evaluation questions unfinished.

Evaluation questions

In what ways does your media product use develop or challenge the conventions of real media products?
The genre of The Thrills is indie rock, originating from Ireland, but with an added hint of 60’s American culture influencing the band’s lyrics and video’s. We decided to portray this genre in a quirky and not necessarily conventional style, opting for animation instead of the band’s favoured performance based videos/ This kind of went against what is seen as typically ‘indie’, therefore slightly challenges the genre’s established conventions. Although we was going against the traditional indie video format, we felt that it still fit within the genre as it’s becoming more and more about creating the unexpected, and mixing indie rock music with sometimes quirky and humorous video’s, which was our intentions with our own product. To further this quirkiness we decided to use a video camera to make the animation as oppose to our original istopmotion plan. This enabled us to use effects such as shaky camera and intentional shadows to fit with the childish/amateur theme we were trying to depict. The mise-en-scene used in our video carried on this style, and by using simple colours like creams, browns, black and reds, we was able to add to the overall simplicity of our product, along with the childish drawings we used to create our various scenes, largely inspired by Michel Gondry’s work on music video’s such as White Stripes – Fell In Love With A Girl, which uses Lego animation. We were also influenced by the video ‘I adore you’ by Melpo Mene, which used a ‘hand-made’ visual style, and built on what is sometimes known as the ‘cute factor’. With our video following a similar style to this, it provided quite a contrast between visuals and lyrics as although according to Goodwin’s theory we did include an amplified relationship between visuals and lyrics, the childish/innocent drawings clashed with the images of prostitutes and lyrics such as “is this what they call sex?” and “dry-humping on dance floors”, causing quite an indie-inspired, odd relationship between the music and the visual style of our video. The mise-en-scene in our product worked well with the genre as we made props such as; a guitar, a Bob Dylan character, a nightclub, a record player with a vinyl, and a ‘vote for J.F. Kennedy’ poster. As well as providing a reference to 60’s America, the poster also added a subtle political allusion, which is a rare convention in indie videos, but evident in 80’s indie band, The Housemartin’s, who used music to express their strong Marxist views. The most extreme example of using music to illustrate political preferences I found is the video ‘Megalomaniac’ by Incubus, with critics describing the video as a “barely veiled condemnation of George W Bush” and essentially targeting corrupted politics. As previously stated, The Thrills are largely inspired by 60’s America and we tried to incorporate this as much as possible into our own video by using iconic references from this era such as films like Psycho and Lolita, on the television screen in one of the scenes, as well as various images of Bob Dylan and an Iron City beer bottle. This kept our product in tone with previous Thrills’ videos, and added to the whole branding of the band. With editing, we mostly cut our footage to the beats of the music, a typically Indie feature, and also to re-enforce the link between the music and the visuals. Overall, although our video may have challenged typical conventions of Indie music videos in certain parts, doing this is what makes an Indie video stand out which is what the genre is all about.

How effective is the compilation of your media product and ancillary tasks?
Our video, magazine advert and DVD cover works well together in that they all share the theme of animation and visual simplicity. Also, just like the visuals on our video match the lyrics, the image on our ancillary tasks matches the title of the album. For example, the title is ‘Saturday Night’, therefore we used a skyline silhouette, and a night sky with stars and a moon, demonstrating a Saturday night. However, our ancillary tasks use a slightly different animation-look style than the video in that it’s a little more ‘cartoony’ and uses more bold and vibrant colours such as blues and yellows in order to make our product more eye-catching. Also, we made our DVD cover and magazine advert very similar, using the same background and fonts, just with different information on each product in order to create a strong, recognisable branding for the album. We haven’t used any photos of the band on our album as there aren’t any in our music video. The band is mainly represented by the animated guy in our video who we made part of our album by putting an image of him on the spine, creating a link between the products.

