Ancillary Tasks

Album's Front Cover - This is the final edit for our front cover of the album. This is completed and we have chosen the sky blue colour and hot pink to tie in with the pop music as well as link in the colours with her outfit.
Poster - This is an poster to advertise our artist and this is what our advert would look like if it were to be in an A4 music magazine. However, it is not finished just yet, we have a few other things to add.
Back Cover - This is the back cover of our album so far, it is not finished yet, as we have decided to change our colour scheme to red and green, as we believe those colours are more assosciated with our genre.

Self and Peer Assessment

After finishing the rough cut of our music video, we did peer assessment to see what others thought of our video so far and also to help us improve it and make it better. This was the feedback we got:

Strengths - what works well:- Clear narrative

- No camera shake
- Authentic performance
- Variety of editing techniques used
- Good choice of performer
- Editing is clear
- Steady shots

Improvements - Areas to work on:

- Speech bubbles need to be placed properly
- Performer needs to add more emotions
- Merge performer better with background
- Lipsyncing shold be clearer

Loss of Footage

Whilst we were out on location, unfortunetaly we lost some of our footage and lost all the location shots of central however after the christmas holidays we were able to go and reshoot the central scenes and progress with the making of our video.

Editing

After getting all our footage and the scenes from the Tricaster, we decided to do some editing and matching it together with the song. We played around with the shots and tried various transitions to match our video. We used various tools on Adobe Premier to help us put our music video together.
We also created different album covers and posters and tried many font styles and colours.

Development of Album's Back Cover

So far we have been working on our album's back cover. The albums called 'The Forbidden Fruit' and we have decided to use green and red colour scheme as most fruits are those colours and it links in well with the tittle of the album. We have nearly finished with this cover, all that is left now to do is to add the logo for the record company and the barcode. Here we also used the trial and error method to add effects to the image used. The back cover consists of her 12 tracks that are on the album.

Album's front cover

We have chosen the above picture to use as our album's front cover. This particular picture is a medium close-up of our actress Noor and it shows her looking up thinking and listening to music with her headphones on. Before adding effects to the image, we edited it and airbrushed it.
We used trial and error method to help us decide what font and style to use on our front cover. Here is an example of our first attempt. We used the colour green for our font and placed it above her head, which makes it seems as if she is looking above at the text, also we used a unique quirky style of font.
This is our second attempt to choose a colour and a font for our album cover. However instead of using green, we have used blue. This is a colour that appeals to both female and male gender, therefore it attracts a variety of audience. We also used a different style of font to experiment.
This is our third attempt, here we used the colour yellow, but we used the same style font as we did for our first attempt. This is because it goes well with the image and goes along with our genre as it is quite girly and lady-like.

EVALUATION

Question 1 -
In what ways does your media product use, develope or challenge forms or conventions of real media products?

Our music video is a pop genre, a mixture of narrative and performance based which includes conventions of pop music.
Britney Spears song 'Lucky' begins similar to our music video, where the artist is in bed.

Britney spears shows her engaging with the audience as she sings towards the camera and then looks at the camera therefore the audience feels as if she is looking at them and singing to them. Pop music videos also tend to have performance based with a mixture of narratives to tie in with the lyrics just like our video. Our narrative of the music video, explores our performing having a horrible day. She wakes up late for work, her computer freezes, she trips over several times, spills her drink all over her and breaks up with her boyfriend. However, even though our music video has a narrative it also subverts the normal conventions of a usual narrative, as a narrative is supposed to be funny for viewers/audience rather than be a dramatic narrative with a happy ending whereas our music video doesn’t feature that. Our narrative shows our performer having a bad day and the ending is the flashbacks of her bad day.
As for the performance side of our video we have asked our performer to mime the lyrics to the song by using Chromo Key (green screen). We have used a mid shot of our performer and we decided to place a plain background behind her in the music video with some words of the lyrics by her to make it more realistic and natural. Usually in pop genre, music videos have the performer miming the song and there are serveral shots showing this, however our green screen is just a mid shot of our performer. Moreover, looking back at our green screen footage we had to make sure that it matched the beat of our track and as she is lip syncing the words we had to also make sure it matched clearly and with the track in the background.

Question 2 -
How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

There are many effective combinations and similarities with the main product and ancillary texts. This is a very important factor for all variety of products, e.g. Album Cover and Music Video. The obvious similarity between them is the Actress used in the music video and for the Album cover. Another similarity is the colours used in the music video and the Album cover; however the font/style is quite different. We have used colours that appeal to both male and female gender, therefore it is not biased. These colours help promote the brand identity of our product as they are bold and feature in both the poster for the album and the album cover itself. The brand identity of all three products all follow the trend of conveying the idea of having a horrible day where everything goes wrong. Also the close relationship between the two characters runs throughout the video and the concept of love. The album cover shows a picture of our main actress Noor with her headphones on listening to music and smiling in a medium close-up. This conveys the idea that despite everything going wrong and having a bad day; it all works out in the end. This portrays her as being a strong individual and having hope, as this can be seen through her facial expressions. All my media products combined provide an effective media product, with all incorporated the theme of humour, anger yet love is highlighted and appeals to all my target audience. The ending of the music video is very basic and goes along with the conventions of a quirky pop genre as it has a happy ending just like the most of them.


