Stuart's Evaluation

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

Our music video and products linked to the music we selected in many ways. Our green screen work was based in the lyrics, with backgrounds coming from mentioned locations. For example, the first line mentions a “Summer Desert Night”, so this was our first background. Our video is also linked to the style of our video. The indie rock style of the song is more suited to a performance video over a concept video.

The green screening in our video limited the lighting we could use. Obviously, our video backgrounds had a particular lighting, and so when filming we had to match the light to the scene, as well as limiting shadows on the green screen.

We attempted to show generalisations of band members with their costume. Our guitarist was given a headband, outlandish hair and gloves to tie in with a glam rock style. Our singer played with his hair, suggesting vanity often linked with a frontman.

Our video links to many other videos of recent years. The idea that we would have all 4 band members as the same person was influenced by Rick Astley’s “Take Me To Your Heart”, in which Astley is shown performing in, filming and directing his own music video.

Our backgrounds were inspired by several different videos. Metallica’s
“I Disappear” shows the band playing in a desert setting, with cutaways linking to the lyrics. “Vertigo”, a U2 video, shows the band in a desert, playing whilst many different visual effects are used around them.

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

Our digipack was obviously influenced by the famous “Abbey Road EP”, as is shown by the parody of the scene. This album cover is widely regarded as one of the best ever, so our reference to this pays homage to album covers.

Our magazine advert is typical of any album advert for a music video. Standard conventions of a video advert, such as release date, reviews and tracks from the album are included around a central image of the band.

We attempted to make sure our ancillary texts were as similar to the video as possible. Screen caps of the background from the video were used to relate to the video, and photographs of the band had them in the same costumes. The name and the band name sign were taken straight from the video.

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

Feedback from our teacher led to a re-rendering of our video backgrounds. Steve thought that the backgrounds we had made would be more active, and so re-rendering them moved us from a single frame per verse to several.

Class feedback for the rough cut was of limited use, although this was mostly due to the unfinished nature of the video. As all our footage was not green screened at this point, most of the feed back was on this, although we also received comments on a strong performance and good lip syncing.

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

Facebook and MySpace helped with the distribution and feedback of our video, as all the people I know can comment. Final Cut’s Chroma Keyer tool was instrumental in our video, and was the most widely used too.