Editing The Commentary
The hardest thing we found about editing our footage was cutting it down to around 5min. We had a lot of footage so we had to decide what we deleted and what we kept. We also wanted the commentary to be organized in the order of the question so Q1 and the beginning of the commentary and ending with Q4. We started the commentary with footage of the beginning of the music video and then the music fades to quite and we start talking, at the end of the commentary the talking fades and the music starts and the end of the music video is shown. To make it visually interesting we had a mixture of us talking/discussing and then some footage/pictures shown whilst were talking that relate to what were talking about e.g clips from the video, pictures of ancillary tasks (q2), screen-shots of final cut and websites we used (q4) etc.
Planing & Filming the commentary
For our commentary we had a basic plan of what we were going to do. For the arrangement we decided to do it all together in front of the camera sitting on chairs. We had a piece of paper with basic answers to each of the questions, we read them out as a voice over where we were going to put some footage over. For the more in depth answers we decided that it needed to be more natural as this way it flows much better and as this footage will have us in it, it wouldn't appear that we were just memorizing a speech. So we did it as a discussion between us talking about the project whilst covering the 4 questions.
Thursday, 10 December 2009
Media evaluation
In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
The genre of our band The Thrills are a 1960’s indie- rock band from Ireland. Instead of a performance based media product like most indie-rock bands we decided to challenge the conventions by making it into a animation; Instead of a stereotypical indie-rock band music video we wanted something interesting and fun. In most of the Thrills music videos they tended to have a sepia filter on them, so we decided to use this effect on our music video to give that 1960’s feel. To add to the 1960’s feel we used mise - en scene to help us for example a guitar, Bob Dylan a ‘Vote J.F Kennedy poster’. Also in most indie-rock music videos the camera is mainly focused on the lead vocalists but we challenged this by focusing on the main animated character. We decided to film our product on a camcorder instead of using istopmotion which was our original idea. By doing this we could intentionally add shadows and have shaky camerawork to create the childish theme which we had intended on doing. However the song talks about ’love’ ’sex’ and ’hate’ which is an opposite theme to our video. We were hugely influenced by Melpo Mene’s ‘I Adore You’ which uses a hand made drawings of characters like we do.
How effective is the combination of your main product & ancillary texts?
Our ancillary texts and main product complement each other very well. There are three parts to the ancillary products: The main part is our media product which is a animated music video for The Thrills ＇Saturday Night’ . We did a DVD cover for the album and a magazine advert as well. We did the DVD cover and the magazine advert a bit differently to our music video but we did still do a cartoon theme just slightly different; The DVD cover is a blue night skyline with shining stars and a moon in the corner. We used the same look for our magazine advert so when the consumers see it they can link the two texts together ( branding our products). The DVD cover and the magazine advert have the same colour background, font etc. except for the information on them are slightly different; The DVD cover has the song lists on the back but the advert has recommendations from music magazines - NME ‘Album Of The Year’ also the release date. The main product and ancillary texts are both simple showing consistency within our products.
What have you learnt from your audience feedback?
The first feedback was about our blog; Telling us how our blog contained the right elements and that we had done a lot of research and that they could see the links between the bands that we had decided to research as well. Also they told us to be careful when making our characters not to make them to unrealistic so that they can understand the story behind the song. Since we were doing an animation for our rough cut we did not have a lot of footage but everyone still gave a positive feedback and encouraged us; They also told us to add more transitions in and also needed to add in the song. Our teacher‘s feedback was very useful she told us to concentrate on different camera angles and various shot types. Our teacher also told us that our video was ‘a quirky and effective approach to the genre of music＇which was good because this is what we wanted the video to be like. People also commented saying how our visual relationship with the lyrics was very good because the visuals were telling what the lyrics were saying in different ways, but everyone could understand what it meant. They also told us that our storyboard was very clear and that they could see what we were trying to achieve and that it will turn out very good if we manage to do everything.
How did you use new media technologies in the construction & research, planning & evaluation stages?
We used many various different new media technologies for the construction, research and planning our media product. To construct our video we used the search engine Google and Wikipedia to help us research about The Thrills to see what genre they were and when they were formed and just general background information to give us a sense of what kind of a band they are. Google images also helped us find the images of The Thrills and also helped us search for examples of digipaks. We used Myspace to contact the band for their permission to use their song ‘Saturday night’ but they did not reply. Also we used YouTube to look up videos which we could use to give us inspiration for our video also to look at some of the Thrills videos so we could analyse their style; Also we uploaded our music video on YouTube so everyone could see it so that we could get feedback from the comments. iTunes was used to import our music, once we had filmed on a camera with a tripod to hold the camera in place, finalcut was used to edit the footage. We tried to cut the footage to the beat of the drums. Powerpoint was used to help plan our product, we made a pitch and presented it to our classmates and they were able to tell us what they liked about our ideas and what we could change. Also the our blog from Blogger helped us plan because what ever we came up with we put it on the blog as well as ideas and what we did for each lesson; We were able to see the process and the progress of our music video. Since we had to make all our props Photoshop was used to create some of the characters used in our music video; We did this buy using the pen tool. Dafont was used whilst we were making the texts for the DVD covers and magazine adverts.
