A2 Media Studies: January 2010

Overall Evaluation

This is my overall evaluation of my coursework for my A2 Media Studies.

View more presentations from Naomi Troon.

Music Video Styles And It's Links With Theories

Within the music video industry, there are various elements that can be excluded or included within a video to make it suit the genre of music and what audiences expect from a music video in that genre.

Camera Work

The camerawork within a music video is usually specific to a genre. For example, in a pop music video, a viewer can expect to have close ups of the artist and accompany the movements that the artist and dancers make. However, an indie or rock band will have more medium and long shots which circle the band to accompany the stage performances shown in the music video. For example, at the start of our music video, we used a shot which we got inspiration from 'Reptilia' by The Strokes, which used a close up shot of the instruments which circle around the band. This shot circles around the band and also used fast cut editing to show the different parts in the band.

Generally, there are a few shots which are dominant in music video (usually the close up) which is used for a variety of reasons. Usually these shots fit the screen better (not having to stretch the image to fit the screen) as well as making the image of the artist more intimate. Also, with using popular shots such as the close up, audiences begin to recognize the artist and the voice which would substantially raise the amount of sales the artist earns.

Many music videos, relate to TV commercials with the use of the camerawork as they contain the same techniques that make commercials sell products and advertise the products (in our case the artist). This includes the lighting and shot types as they focus on the detail in the artists face.

Editing

The editing in music videos are usually quite fast with quick changes to keep momentum and also to keep the video exciting and interesting. The fast cut montage is a technique used by many producers to fit as many different images into the music video so that it takes multiple viewings to see every clip in the music video. This technique boosts the amount of views and substantially increasing viewing sales.

However, there are music videos that do use the slow pace and gentle transitions to establish the setting and mood for the music video. This emphasizes the song through the video and is often popular with female solo artists that have a large audience appeal and meeting the various requirements desired by the audience.

Editing also expands the kind of audience that will view the video, as advanced editing with use of split screens, colourisation and CGI effects provide a different kind of pleasure when watching the video.

Star Image

The star image is Richard Dyer's theory for the grouping of materials that establish a star;

'a star is an image constructed from a range of materials'

This closely shows the relationship between products that affects the selling of a product. This can include lyrical themes in songs, album covers, media coverage of the artist, live performances, and music videos.

In particular, music videos often change directors between each one but still contain elements and successful ideas that were used in the previous video. This reinforces the existing 'star image' and sometimes furthers this to expand the image by including new talents, etc.

Voyeurism

Voyeurism is the idea of the males gaze in music videos, which is usually done by including a female within the music video and manipulating the camera to meet the desires of the male gaze. Theorists such as Goodwin suggest that female performers will become the target of the male gaze by using camerawork and editing to get close up shots of the body and showing a sexual treatment of the star. This can also be reinforced by the use of dancers in male artists videos in order to show the attraction to the performer.

In female artists videos, the idea of voyeurism when the male body is shown is confusing as it raises questions about how the female viewer will interpret and respond to the images shown. In some female artists videos, they do use this gaze to show that they are independent and that they can be sexually provocative and in control of the situation.

In music videos, voyeurism is shown through the use of split screens showing characters watching the video or CCTV or webcams. This style has become frequently used in music videos by RnB and Pop genres which focus on the 'star image' of an artist.

Intertextuality

The intertextuality of music videos often includes soundtracks to films and television programs which include a story line linked to the plot in the film - and often using clips and characters.

John Stewart suggests that the references in music videos through intertextuality usually come through from cinema, fashion and photography. This can include catwalk references and news with the use of supermodels and mannequin style females which also present and support the stereotype views shown in the media and in some songs.

The sources of intertextuality will grow with the changes in technology. John Stewart also suggests that video games will begin to influence the contents of music videos in terms of editing and graphics to aim at a larger audience.

Narrative and Performance

Music Videos often have an incomplete story line so the clips are broken and separated to show a potential narrative to the video. These clips can sometimes be re-arranged and placed in incoherent orders to make a substantial plot hard to discover and make sense. This often reinforces the idea of a multiple viewing in order to understand the video and all its parts.

Steve Archer suggests that there is a formulae to making videos.

"Often, music videos will cut between a narrative and a performance of the song by the band. Additionally, a carefully choreographed dance might be a part of the artist's performance or an extra aspect of the video designed to aid visualization and the 'repeatability' factor. Sometimes, the artist (especially the singer) will be a part of the story, acting as a narrator and participant at the same time. But it is the lip-synch close-up and the miming of playing instruments that remains at the heart of music videos, as if to assure us that the band really can kick it."

