Marcus Howard Evaluation

A music video is a visual representation of a song. They usually include the artist singing or a band performance. On top of that, they may have a narrative or moral to the images. On the other hand, the video could be totally random and have no relation to the artist or band. There are also videos where the video relates to the song but not the artist. They do this by either adapting around the lyrics to create picture or tell a story over the lyrics. The song lights and music is an indie-electro pop song therefore it would make sense to conform to the dance video conventions. The dance video conventions are bright colours, odd locations, dancers, clubs, girls and outfits. A good example of this is “Now your Gone” by “Bass Hunter”. It doesn’t only use all the conventions but it has lyrical relation to the video as well as a narrative. Our video would generally follow this theme of dance but we didn’t want follow them completely due to the quirky mix of genres. We have tried to adapt on these conventions by following the odd genre. For “bright colours” we used a shadow dance in the break part of the song. We used a car park roof as our “odd location”. We did our own dance to fit in the “dancers” category. We couldn’t find access to any clubs or girls but we did use outfits. We created a boy band that all had their individual roles. This challenged what usually happens in dance videos because the focal point would either be on a DJ or a single singer. It hasn’t just been down to the outfitting that defines our video, the location time and editing plays a massive role.

We made sure that the location somewhere open and out of the ordinary again following the theme of dance. An obvious time to choose was night as the general nightlife music is dance. The editing had to be very clever to gain what we wanted. After looking at different videos and seeing their conventions, we noticed that they used a large variety of shots and used a lot of effects on those shots. We used this technique when we did our dance routine because it was the unique selling point of our video. It also made the dance seem more interesting with low angle, high angle, and close up and long shots. Artists in dance videos generally look “cool” so we tried to portray this with matching uniforms and sunglasses which weren’t needed as it was night but the artist wear them in night clubs. The sunglasses where also an idea for a hidden identity look as if we were doing something we weren’t meant to be, this could be our back icon as they are our only props. The other reason for them was that we all had the same uniforms but very different sunglasses so it gave us all a sense of individuality.

Our ancillary products have a very obvious theme to them which is bright colours and a “rave” atmosphere. Our digipack related more to our video as it has a street feel to it. We used a brick wall and street lighting to relate to the video being on the street. We ran coloured streaks of lights along our faces which was a suggestion that we were part of the music. This was also another relation to the video as the pictures were taken from the video. On the magazine cover we tried to follow the same theme but didn’t include the band as again we wanted to keep some sense of hidden identity. Although we stuck to the theme of dance, we gave a different look to the advert. We made it a lot brighter and made it more informative about the digipack. We tried to use a variety of different styles in our products to keep things out of the ordinary. This was done by not throwing off the audience making them think they were getting the same video no matter what product they have seen.

Generally we thought the feedback was useful. We knew there were things we had to touch up on and with further time we would have completed them. Our peers just stressed how important they were to them as an audience. The most common comments were on the length of shots and variety. This was a good example of things we thought look good but clearly weren’t letting us know how to change it in the future. Another main criticism was the inconsistency of the video. There were a lot of “random” shots that weren’t conventional to the video. The overcome this we scrapped most of the rough cut footage and stuck to 1 location and 1 time zone. One of the main things we knew was missing was the amount of lip syncing. We had such a small amount that it made it really hard to fill up the time for our video. Other than criticisms, we did get good comments. For example they thought the costumes, dance routine and “non-conforming conventions” were all good which helped us to reach a decent final product. Our ancillary products were mainly praised. They thought the digipack looked very professional and noticed there was a strong relation between it and the video. They liked the faces on the front but weren’t too keen on the full body shots on the back as they were too blurry and didn’t fit in. We could have chosen another image to take this place but we thought it would be a good group shot to show the band. For the magazine, there was mixed views from people thinking it was too bright and too much going on. Then again people did agree with what we were trying to get across with that it’s different but not too different. They thought it really complimented the digipack. I thought the comments were very fair and definitely useful if we were to change our products. I would say the main thing we have learnt from peer feedback is not the get caught up in what you think is good and look at it from the audience’s perspective.

The technology that we used for the video was really useful. In the research stage, the internet was a huge help. The first pages we looked at were previous blogs on similar projects. This gave us an insight on what our blog needed to look like and what to include. Following that, Youtube was a good source of video information and useful for putting on the blog. It also showed us a variety of dance videos made by professionals and amateurs. The amateur videos gave us a good idea of what our final product would look like. We used photos and I-photo to create a storyboard of our ideal music video. We used the internet again as a main source of information for the evaluation stage by looking at other similar magazine adverts and Digipacks on Google. For the video we used software such as final cut express and Photoshop. We used final cut to edit the video in the way we needed. It was very useful as it let us have an easy to use piece of software with a versatile range of effects. The layout of final cut was very good with the editing process. It let us move videos, cut them down and edit individual clips. We used this in our video all throughout. We had to cut down every clip that we had and mix them around to make sure they made sense. A good example of moving clips to make them fit with the song was the lip syncing. We had to shift the clips over and over again to make sure they were exact on the timing of the lyrics to look as though we were singing the song. A good example of putting effects over the top of a clip is in the second verse where the shadow is lip syncing. We put an overdrive effect on to make it stand out more and this gave us the ability to make it the colour we wanted. These technologies aren’t only useful to us but help amateur producers get noticed. With these types of software you could produce a piece that looks very professional. To help this gain interest, site such as Youtube are a great help to get these videos made public and recognised. The site allows the video to be viewed world wide.