Question 3 -
What have you learned from your audience feedback?

After finishing our first rough cut of our music video, we had a audience review to let us know the strengths and weaknesses of our video. From our audience feedback we learnt that in the chorus, instead of having angry images behind our singer we should consider have more narrative of her bad day. Therefore having influences of the original artist we have decided to replace the angry pictures with ones of her falling down, things spilling on her, her walking into doors, tights ripping and various bad situations that are common in everyday life.
From our feedback we were also told that we should try and include more visual slap stick and possibly relook at filming our tricaster scenes again as some of the lip syncing was out of time and this could effect our overall grade majorly. Moreover, we also got suggested that we should try and use different angles in the office shots therefore we are looking into ways we can change that and improve on it. We took this feedback in account and have started improving our music video and adding final touches.

From our presentation evening the audience's feedback was as following:

- Needed clearer narrative

- More still images and shots

- More footage of narraive scenes

- More visual slapstick

- More lip syncing - more green screen footage

- More angles for the office shots


However, the audience said also stated what worked well and were the positive point about our video:

- The still images

- Different locations we had used for the video

- Funy Narrative

- Use Of Performer

- No Camera Shake

- Variety of Editing Techniques

- Authentic lip syncing


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

Throughtout my A2 media course I have used many different types of media technologies to present my research, planning and evaluation. When first finding out about our coursework we had to research into the different codes and conventions of a music video as well as our specific chosen genre. This helped us to understand what is expected of our own music video and what audiences wish to see. After this we decided to look at other music videos for references, we looked at videos such as Pharcyde's - Drop alongside Britney Spear - Toxic and many other video's of our choice. We then went onto explaining the codes and conventions of the videos, the specific genre they were and whether it was narrative / concept / performance based, we also meantioned the different themes they have incorporated in their video. For our research, we analysed different videos and then posted them on our blog by embedding the code. Moreover, we also did Vox Pox alongside our research and planning. The Vox Pox consisted of me and my fellow group members asking questions about our music video and what they expect to see from it and what they thought about our ideas so far. We asked questions from different members of our school, such as the students, teachers and other workers. To do this we used an analogue camcorder and after we uploaded the footage by using Adobe Premier Pro and then went onto editing it by using Tricaster. After finishing the editing, we decided to upload our Vox Pox on the famous streaming site YouTube, which allowed others to watch our video and it also allowed us to get the emedded code to post on our blog.

After finishing the Vox Pox, we then had to look into unsigned bands/artists which we thought had the potential to be used for our music video. After researching we found a few artists that we thought could possible be used for our video, we took the name of the artist down alongside the track name and album name and then presented it to our teacher and fellow class mates. To find the songs/artists we used a website called 'http://www.unsigned.com'. We used Microsoft Powerpoint to present the different artists and song choice. After this, we uploaded the presentation to Slide Share, which allowed us to put our presentation online and we then used this to upload the presentation on to our blogs to show reserach and plannning. We finally made our final choice, which was 'Diva Eve' as our unsigned artist and her song 'Wrong Song'. After this, we had roughly planned what the video would look like, by planning the different locations, performers and scenes that were needed for the video. For our planning stage, we used a digital camera to take pictures of the locations we considered using, we also took pictures of our perfomers. After this, we decided our final peformers and finished taking different shots. The equipment we used to film our footage was an Analogue camcorder and tripod, this allowed us to film at different locations at different times. We then taped our footage and imported it onto the desktop publishing video editing programme Adobe Premier Pro. This allowed us to edit, cut or crop our taped footage. For this we used the Razor tool which enabled us to edit different footage, from different locations and then match it together forming a sequences. To make our video more realistic and better, we used various types of transitions such as jump, fade, wipe and fade. This gave our work a more proffesional and naturalistic look. After adding the different transitions, we then decided to add the green screen footage, we placed the footage where we thought went well and looked most realistic making our video look natural and a simple running sequel. After finishing this, we finally added the audio track and matched the lip syncing (green screen) footage with the lyrics in the song and then added still images into the video. We also edited the different green screen footage alongside the location footage, still images and the audio track together and added the editing the transitions matching it all together to form first draft of our music video. By this stage, most our music video was done, only final touches were needed.
When looking at the different editing transitions we had used the clockwise wipe, fade, jump cut and push transition to create a comical effect, we also used a text tool to create funny phrases, again to add a comical effect to the video. We added phrases such as 'why am i wasting my time with this loser?' and placed the texts either in a speech bubble, which gave a cartoonic touch to the video or on the plain background with the green screen footage and also on the still images that were used. The green screen footage used, gave our music video a professional and expert look, making our video seem more natural. This look is also used in many music videos with a plain background or an image behind the performer or scene.

