Frazer Cowell - Evaluation

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

In our Music Video, we created links between the lyrics and the visuals. An example of this is with the backgrounds we made for use with the Green Screen; the lyric “Summer Desert Night” – And the verse it is in – has a background of a desert at night time.

Record Companies dealing with music form the Rock Genre often want the performers to look the part – look “Rocky”. To fit this, we made the band members wear certain items of clothing. For example, the guitarist wore black gloves and a head scarf.

Rock Videos often show the full band multiple times. In the chorus sections of our song we had all four band members on show. The song is also part of the “Indie” genre; full band shots are often part of music videos for songs in the Indie genre.

In our Digipak we made reference to the famous Abbey Road album cover, by The Beatles. We used this parody for the Back cover of the Digipak.

When filming, because we needed to shoot the same angles and shots for all four band members, we used multiple cameras that were all recording at the same time. This reduced the time needed to shoot as we could get three shots with one take.

Good Mise-En-Scene was necessary to create a clear difference between each of the four band members, since we had the same one performer acting all four roles. Although the use of a microphone and instruments played a big part in showing this difference in character, the use of costume was also important. Because of this, we made all of the band members wear different shirts and jackets. For example, the bassist wore a blue shirt with white text on it whereas the Guitarist wore a cream coloured shirt.

We watched existing music videos to gain inspiration and ideas for our own video. “The Masterplan” by Oasis (Released October 1995) sparked our idea about 3D backgrounds. The song “Vertigo” by U2 (Released 8th November 2004) is in a wide desert setting - we wanted to create a desert scene similar to the one in this U2 video. Sections from the Rick Astley video “Take Me to Your Heart” (Released 1988) uses handheld shots well and gave us the idea to try out these kinds of shots ourselves. The same Rick Astley video also has clips of Astley operating a camera and miming a few lines sang by female backing singers. This gave us the idea of having the same performer for all four band members.

The Album cover to various Wet Wet Wet albums, Queen’s Greatest Hits, as well as numerous other album covers, features all of the band members on the front. With our Album cover we, too, had all of the band members on show. We also parodied the Abbey Road cover, as mentioned earlier.

With our Magazine Advert, we tried to relate it to our digipak design to create brand identity. We did this by using the same image on the Magazine Advert as we did for our Digipak, just with a few alterations – moving the position of the band members is an example of an alteration. We also added the typical details on a Magazine Advert: Album summary, review and the “Out Now” text.

How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

When making our Digipak design we wanted it to link in with the video itself. We did this by making sure the four band members, in their costumes, we visible multiple times; Front, Back and on the inside. We also used the 3D backgrounds we made.

Every panel in our Digipak is different to the others because we wanted to create a sense of individuality, but keeping with the four band member concept used in the video.

The front cover itself uses a 3D background used in the video with the four band members, in costume, in the scenery. The Abbey Road parody, used as the back cover of our Digipak, also shows all four band members while paying homage to what can be considered, by many, to be one of the best album covers of all time.

The use of a 3D background on the track list references the “Summer Desert Night” scene from the video.

The panel which consists of the four band members silhouetted was used in our final Digipak design because it is another way to show the difference between the band members without the use of colours.

The two panels behind the two disc spaces are from a screenshot of our final video.

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Feedback from both our Class and the Teacher about the Roughcut mostly stated that the Green Screen effects needed to be put in place, since our Rough Cut did not include this. Although, we were praised about Stu, our performer, giving a very strong performance.

In response to this feedback we continued to work on the effects, in particular the Green Screening, while also trying to focus on some of Stu’s stronger performances.

The Class Feedback for the final video continues to praise the strong performance from Stu. We have also been told that we have used a good range of camera shots & angles, which help to maintain internet in the video, and that the 3D backgrounds are well made.

Although them being well made, Feedback from our teacher mentioned that the 3D backgrounds may have worked to a greater extent if they had a major dynamic form about them – if they all had little movements and animations to avoid static backgrounds.

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

We used Facebook for feedback purposes, as well as easy communication between each member of the group. Facebook, Myspace and Twitter were all used to contact Butch Walker. However, we never got any responses, unfortunately.

The website “Youtube” was used by us so we could watch other music videos and to gain inspiration and spark ideas.

We filmed our footage, for both the Music Video and the Documentary Video, using a Canon MD205 camera with this footage then being uploaded to the Apple Mac computer after filming sessions.

For editing, the program Final Cut Express was used, with Photoshop being used for the Digipak and Magazine advert. The Chroma Key effect is the tool used in Final Cut Express to cut out the GreenScreen backdrop.