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?
The first feedback we received was about our blog; how our planning was going, what research we had done into similar bands, what test footage had we done so far, and how is our original music video concept. This feedback was generally very positive, and we were told that we had a good balance of text and images on our blog. Our concept was also praised and described as “innovative” and “imaginative”. The only criticism we received was that we needed to make sure that our “drawings look realistic enough to recognise and that they move smoothly for understanding the story behind it”. This was definitely something we needed to bear in mind, and made us more alert when drawing our props and making sure they were simple and clear to the audience. After making our storyboards we then got to work on filming, resulting in creating a rough cut. As we was doing an animation it took us a lot longer to film our footage than some other groups so there really wasn’t much to judge. However, we were informed that our artwork on the props was good, but we needed to add the song to the sequence and start thinking about transitions. Our teacher feedback included comments on making sure that we treat the animate like cinematic footage and pay more attention to angles, movement and distance, and basically making sure we included variety in our camerawork. This was something we worked on during our second week of filming, and made sure that we varied our camerawork. On a positive note, our style of video was described as “a quirky and effective approach to the genre of music” which was appreciated as this was the effect we was aiming for. When we had finished our entire video we received feedback based on Goodwin's theory. Here we were told that our "humour was enjoyable", the "relationship between lyrics and video visuals were obvious giving images that illustrate in different ways what is being said in the song", and "there is a voyeuristic treatment of the female body when the prostitute is shown". All of this feedback was appreciated, and we were made aware of things our video seemed to do that we never even intended (voyeuristic view of the prostitute). All this feedback was positive so we were quite happy with what we had produced. Our final feedback was on our ancillary tasks. Feedback included "good use of indie inspired typefaces", "strong relation with the final media product" and "no images of the band". However this last comment may be true, but having no image of the band was definitely intended as based our album on the video which represents the band as the one animated man, featured on the spine of our DVD cover. All feedback received during this product was very constructive and made us aware of elements that we had done well and other things that we needed to work more on and improve.

How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
To plan our music video we used Google Search engine a lot to research The Thrills and see what kind of band they were, what inspires their music/videos, and the band’s overall image. Online encyclopaedia, Wikipedia came in handy for this, as did video sharing website Youtube. On Youtube we were able to watch The Thrills music videos to gain an understanding of a signature style which is a constant theme in their videos and image. This is when we noticed a strong 60’s American influence, largely demonstrated through the sepia filter on some of their videos, 60’s intertextual references in their visuals as well as song lyrics, as well as the band’s choice of costume. All of this information was then put onto our planning blog, by use of blog publishing system, Blogger. On here we published our pitch which was done on a PowerPoint presentation as we felt it was the most effective way to pitch our ideas for our music video, explain why we have decided to do certain things, and use visual examples that illustrate different elements of our media product. Once we had planned our concept and pitched it to the class, we begun to make our product. As we chose to do an animation, we had to make all of our own props. Most of these were made simply with paper and pencils, but some were made on Photoshop. We took some photos of these props with a stills camera and uploaded the photos to Blogger. We then filmed our animation using a camera and tripod. Although originally our plan was to use istopmotion in our video, we eventually decided against it as we found it too time consuming and thought using a video camera would help us achieve the overall effect we was aiming for. We uploaded our footage to Final Cut as we went, and eventually started to put the visuals to the music in a sequence. We tried to cut the music to the music beats as much as possible. We then added a sepia filter to all of our footage in order to link the product to previous Thrills videos. We also sped up the footage in order to make our animation go faster. Finally, we uploaded our video to Youtube and begun working on our ancillary tasks. To make our DVD cover and magazine advert we used Google Images to get the images we wanted to use, before modifying them on Photoshop to make them fit with our animation style specifications. We also used the website Dafont, which is an archive of freely downloadable fonts, for the text on our products. All of these new media technologies have helped amateur film makers by making it easier for them to access online media, and create their own products using programs such as Final Cut Pro that’s targeted at independent film makers so not as complicated to use as other programs like Avid’s Media Composer.