Stephen - Music Video Evaluation

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

The song which our music video is based upon is a Rock song by an American artist; Butch Walker. When simplified, I personally felt the song had reflections of his home countries history embedded in the lyrics, rising from the "desert night" to the modern developed cities, such as Vegas, specifically chosen to be represented in the video due to the references of spike haired preachers and Elvis in the lyrics. Our chosen artist is a Rock artist, and therefore we decided to maintain the standard of rock videos, of having a performance based video, with the precedent being set by bands such as U2 and Metallica. I also wanted to attempt to illustrate the progression of time through the video and therefore placed it during a complete daylight cycle. We used the green screen to allow us to perform in locations which we would of never had access to during the project. To add some extra meaning and interest to our video, we wished to combine the performance which is a staple of Rock Music videos with an extra dimension of 3D animations.

As a performance video, we required a band, all of whom were portrayed by Stuart, each with their instruments and parts, The different band members also wore separate costumes, of course in the case of rock bands, the costumes do not tend to be elaborate, we also wanted to explore the interactions between the band members, however this was not possible.

Using the green screen we were able to project our performance onto our background. We were quite adventurous with the camera, however this caused problems of it's own. Many of our shots were inspired by Take me to your Heart by Rick Astley, with the hand-held camera work and the kind of close in shots. Ideally we would of explored greater movement as in Vertigo by U2, where we only used level band shots as such, due to not having the budget for a helicopter.

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

We tried to keep our visuals unique, but also consistent and compatible between the music video and ancillary texts. To allow a identity to be shared between them rather than being easily separated. We opted to keep the material simple, and therefore decided to combine the band with existing footage. It was simple to rearrange the scene, due to the green screen, as we wanted to keep the band together, due to the video being a performance video, therefore we used footage from the music video, we opted that the digipak and the magazine advert should not be abstracted and should be based off the video. We broke this rule partially when we parodied the Abbey Road cover however we took photos specifically for this purpose to allow the band members to be coherent despite it not actually being the video and also so the physical expression would be consistent across the band.

What have your learned from your audience feedback?

During the rough cut feedback, our video was not suitably completed to allow proper feedback to be relevant. Largely this early feedback was that the performance was strong but the video very much unfinished. In fact we did not see the final product until after the final export.

Our roughcut was a lot more useful internally than as allowing audience feedback, as it highlighted many issues with the video at this early stage, which we fixed. Most of the external feedback was to finish the video, however the roughcut allowed us to address any obvious issues.

There is a fairly universal feeling now that the deadline is long past that the video could of been far better with a little extra time, that the performance is solid but the implementation is lacking, rather than focusing on individual flaws it is accepted that there are many visual problems in the video. However the video has taught me not to rely on others where possible, as this meant that the background was left unrendered and therefore is not fluidly animated, as only a few frames were used in the video.

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

Obviously throughout the project, there has been a heavy focus on technology, especially in the construction. While the internet was a great resource for research and planning, we used a lot of resources to create our video. Regardless of what we were working on, I would comfortably manage to slow our up-to-date computers to a crawl. We were able to expriment with many effects in Final Cut, Photoshop and finally modo. These are all digital in nature but play a massive part in our project, however are also time-consuming as they require heavy number crunching.

The background for instance was entirely created in Modo. In 3D digital modelling you create a surface which represents a volume as in reality, such as creating a cube which would have no internals, or volume for instance but would represent that. I also used Photoshop as a supporting role in this, to create textures, and photoshop was the tool used to create the ancillary texts. In Final Cut we made heavy use of the Chroma key to allow us to cut out the performance to allow it to be composited.

We had various cameras which were used for filming, between us we owned 3 digital cameras, as well as a camera which was borrowed from the college. This allowed us to film a single performance from multiple angles.

We also made use of sites such as Facebook to collaborate.