Evaluation by Sophie Pritchard

Q1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products.

Our media product includes a music video, a digipak and a magazine advert, all of which that follow music video forms and conventions and also Goodwin’s music video theory. The music video that we created is a conceptual video as it does not follow a narrative; instead it involves random different ideas that have been combined together to create a comical and interesting video. The style and genre of the music video is a comedy as we have created irony within it by taking traditional stereotypes of an R&B music video and playing with these ideas to create something funny.

The way we were able to make sure our music video followed the forms and conventions of a professional music video were through Andrew Goodwin writing in ‘Dancing in the Distraction Factory’ (Routledge 1992.) The first point Goodwin creates is music videos demonstrate genre characteristics. The music which we used for our video is ‘Milkshake’ by Kelis ft Mightyfools which is an R&B/ dance song. To portray this within our video we decided to use the characteristics of an R&B music video and a dance music video however to create it to be comical. The characteristics we used are sexual elements such as the washing of a car in a bikini, female dancers and eating of strawberries.

The reason why we did this was that within our genre of music videos, many of these elements are used often for example in the music video 'Candy Shop' by 50 Cent. They have become traditional within that genre. So to create our music video to be professional we decided to include them. If we were to copy each element exactly like how the professionals have done that would create our music video to not be unique so therefore we created it to be a comedy by making the stereotypical sexy females washing the car to be males wearing bikinis washing a car.

We gained this idea from the video by Aphex Twin, ‘Windowlicker' as this includes horrifically, ugly men being portrayed as women.

 The second point Goodwin makes is if there is a relationship between the lyrics and the visuals. We accomplished doing this throughout our music video mainly by involving milkshakes. We included this in various parts of our video as by involving milkshakes makes the lyrics relate to the visuals.

  This was the only way we could relate the lyrics to the visuals because with the song being a remix there is no established lyrics within the song.
Third point stated is if there is a relationship between the music and the visuals. Are video definitely follows this point as the music for our video has a range of paces throughout, so we have fitted our visuals to go alongside the beats of the song. An example that shows this well is a part of the song where the pace increases dramatically, getting faster and faster, so to relate the music to the visuals we made the visuals cut to the beat and tempo which is where you see the morphing of a female into a male. 

Within our video we do include elements which involve frequent notion of looking, which is the 5th point Goodwin makes. We have many parts in the video that portray people in the video in a sexual way. For example the female dancers are dressed in a way that creates them to be sexy as they are wearing a leotard and high heels.

There is also camera angles that enhances this and shows voyeuristic treatment of the female body such as low angles, close ups and tilting to reveal the body this being a male gaze. The dancers in the video where also given a sexy choreographed dance which on its own gives the sense that they are on sexual display to the audience.

The last point made my Andrew Goodwin is if there is intertextual references made within the video. Within our video we did not use exact intertextuality however we did include common characteristics that are seen in many famous music videos such as 'These Boots are made for Walking' by Jessica Simpson which has a classic car wash scene in it.

The forms and conventions if our music video does however indicate our influences for certain parts of the video like as mentioned before The Aphex Twins - 'Windowlicker' was our main inspiration for the video as we liked the way the video created irony around the sexual elements within R&B music videos.

http://www.wix.com/sophielouise_1994/music-video-evaluation#!question-1

Evaluation by Sophie Pritchard

Q2. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

In order to create an effective product being our music video it is important that we have made a brand image for our product so that our product becomes distinctive to the company brand.

First of all we created a digipak and we knew in order to make it professional looking and as realistic as possible we must include conventions which are within a traditional album cover and digipak.

The elements we have included are the record labels logo, the production company’s logo, a list of the sound tracks on the album, the title of the albums name and artist, copyright information, a background image and a continuous theme throughout. By doing all of this it has made our digipak look professional and now includes the forms and conventions needed for a digipak.

