The final cut of our music video

Evaluation Questions for your advanced portfolio

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.

Poster

Final Front Cover

We decided to create a montage of images to represent the similarity of our very own Kate Nash and the original. Here we have demonstraed the use of our photoshoot and linked bright colours, lips and hearts with cartoon themed text to show the way in which we represent the lyrics and charater of the album "Made of Bricks" and featured song "Pumkin Soup"

Final CD Back cover and strip

Final- CD Inside Cover

This is our final inside cover,we have now filled in the blank spaces with lyrics from the song Pumpkin Soup. We also added a twitter and web address so that the fans can follow Kate Nash, and keep up to date with her latest releases. We also added a personal message from Kate Nash, and 3 groups of lips because we have kept this theme throughout the project.

Rough Cut Of Inside Cover

Here we have deisgned a rough cut of the inside cover, however we have decided to edit it afterwards because we felt the picture of the car was irrelevant, and the shape was rectangle rather than square which did not fit in and wasnt approriate for a CD inside cover. There was also too much free unused space arond the images and text.

Photo Shoot

Today we took our main singer (Hannah Stanton) to different locations so that we could shoot images for our album cover. We combined vibrant colours with different backdrops so that we could express the continuing theme of cheerful and abstract world which is the focus of the album and video.

Final Two Options

Blog Update

We our currently in the middle of putting the final touches to our music video and also making the final design for our digipack and poster...

Ideas for the front of our Digipack and possible colour themes

Ideas for the front of our Digipack

Idea 3

Textual analysis - KT Tunstall poster

KT Tunstall's advertisment is simple effective due to having a black plain background with KT wearing all white and sliver with a large sliver sparkly guitar, this is effective as she stands out and grabs your attention. Many different fonts are used this makes the poster look for appealing. Her name is located in the top left hand corner, it stands out due to the large font used. The title of the song is placed at bottom of the page in bold writing which stands out. The glittery guitar resembles the pop genre, but the guitar itself resembles the india genre. PLAY.COM is advertised in the right hand corner this is showing where you can download or buy the song. The information about the song is placed at the centre top with bold line above and under it, this makes the information stand out more. For our own poster i would like to advertise the information in the same way as its effective.

Poster Contextual- Lily Allen

These two posters completely contrast against one another, the one above looks like it could be a design from the 60's whilst the poster below looks very modern. The one below has lots of bright and clashing colours which make it stand out and also draw people in. The bubble writing also helps to accentuate the words, Lily Allen looks cartoonised which reflects her quirky personality because she is very cartoon like herself. Her fashion sense is modern with a quirky twist, this is completely in contrast to the poster above where she is styled in a 60's theme. I like the way that both posters are kept quite simple with two or three main colours. My favourite is the the poster below, because it stands out and i would like to design are poster to be similar to this so it grabs people when they walk past it. I want to keep our poster modern whilst giving it a quirky twist just as Lily Allen has done here. I feel that the poster below best represents our genre of music we have chosen out of the two and we will try to incorporate this in our designs. 

Rough Cut! - Please comment on what's good and bad thank you.

Blog update

We have now produced a rough cut of our music video, which we will upload on to here in within the next day. We are also in the middle of working on our digipack and poster, we have made a few rough designs that we plan to scan in to the computer, edit and then upload on to our blog.

Digipack Contextual- Katy Perry

The front cover of the digipack is quite simplistic, i think this is deliberate so that all the focus can be on Perry. The pose she is lying in is sexy, yet quite innocent looking at the same time. The shot is quite polished looking, she looks sexy because again she is wearing red lipstick and has her mouth open which is quite suggestive. The colour of the title "Teenage Dream" is the same as the disc when you open up the pack, i like this idea where the front colour is relating to the colour of the disc because is easily recognisable yet also distinctive as you would relate to this disc being Perry's if you saw it anywhere. The clowds have also got a pink tinge to them which make them look girly, the cover has a very candyesque as the writing looks like sweets and the clouds look like candy floss.  The words "teenage Dream" look like they are melting, which could also be representing a teenage heart melting as they fall in love. 

Katy Perry as pictured here on her digipack which has been opened out has used two different but both are quite sexy shots of the artist. The one on the right is a medium close up of Perry, who is pouting whilst dressed in a low cut top. The one on the left of her sat down is a medium long shot, in both images she is making eye contact with the camera which shows confidence. the fact that she is wearing a dark red lipstick and dark eyeliner gives her sex appeal. However Perry is set to please a wide range of audiences so although her make up is oozing with sex appeal her dress is still quite dainty and pretty therefore showing that her audience is a male/female aimed one. 