Finally, we edited our whole music video and got audience feedback and then made the amendments and improvements, we had rendered our video as it was finished and uploaded onto YouTube and we had got the embedded code from there and uploaded it onto our blog. Whilst uploading the video we took into account that we were publicly displaying our finished product.
Whilst writing my evaluation I had used all the information given and uploaded it all onto my blog to show my ability in doing all the different tasks, products and plans I have produced and done in the time given. This also allowed me to reflect back on my work and see my strentghs and weaknesses allowing me to improve even further if necessary. I then continued to show my work through screen shots by pasting them on the programme Paint and then uploading these images onto my blog and describing what I have done. At the end I had also explained whether I was succesful in achieving what I wanted from my music video and if I achieved my overall targets.

Back Cover - Album

This is what we have done so far. After looking at different font styles, we decided to make a rough guide to show what the album back cover might look like. We chose to make two designs, one with black background and the other with white. We tried different colours schemes to see which one looked the best and went well with the front cover of the album.

Font Options

Before actually decided what style font we are using, we considered various options shown above. These are the 6 fonts we have chosen and out of all of them we have chosen the last one - Freehand591 BT.

Editing Screen shots

This shot was filmed in Hyde park. This is a medium long shot to show our actors gesture and body language, which is also followed by text to make it obvious. This hand is over his heart which connotes he is hurt by the girl and is in pain and the text shows how he feels. The surroundings our also in the shot to give it a more realistic touch. We also used a speech bubble to state his thoughts.

Here is one of our first shots in our music video. This scene was filmd in Noor's house, in her bedroom. For the first scene we have decided to place the Tricaster footage on top of our narrative scene to show her looking back at her day as well as lip syncing the lyrics that match our narrative scene. This is a medium shot, which shows her surroundings and environment to make it the scene look realistic.

Here we have a shot of our actors sitting in a cafe, spending time together. This is a over shoulder shot. By looking at their gestures we can tell that even though they are together, they are not literally together. He is on his phone, and she is sitting there with her hand on her chin, looking bored. This represents that their is tension between them and they are not happy together, this can be seen throughout the whole music video. We also made sure we got the background and the surroundings
as this makes the scene look even more realistic and natural.

This is a shot reverse shot which shows our main actors, Noor and Michael. This scene was shot in central london. We filmed both performers in Costa and sat directly opposite them and had a conversation to make it look natural and realistic as if they were talking to each other and not the camera. We were planning to have a straight cut inbetween the two clips to give it a more natural/realistc movie style effect rather then adding a transition. We filmed this in a Cafe as that is a common location for couples to go and spend time together. This also makes it look more realistic.

Artist Career

Chris brown:


Chris Brown Run It
Uploaded by avajra. - Music videos, artist interviews, concerts and more.
Christopher Maurice "Chris" Brown born May 5, 1989 is an American recording artist and actor. He made his recording debut in late 2005 with the self-titled album Chris Brown at the age of 16. His first hit single was 'Run It'. His music videos are usually performance and narrative based. We can also see that the quality of the video isnt very good, compared to Champion & Yeah 3x. Moreover, props used in this particular video also support his age factor, he is wearing long baggy T-shirts and baggy trousers and a new era hat. Whereas in Champion, he is wearing a long black coat which suggest his age and his maturity. He is also seen wearing a tux when he is sitting down in a tunnel.


Chris Brown - Yo Excuse Me Miss by Drunken-Li-Dragon


Champion -

Chipmunk Feat. Chris Brown - Champion
Uploaded by jimihubabua. - Watch more music videos, in HD!

Chris brown's latest single is called 'Champion' featuring Chipmunk. Comparing this video to his first video 'Run It' we can see he has improved a lot. He has made drastic progress throughout the years and this can be seen in his current music videos, from the props used to the location it was filmed at. He has improved in serveral ways, his first music video was realeased when he was 16 years old, his age factor can be seen through this video as he is singing to a girl in a gym and dancing trying to get her attention. Whereas in Champion, he is 22 years old and has matured up and this can be sensed through his lyrics. Also the quality of the music video differs from Run It, half way through Champion, there is a long shot of Chris Brown and Chipmunk walking on water. Here we can see that special effects have been used which relate to the song title and the lyrics, as he is seen as a Champion.


Chris Brown - Yeah 3x (Official Video)
Uploaded by Henrietta-Aime-Fumer_Tv. - Explore more music videos.

Feedback

Hina you have shown some good evidence of your research and planning work - well done.
Targets: 1) You must include a history of a music artist / band via their music videos
2) Upload some screen shots of your music video with an explanation of the visual codes you have used
3) Update your running commentary