The front cover of our digipak involves an image of a girls eyes however is repeated in strips showing her eye colour to be different in each strip.  The colours used for the eye colours are bright and bold which is a continuous theme within our company as we want to come across as fun and appealing to a teenage generation. The image has an overall pink hint as pink being a feminine colour it implies about the sexual theme within our music video. The image takes up the whole page as it is a close up photograph; this creates to be more eye catching. We have used the same font within the digipak as this sticks to the conventions and forms, another element which makes us recognisable as a brand. The font is sharp and in capital letters which again is eye catching.


The influences we gained which inspired us for the digipak was the music video ‘Bad Romance’ by Lady Gaga. The reason being is within this videos there is clips of her which shows her eyes to be enlarged and doll like, this inspired us as we found this very interesting to look at and memorable.

We wanted to create something like this to be within our music video, our digipak and our magazine advert. We came up with the idea of using coloured eye contacts as with our music production being called UV productions we wanted a UV theme to be throughout our brand. So by having brightly coloured eye contacts this would be noticeable and be memorable to our brand.

Within the magazine we also had to contain the forms and conventions that are involved within a magazine advert which are also within the digipak, such as the logos, titles, images etc. We also decided that we must stick to the same forms and conventions as we have done with the digipak in order to stick to the same theme throughout.

. As done in our digipak our magazine includes the same font and image as this is what creates our brand to have a theme and also sticking to the brightly used colours allows our product to be appealing to our target audience. For the background of our magazine advert we have used an effect which creates a liquid effect as if paint is been put into water. This element has been included in our music video and also in our digipak which has been a successful way of linking the products together to be from one brand. 

Overall we as a group have tried to include elements and themes within our brand to connect our products together; we have also used traditional forms and conventions in order to create our product to be professional looking. 

http://www.wix.com/sophielouise_1994/music-video-evaluation#!question-2

Evaluation by Sophie Pritchard

Q3. What have you learned from your audience feedback?

In order to gain the target audience we wanted we carried out some research of what a dance music fan is interested in, in order to advertise and create the right characteristics within our music product. We then came up with a demographic who had a particular interest in dance music, the demographic is a male, his age is 18, his likes are DJ'ing and clubbing, his favorite past time is reading Mixmag, his favorite TV shows are Misfits, Everybody Loves Raymond and Skins and his favorite music video channel is MTV Dance.

We decided on these particular things as through researching different medias we found out what particular medias target to a dance music fan which resulted in the many things listed above. To be accurate with our demographic we researched on the website BARB which holds all the information about TV channel ratings and presented us with the information of what channels reached the most viewing hours which allowed us to get an idea of what channels would show our music video to our demographic.

Through doing research on dance music videos it was apparent that there is certain characteristics which are involved within the videos, such as upbeat edits, energetic context, for example a club scene. Through doing target audience research through his likes and dislikes it shows that he would want the characteristics of a dance music video to be shown. We created a presentation to show to an audience of our target age being 17 and older to demonstrate to them what our music video would include.

From showing this presentation we created some questionnaires for our audience to fill out to see if they believed our music video would work and if they think it would reach to our target demographic. By doing this it was extremely beneficial for me and my group as it allowed us to see if we needed to change elements to make are aim more reachable.

The questionnaires informed us that we were heading in the right direction as the characteristics we wanted to involve did show that our genre of music would be a cross between dance music and R&B music which was our aim. The questionnaires also showed us that our target demographics age was right as the majority agreed to the age group.
Many dance music videos are simply of a clubbing scene however this would be hard to create with the resources we as a group have, so therefore we had to come up with an idea which would have some dance music characteristics but also have other elements. We decided to create a comical side to the video as within our demographics likes, was the TV show 'Everybody Loves Raymond' which is an American comedy.

With being the same age as our demographic we as a group knew that many 18 year olds watch comedy shows so therefore having a comedy element within the video would still be appealing to our target audience. Through doing further research on professional music videos we realised that in many of the videos there is a sexual element, this is shown in such videos as Bob Sinclar 'What I Want,' here it shows women  in a stereotypical way to be shown as perfect.