The genre of our band The Thrills are a 1960’s indie- rock band from Ireland. Instead of a performance based media product like most indie-rock bands we decided to challenge the conventions by making it into a animation; Instead of a stereotypical indie-rock band music video we wanted something interesting and fun. In most of the Thrills music videos they tended to have a sepia filter on them, so we decided to use this effect on our music video to give that 1960’s feel. To add to the 1960’s feel we used mise - en scene to help us for example a guitar, Bob Dylan a ‘Vote J.F Kennedy poster’. Also in most indie-rock music videos the camera is mainly focused on the lead vocalists but we challenged this by focusing on the main animated character. We decided to film our product on a camcorder instead of using istopmotion which was our original idea. By doing this we could intentionally add shadows and have shaky camerawork to create the childish theme which we had intended on doing. However the song talks about ’love’ ’sex’ and ’hate’ which is an opposite theme to our video. We were hugely influenced by Melpo Mene’s ‘I Adore You’ which uses a hand made drawings of characters like we do.
How effective is the combination of your main product & ancillary texts?
Our ancillary texts and main product complement each other very well. There are three parts to the ancillary products: The main part is our media product which is a animated music video for The Thrills ＇Saturday Night’ . We did a DVD cover for the album and a magazine advert as well. We did the DVD cover and the magazine advert a bit differently to our music video but we did still do a cartoon theme just slightly different; The DVD cover is a blue night skyline with shining stars and a moon in the corner. We used the same look for our magazine advert so when the consumers see it they can link the two texts together ( branding our products). The DVD cover and the magazine advert have the same colour background, font etc. except for the information on them are slightly different; The DVD cover has the song lists on the back but the advert has recommendations from music magazines - NME ‘Album Of The Year’ also the release date. The main product and ancillary texts are both simple showing consistency within our products.
What have you learnt from your audience feedback?
The first feedback was about our blog; Telling us how our blog contained the right elements and that we had done a lot of research and that they could see the links between the bands that we had decided to research as well. Also they told us to be careful when making our characters not to make them to unrealistic so that they can understand the story behind the song. Since we were doing an animation for our rough cut we did not have a lot of footage but everyone still gave a positive feedback and encouraged us; They also told us to add more transitions in and also needed to add in the song. Our teacher‘s feedback was very useful she told us to concentrate on different camera angles and various shot types. Our teacher also told us that our video was ‘a quirky and effective approach to the genre of music＇which was good because this is what we wanted the video to be like. People also commented saying how our visual relationship with the lyrics was very good because the visuals were telling what the lyrics were saying in different ways, but everyone could understand what it meant. They also told us that our storyboard was very clear and that they could see what we were trying to achieve and that it will turn out very good if we manage to do everything.
How did you use new media technologies in the construction & research, planning & evaluation stages?
We used many various different new media technologies for the construction, research and planning our media product. To construct our video we used the search engine Google and Wikipedia to help us research about The Thrills to see what genre they were and when they were formed and just general background information to give us a sense of what kind of a band they are. Google images also helped us find the images of The Thrills and also helped us search for examples of digipaks. We used Myspace to contact the band for their permission to use their song ‘Saturday night’ but they did not reply. Also we used YouTube to look up videos which we could use to give us inspiration for our video also to look at some of the Thrills videos so we could analyse their style; Also we uploaded our music video on YouTube so everyone could see it so that we could get feedback from the comments. iTunes was used to import our music, once we had filmed on a camera with a tripod to hold the camera in place, finalcut was used to edit the footage. We tried to cut the footage to the beat of the drums. Powerpoint was used to help plan our product, we made a pitch and presented it to our classmates and they were able to tell us what they liked about our ideas and what we could change. Also the our blog from Blogger helped us plan because what ever we came up with we put it on the blog as well as ideas and what we did for each lesson; We were able to see the process and the progress of our music video. Since we had to make all our props Photoshop was used to create some of the characters used in our music video; We did this buy using the pen tool. Dafont was used whilst we were making the texts for the DVD covers and magazine adverts.
Media Evaluation
1.
In what ways does your media products use develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products ?
The Thrills are a indie/rock band originating from Ireland. They are inspired by the 1960s and include this in their previous videos. We then went on to look at other indie/rock bands and their videos and after analysing some videos and noticing that most music videos are performance based lead us on to think how we could challenge this convention of videos.
