Nicola's evaluation

Music Video Evaluation
1)Our products such as the DVD cover & magazine follow then conventions of having the main character on the front of them, so if people see the music video, then the digipack in shops then can relate back to the video and know what they are buying. Our DVD cover has all the basic detailing on it that follows the conventions of DVD covers such as the DVD rating, the companies that created the DVD logo, barcodes and a track listing on the back. The magazine advert follows the conventions, of having a release date to let know people when they can buy the product, the band name and singers. The production company logo and information about what is available on the DVD. Even though the song style of ‘indie’ wouldn’t often be put with an animation, because often for this style most videos are live action, we thought we have done a good job of linking the lyrics to our video for example the songs talks about rain falling on the mans head, so at the beginning of our video we created these lyrics. We also linked the music to the video by in the middle of the song a piano is played, so we had our characters jump around on a piano in time with the music. We tried to incorporate intertextuality into our video by having the space invaders sequence.
2) I think the combination of all 3 of our products has been very effective. We used the main male & female from our music video on the magazine advert & also we used the main male on our DVD cover; we done this so if people saw the video they can see the ancillary tasks they know what they are buying. We also used the visual motif of the colour orange through out our products which relates to the title of our song. During our music video, we have a starry sky which is something we brought through to our DVD cover & used it as our background. Originally we had created many idea’s for our DVD cover & magazine advert these included such as a guy standing having tangerines falling onto him; this was a good idea as it includes a reference to the song but compared to other idea’s it was not as strong. Another idea was having heads with speech bubbles coming out saying ‘The Hush Sounds’ but we felt this wasn’t a very exciting idea & does not have much reference to the video. As we didn’t have long to complete our ancillary tasks we spilt into 2 groups, one group doing the DVD cover & the other doing the magazine advert, we felt this would been an effective use of our time & skills.
3) We learnt a lot from our audience feedback; the first feedback we had was after we done our pitch. Our teacher told us we had an excellent pitch and we had clear ideas so this gave us the motivation to carry on with what we were doing. Once we completed our rough-cut we showed it to our fellow class mates & teacher, we thought showing it to our class mates was a good way of getting feedback from people that are the target audience our song has. Most of our peers said that, many of our shots were too long in time & we didn’t have many different shots, as we didn’t use many close ups. After receiving this feedback, we watched back our video and noticed what our peers said about the length of the shots, so at the beginning shot we decided to add close ups of his thought bubbles; we done this as it breaks up the length of the shot & gives us the opportunity to use close ups. Our teacher’s feedback was to include our tangerine character more, so we carried on using him as a main feature of the video such as he demolished the stack of furniture and knocked the heart over.
4) We used a lot of new media technologies in creating our music video & the ancillary tasks. To get some of the idea’s for our video we used YouTube to look up idea’s and found a previous group of long road student’s work, who created the ‘milkmaid’ video. There concept is very similar to how we wanted to create our video. When making our video we used Istop animation, a programme that as a group we were not very familiar with, so we were constantly learning through our project the difficulties that come with creating an animation using Istop such as lighting & just how long it takes to create an animation. We also had to use Photoshop to create our ancillary tasks, for our DVD cover, we had to take pictures of us against a plain background; upload it to Photoshop then use the magnetic lasso to draw around us, so we could then add it to the background. We also used our online blog to keep up to date with all the planning of our work and to get peer feedback about our work; using the blog was a great way for us to visually see our work, as sometimes we had so much going on we forgot we had to do, so referring back to our blog was useful. We used websites such as play.com & amazon.com to look up ideas for our DVD cover & magazine advert, as we were not sure of the conventions that were used. To find out about the band we used MySpace to find out about them & to contact them for permission and idea’s for their song.

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.

Music Video Evaulation Comentary

Post Production Technical Difficulties Commentary

Our commentary sequence will need to be re-arranged into a logical order so that each clip answers the relevant questions. To do this, we'll be renaming the clips so we can identify which topic we specifically spoke about.

We have found that during this commentary we have had some issues. We have found that although we have enough footage and have enough material on the topic questions provided. We found that cutting and ordering theses clips was difficult as all the clips blend together and we did not shoot them in a specific order. Whilst uploading the footage from the camera a part of our footage had become out of sync with the audio; as such we had to trim and rematch both the audio and video strands. This took valuable time and has set us back in our second day of editing.

