our influence from Hall of Fame and We Are Young. We went for smart casual as this is what we believe indie to be like.

We expected this result and we have had inspiration from The Script and Hall of Fame Feat William, we were pleased that we could annotate the video and base some aspects of that in our video like the setting of the performance in a warehouse. All in the entire questionnaire went well and we got the responses we expected from people chosen at complete random who were aged between 16-19.

Question 4

4: How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

For our media video we had to choose a piece of music, that was not copyright, this was hard because we wanted to do a promo on a piece of music that had a video with it so we could use some key ideas. We used the website unsigned.com to find our track, we wanted to focus on the indie pop genre and wasn’t really interested in anything other than the indie genre as it didn’t suit our singer or our style as a group. We managed after a long time to find a track that we all agreed was what we wanted to do, they are fairly local and so we could use them and it would work with our looks and figure. We used the website unsigned because it was free and the artist are unsigned so here isn’t a copyright issue, this was the great thing about the website and the track as it fitted all of our criteria. We thought that if we made a DigiPak, Magazine advert and a Promo and we send it to them it can only benefit them and help them.

Face book helped us as you band has a Facebook page so we could gather information from this to help us with trying to make an image for them.  With the Facebook page we will send the band the video and see what they think to it. We found that face book was a quick way to get information.

 

YouTube – we used YouTube to find out what the band had done and whether they had out other songs on YouTube and also to see if they have a music video to any of their work. We could also use YouTube to look at promos from professionals that had made videos that were in the charts at the time. We also uploaded our promo to YouTube to gain feedback and to see how many views we will receive.

Final Cut pro- we used this to put our promo together and add effects, we found this was a good program to use as it had all of the features that we needed to make a convincing piece. We used lots of features on this program to do with the lighting and the depth of colours and the contrasts that were used for different scene, we also used some effects like the camera shot where it says memory 2 this was a feature that was available on Final Cut Pro.

Photoshop- we used this for our DigiPak and also for our magazine front cover this was a good program to use as it has lots of features that can be applied to pictures and text that looks professional and not like a teenager has made it. I enjoyed working with Photoshop as I learnt what I needed to do and learnt what different buttons did, I am now more confident in the use of it, whereas at first I was were unsure on how to use it and felt incapable to use it.

Email – we used email to contact the band to see if it would be alright to use their song and to see if they had any advice of what we could do it on and their interpretations of the lyrics as they had written them

From this I have learnt a lot from my AS level, we only used final cut pro on the end scene which didn’t take a lot of doing but we wanted to gain experience and learn how to use Final Cut Pro and so we did the whole promo on there. We learnt a lot along the way, Kingston knew a fair bit already and he told us what he knew but the rest we figured out how to do it by reading up on it and looking guides that helped us to succeed in what we wanted to do. Using Photoshop was also a challenge as I spent a lot of time using that and working on our magazine advert and on our DigiPak, I didn’t know a great deal and had never used it before and so I read up on how to perform simple task and then asked other who were more knowledgeable on the subject, from this my knowledge grew.

From the filming side I learnt a lot more about shot composition and where the best shots were taken from and what was required to get the best results. When we were filming we decided we wanted a high shot and so we got a forklift and raise the camera on a top board and pallets and a member of our team and raised them up a few metres to get a higher shot, we also made pan shots with a pallet truck, a top board and pallets with the camera on a tripod. I feel that the next production we did together we could make it look really good as we know what to do and we can only go forward and we now also know the importance of planning before we go out to shoot as we had some problems with this as well but we overcame it and had a brief meeting to discuss what we were going to do on the morning of the shooting in the warehouse canteen.

Some of the problems we had while filming was the lighting in the warehouse and the fact that production had stopped and so the workers were around stock taking and did appear in certain shots but we re-did the shots and got them right. We also had problems with the items in the background e.g. the white board, loose boxes, the box machines and other bit that just appeared in the shots this was not ideal but we had to be grateful as we only had the warehouse for 5-6 hours. We also had a slight problem with lip sinking but we overcame this by spending some time on this and zooming in of the clip and taking clips out and adding clips in to make it look professional.

We used Blogger to add all of our notes onto of what we have been doing and also to show research that we have done, we used blogger as you can upload video and images onto it and it is free and so we could keep a video journal of what we have been up to. Blogger is a good way of keeping a journal as it is easy to use and all of the world can see unless you have privacy setting on and friends, family and other can see it without a password and can see what you have been up to.

We used the internet and search engines to look up the artist and see what we could find on them, if you are going to find anything on them anywhere then it will be on the internet as it is the highest use of information that is around, due to the high number of people using the internet we thought we could find what we needed on there without using the traditional methods like book because we doubted that we could find anything in there.

By putting what we had done on the internet it has opened it up to the world and millions of people can view it and it can only make the band more popular, we thought the internet was good because our teacher can view it without having to chase us for paperwork and the change of it getting lost on the internet are slim whereas the chance of paper items getting lost are high. By putting it on the internet we would be reaching out to our target market that would be looking for this sort of material. We thought if I was in a book or two it wouldn’t appreciated as much and would hardly be looked at as book are dated with today’s technology and the vast audience that would prefer to use the internet instead of a book because of the ease of use and the speed in which the internet does this. The internet is the best way to publish the band by the sheer amount of traffic that it is used by and this is why we chose it.