By using these shots, it allows shots to establish eye contact with the audience and provide an intimacy which would not be otherwise available at a live event given by the band. This can be applied into my music video, where we used the cuts between establishing shots and a performance of the song as well as including a band member in the establishing shots.

Often the mise-en-scene, can affect the impression given by the music video and give a sense of authenticity with the stage performances in a music video. This is also important when using intertextuality within the music video with references to film - as doing a performance on the same set can create the link needed to link the two together.

Altered Time Management

This is our altered time plan.

DVD covers for Digipack

Plan for Digipack

Below are a couple of images of the original plans we made for our DVD cover along with any notes that we made whilst we designed it.

FRONT:

INSIDE:

In these designs, we included notes such as the font, colour of text and sizes so that we were able to produce the product quickly making drafting possible. By marking on the page what exactly we wanted from pictures (such as what was shown) it meant that when it came to taking still images at the bands gigs or from the bands archives.

The outline of our ideas for the DVD design came from the bands MySpace profile (shown below). The bands profile helped us to pick the colour scheme and also the type of images and information shown.

If we have a suitable amount of time, we would also like to create products that could be included in the digipack like a booklet containing all the songs lyrics, pictures of the band and maybe extra footage (a commentary or documentary of the production of the music video itself). By having this extra part to the product, it will be a more realistic product and may attract a wider audience if additional 'free' posters/other products are included in the price.

Final Magazine Advert

Plan for Magazine Advert

This is the plan for our magazine advert. By showing where we were going to put everything on the page and having notes about specific details of the advert, we will be able to produce this product quickly in order to get sufficient feedback and also to produce multiple drafts.

On this advert, we have looked at the other adverts (as shown in the research) and noted some of the typical aspects that are usually found in the example adverts. Some of the elements that we will be including are:

Band name
Digipack name
Release date
Where the product can be purchased
Record Label
Short quotes from reviews

By including these elements, we will have included some of the typical information that is given on published adverts in magazines which will essentially make our product look professional and easily understood by audiences.

Meeting the Demands of a Record Label

To meet the demands of a record label and our audience, we have to include codes and conventions of our music genre.

Just one of these conventions would be to show the band performing. Because the band we are using are unsigned, we will have a blank canvas to work on and produce individual ideas. However, for the start of the song we had influences from other artists and music videos, for example 'reptilia' by The Strokes. We also chose to use a close up of the singers face which is similar to our music genre. We decided to put this clip at the chorus so that it could be lip-synched to the music easily and because it's a common convention in music videos so it would be important to include it in our own video.

Most of the other shots are medium and long shots with panning in places. We chose to put in a range because of the importance of making the music video interesting. During filming at the gig, we used three different cameras to capture this as we had only one shot of filming the song as it was to look as natural as possible as well as being to a live audience.

The digipack research identified the importance of including record label logos and names on the case/covers. We wanted to incorporate this into our own print products and came up with a logo for our own record label. We put this on the back of our digipack as it looks professional and it's also in a place that audiences would look at for information on the record label.

The final logo above is our logo which we placed on the back of the digipack. The idea for the name came from both myself and Katie because we thought that it was a convention of record labels to include names, for example Warner Bros.

Mind map for Digipack and Magazine Advert

This is our mindmap for the digipack we hope to create including most of the features we wish to include.

This is our mindmap for the magazine advert we hope to create including most of the features we hope to include.

Final Storyboard

This is the final storyboard for our music video.

Final Music Video

This is our final music video that we have produced to go with our print products.

Rough Cut

This is the rough cut of our music video for Modern Mafia - Rain Dance.

In this rough cut of our music video, we have applied some of the effects that we will be using and also all of the clips that will be in the final music video. There are several changes that we would like to make for the final version of this music video to make sure that it hits all of the codes and conventions of the genre of music we are making a music video for.

These changes will be small ones, such as finish applying the effects to the clips and change some of the transitions. We think that small changes like this will help the video look more professional and also make it look more of a indie music video for the final product. Also by making these changes, we will be making sure that we are giving our audience what they want which we know about from the questionnaire we completed earlier in the project.

There are also a few changes that we want to make in order to make the music video individual but also professional, for example, adding the bands name and song name at the beginning of the song to introduce it - just like on music channels, etc. By doing this we think that it will give the individual twist that the song needs to be successful if published.

