We made sure that we had fast edits and jump cuts are displayed throughout the video as we found this was a major part of music videos. As I have already mentioned in my research we found that pretty much every music video we watched on VidZone and also the many music channels had fast edits and cuts. Another convention we found that popped up in most videos had Edits that reflect the tempo or structure of the song this was most evident in rock and heavy metal a prime example being The pretender by the Foo fighters up until the chorus the song has quite spaced out edits then as soon as Dave Grohl begins to shout the chorus the edits rapidly speed up. So in our video we used colour fades as well as close-ups of the lead singer and guitarist. we found throughout the videos we had watched in our research that had this all the way through so this was a convention we stuck to. Another convention that we followed was having titles at the beginning and end of the song.
We also challenged conventions that music videos have. Something that we did do that is that we had very little lip syncing. We only included one line of lip syncing which was "Heaven smiles above me" this was about half way through our song we felt very little lip syncing suited our video as we wanted to show the effects of the drugs. From our research we found Little lip syncing is very rare in Rock Music Videos so we were happy with the way ours came out and we both felt that this convention was challenged sucessfully.
As I have already mentioned the main focus in music videos is the lead singer this was a convention we chose to follow. I was the main actor throughout our piece . Iam in every shot or the shot is in the point of view of myself. We found this also was a wise decision as it works is practically every music video why wouldn't it work in ours?. Other classic convention that we used in our work was a process known as montage editing this is where numerous types of clips switch between one and other. An example that I can think of is in Boys will be boys by The ordinary boys where the lead singer walks down the street singing then the video cuts back to the whole band playing in a room. A prime example of this in our work is during our Chorus or our song where we switched between skip motion shots of Myself Playing the guitar and random POV shots of walking down the street.In our rearch we found that there was three main types of music videos these are Illistration Videos - Literally shows on screen what is happening in the lyrics , Amplification Videos - Take the lyrics or mood of the song and develops them into a bigger, related concept and Disjuncture Videos - Are completely random or abstract with no obvious link to the song. Our video was a mixture of Illistration ,amplification and disjuncture as at the beginning of the song the Lyrics say "We get these pills to swallow" we acted this out in our work. We got the video to change with the mood of the song a great example is when the chorus kicks in. We also show the result of the drugs in the the chaos espect from it this was done by colour changes and flashbacks. So we managed to get all three types into one video we both realised it was risk doing this but we were happy with the final product but we'll half to wait and see what everyone else thinks!
Edits and transactions reflect the tempo and mood of the song and this was noticeable through our video. When then when a mood is sad, slow drawn out fades this showed this in our work with the black and grey colour change.This is a convention we liked and developed through out our media to our adavantage it paided off and we were happy with the final outcome.2. How effective is the combination of you main product and ancillary?
For our ancillary pieces we decided to create a Album cover and also a Website.
Our (album cover) is specifically matched with the theme of our song which was pills there was aface made of pills that I had taken from google images then dramatically edited on Adobe Photoshop.From all the audience feedback we gained we were told that the video and album cover fitted and worked well together. When designing the album cover we had the idea of filling the cover with pills to really make our theme obvious but we wanted to keep the cover similar to actual Queens of the Stone age album covers. The bands Album covers are simple and often focus on one image therefore will followed this tradition when making ours so it didn't look out of place when placed next to the others.
Most bands out there have something that makes there work recognisable this could be a name, symbol or picture to associate the band with. A prime example being Blink 1-8-2 there logo is spread throughout there merchandise t-shirts,mugs,bags just to name a few have there logo on for everybody to see.
Above is Blink 182's logo anybody who knows anything about music will almost instanly link this to the the band. The point of a logo is it needs to be powerful and effective so people know who it is without a letter of text. Another example above is of Slipknot's logo it's a simple letter "S" but its reconisable becuase of the colours and font it's in again another example of a bold powerful band logo that everyone would notice if they saw it on the street. After reserching we discovered that Queens of the Stone age had no Logo, we found that the different typed of intersting fonts and texts worked in the same fashion on the older album covers for Queens of the Stone Age. From this we created an appealing font to use for our album cover. Having a name logo for our Queens of the Stone Age Album cover and band website incorporated synergy which is where different products work together to our advantage. In terms of the final outcome this worked very well.
3. What have you learnt from your audience feedback?
Audience feedback really helped us in makeing our work a better product. We gathered feedback for three different sources these were Facebook comments, Private Screening and Questionnaires. As soon as the video was complete we uploaded it onto Facebook for people to see. We gained quite a few comments from the upload giving us helpful constructive critisim. From the comments left we recieved a good varied range of positive and negative points for us to think about and discuss. From each comment we got positive or negative we tryed our best to make the changes. Examples of this would be a comment that read - " - I like the video, it has a lot of potential, I especially like the beginning but I think you start to lose the audience with that really long point of view shot. You should think about changing it up or adding some variety to it." From this comment we were able to instantly make a big difference to our work very simply. We make three changes to our work these were adding different colour fades over that shot in time with the instrumentals, shot of Myself stumbling into Matt Roberts And the flashback of Myself drinking the Vodka.