We wanted something different and quirky which led us to look at Michel Gondry's work. He made a video for The White Strips but it was a Lego men animation, we really liked the idea of making a different style of video and went on to do more research. We looked at Melop Mene - I Adore You, a completely hand drawn animation and it challenge normal conventions but also used them still use different shots and camera angles.
We decided to go with hard drawn to make it stand out and different to other indie/rock band videos.
Originally we were going to use Photoshop because that would of made it stand out from other animations as well as other music videos.
With our group making a animation it made it easier to get the visuals and lyrics to match up and this is a normal convention in other music videos but we added a twist to the way we made it by putting the childish edge to our drawings.
We had to keep the props and background simple and plain so that they would be easy to re-make if anything happened to them and also because we needed to make it look 1960s style and we did this by adding filters, basically by keeping this 1960s style theme that The Thrills following its a form of them and their image. We included some famous icons from the 60s such as Bob Dylan and the love he had for his music which tide nice in with the lyrics & also President Kennedy.
Even though we challenged and didn't use the normal conventions of a music video in some ways we did use the conventions and challenge them at the same time. However the childish and quirky way we made our video defiantly challenge other media products.
2.
How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary products ?
The combination of our music video and the ancillary products are effective in different ways.
Our main product - music video, we created a different quirky animation with a 1960s influence running throughout. The video is very plain almost dull colours but we need to create the sense of the 1960s so we put a sepia tone over the footage. Throughout the whole video there are no references to the band or images at all because we didn't want to get into the performance based music video. However our Ancillary products are different but still has our childish quirkiness to them, the Digipak was a simple night sky reflecting the name of the album "Saturday Night". There is a city scape skyline with bright bold stars and a moon, this is a complete change to the colour choices in the video. The font chose to be the title and information was bold and seen straight away and we used the same font on the Digipak and magazine advert which linked them nicely but then also there are other things that link the two products together. We used the skyline, font, moon, stars etc. on both of the products.
I think that by making these products so similar will help people to recognise the band and there style but also show they are different to other indie/rock bands. This to me is an effective way of making people remember and recognise our products because the more you see something or a similar object along the same lines it make the consumer think about our product.
3.
What have you learnt form your audience feedback ?
Throughout the making of our music video we were given feedback from and peers and teacher and it became very useful because it would so us where and how we were going wrong.
Our first real feedback blog was when we had to so our rough cut video to our peers, however , even though we only had 5 seconds of footage we got a good response, which made us believe in ourselves even more. Although our rough cut couldn't be properly judged because we hadn't started editing or anything yet our peers were very nice and complimentary.
We also got feed back from our teacher which also was a very useful and worth while thing because we got told things that we most likely wouldn't of thought about ourselves such as our camera work and how we needed to treat it as a actual cinematic piece of work.
The peer feedback using Goodwin's Theory was very helpful to know exactly what our peers thought of our video. With the Goodwin's theory feedback it all turned out to be good about our editing, camera work & Music and visuals.
Music and visuals was hard for us to get right while filming and then to get good feedback about how people liked the movement of the characters and other props. The last feedback we got was about the whole video but the main point that stood out to us was that we had no reference to the band at all and we never even thought about how we hadn't referred to the band until some one mentioned it.
4.
How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
We have used many different new media technologies throughout the making of our music video. In the planning stages of this project we used the internet, Google to find the lyrics and find out more about The Thrills themselves. We had to contact the band to check we could make this video and use there song, for this we used MySpace.com the on-line social networking site.
We used Wikipedia to get the basic information on The Thrills and this is when we found out about the 1960s influence and then to get more of a feel for what The Thrills do with their previous videos and how to get this classic 1960s feel.
In order to get started we had to get the music track from the CD on to the MAC, to do this we used iTunes to get the track and then converted it into a suitable file so that we could us it in Final Cut Express. Next we had to get our first ideas together to show our class and we used PowerPoint for this and then used slideshare a website which allows you to share you PowerPoints.
For some of our characters in our animation we used Photoshop and printed them and then filmed.
Anything that was filmed on the camera was then captured it to Final Cut Express and edited, it came to making our rough cut and we had to convert the Final Cut Express file in to a Quicktime file which was then uploaded to YouTube and also to blogger which is where we recorded all of our progress.
After the rough cut we had to carry on filming and capturing until everything was filmed and captured into Final Cut Express it was time to edit. When this was all finished we had to convert it again and upload it to Blogger & YouTube.
Our Digipak & Magazine advert were made all in Photoshop, however we used Google and Wikipedia to research and get the pictures we needed to use and help us create and desired finished products.
In what ways does your media products use develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products ?