We will be making these changes as soon as possible in order to get to work on the print publications as soon as we can to ensure that they are of the same quality as the music video and vice versa.

Filming - Part 2

The second part of filming went quite smoothly even though we did have to make previous changes to the idea to suit factors that we couldn't control (the weather being too good - is there such a thing????!!!)

Unfortunately for this filming day, we didn't get the tripod we had booked so we had to use our shoulders to keep the camera steady. This is an advantage that we had found whilst filming - there was three of us so it worked well :)

We began filming from where we left off after the gig and the telford scenes and begun in shifnal. At the start of this filming, I was the one picking the locations for the event and we ended up shooting in the outskirts of shifnal for an erie feel.

The map above shows where we filmed in shifnal.

The weather at this point was quite mild and there was a little fog. On the screen this looked great but it was a shame that we didnt have any rain like we had hoped. At this location, we used a long shot with Ed walking towards the camera and walk past eventually. We did this a couple of time to make sure that his foot timing was correct and also to make sure there wasn't any camera glitches.

In the town, we filmed down a little alleyway which showed a traditional town. This gave the transition from busy to deserted that we wanted - even though there wasn't the whole rain appeal that we had hoped for. Unfortunately, we had to do quite a few shoots of this clip because people kept walking into the clip and kept being disrupted but we managed to go with a clip with just talking in it which we could take out of the final clip (as we weren't going to use the sound in the clips anyway).

Overall, it was a good day filming and we managed to make the most of the equipment we had (camera and a shoulder) and also the weather also helped us to produce a erie effect instead of the whole sunny day we thought we might have got.

Editing the video

When editing the music video, we chose to use a lot of effects on the clips to make it fit in with the codes and conventions of this genre of music as well as music videos. To do this we decided to use Final Cut on the Mac computers. This gave us the effects to choose from as well as being able to import other parts like text into the music video where we wanted it to go.

At first we looked back at our footage after we put all the clips into the order that we wanted them and then chose to put layers over clips that seemed too light. To do this we chose to use the ........ layering effect. This effect adds brown tones over the image which toned down the brightness of the original colours. This made a cool, moody effect over the clips. The clips we chose to use this effect was on the performance (gig) clips as well as the instrument clips that were used at the beginning and towards the end of the music video.

After sorting out the layers on the clips, we then decided to place transitions inbetween the clips but to keep the video interesting used different transitions throughout (although repeating in some places). The transitions we used were:

We chose to use these transitions for various reasons which include keeping the music video entertaining. However, when we added these transitions it did knock all of our clips out of place so that made the clips out of sync with the music (especially on the bits where we wanted to lip sync the video). Unfortunately, there was not enough time to correct the clips into the exact timings we had before because of the timings on the transitions. We did try and get them as close as we could though.

Cutting the song

Unfortunately, we have had to cut our song down from the original length in our last editing session. We did this because we did not have enough footage to fill the whole 6 minutes of the song and also because we did not want to reuse clips and also go filming again when we are so close to the deadline.

By cutting the song to just over 4 minutes, we were able to keep the minimum length for the music video but also be able to make sure the music video was still realistic enough. We cut the song at a suitable place (there was a instrumental part before the chorus was repeated over and over again) so we cut it there and used a fade out of the music at the end of the song so cover up the obvious cutting part.

Changing Idea's

After completing our rough cut of the music video and some of our problems with the weather, we will be making a few changes to the music video in order to make sure that the video is not repeatative. These changes will be:

Getting rid of the fading at the end of the song and correct the timing so it finishes on the last chord in the phrase.
Where there are no images on the screen due to weather not permitting to be good and rain for us, we will be putting a new scene into it (which will mean filming YET AGAIN but it will make it good).

In this scene, we will be...
Adding text to the start of the video, as if on MTV music channels to give a hint of professionalism to the video.

We think that by making these changes that our music video will look better and hit more of the codes and conventions in indie rock music.

Oh no, the weather!!

Unfortunately for us, the weather is not behaving itself and is therefore causing a bit of chaos for our music video and the final filming/editing.

For one of our scenes, we need it to rain on the Iron Bridge so that we can film it and it's not rained in a while and the deadline is coming up quickly so we are having to think of new idea's (backup plans) incase we cannot get the footage before the deadline.

Current resolutions to this include faking the rain using poured water on a puddle, using small clips from movies or other music videos, changing the idea of a 'wet' scene entirely.

A2 Media Studies