Through knowing this we thought for our music video we would contain this however create it to be ironic in order to show comedy. Through including all of these elements we believe that this would gain the interest of our target audience as we believe as a group that through the representation of sexuality and showing aspects of stereotypical characteristics of a dance music video being the showing of sexy female dancers and having certain situations such as washing a car in swimwear is extremely engaging for a teenage male. Also comedy being appealing to our audience we would include this to gain are audience attention.

http://www.wix.com/sophielouise_1994/music-video-evaluation#!question-3

Evaluation by Sophie Pritchard

Q4. How did you use new media technologies in the research, planning, construction and evaluation stages?

While creating our overall media product we used a variety of technologies in helping us along the way in many areas of our product such as cameras, tripods, internet, Photoshop, blogger and several other technologies.

Within the video production of our product we had to consider the equipment we needed in order to create our intended music video. The equipment we used for this was a Sanyo HD camera, a tripod and a portable site light. The camera we used was good as it allowed us to capture the footage we wanted. Also when using this camera it allowed us to capture high resolution footage therefore resulting us in having a more professional looking video. Before using this camera we was given a different camera to use which was more dated, tape video recorder which was producing low quality footage so when given the HD camera we was very pleased at the difference in quality.

The first image shows the first camera we used which produced blurry, out of focus footage however the second image shows the Sanyo HD camera which gave us high quality footage.

The only issue we found when using the HD camera was that when zooming in on the camera it would become out of focus, leaving us with blurry footage. We overcame this issue by zooming in on the parts we wanted to be close up when on the editing suite. The tripod we used was very ideal as its features created us to be able to get the certain shots and angles we wanted in the video. When wanting to have a low angle or a high angle we could do this due to the range in height the tripod went which was very good quality.

Here these images show the variety in anlges the tripod allowed us to do.

Also other elements of the tripod such as the pan and tilt controls let us gain different camera shots, adding variety to our video. When using the tripod as well we could gain a steady shot, making it to be professional. When shooting in different locations this meant that the lighting changed each time and also when filming the lighting at points was very dull. To solve this we used a portable site light which we was able to use indoors and outdoors. Using the artificial light made our shots look much more vibrant.

The first image here shows our shots without the artificial lighting and then the second image shows the massive improvement in vibrancy and colour when using it.

When editing our video we also used technologies to help us, the main one being the software on Apple, Final Cut Express. As this was mine and my groups first time using this software we had to get to grips with the controls available. To do this we created some short clips and played around with tools to see what effects we could create. We also had to work out the ways in cutting and rearranging footage before working on our material. Here is one of our short video clips that we created in order to get used to the technology.


Once we knew how to use the editing software we was able to use it very efficiently. We found cutting our footage very easy and also fitting in the cuts to the beat. One thing when editing our footage that we was not pleased about was the vibrancy of the colours. As our production company being UV we wanted all the colours in our video to be bright and colourful so to change the colours we used the colour effects which allowed us to change the brightness, contrast and hue of our colours which really made a difference to our video.

We was overall very pleased the outcome of our video due to the software we was available to. The Mac computers were also a great help as with the large screens we was able to cut footage to the exact points we wanted.
Technologies also played a big role when creating our digipak and our magazine advert. For the magazine and the digipak we had to take some photographs in order to have images to use. The camera we used to take these photos was an Nikon D40 digital stills camera which created us to have high resolution photographs, which was especially good as we wanted close ups so therefore the quality of the photos was of a high standard, making our products look professional.

When editing our photos we used Adobe CS4 Photoshop which was a great software to touch up any imperfections of the photos. Also for our digipak and magazine advert we wanted to use a particular photo however to change the colour of the eyes in the image. We did this very easily with using Adobe Photoshop as the tools available are very straightforward however creates top quality effects.

We also used Adobe Photoshop in other areas of our work such as when creating our company production logo and also when making the morphing section of our music video we had to align all the photographs so that the bodies were in line with each other and to also to make sure they all had the same lighting to allow the stop motion to work effectively.