The Thrills are a indie/rock band originating from Ireland. They are inspired by the 1960s and include this in their previous videos. We then went on to look at other indie/rock bands and their videos and after analysing some videos and noticing that most music videos are performance based lead us on to think how we could challenge this convention of videos.
We wanted something different and quirky which led us to look at Michel Gondry's work. He made a video for The White Strips but it was a Lego men animation, we really liked the idea of making a different style of video and went on to do more research. We looked at Melop Mene - I Adore You, a completely hand drawn animation and it challenge normal conventions but also used them still use different shots and camera angles.
We decided to go with hard drawn to make it stand out and different to other indie/rock band videos.
Originally we were going to use Photoshop because that would of made it stand out from other animations as well as other music videos.
With our group making a animation it made it easier to get the visuals and lyrics to match up and this is a normal convention in other music videos but we added a twist to the way we made it by putting the childish edge to our drawings.
We had to keep the props and background simple and plain so that they would be easy to re-make if anything happened to them and also because we needed to make it look 1960s style and we did this by adding filters, basically by keeping this 1960s style theme that The Thrills following its a form of them and their image. We included some famous icons from the 60s such as Bob Dylan and the love he had for his music which tide nice in with the lyrics & also President Kennedy.
Even though we challenged and didn't use the normal conventions of a music video in some ways we did use the conventions and challenge them at the same time. However the childish and quirky way we made our video defiantly challenge other media products.
2.
How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary products ?
The combination of our music video and the ancillary products are effective in different ways.
Our main product - music video, we created a different quirky animation with a 1960s influence running throughout. The video is very plain almost dull colours but we need to create the sense of the 1960s so we put a sepia tone over the footage. Throughout the whole video there are no references to the band or images at all because we didn't want to get into the performance based music video. However our Ancillary products are different but still has our childish quirkiness to them, the Digipak was a simple night sky reflecting the name of the album "Saturday Night". There is a city scape skyline with bright bold stars and a moon, this is a complete change to the colour choices in the video. The font chose to be the title and information was bold and seen straight away and we used the same font on the Digipak and magazine advert which linked them nicely but then also there are other things that link the two products together. We used the skyline, font, moon, stars etc. on both of the products.
I think that by making these products so similar will help people to recognise the band and there style but also show they are different to other indie/rock bands. This to me is an effective way of making people remember and recognise our products because the more you see something or a similar object along the same lines it make the consumer think about our product.
3.
What have you learnt form your audience feedback ?
Throughout the making of our music video we were given feedback from and peers and teacher and it became very useful because it would so us where and how we were going wrong.
Our first real feedback blog was when we had to so our rough cut video to our peers, however , even though we only had 5 seconds of footage we got a good response, which made us believe in ourselves even more. Although our rough cut couldn't be properly judged because we hadn't started editing or anything yet our peers were very nice and complimentary.
We also got feed back from our teacher which also was a very useful and worth while thing because we got told things that we most likely wouldn't of thought about ourselves such as our camera work and how we needed to treat it as a actual cinematic piece of work.
The peer feedback using Goodwin's Theory was very helpful to know exactly what our peers thought of our video. With the Goodwin's theory feedback it all turned out to be good about our editing, camera work & Music and visuals.
Music and visuals was hard for us to get right while filming and then to get good feedback about how people liked the movement of the characters and other props. The last feedback we got was about the whole video but the main point that stood out to us was that we had no reference to the band at all and we never even thought about how we hadn't referred to the band until some one mentioned it.
4.
How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
We have used many different new media technologies throughout the making of our music video. In the planning stages of this project we used the internet, Google to find the lyrics and find out more about The Thrills themselves. We had to contact the band to check we could make this video and use there song, for this we used MySpace.com the on-line social networking site.
We used Wikipedia to get the basic information on The Thrills and this is when we found out about the 1960s influence and then to get more of a feel for what The Thrills do with their previous videos and how to get this classic 1960s feel.
In order to get started we had to get the music track from the CD on to the MAC, to do this we used iTunes to get the track and then converted it into a suitable file so that we could us it in Final Cut Express. Next we had to get our first ideas together to show our class and we used PowerPoint for this and then used slideshare a website which allows you to share you PowerPoints.
For some of our characters in our animation we used Photoshop and printed them and then filmed.
Anything that was filmed on the camera was then captured it to Final Cut Express and edited, it came to making our rough cut and we had to convert the Final Cut Express file in to a Quicktime file which was then uploaded to YouTube and also to blogger which is where we recorded all of our progress.
After the rough cut we had to carry on filming and capturing until everything was filmed and captured into Final Cut Express it was time to edit. When this was all finished we had to convert it again and upload it to Blogger & YouTube.
Our Digipak & Magazine advert were made all in Photoshop, however we used Google and Wikipedia to research and get the pictures we needed to use and help us create and desired finished products.