We were recommended by our teacher to include texts and photos to our commentary in order to convey a clear message to the examiners. We were also required to work on our transcript.

Evaluation Commentary Shooting

These are a list of topics roughly noted that we spoke about while filming -

• Create a promotional package for music album.
• Present a pitch to receive feedback for our concept
• Character idea's i.e. the suit guy, female character and tangerine character
• Story boarding media technology, filming process, prop/decor design
• Contextual themes, intertextual references, Goodwin's law with visuals/lyrical relationships
• Rough cut feedback
• Referring and updating our blog
• Copyright issues and official permission for song rights
• Compare the three products, how effective they were
• Technical issues we encountered
• Improvised some additional scenes
• Talk about the peer feedback received overall

(Draft for final evaluation - Vincent)

For our commentary evaluation video, we decided to find a suitable location where we'd have no disruption. Beforehand, we planned what topics to talk about for each question. Our teacher had also given us a clear explanation what answers the questions were demanding. The 2nd question was on the subject on comparing our three media products which required us to think objectively. This question required us to talk about the textual relationship between the music video and our ancillary products. We spoke on how the mise-en-scene for each of the ancillary product has a close resemblance.

(2)The similarity between the two is the mere presence of the main characters. For the magazine advert, we spoke about how we intended to let the audience know that our MV is an animation. We explicitly chose the color scheme to be black & white so we could allow the orange patches on the characters stand out. We believed this would show a good lyrical and visual relationship as the song is called "Sweet Tangerine". Our aim was to make the ancillary products appeal from teen to young adult viewers. This is why we decided to edit the couple together with the night sky background on the DVD cover. The combination of these mise-en-scene devices would allow the audience to think there's some narrative involved with integrated themes such as romance and fantasy.

(3) In general received positive reception for our animation in particular for our rough cut. For our pitch we managed the assertively express our points by displaying our blog. We had shown a strong visual relationship between the 3 products. The vital feedback was the fact we kept our blog up to date with any trivialities. Before we designed a lot of rough sketches with the variety of props/decor we'd require. To aid our planning we were suggested to refer to more relevant images from the Internet. This would help compliment for any current idea's that need developing.

(4) In order the achieve these results, a lot of research and planning was executed to confirm our idea's for the pitch. Overall, we had envisioned great ideas foor how our products would turn out. We had examined the lyrics carefully to plan our scenes that would have lyrical/visual correlation. However, we didn't take into account the type of shots we'd film to compliment the video's pace. One of the main feedback comments was to include more variety of shots and to fix the inconsistent lighting. We eventually managed to get round to curing the dull lighting via the Final Cut Pro filters with the guide of a technician. Despite being taught the right filters to help sort out the footage, we wasted valuable time attempting to figure out the correct effect around Final Cut. This was due to our novice experience. To prevent this from happening I think we should try to experiment with the options beforehand so we don't need to rely on extra support.

The major influences for our concepts were previous animation video's that inspired us. An example is the milkmaid done by previous A2 students. We took into close consideration how they edited the sequence while examining the lighting and choreography implemented in each scene. In the end we decided to take the real life props and analyze how the characters were designed to perform movements with their limbs. We also used google images to found a range of pictures to construct our mood board. This montage of images facilitated the film production of our animation so we wouldn't go off track from our story boarded scenes. However, we didn't anticipate us running out scenes to fill up the songs gap. This was due to the our inexperience with istopmotion as we weren't adapted to determining how much action should be filmed within a second. We were very fatigued after attempting to perfect the choreography in each scene so we ended up dismissing the time frame required per sequence. An improvement to work on this error is to keep referring to our storyboard time line in order to prevent us from creating extra ideas. Refreshing our technical pre-production materials such as the shot list and time line would definitely stop us from suffering deficient footage with our animation.

Before the post-production stage, we decided to experiment with the available filters in Final Cut. We did this to ensure that we could fix the lighting in case we encountered any inconsistencies.

