"Pumpkin Soup"

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

Our product uses conventions of real media products because it reflects the keys aspects that are included in a music video. First of all we did some back ground research to help us identify what the key concepts were in a pop music video. So we each picked a music video and wrote a textual analysis of it to help us develop our own music video. We looked at Kate Nash and Katy Perry and found them both to have similar concepts and ideas imprinted in to their video. For example, In “Foundations” by Kate Nash and “Fireworks” by Katy Perry both have a narrative which continues all the way through the video. This is the main concept and we were influenced by this to have a narrative in our video as the main focal point. When we looked at other videos we were inspired to include some performance based work as well, as we found this to be a key element in a lot of pop videos. We liked Kate Nash’s idea in her video of Pumpkin Soup where she uses cartoon animation at the beginning of the video, so we have taken this idea and made it in to out own idea by using it to introduce our music video.

We challenged forms of real media products by having lots of settings in our music video as opposed to one or limited settings. In our video settings included; a bedroom, a park, by a river, on a bench, in an alley way, in a classroom (made to look like a studio for the performance part), on a bridge, and by a castle. We developed the conventions by using cards in our video which each one of us hold up at some point and they appear throughout the video and relate to the lyrics in the song.

We took a look at the settings the artist had used and noticed that Katy Perry varied her settings in Firework whilst Kate Nash kept them the same in Foundations. Kate Nash also used cartoon writing at the beginning of her Pumpkin Soup video, we really liked this idea so decided to produce our own take of this from scratch. We decided it would be the best idea to combine some ideas from each of the music videos. We made a questionnaire and got a selection of people to fill it out, this helped us to decide what costume to use in our video and also the location. We kept our dress style quite casual as this is what people said would look best but also what Kate Nash uses in her music videos.

There are usually a few dance routines in pop videos such as Katy Perry’s ‘Hot n’ Cold’ music video. The conventions of a typical pop video mean that usually the singer plays the lead in everything including the performance and narrative side of the video. However, we wanted to tell a love story in light hearted way and we wanted to show that the video was about girls all over the place who were falling in and out of love. This is why we had a singer who performed the song in a studio like environment but also a few actors who played out various characters in different locations and who also mimed parts of the lyrics.

Here are a few examples of the cartoon writing Kate Nash uses at the beginning of her video Pumpkin Soup.

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

We produced two different questionnaires, one for ideas and to help us produce an effective music video, and the other we produced after we made our music video for feedback on what could improve.

Our first questionnaire we asked was what would you except to see in a pop music video. The most popular answer was funny and cheeky so we tried to portray these themes into are own music video. On the street, in the park and in a house were the most popular places for the music video to be filmed, with a mixture of performance and narrative. Therefore we included a “story” of a girlfriend and boyfriend being unfaithful, along with performance based material. We found this questionnaire very useful as without this audience feedback we would have not been able to produce an effective music video for the audience.

We produced a questionnaire after we finished our music video, including questions on what the audience liked the most, disliked the most and what could be improved etc…

The most popular “liked” part was the story line as a whole the audience said that it made full sense and wasn’t confusing. Also they said that it was cheeky and funny. The audience feedback told us that the scene with the singer performing in front of a door did not look as successful as the rest of the performance based scenes, therefore we took this into consideration and took time to change the scene, and as a result we improved this by re-filming.

100% of the audience feedback said that the music video fitted the genre/style and the editing fitted the pace of the music, this was succeeded with help from our early audience feedback questionnaire. For your own interest we asked the audience if after watching our music video would they watch more pop music videos, the majority said yes they would as they found it funny and interesting to watch.

In feedback that we got back on our blog, a number of people said that there wasn’t enough footage of the singer in the video which made it misleading as to who was the performer and who was the actor. So we added more footage of the singer in to the video to overcome this and make it clear who the singer was. Overall we found feedback questionnaires more effective than the feed back we got on our blog. However we posted the video on facebook and received positive feedback, we found that people particularly liked the idea of the cards.

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

We looked at artist’s posters and videos that already exist and came to find that the strongest posters and digipacts out there are those that relate strongly to the music video. This may include having strong colours or images used in the video also included in the promotional material.

Kate Nash is quite controversial and because we like this we have decided to keep some of her ideas in our ancillary texts but we have developed them in to our own so they are not identical to hers.

We liked the idea of the montage created here on one of her CD covers and decided to create montages of our own to fit in with this concept. We spent time cutting out heart shapes using magazines and laying them out on a blank piece of paper to see which one would look the best. You can see this on our blog which include the different stages of development when creating our digi-pack and also the different colour themes we looked at before deciding on our final one.

In our final CD front cover, we decided to combine a range of photographs and heart shapes which contrast against the bright pink background. We chose hot pink as our colour as it is girly and also reflects our genre of pop. A lot of pop artists choose to combine bright clashing colours and bold text. We have done our own take on this as we feel it’s very effective in the sense of catching people’s eyes and grabbing the target audience’s attention. We have also used two medium shots of the artist and four smaller shots of the artist to remind the audience who she is, this also puts a face to a name. We have included a range of shots to make the front cover appear interesting and diverse. This will also mean that the audience will think that the video is interesting and fun and draw them in to buying the CD and watching the video.

Here is the front cover of Mika’s CD entitled ‘Life in Cartoon Motion’. His CD cover really stands out because it’s full of bright and clashing colours. It also relates to the title of his CD because he has lots of cartoon characters on the cover. There is also a photograph of Mika; we have taken all of these ideas in to consideration when putting the final touches of our digipack together.
This is Mika's CD Cover:

This is our final CD front cover:

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

We used various media technologies in the construction of our music video; these included our Blog which we have used to show our progression and updates. A digital camera which we used to take photographs of the singer (Hannah Stanton) in different locations. We used final cut express to upload our video on to and edit. We used different editing techniques within this to link together our video. We also uploaded the song Pumpkin Soup on to here so that we could sync the video over the top. We used final cut express on a Mac computer to construct and produce our music video.

When it came to making our digipack we used a variety of different software to enable to create our final front and back cover for our digipack. This included scanning our ideas that we created on paper on to the computer to enable us to edit them on publisher, gimp, coral, word and paint.

We used a digital camera to shoot the front cover of our digipack and poster before uploading them on to the computer to edit and put on to our final front cover of our digipack. We posted our video on to facebook to gain audience feedback, which therefore enabled us to improve our video. People commented on what they liked the most and what needed to be improved. On our blog we created a poll to find out what genre of music people liked the most. Once we had all of our relevant feedback we then went on to decide our genre of music which was pop. This then gave us the building blocks to produce our music video and ancillary products.

We used word to produce our evaluation, we decide not to use a power point or record ourselves talking as we thought writing in paragraphs was one of our group’s strongest and most relevant points.