GROUP 23 - Music Video 2009/10: Alice

Alice Newnum

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Our media product has many conventions of real media products in the way we have created and developed it. We kept our music video fairly conventional, as the audience is familiar with those media forms.
We researched the more unconventional directors like Spike Jonze and Chris Cunningham. We really liked the idea of having a music video that was different to the rest, however these directors do not usually make videos for our type of genre, they usually do music videos to more electro music. So we tried to give it more of a feel of those directors but keeping to the genre of the song.
The media product we made is a narrative based music video, it also features some performance of the artists lip-syncing. This is a challenge to most music videos as they are usually performance based and we didn’t use it as the main aspect of the video. We wanted to create a more original music video something that would fit the genre of music. It still conveys the main media conventions of a music video even though it is narrative based, we has used close ups of the artists featured in the video. Also thought out the video we have placed the band name “XX’’ slightly in different places for example on the mirror with xx written in condensation almost like a subliminal message to make the band identity and keep the audience familiar with the name. Which is a convention used in many music videos lots of close ups we did this as well by having the band name to meet demands of the record label. We used many camera shots to establish the scene as location is a big part of our music videos style then we would then focus in on the artist with close ups and mid shots. We also used the convention of lyrics and visuals, we feature ‘im not finished with’’ as it is sung. We also incorporate music and visuals by having the artists walk to the beat, as well as editing so the cuts go to the beat of the music. We also have Intertextuality in our music video, the bathroom scene where the boy sees the girl in the mirror relates to Romeo and Juliet the version directed by Baz Lurhmann, in the movie there is a scene where the boy and girl both see each other in the bathroom looking through the fish tank.
Another challenge of our music video is our mise en scene we choose to do a vintage old school look rather than the all glamed up look like most music videos you see on mtv. This style relates to the genre of music and the audience that follow this type of music indie acoustic. We did this by filming in an old house with lots of antique features and keeping the lighting looking fairly natural. We feel the old look fitted well with the music and would work well as a style for the band, which we then incorporated into the digi pak and advert. The actors also followed the natural theme by their costumes, we kept them smart casual and in the old style, this developed on the fashion that’s quite popular at the moment vintage it went against the usually sexually provocative look most artists display in their music videos.
We took a different approach to the usual performance sequence in music videos and we kept it in a block, the reason we did this because we didn’t want to disrupt the narrative and they worked well being more separate. We conformed to the usual conventions by having lots of different shots and keeping the audience interested. We incorporated a lot of match on action shots these worked really well with the beat of the music creating a smooth transaction. We use the media forms and Goodwin’s theory however we put these classic features in a more suttle way as this sort of genre of music doesn’t usually go with extreme these.
Our music features a hide and seek narrative. Sort of an ideology of seeking for love and hiding form the past they can’t accept.
Our digi pak and advert challenge the usual media products as usually the artists are featured on the font cover as a close up. On our product we used images from the location we did this as the house in our video is a big part of the style and we wanted to keep everything linking to this bands style. So the audience will become familiar with that bands style. Our advert and digi pak however did fit with the standard forms by having the website and company logo’s. We decided to use my space as a logo as this is now a feature for most bands as myspace is a place to now look for new artists. Our digi pak was in a gatefold design as we were asked to make a special edition one and we thought the gatefold would give us room to add all these extra little features. We went with a quite quirky design after looking at artists like Mika and Bjork. We added quite personal touches like the artists signatures making it more unique.