Planning for Audio Commentary

Content

Outline of brief
Pitch and feedback
Research and planning- new media technologies and conventions
Challenges of shoot
Rough cut and feedback
Final cut- conventions, Goodwin theory
Research and planning ancillary tasks - conventions and new media technologies
Feedback from peer and teacher
Final ancillary tasks- effectiveness of combination
Finally how successful you were at meeting brief

Techniques

Textual prompts
Formal- Structures and scripted
Informal setting- Spontaneous
Specific
Summary
Multiple points of view
Screen Grabs- Blog, Products
Split screens
Talking heads
Clips from film- No particular order
Voice over while video runs
Artists/director

Genre Conventions/Characteristics

To update and ease the need for our group. We've decided to make a list of typical conventions used for the genre of music we made our animation for.

• Shows the artist/band through out the video
• Some special effects utilized
• Usually a calm setting, but gradually develops into something bigger when music's rhythm kicks in
• Black and white filter may be used
• Tends to have a narrative
• Close ups of the artists/band are often incorporated.
• Live show performances.

Example groups include:

• Snow Patrol
• Jamie T
• Kings of Leon
  
• The Fray
  
  
  
  
  

Digi-pak DVD / Magazine Advert FINAL Product

Digipack & Magazine Advert Progress

For the deadline, we've split into two groups to complete both products. We've played around with a few filters to make our magazine advert eye-catching and appealing. One of these main effects is the grainy filter which we used to make foreground look artistic with creates a smudge like effect to blur out the holder of the two characters. In the end, we resorted to the black & white filter as we had trouble trying to fix the lightning affecting the holders face. The next step was to select the characters dresses via the magnetic tool so we could later highlight them in a rich orange colour.

For the digipak we collected a few images from google so we could include the visual conventions of a DVD cover (as mentioned below).

Design of the Magazine Advert

We discussed as a group which one of Ollie's design would suit the Magazine. Moreover, we got our teacher to evaluate the rough drawings to help us envision how it would appeal to the audience.

The decision was to have the cover of an imaginary person holding the cut out characters from the music video as it presents the most innovative dreamy content that represents our product.


Associate Website - www.myspace.com/thehushsounds


Example Bar Code

Record Labels


BBFC Rating

Digipack Idea / Schedule

As the deadline is this coming friday. We've decided to devote our time to finishing the magazine advert first as this requires little effort then our plan to mold a 3-fold CD cover.

*UPDATE* 26/11/09
Because of the short time before the final deadline. We've decided to the design a standard DVD cover as attempting a gatefold would be time consuming despite the fact we've been provided a template. It's also because our group memebers are amateurs with photoshop so we didn't want to waste too much time learning to use the software.

Group Evaluation of the Project

As a group we feel that the project has gone quite well and we are proud of the product we produced. The planning didn't go as well as we would like because we underestimated how long it would take. We have decided that we should have done some tests before we started to experiment with timings and lighting as these were the two things we struggled with. The project turned out well and we feel that if given the choice to do it again, the only thing we would have changed is to plan it more efficiently and to make sure when filming, we were more careful with shadows. We have used quite alot of intertextuality.

For example, the cloud scene where the characters are jumping down the cloud reminds us a scene in Mary Poppins where the characters walk up the cloud stairway and float back down the smoke to the floor. We also put in space invaders from the space invaders game and the idea for the piano scene came from a toy/gadget shown in the picture below:

Analysis of Digipack

Analysis of 3-fold digipack:




How is the artist represented?
The artist is represented with a primary colour scheme. The layout of the digipack is primarily in one colour which is a plain plum colour. Once the digipack is open this colour contrasts with a pea green colour which makes it more visually exciting. This makes the artist appear abstract through the bold use of colour. The images for example, the paper cut out of a person on white paper, in reference to the artist could make him appear as plain or even slightly dull.

Is there a visual relationship between the digipack and any other product?
There is a analogy that can be associated with the Mary Poppins movie. One of the scenes that contain a similar visual style is where the men are dancing on the chimney tops. Despite the grainy colors, the whole concept of having a choreographed regime matches our dreamy sequence of Sweet Tangerine.