Digipack Contextual- Lily Allen

Lily Allen who has been placed in the foreground, is clearly the main focus of attention here. Everything around her relates to her songs in one way or another, which we will take in to consideration when creating our own digipack. The dress she is wearing relates to one of her songs as it is named after it "LDN". The clashing colours that have been used for this digipack are very well suited to Allen, as she is a quirky and outgoing artist and known for being a little bit different. The classic red bus in the background, the policemen and big ben tell me that she is in London. However this also relates to some of her lyrics in "LDN" as she says "Riding through the city on my bike all day cause the filth took away my license". Therefore the policeman shown in the bottom left hand corner is also very relevant, obviously alot of thought has gone in the making of this digipack and how to link the lyrics of the song to the images. The pimp by the bus realtes to "Then I see it's a pimp and his crack whore" and the man mugging the old lady relates to "a kid came along to offer a hand But before she had time to accept it hits her over the head, doesn't care if she's dead Cause he's got all her jewelery and wallet".



Update on progress!

We are currently still filming the final shots of our video with roughly a quarter of the video left to shoot. We've begun to research ancillary texts for our digi-pack and develop an image around the video we have created.

Treatment sheet

The name of our song is "Pumpkin Soup" by Kate Nash. The story line that we proposed is a love story of a couple, the girlfriend is confussed as she doesn't know where she stands. Her boyfriend flirts with another girl in the video and this upsets the girl and causes arguments between the couple. Eventually towards the end the couple make up and in one of the final screens there are a number of clips showing different couples in love. We did this in order to empthasise the theme of love in our video and show how important it is to express this. 

The settings in the video vary but all have been shot in the daytime, we have a sceen in a car, a bedroom, park and general oudoors. The length of all the shots average between 10 and 15 seconds, we did because we didn't want the audience to become bored of watching the same bit of film for two long. Also if we didn't change the shots and setting regulary enough the sceens wouldn't have been broken up and therefore it would have been hard to get the grasp of the storyline. 

The mood varies throughout the video from being happy when the couple are together to sad when the boyfriend is flirting with another girl however the boyfriend eventually realises that he has made a mistake and that he loves his girlfriend and regrets ever flirting and spending time with another girl. We were influenced by Kate Nash and what she had done in her other videos e.g. in Foundations she uses lots of straight cuts which worked well because it kept the story flowing so that the audience didn't get bored. We decided to do the same in our video to illustrate that the story was fast moving and that lots was going on and taking place during a short space of time. It also illustrates that young relationships are fast moving and confusing. 

The types of shots we have used include over the shoulder shots, this particular shot is used when the girlfriend is sat on the bench texting the boyfriend. We used this type of shot because we wanted to show that she was alone and upset. Another kind of shot we used was a long shot, this is used when shooting the couple by the river walking along holding hands and also when they are feeding the ducks directly next to the river. We have used a medium close up shot when shooting the singer performing the chorus because we wanted the audience to focus on the singer making eye contact with the camera. The length of all the shots are quite short because we wanted to keep the video fast moving and modern.

We used different lighting when shooting the singer, this included putting red and blue filters over the lights in order to create different effects. This was successful as it added to the mood and atmosphere of the scene and overall performance.

The Cast

• Hannah Stanton is the singer for the chorus. We picked Hannah Stanton to be the singer as she felt comfortable performing in front of the camera.
• Charlotte is the main actor (girlfriend), we picked Charlotte to be the main actor as we thought she would play this the best to her ability. Along with Rich Bufton who plays the boyfriend, we picked Rich as we felt it was appropriate, because we all felt comfortable acting with him; therefore we could act to our best.
• Hannah Morgan is another actor who the boyfriend (Rich Bufton) flirts with, as we thought she best suited this role.

Reece Shots

 
 This is a shot for the couple to romantically walk down holding hands.











This is a shot where one of the actors could walk down by themselves.
















 This is a view of one of the areas that we may chose to film a number of different shots in.

This is where the singer will perform part of the lyrics.

 This is another possible angle in which we could shoot the singer from.

 This is where the actors may be in the background whilst the singer is sat on the bench.

 This is a shot of a possible window that we could use to zoom in on and fade away in to a room where the actors will be.

 This is a possible setting in which the actor walks towards the camera in a distressed mood.

This is another angle which we may use when the actor is walking towards the camera.

This is a shot in which the actor will perform the chorus in to a microphone, the posters on the wall will be taken down when we come to shooting this part.

Storyboard

beat sheet

Audience Questionnaire

We produced a questionnaire asking many questions which will hopefully help us to produce a successful video. We will be handing out many copies of the questionnaire to people with all different taste in genres as this will get many different views what we will need to inculde.