In terms of the private screening part of our work it was family and friends turn to see what they thought. From the feedback we gathered it was pretty much all posative which we were pleased with a we now knew the changes we had made had improved our work and people had noticed. Example of a few comments we got were "I love the beginning, it works really well and got me into it straight away" "well good mate, you should be dead proud. slick edits in time with the music work perfectly." An example of a comment that had things we could have done differently in was "Nice video guys! One slight suggestion, add more shots to the middle, it gets a bit boring watching Tom in the same place, but other than that good work guys". From this comment we decided to make another change this was filming at night on the road we felt this gave a our video more variation.All previous comments and feeback we gained was from the drafts of our work. The third and final way of feedback gathering we did was giving out questionnaires of our finished video we were not going to make any changes after this. The questionnaire was made up of 5 simple questions these were -
1. Did you enjoy it? Yes/No
2. Are there any parts that you find particularly memorable? Yes/No, explain: _________
3. Is there anything you wished to see more of? Yes/No explain:_________
4. Is there anything you wished to see less of? Yes/No explain:_________
5. Would this look out of place on a Music Channel such as MTV, NME or Scuzz? Yes/No
We kept the questionnaire short so people didn't get bored filling it out and also so we could gain the information needed to find out if our work was successful.Out of the 10 questionnaires we gave out we recieved 5 completed ones back which isn't as many as we would have liked but we still had feedback we could work with and evaluate. The pie charts we put the information in are below.
We got what we expected from these questionnaire results the main probelm was time and we used what we had to the best of our ability so we where happy with the final outcome. After these findings we uploaded the video back on facebook and recieved a few comment form people saying they we glad we took there advice. Overall the audience feedback has proved that it can help make your work better and more enjoyable for the people watching it.
4. How did you use new media technologies in the construction, research, planning and evaluation stages?Throughout this task I have used a varied range of different new media technologies to make the work better and more interesting. In the Research part of my work was very helpful to us as it has 1000's of different videos from all different all different genres from Jazz to Death metal.Vidzone helped us massively in the understanding of the different themes that make up different types of music prime examples are hip-hop videos out of about 20 we watched 17 or 18 had Women,Money,Expensive cars in. In rap music is Bling and money this was evident in the videos we watched. Also we looked at rock videos as this was the most likely genre our song was going to be we found from watching a number of them that they all contain a lot of the same things such as Fast Edits, Lip Syncing, Close-ups of the singer/Guitarist doing solo also the name of the song, artist and album appeared at the bottom at the beginning and end of every song.
We used a Video Camera to record footage, the specific camera we used is a Sony Handycam DCR-SX30 with a 60x optical zoom. This camera had a Hard Disk Drive (HDD), this meant that we didn't have to worry about buying mini disks or tapes to film the footage onto, instead any footage was converted straight to MPEG Format and burnt onto the HDD ready for USB connectivity with a laptop or computer for transfer. During construction of our video Oliver exploited the new version of I movie in the editing process of our task. We had the choice the use the schools Sony Vagas software but Oliver knew a lot more about Imoive and the way it worked and it paid off as we were very happy with the finals result. As soon as we had finished filming we could get our teeth straight into editing as Oliver knew exactly what he was doing we weren't left clicking on random buttons. When we created the album cover for our work we used Adobe Photoshop CS4 as it's a very popular design programme and we had just enough knowledge it to create a album cover we were happy with. When creating the website for our band we used an online site called WIX this site gives you basic layouts to build a website then you add in text and pictures ETC. As we cut the song down from 4:38 to 2:30 we used a pragramme on Olivers laptop called Garageband 08 to slice and merge the song together this programme was exteremely helpful to us all the people we showed the video didin't relise that the orginal had been cut down.
In the evaluation part of our work media technologies helped loads in gathering feedback from people on what they like and what they didn't. A prime example of this would be from a fellow media student Holly Weaver from our media class she left a comment of our video post on facebook and this is how it read " I like the beginning when you going round the bus shelter, one thing I don’t like about it is when You have that bit off matt and it had that flashing colours effect on it, I’m guessing it is suppose to be from the point of view of the druggy, so I think blurring that shot a bit would have looked better instead of ... the changing colours This comment is a prime example of how the exploitation of facebook helped us gather feedback and constructive criticism.
We also made a Questionnaire, to process the results oliver used Mac's own 'Numbers' from iWorks 08, this is Mac's response to Microsoft Excel. This allowed us to create graphs very easily and charts to display our results in a professional interesting way.
