Samantha Ferguson Evaluation
Project: Music Video, 'When Will It End.'
For my media coursework I chose the music video option. In which the task was to create a music video, a mock up album and magazine advert to promote an artist. We had a period of 12 weeks to do this and worked in groups. I worked in a group with 3 other girls in my class, Ivy, Hannah and Shamayla. For the ancillary tasks (the making of the album and magazine cover) we chose to split off in to two groups, I worked with Shamayla in this. I mainly contributed by filming the video, taking photographs for the ancillary tasks and working on In design and Photoshop to create the album panels. I also did a lot of editing in Final Cut Express as I felt I needed more experience in this aspect doing only a print project last year.
As a group we decided that the genre of our music video is pop. This is because it is orientated toward the youth market, usually through simple love songs which is what our song, ‘when will it end’ is. The song was originally sung by Erica Shine, an American rock-pop artist. We found the song on this website >> http://www.jamendo.com/en/artist/Erica_Shine. It allows the tracks to be downloaded and used legally.
According to Goodwin’s six points of conventions, a successful music video needs to include:
- Genre Characteristics
- Visuals/Lyrics
- Visuals/Music
- Needs to sell artist
- Intertextuality
- Voyeurism
So we considered all of these before actually making our video. We also starting thinking about the brand image of our artist and so we researched similar artists such as Taylor Swift, Natasha Bedingfield and Leona Lewis. We looked at the typical codes and conventions found in videos for these artists and found that most of their songs were about love and so the video had to reflect that.
All of these pop videos about love contained similar conventions such as they all had intimacy between the artist and a love interest, or the protagonist and a love interest. So we too, added that into our video. In our video (shown to the right) and Taylor Swift’s video (shown to the left) the intimacy is shown through a kiss. We chose this connotation of love as it is probably the most powerful because it shows the bond between the two people.
The videos also contained something that symbolizes their love. In Leona Lewis’ video it is a heart on fire, giving connation’s that the relationship she sings about is fiery. In Natasha Bedingfield’s video, red hearts are shown throughout, symbolizing the love that she longs for.
In our video a rose appears throughout the video to show that the artist still loves the man she sings about.
A final convention that appealed to us from these videos is that they all tell a narrative. In Leona Lewis’ video the narrative cuts to all different relationships, some good and some bad. Similarly, our video contains flashbacks as we thought it would portray the story of the song better and some viewers could relate to the situations. In our video the flashbacks are in black and white, the connotations of this are that they are in the past and she misses them. Also, we have flashbacks of her good times and bad times throughout the journey of this relationship, for example:
We see her walking with her boyfriend
Similarly in Leona Lewis' video we see happy couples together
And we also see couples splitting up and people alone
Our ancillary tasks also establish that our artist Eloise belongs to the pop genre. The front cover of the album contains pink font and a pink flower; this will appeal to the existing audience which is young females. Below are some album covers for other successful female pop artists. All are very simple with just the name of the album and artist and also a simple photo of the artist.
We decided to go against these conventions and not show Eloise on the front of the album as it worked for many other artists such as
Although these artists are not similar to Eloise we thought it would be good to try something different as audiences like the ‘same but different.’ This means that they will always go back to a certain genre but they do like something different to keep the genre fresh so the audience does not get bored.
We also used typical conventions of a love song video by using a typical prop, a rose, throughout the video. It is vital to use typical elements through the brand image of an artist because the audience for pop music already exists and they revel in the familiar. This can be proved through Graeme Burton’s ‘Circle of Pleasure and Profit.’
This diagram makes it clear that there is indeed a tight relationship between the media industries that manufacture genre products and the audience.
Scribdddddd
Our innovations are likely to prove successful because other artists exist like Eloise, such as Leona Lewis.
Leona Lewis is a successful and classy pop artist. She has a recognisable brand image that appeals to all females. However, we believe Eloise will only appear to a younger audience as she is young herself.
Eloise also has something new to offer as she plays her own instrument. This gives her an edge as not many other pop artists out there do that and this again links to the ‘same but different’ theory.I believe that our choices did work effectively as when answering our questionnaire people commented on the fact that Eloise brings something different to the pop genre. There were also comments about how her albums link to the video to show that both clearly belong to that artist.
The brand image that we wanted to create for Eloise is that she is a sweet, young girl that sings songs with a lot of ideologies about love and relationships. We want her to be someone that other young girls can relate to, perhaps similar to Taylor Swift. Although Eloise’s songs and appearance would be more elegant than Taylor Swift as she specializes in country music.