How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

Our music video, digi pak and advert work well altogether as a combination. The reason they work well is because they all follow a distinct theme and style. We connected the digi pak and advert by using the same font and colours. We made sure we had ‘The XX’’ in big and in the same font for both digi pak and advert. To link the music video to the digi pak we placed stills on the back. For the advert we came up with a dolls house idea, which really helps to display the style. We put the images we took on location and created them into a dolls house on Photoshop. This gives the potential buyer a clear link between the music video and the advert. We did not use any stills form the music video on the advert as they were quite pixel Ted and did not look as good and professional.
All three come across as quite effective and would definitely appeal to the target audience of the genre, our target audience is teenagers and young adults interested in acoustic indie. We keep a visual theme, which is the location and house this brings all products together. All the products appeal to this audience, as it’s quite a big scene at the moment finding the more different and original music and bands. We really use this idea and try to keep the music video different. We create a certain representation of our artists in all three products, we keep the artists in a casual way we don’t over dress them and we keep the style of genre by having them look natural and making our products have an old antique feel. We have steered away from the artificial look of most artists.

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

All the audience feedback has contributed a lot to how the music video should be edited, what should feature and even lead our group to do another filming session. Using the bog as a class means all our classmates have access to our work and can comment freely their thoughts. We presented our pitch for the song we wanted and this was in front of all our class, this gave us really in depth feedback, specifically to our idea fitting our genre. This was really useful after the rough-cut each group gave us feedback we had negative and positive and it was good to see what was working well and what we could improve on. It put in perspective what our music video was lacking. It ended up, as we needed to feature the artists more closely and get them lip-syncing a bit more maybe in a new location. Our teacher also commented on the bog, which helped us keep on the right track. After our first pitch it was fairly useful hearing people thoughts to develop on the idea.
Feedback involved going thought Goodwin’s theory and analysing our rough-cut, it made our group realise how important it is to get an audiences point of view on your work. What we really got out of having so much feedback was what is working and effective. A lot of groups commented on our style and theme incorporated by the pros and they said they thought it was effective and fitted with the tone of the music. This is one of the comments we received ‘Lots of different shots, quick changes, good story telling, good costumes and interesting footage’’ It was good to get feedback from our target audience teenagers that are interested in music.
We also got access to other groups progress, looking at the other groups would always give us ideas on how to improve our music video and remind us to think about certain points.

How did you use new media technology in the construction and research, planning and evaluative stages?

Through out our whole project we have used technology. At the beginning of our task we were given a cd of tracks to choose form and that’s all. So immediately we went on the Internet and got up the lyrics of the song’s we liked. If we didn’t have access to the Internet, our music video would not be as accomplished. We used the Internet to research everything; band, other music videos in that genre, different adverts, cd covers. It gave us most of the ideas. We also used social networking sites for instance myspace, as myspace is a big part of the music industry and it is becoming more popular to access music online and even buy it online. On myspace we found the XX and we got a feel for the sort of genre of music by listening to a few other tracks. We concluded that the genre was acoustic indie after listening to more.
On you tube we found the XX’s music video for ‘Heart skipped a beat” this was interesting as we were not expecting the video we found, as it seemed quite weak and dull and it didn’t seem typical of the genre. We also looked up videos from the same genre, researching this to see what are target audience is expecting.
Being able to access the Internet was really important to the development of our music video. The planning in particular as you can find a lot of useful information easily. We got access to the lyrics by googling the track. Having access to the lyrics was really important as we developed all our ideas using the lyrics, as we wanted the lyrics to go with the visuals, they were the basis of our ideas.
Developing all our ideas on a bog was different. It meant we could easily access what we did last lesson and it was much easier to plan. Also using the bog meant that anyone could access it and comment on our ideas. Which is what our class did, having the blog meant we got more feedback which is essential to the creating, for example when we were thinking on the ghosting idea and we did test footage we got positive feedback and used it. We also ended up putting our music video on to youtube.com this meant more people were likely to access it and comment their thoughts.
We used Photoshop to construct our two ancillary products a digi pak and advert for our music video. Using Photoshop meant we were bale to give it a more professional look and achieve more complicated ideas, which would have not worked out if we were doing it on word or paint.
We used final cut to edit our footage. Final is quite an advanced piece of software and it gave our group access to some really useful editing features fro example filters and transitions. We also put our storyboard into final cut, this really gave us a view of how are music video was going to fit together and look, which helped with planning each shot clearly.