Magazine Advert

This is the magazine article of my group

Music Video Pictures

When we went back to re-film, the lighting problem had been solved by a large flood light which turned out to be a great success. During this time we took photos whilst filming of the artist.

Evaluation 4

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

Movie Editing

When it came to editing, i had a bit of experience due to the project last year. Of course this year was alot mroe advanced editing, due to having to get the lyrics in time with the lip singing and the guitar playing in time with the music. The precision timer was a great help, it allowed my partner and i to place the clip in the exact right time of the video so that it all went in time perfectly and this was something that we wanted to be one of our strong points. Colourisation was someting that we only touched on, we used it to enhance the colours already on screen because our lighting made it bright enough for us.

Desktop Publishing

Creating the ancillary task, involved using a programme i had never used before (SerifPhotoPlus) and i got the very basics of it, luckily enough our ancillary tasks wernt goign to have much complication to them. If your look at my ancillary task you will see i used a standard photo of our artist and then used colours within the picture, created boxes and then added text into them, a very simple idea, that i feel worked. The photography as per say was not edited, merely arranged to our preferance. The layout as you can see on both the CD cover and magazine article are very simple, but this is the type of layout i was aiming for.

Canon Digital Videa Camera and Tripod

I found using the camera and tripod an enjoyable challenge, though once you had the basics of it, it was very easy to understand and work. The type's of shots you can use with a camera are endless due to how portable it is, we tried to accomplish this with out camera, working round the artist to get the best shots we could get. The good thing about using a tripod, is it gives you such a sturdy base to film from, you'll always going to have some good footage using it. My partner and i decided this would be a good idea to do when filming, we set up the camera on the tripid and allowed the artist to play the whole song in one given position so we always had something to go back to and use. To create a fast cut montage, you can either achieve through editing or by filming very short clips of the artist that you want to use and then in the editing stage you link them all together, this is something my partner and i achieved in our music video, we video different parts of the artist, for example down the guitar and then quickly cut to his boot tapping with the music.

WebBlog

Blogger wasnt a new technology to me, it was like the Camera, i had used it before, but only in a very basic version, this year, blogger has been brought to a new level. Alot more posting has occured, as well as new programmes introduced to upload audio and visual clips to your blog. I had alot of trouble posting these programmes, so there is no video posting on my blog, though there is alot more pictures and quality posting than last year.

Still Camera's

Still camera's were used within this project, mainly for location shots and to help us with our ancillary tasks, but this again was not a new technology to me. All the shots taken have been posted on my blog and can be viewed.

Lighting Technology

During this music video task, my partner and i had to film twice, the first time we filmed, it was in the hay barn with a single light, and due to the weather conditions it was hard to find a bright day to film on. After uploading and watching our first footage on the macs, we decided it would be a better idea to find suitable lighting and then film again. So we asked around and managed to get hold of a set of industrial flood lights, it was perfect. We went back to the same location and set up the lights and put our artist in position and it was spot on. We filmed out video like that and we also took our ancillary task photos there, the lighting was something that we did very well, and is definitly worth doing once lookign at the end result.

Evaluation 3

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

When it came to showcasing our video, we did it in class. Unfortunately, neither me or my partner made a questionnaire to give out to our class mates, so we used the questionnaire that our teacher had designed that gave an all round coverage of the films and the questions that needed to be answered. So our music video was played to the class and they filled out the questionnaire, and we got about 9 or 10 or so back. Here's a short summary of what they said :

Positive

One really positive aspects of the feedback was that all of the questionnaires we got back, said that the lip singing was on time and really well done with the timing and changing of shots. Another positive was that all of the questionnaires said that the location that we picked suited the music genre really well. Another good point that was made is that lighting used was really good, after showcasing our music video, we had several of our class mates ask us how we got such good lighting and we told them that it was due to the floodlights that we achieved this.

Negative

The negative feed back we got back from the questionnaire was that although the location was good, we should of perhaps used another location as well as the hay barn. This point was brought across on more than one questionnaire and instead of taking as negative, we took it as constructive, so if we were to do this task again, we would perhaps look into other locations too. On one of the questionnaires too it made the point that we held onto the opening shot for too long, but we felt that since the introduction to the song is alot slower beat than the rest of the song we didnt feel that we would've changed it if given another chance.

