Beths evaluation

The brief for this project was to create a promotional package, including a music video, a magazine advert and a digipack.
One of the first things we did was to choose a song out of 12 choices. We decided to do an animation because we felt that it suited our group better and we could create a stronger video. Although animation goes against the typical conventions of the indie rock genre, I feel that we managed to create good links between the song (music/lyrics) and the visuals. We chose to challenge the conventions of the indie rock genre by doing an animation because we felt that it would shock our audience and would attract them to watch the video.
We chose to have a narrative based video but with an abstract concept included. Some of the feedback after the rough-cut said that we challenged the conventions of a typical music video by having slightly longer shots and that the narrative wasn’t very clear.
For the research and planning for the ancillary tasks, we looked at previous digipacks and magazine adverts, and noted down the conventions. We followed a lot of the conventions for a magazine advert such as having the song title and artists name clearly written, visual links to the video by displaying the characters from the video, reviews, the details of when and where it would be released and the record company logo. The digipack also conformed to the conventions by consisting of a track list, the album title, visual links to the video in the same way as the magazine advert, the production company logo, reviews and star ratings.
I think that although we conformed to the typical conventions, we could have spent more time completing both tasks. Due to time constraints, we divided our group into two groups of two and each group was assigned to on task. As we had already discussed ideas and how we wanted the products to look, this meant that the products were completed faster and more efficiently.
As well as following the conventions of a typical magazine advert and digipack, we have followed the conventions set out by Andrew Goodwin. We feel that the relationship between the music and visuals can be strong at times, for example when you can hear a piano playing, our characters are dancing on a piano. The video also cuts to the beat of the music at times. The relationship between lyrics and visuals is also strong. When the song says there are rain drops falling on his head the video shows this, when it says that ‘she’ is all his, the female character is standing with another man. The song also says about feelings leaving and there is a visual of a heart breaking. The most obvious relationship is with the song title and the tangerine msn in the video. We have also included intertextuality with the milkmaid video and the classic space invaders game.
I think that there are some very strong links between all three products. For example, the characters are the prominent feature in all three products. Another link would be the visual motif of colour, and this links strongly with the song title as tangerines are orange. This appears on many of the props throughout the music video and is used as one of the main colours in both the digipack and magazine advert. The last link between the three products is the starry background. This background can be found in both ancillary tasks and is a frequently used background in the video.
I feel that the magazine works well at attracting audience because it is unusual in the sense that it had both real people and drawn characters in it. I think that the digipack is effective and useful because the main object on the front is the main character in the music video. This is useful for people looking for the digipack and now knowing the name.
The whole class had to pitch for their chosen song and this was done using our blog and mood board to help us illustrate our ideas. The feedback from our teacher and audience was good and they told us that our ideas were very good and detailed. However, I feel that we should have planned the digipack and magazine advert in more detail at that stage.
We noticed that our original storyboard is very similar to our final product so I am pleased with our planning for our music video. When planning our timings, we underestimated how long it would take to film the whole video.
By the time the rough-cut deadline was upon us we had put all the footage we had in the correct order and had started to edit some shots. However, we didn’t have enough footage to fit the whole length of the song.
In response to the rough-cut feedback and because we had completed all our ideas on the storyboard we decided to add some more short scenes to keep it interesting and to have a variety of shots.
The initial ideas for our music video came from a video called ‘The milkmaid’, made by previous students. This video was found using the internet during our research and planning stage. The milkmaid made us choose to draw our props rather than use toys or plasticine. This resulted in us having a total of 153 individual drawings but we were pleased with the results. Drawing the props gave us the freedom of choosing whatever we wanted in our video. Some of the original ideas for props included the two characters, the stars, the clouds and the cow.
Some of the difficulties with the timing of filming was due to us using Istop motion, which was a program which was completely new to us all. Throughout the project we got more confident in using this new technology.
We used final cut to edit our footage and this process went reasonably well with only a few problems. One of these problems was lighting, where we had filmed the same scene on two different days. To fix this problem we used some of the filters on final cut to change the saturation and brightness.
Throughout the project we have been regularly updating our blog, showing our progress. This blog includes any ideas we have had, evaluations of our work so far, planning for work that needs to be done, feedback from peers and our teacher and evidence of the work we have done. We have found this a useful way of documenting our work as it is easy to access and edit.
We used emails and MySpace to contact the band in our research stage to make sure they knew we were using their song, and to see if they had any thoughts on ideas. For the ancillary tasks we also used the internet with sites such as play.com to check the top 25 DVDs out at the moment.
I feel that overall we had a very successful project.