Another technology that has helped us hugely throughout the process has been Web 2.0. the reason for this is it allowed us to carry out a wide range of research, giving us access to websites such as YouTube and search engines. Also it allowed us to use Blogger which we used to hold all of our progress and information about creating our products, acting as a diary to our stages of creation.

Overall the software and hardware we was available to during the whole process of creating our music video, our digipak and magazine advert has been extremely useful and to our advantage. We have been able to create high quality products through the technologies we have used.

http://www.wix.com/sophielouise_1994/music-video-evaluation#!question-4



Filming Day 5

For our last filming session all we needed to do was to film some close up shots of the car wash scene, the falling of the milkshake and throwing of the ice cream. We wanted to use the video on our blog of things smashing as inspiration for part of this filming day. We used four different glasses filled them with milkshake and smashed them on a white sheet so that it was possible to see the full effect of the glasses smashing. To get the intended angles we had to use two cameras, both being in different positions when filming as we only had 4 glasses so therefore we had to be  precise to get a variety shots. The next thing we had to capture was the throwing of ice cream at a wall, which we planned  in our post - it storyboard. To achieve this we again used both cameras at different positions and captured the same footage at different angles. we found that by spraying the wall with water before throwing the ice cream gave the best effect as it would allow the ice cream to melt down the wall and splatter once thrown. Finally the last things we had to film was the close ups for the car scene which was quick and easily done as we knew the car wash sequence already. This day of filming was very successful  as we managed to get every piece of footage that we needed to be capable of finishing our music video. 

Changes to album cover

After looking at many CDs we decided ours was missing a few things such as; a blurb including the rights to the music (which we do not hold) more songs (as it has two CDs and we had five versions of the same song!) we also included details about the songs such as timings and featuring artists.

We also realised we had made the small mistake of not including the artist's name on the cover! Here is our improved version.

Our favourite part is that if you use an app on your smartphone that can scan QR barcodes to scan the barcode on the bottom right, you will be taken to our blog;

uvproductions.blogspot.com

-Click the image to enlarge and see it the way it should be seen-

Props

Here are the props we used within our music video:

This is an image of a cocktail umbrella which we used at the start of the film as it is eye catching and creates mystery of what is going to be included in the video.

We also used strawberries in the video as it was used within stereotypical shots which portray sexual elements.

As the title is 'Milkshake' we decided we must include milkshakes within the video. This prop was used throughout the video to keep relating to the title of the song and to remind the audience.

This is an image of food colouring in water, we used food colouring to create a certain effect which matches a certain part of the music. It goes well with the music as it is a slow movement which goes well with the slow paced section in the song.

When the music slows down we decided to film a crazy daisy squirting water.

Champagne is another prop used which is used for a champagne fight in the music video. It creates comedy within the video.

We needed to use props for the car wash scene to make it realistic so objects such as a sponge, bucket and hose was used.

In this picture you can see all the props used in the car wash scene, also you can see the car that we used. This again was needed to be realistic for the audience to watch.

Ice lolly was a prop we used as we wanted to create an intended effect with it which was to show the ice lolly melting but in fast motion, to see the whole melting process.

We decided to follow our post it note storyboard and shoot ice cream being thrown at a garage door. For this we needed the prop of the ice cream. 

We wanted to try and experiment and use the images that we have used for inspiration and video colored paint dripping down a white page. 

We also covered the camera in cling film so that we could spray silly string towards the camera. 

To end the music video we used the prop, being a part popper. This shown popping at the end of the song shows the ending of the video.

At the moment we are playing around with the magazine advert, here are a few of our ideas.

We are not sure whether to go with the split album cover or the normal one, we are happy with the background as it fits in with the conventions of our music video and our album cover. The benefits of the split album cover are that it looks different to the album cover and shows that is more of a themed product than the same thing simply put on a different sized background. It also shows that we can use photoshop properly more than just plonking an image on another. However, many people we have asked have told us that the first image looked more professional and more like we are promoting an album, this is because it follows the conventions of other album promoting magazine adverts. Our final choice is still in contention.