Transcript Music Commentary Evaluation

Transcription


Ollie – What was the brief? / What were the initial ideas? / Where did the ideas come from?

For this project we were told to make a promotional package, consisting of a digipak, magazine advert and a music video.

Our music video was based on a song we chose. We first had 12 songs for a CD. We then picked 3 songs in order to condense our choices so we could generate some brief ideas. We picked the song by The Hush Sound called “Sweet Tangerine”. We chose to do an animation for our project because it was the best way to represent our talents and the best way to show this music.

The research for our project was simple. We already had a rough idea of the storyline that was posted on the blog based on the first storyboard we had. We needed to see what we needed to include in those shots, what kind of props we would need and how long we’d need it to be filmed as a close up or long shot. The fact we did this an animation made this a lot harder. Because we needed to make so many props we ended up with 150 props.

Our time frame for this project was really large. So we needed to get all the animation as quickly as possible so we had time for editing. Our ideas for the props from Google and other places and the other idea for the tangerine man came from an image from Google of a small man made out of a tangerine peel within a tangerine in the centre and we decided to use this as the key roles in our project. The main male character was designed from an image found on Google of a man drawn in a suit and the female character was from our imagination. The props such as the stars, clouds, sun are miscellaneous props apart from the sun appear more than once.


Beth – Pitch

In our pitch we had to explain why we chose the song we did and say our initial idea’s for the video and the ancillary tasks. We decided the video should be a little random like a dream, because we had some ideas about flying objects such as clouds and floating characters. So we decided to pick “Sweet Tangerine” because it has a random tone. We felt that the pitch went well for the music video. But we didn’t feel that we didn’t have enough developed ideas for the ancillary products. The pitch was detailed for the music video but it was relatively vague for the ancillary products which we should have planned more.


Ollie – Idea for Video

The idea for our music video came from a selection of research we did. We found a music video called the milkmaid from a previous group of students. We based our ideas around that animation because it used istopmotion and it was done in cardboard like we wanted to do. It also had the effects we wanted to do. So we watched it, made notes and then brought these over to make our final music video.


Vincent – How did the filming go?

We it came to the film stages we encountered a few technical difficulties. One of them was that we weren’t familiar with istopmotion. We had a environmental disruptions such as the lighting which caused a few pauses to how we wanted our backgrounds to appear. In other words we had to communicate with our other colleagues just to confirm whether it was alright to turn off the classroom nights. When it came to the editing stage we also had trouble trying to tamper with the colour filters such as the trying to do the piano background keys to light up as the couple would dance around. This was part of our original idea which we attempted to try out. But most importantly when it came to the rough cut, we had tried to upload it onto any sort of websites that would distribute our product. But unfortunately, we were infringing on their copyrights.


Nicola – Rough cut

To begin with didn’t actually meet with our rougt cut deadline. Because it takes such a long time to shoot the animation because it was a week afterwards to feel the gaps. Once we had completed we received peer feedback from our colleagues and teacher saying that we should include close up shots to break up the sequence in order to improve the flow.


Vincent – How did you use the blog?

One of the important aspects of the task was that to frequently update our blog. We needed to this in order to keep referring to our progress in case we ran out of ideas or expand on it so we could keep the flow of our project going. We wanted to implement Goodwin’s Law by interpreting the lyrics with the visuals to create a narrative link. So we searched up the lyrics for our song and so we tried to make sure we found the suitable scenes in conjunction with the relevant lyrics. Other than that, we started to neglect our blog a bit when it came to the ancillary tasks because we were total novices with photoshop. So we didn’t really know how to perform the right functions to achieve the desired effect such as adjusting the layers, including the relevant visual conventions of an ancillary product. For the magazine advert we did some analysis just so we could tell what combination of info was required to be made appealing to the audience. This would eventually get the right package together.


Beth – Which conventions were followed?

We think that the typical conventions are included for our digipak and magazine advert. It contains pictures of the band and both of them have images of the main characters from our animation. So if someone see’s the video and wants to go out and buy then it’ll be easy for them to find because of the prominent appearance of the characters.


Nicola – New Media Technologies

We used a lot of media technology in creating our music video project. We used the internet by searching on Google images for examples of sketched characters that we could that would an inspiration for our character concept. We used istopmotion to film the animation, it was a software that none of us were really confident with. We were required to connect our camcorder to the Mac in order to make animation a lot convenient rather than using a normal camera to take stills one by one. It would grant us the ability to take stills from istopmotion to create a continuous flow.

We had to frequently use our blog to communicate with the teacher so we could receive feedback on our progress on a whole for the project. To contact the band we used utilized media technology by searching up their contact details on their myspace page. We did this to confirm from them that we had official rights to use their music to create our project. Unfortunately we didn’t get word back from them so we had to press on without formal approval.


Ollie – Feedback

Throughout this project we have received peer to peer feedback and from our teacher. The feedback we received has aided is in improving the downsides in our music video as well as our ancillary products. We were told our animation seemed repetitive during the rough cut stage. We resolved this b y having quicker and shorter cuts and including more shot types and different pieces of footage. Our teacher told us that our project was based overall on good ideas. However she believed we could’ve improved it further from the rough cut. So with her ideas on board we chose to create a variety of shots. For example we decided to create a sequence of close up’s near the initial dream thought bubble scene where the camera zooms onto the male characters face. This was somewhat better in helping us to break up the lengthy birds -eye view shot we had previously.


Beth – Links between products

Our brief was to make a promotional package which included the music video, digipak and the magazine advert. We were told to link the three together. We tried to link the music video and the ancillary tasks in various different ways. We carried the single orange colour throughout the whole project just to create the familiar tone with the song. Obviously there’s the tangerine man that plays a major whole in serving as the song’s mascot. As for the ancillary products, the text was also coloured in orange. We’ve got the characters included in the digipak from music video as well as the sparkly night sky in both ancillary products. We did suffer some difficulties with the ancillary task since we didn’t have enough time to finish putting on the appropriate filters to achieve the desired effect.