A2 Media Studies

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.