- In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
For a music video to escape conventions of previous media products, is next to impossible, for music videos themselves are already a heavy product of the mainstream music industry, regardless of the content presented within it. Having said that I don’t believe that music videos can’t take on many of the conventional traits of previous media products, and push them in a way that is so unique it sets the trend for many videos to come. With our video, we tried to go against having a clear, black and white narrative, and instead create a visually interesting and exciting video, mainly editing based. The decision to leave out a form of narrative came after a few decisions, as at first we had a completely different idea and song to work with. We originally planned a much more dark and sinister video, filmed in an ideal location we found, an abandoned hospital block. Unfortunately we had difficulties coming up with interesting ideas and getting good shots, and the location became inaccessible. We were forced to rethink the whole project, which lead us to think “why do we even need a narrative?” and that’s how our final piece was first conceived as an idea. We also liked the fact that the viewer could take away what they wanted from the video, and give it their own interpretation of what it meant to them, which I felt gave it a lot more of a personal quality to it.
A media product we were very influenced by in the early stages of development was a video by rap group “The Pharcyde” called “The Drop.” The bizarre nature of the video lead us to aspire towards a similar tone, as the whole video is in reverse, yet set in a typical busy New York style area. I saw this as a contrast between the mundane and repetitive life of day to day work in a busy urban environment with excitement and something out of the ordinary. Originally we planned to have most, if not all of the video shot in reverse also, in tribute to the drop. This turned out to be a rather more tedious task than we first thought it would be, so we decided to mix it up with some fast paced editing, and various other effects, even though there are a fair few bits in the video that are in reverse, and are effective.
With the whole gas mask and suit theme, we were going with a creepy look, the dullness of an everyday suit, combined with the shocking image of a gas mask – something most people rarely see – is very visually striking, this is why we chose the opening shot to be the artist walking towards the camera from a distance, as at first the viewer doesn’t quite notice the gas mask, and from a distance the suit is more recognizable. We also used this contrast to replicate a meeting of two very different styles of music, one which the ‘artist’ combines in his song white light. The suit represents early 60’s pop bands, such as The Beatles or The Kinks, who would often perform in a matching wardrobe of just suits, and plain old mop hairstyles. The gas mask represents the new generation of electronic music, where the creative input towards making their products involves less instrumentation and more of a production element. An example of a musician who has taken on the gas mask as a suitable representation is dubstep heavyweight Caspa. This contrast directly mimics the tone of Gorillaz song white light – the song we chose for our music video. The song contains a lot of traditional instrumentation, yet at the same time it is heavily produced, and the strong pounding beat imitates that of modern day dance music.
- How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
Our Main product and our ancillary texts go quite well together, we kept the theme of the gas mask strong through out both. The magazine advert was designed to be bold and striking, with the artists image barely coming out of the black background. The front cover of the digi pack has the same image as that on the magazine advert, so people can draw a familiarity between the two. With the magazine advert I tried to make it as realistic and believable as possible, and in the end this boiled down to the little details, such as shops you can buy the digi pack and the record label’s logo. One criticism I have is that we used a different logo for both the magazine advert and the digi pack cover, due to the digi pack cover being designed by someone other than me in the group. This detaches from the reality and the authenticity of the artist. If more time was given this is one of the things I would have spent more time looking over.
The Advert differs from the digi pack cover in the sense that its trying to get people to buy the digi pack, therefore it needs to be more attention grabbing and appealing to its target audience. I used a stark contrast between black and red to grab the readers focus, and the use of large font gives out all the vital information, i.e. artist name and release date, from only a glance.
- What have you learnt from your audience feedback?
Throughout production, audience feedback and research was very important to us, as it helped us connect with our audience more and improve our video to our target audiences liking. We made questionnaires and handed them out to a wide variety of people, to be able to get mixed opinions on music and music videos. Unfortunately we did not hand out the questionnaires equally between sexes, meaning we have more of a biased opinion from a male viewpoint. The majority of the people who filled out our questionnaire were between the ages of 19-21, as most of them were handed out in our college.
The most important research from our questionnaires was obviously what people liked in music videos, since we were going for a very abstract and non linier music video. We found that most people liked a narrative, but we also found out that a respectable minority enjoyed ones without a narrative. Since we were creating an artist that was meant to reach out to the minorities of the masses, we decided to continue with our original concept. We were very happy when we found out that most people like unique videos over conventional videos, as this obviously benefits our ideas. Another thing we learnt was that our audience liked variety in location, something I think we strived to achieve from very early on in development. And last but not least we learnt that people aren’t too fond of performance shots in videos, which also directly links to our video, as the nature of our artist doesn’t allow for many performance shots. Along with these questionnaires, the internet has also been great help, e.g. uploading the final video to youtube to get feedback from around the world.
- How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
New media technologies were obviously a very large and important part of what helped make our music video what it is, and even in the research planning and evaluation stages, we still took advantage of the tools at our fingertips to get the most out of what we could. Obviously the most important media technology we used, which goes without saying, was the camera. We used a standard digital filming camera, with a tripod for stability. Since it was a music video and no audio was required to be captured, we didn’t have to worry about audio quality, i.e. an external microphone. When we originally had the idea of the abandoned hospital location, we used a normal still image digital camera to take pictures of the location, to bring back and get some feedback on. Ultimately this helped us change our ideas and dismiss the location as unsuitable, as lighting would have been a key issue. A huge part of our tone and theme of the video, as has been mentioned before, was the amount of editing that went into the piece. To edit we were working on final cut pro on a mac, which was very effective and useful software. We used various techniques and effects with in final cut pro to replicate some almost animation inspired techniques, such as stop motion. We also used a lot of reverse effects, as said before.
The internet was a huge help throughout the production process, in creation, research and evaluation especially. Youtube is one of the best tools I could think of that we used throughout, tutorials on the video site taught me a lot about editing on mac computers, having come from a primarily PC based background. Youtube also helped us out a lot in later stages, i.e. uploading the finished product and getting feedback from around the globe, which is really invaluable. The vast database of music videos that are already online also was of tremendous help, as we researched many different styles and directors to find inspiration that we thought would benefit our piece. Another benefit of the internet in media is obviously this blog. Essentially a journal of how far we have come since birth of this idea, a blog like this is invaluable when looking at our piece and insights into how it was made and what ideas were put behind what you see on screen. New media technologies also helped in the evaluation stage, as we did a voice over over the original video, and that helped give any fans a further insight into what we did and why we did it. Overall we used various new media technologies throughout production
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