Our logo is very simply, Eloise’s name. We thought this would work well as it establishes who she is and isn’t too extravagant, we made sure our logo was elegant and simple, like our artist. It is in a simple font called, journal which we found on http://www.dafont.com/search.php?psize=m&q=journal. It is a helpful website as it contains many different fonts to choose from and you can preview what your text will look like before you download.
For the magazine advert we decided to use Hannah and Ivy’s ancillary tasks and so the logo had to be altered so that it could be associated with the albums ‘for sale.’ For the magazine advert the logo is in another font which is also very simple, brush stroke std. It is in black with a white outlining to make it stand out.
Branding, Need to Scribd
Branding 2
After researching some media institutions we came to the conclusion that RCA records, within Sony, would be the most likely to distribute our media product. RCA is the name of three different co-owned record labels. RCA Records is the pop music, rock music and country music label. Whereas the other two co-owned labels, RCA Victor and RCA Red Seal specialize in other musical genres such as blues, jazz etc. It is an extremely successful and edgy label with pop artists signed up such as: Kelly Clarkson, Beyonce, Leona Lewis and new pop star Diana Vickers. The link below takes you to the homepage of the RCA website.
In my coursework project this year I had the opportunity to work on software’s and programmes that I didn’t know of previously.
One that we used frequently was final cut express. I used this to do a lot of editing on in which we had to use a tool called the razor to cut scenes to the exact time we wanted them to run for. This is useful when trying to create a music video as lots of short clips is needed. The clips had to be placed on the timeline so we could see where each clip was placed and when it would play and in what order. However, the timeline kept getting a bit jammed and overcrowded as we had a few hours of footage and wanted to cut it down to a few minutes.
There is a variety of good special effects available on Final Cut Express which are easy to use. We used the fade transition on each scene so that the video ran smoothly and there were no jagged cuts or jumps. We also used the black and white filter on the flashback scenes which I thought was a really good tool as it allowed us to make our video look more professional in a matter of seconds.
I did not work on imovie last year so I cannot compare the two but as a new person using Final Cut Express I felt it a very useful package and it was also easy to use once we were all trained on it.
I also used Scribd.com this year to help me present my evaluation. I used slideshare.net last year when I was evaluating my print project and both websites work in a very similar way so I had no trouble with it at all. I think that these websites are really helpful in making evaluations look more presentable.
http://www.slideshare.net/ http://www.scribd.com/
Last year, for my magazine project I worked on the digital stills cameras and this year I did the same, for my ancillary tasks. However I had no experience on the Canon DV video cameras which we needed to use to film our project. It took me a while to set the camera up at first as I didn’t know how to position it on the tripod or how to place the tape in. But after help from other students and a few times practice I was able to use them effectively and I shot a variety of clips on the video such as close up, mid shot and over the shoulder shots.
A close up shot.
A mid shot.
An over the shoulder shot.
I also used many technologies that I had experience on. We worked on Apple macs which I had worked on last year, and the programmes we used on the macs were Photoshop and Indesign. We used these to perfect our album panels and magazine advert for our ancillary tasks. I like the use of the cutting out tool that you can use on Photoshop as it allows you to freely move the person in the image away from the background, or place them on a different background entirely. A new thing that I learned on Photoshop this year was how to change the colour grader so that the person in the image (Eloise) could stay in colour whilst the background could be changed to black and white.
Indesign was used to place all of our Photoshop images into a frame for a CD panel, this was good because it made everything look a lot more professional and I don’t know of any other programmes that have a set up where you can make an album panel to scale.
I used a variety of different websites during my coursework. Whilst doing research I used Google images, Youtube.com and Dafont.com, we also used Jamendo.com to find our artists song. A website I used the most is blogger. Blogger is very useful for helping keep track of your progress and also allows us as a team to work together from home, via the blog. However, as it is such a popular website lots of people are uploading at the same time and so this can cause a long amount of waiting time when you want to upload yourself.
To conclude, I am proud of our final product as I do feel that it comes close to what a professional artist would have. I think we worked to the best of our ability as students to produce a video on Final Cut Express, some of us having never used it before.
The video works really well with the narrative of the song and also the style of the artist and I think we have made our brand image very clear. However, we could have worked closer on the ancillary tasks so that the brand image was more similar for both.
I do feel that the video could have been better improved with more advanced editing and maybe if it was cut at a faster pace as this would keep the young audience’s attention more.
I feel that the ancillary tasks are very effective too, as I spent a lot of time trying to get them to fit in with Eloise’s image. Although I could have spent more time taking different photos and perhaps experimenting with affects more.