Does it follow the conventions?
The digipack we are analysing follows many of the typical conventions found on a digipack. for example, it has a clear track list displayed on the back cover, it has the album title and the name of the artist written on the front cover. Also on the back cover is a barcode and a production company logo. It also has a link to the bands website and other sites related to the production of the digipack. However, there isn't any obvious bonus tracks or additional features.

What is the special content?
The 3-cover digipak contains a bonus soundtrack disc containing the behind the scene production videos and extended interviews of the band. There was also a small manual book which contains the lyrics for a few of their favorite songs.

Does it have a strong mise on scene?
I believe that the mise-en-scene presented is genuinely strong and rich. Despite the monotone colour scheme utilized. A few abstract logos are incorporated with the trendy patterns used on the interior of the digipak. The urban patterns give a strong impression of the genre of the band's music. It indicates that this band is likely to have rough industrialized persona with the quality of their music.

How does it attract the audience?
The main attraction is the contrast use of colours between the interior and exterior design of the digipak. There is a limited amount of choices used for the exterior which makes the appeal seem simplistically bland but interesting to look at with the abstract artwork logos.

How can you tell who the audience is?
I think that a young audience ranged between 13-18 year old's would be attracted to this product.
The reason being is mainly due to the combined colours used to appeal to a accessible audience. You have the light shades of white surrounding the artwork on the exterior with a plain smooth purple background. The interior also serves an artistic pattern combining purple stripes and a diluted green cover. These visual contrasts also aid in making the band seem iconic to a general teen audience.

Digipack Details

We've listed

Collectors item:

- Greatest hits
- Limited Edition
- Posters
- Lyrics Manual
- B-sides
- Interviews and band footage
- Behind the scenes (Filming, Studio Production, Band Tours)
- Documentary
- Live performance
- Bonus tracks
- Higher RRP (Recommended Retail Price)

Conventions:

- Track list
- Websites
- Album title
- Visual link to video
- Production company logo
- Reviews
- Bar code
- Ratings Information e.g. PG, Explicit Content/Lyrics
- Running time
- Band artwork
- Band members/links
- Customer/Newspaper Star Ratings & Testimonials

Magazine Advert

Function:

- Promote the artist
- Sell the song
- Eye-catching (visually striking)

Conventions:

- Song/Album title
- Visual links to the video (intertextuality)
- Reviews by newspapers, music magazines, celebs e.g DJs, Radio Hosts
- Condensed info/content
- Release date
- Artist name
- Where its available
- Record label logo
- Websites e.g. myspace

Nicola's choice for digipack still

I chose this image as i felt that it is the best representational image of our music video. The image is from one of the longest shots in our music video and is i feel the most highly technical sequence from our music video. This picture depicts our two main characters which is an essential component of any DVD case or magazine advert. This image if used on either the DVD case or magazine advert would be both eye catching and enticing to anyone who views it.

Ancillary Products Planning

Digipak Preparation:

To continue with our digipak, we started designing a new template design that is of DVD size.
Originally, we planned to do a 3 fold CD template as we agreed that this would be more appealing. We believed that the overall content and style of design for this template would require more effort to gain the attraction because of the extended artwork of the exterior and interior cover.

We took a few examples of a DVD cover, 3-fold CD cover and a magazine advert for us to analyse.

Front of DVD

Back of DVD

Front of 3-fold











Interior of first fold










Full interior of 3-fold










Full exterior of 3-fold










Magazine Advert Example

Pictures

These pictures show just how many props we used throughout the project! It consists of about 153 individual items. The heart that breaks, once cut up, ended up being 33 little pieces. The space invaders scene included 18 ammo & shots, also there was 29 stars. Although there are not all of the images we drew for our project here this helps to demonstrate the amount of work we had to undertake.

Final Cut

This is our final music video enjoy!

Post-Production Finale

At the moment we're fixing the lighting of a few scenes. Due to the numerous days we filmed, the color correction isn't consistent through out. So we've decided to fiddle around with the "saturation" and "color corrector" filters to adjust the brightness and color quality.

One of the noticeable scenes was the where filmed the piano background on 2 different days. The white balance didn't appear to be even when the jump cut enters, so we needed to fix this so it wouldn't make our editing look sloppy.