Evaluation 2

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

House Colours

When we decided on the location for our music video, and had the appropriate lighting we took some photographs before filming. These photographs we used when doing our ancillary tasks. The house colours that we achieved were by using our images, there was a tool on Serif (the programme we used on the computers creating the ancillary tasks) that allowed you to take a colour from the picture by simply selecting it and then you could use that colour as a font or a text box and that is what i did for my magazine article.

Typography

I decided to use a variety of fonts when doing my ancillary tasks. In the magazine article i used about 3 or 4 different fonts which all varied in size depending on the content of the text. For the rating's by popular music companies in, i used a style of font that used symbols which is how i did the star's. In the CD cover, again, a variety of fonts were used throughout the cover, but on the back sheet of the cover, my partner and i decided that when listing the songs, each song would be a different size to the next, or be italic or bold so that all songs looked different and caught the eye of a reader.

Image Motif

Image motifs were not really used through our ancillary tasks unfortunately, if done again, i would research into an image motif more and create one for my artist.

Genre characteristics

When listening to our artist, my partner and i pictured them playing in a natural type of place, but one that went well with there sound. It was a hard task to do, but we both decided on using a field or a hay barn (originally starting off in a field and due to lighting problems changed to a hay barn). When we got to the hay barn and the artists started play, i felt that it all just clicked and went very well together.

Use of Images

All of our ancillary tasks involved pictures that my partner and i took when filming. Due to the great lighting our pictures came out great, so we were lucky enough to use them in our CD cover and magazine article. We didnt edit our pictures at all because we were happy with the way they were taken, also we wanted to stick with the natural theme of our music genre. The pictures were of course scaled down to fit certains area's and with the front cover of the CD cover it was cut up.

Industry Information

Industry Information was easy enough to come by, we got majority of it off google, making sure that non of it breached copy right laws.

Layout Design

The layout designs were all very similar throughout the ancillary tasks, but all different enough to be enjoyed from different aspects. This is how we created our Brand Identity.

Use of Still Shots

Our still shots were used alot, all of them are posted up on my blog. We used them for all ancillary tasks, because we decided early on in the project that it would be the best way of showing our artist, by using him as the image motif.

Evaluation 1

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

Our music video is performance based, the reason for this is because we thought it would be appropriate with the genre that our artist fits (an accoustic guitar sound, like John Mayer). Originally we planned for our video to be Narrative with the band, but we decided against this idea, due to the fact that our location had to be changed because the lighting was bad in the field.

The music to visuals in our video is good, since our whole video is performanced based, we had to get the timing right. Our artist use's a guitar in his video and we laid the music over the top of the video and then with precision editing we got the timing and lip syncing exactly on time. The lyrics to visuals is not as successful as the music to visuals but we decided it wouldnt be as effective with the type of music video that we were trying to achieve.

Throughout our video, we use as many close ups of our artist as possible, due to the fact that he is our star image motif. Many other bands actually have a image or symbol as there star image motif, we have stuck to using the

artist.

We did start our video with the intention of using the notion of looking, but due to the fact its performance based we decided against the idea. One of the lyrics was 'looking in your eyes' and we did a close up of the artists eye but it didnt go with the music at all so we took it out. Though we did get the artist to look at the camera every now and again and then cut back to normal.

We have created a brand identity within our anncilary tasks. The idea of cutting up our images into sections, creating boxers throughout the image but so that its still made up, we got the idea from an album cover of John Mayer's (as seen above). Also we have used soft colours as the house colours, all the colours we used originally came from the images taken on set of the music video.

We did use a variety of different editing techniques when using the macs. We have a fast cut montage within the video as well as shots that we hold onto a lot longer than normal because we agreed that it went with the beat of the music. We did changed the colourisation of the video, purely just to make it a bit brighter, though this isnt a technique we used a lot of. One thing i did find difficult was trying to get the transitions on time with the beat as well as in time with the lip singing, so unfortunately not all our beats on exactly on time but some of them are and the lip singing is on time and we agreed that was more important.

Final Music Video

This is my final music video.