EVALUATING OUR A2 MUSIC

VIDEOBy Penda Sosseh

IN WHAT WAY DOES YOUR MEDIA PRODUCT USE, DEVELOP OR CHALLENGE FORMS AND CONVENTIONS OF REAL MEDIA PRODUCTS?

OUR MUSIC VIDEO

We wanted to create an authentic pop video for our media coursework. We did a lot of research into music videos of a similar style and genre to ours to gauge what kind of thing we should be aiming to create.

As our video would be mainly narrative based, not performance based like some pop videos it was important that we established a setting for the audience to understand the context of the video.

We tried to follow the conventions of real media products in our music video by discussing the conventions of videos similar to the video we wanted to create. We wanted to make a typified pop video similar to the artists we were emulating like Katy Perry, Taylor Swift, Pink, Avril Lavigne.

We created a star image based on these examples, we wanted a young female performer that would appeal to young audiences, specifically girls aged 11-25 who liked pop music.

We created the pop star, Lois Lame, and wanted her to emulate artist like Taylor Swift, and Avril Lavigne, they are both strong independent young women who present strong morals to their fans.

We also wanted to adhere to pop music video genre conventions so we wanted the video to be colourful, eye-catching and lighthearted.

We noticed that popular music videos often had a simple narrative that focused on teens, similar to a TV show or short film, so we created a narrative out of the lyrics of our song, ‘One of The Boys’ by Katy Perry, this was similar to the music videos of Taylor Swift which often feature her playing a character in her narrative.

Lois Lame is playing two characters in her music video, so we used costume to distinguish the difference to the viewer, our key item was a wig, since we had viewed lots of different successful music videos by artists like Christina Aguilera and Britney Spears.

The ‘Tomboy’ Character

The ‘Girly’ Character

Examples of artists using wigs to play characters in their music videos

Our video has a simple narrative, our main character played by Lois Lame, is a tomboy who wants to date one of her friends, a boy, who already dating a ‘girly’ girl. So she decides to have a make-over but then decides she’s too good for him.

We analyzed the lyrics of the song to come up with a narrative that we could create visualy without any dialouge.

As our video would be mainly narrative based, which is typical of music videos from young pop artists we wanted to have our narrative take place in a school, this also made it easy for us to know where to shoot. Many artists have set their music videos in schools.

Normally the star or performer have a glamorous look in their music video, they normally wear a lot of make-up and have fashionable clothes, so we wanted to emulate this in our music video.

Demi Lovato Taylor SwiftLois Lame

OUR ALBUM ADVERT We had a photoshoot using some

of the costumes and props from the music video so we could use the images for our digi-pak and album advert, we used them because we wanted the audience to be able to see the link between the video and the digi-pak and album advert.

I wanted the album advert have the same visual or overall theme as the digi-pak so I decided I wanted to focus heavily on star image for these media products.

I researched some album covers for inspiration for our digi-pak.

My Album Advert

INFLUENTIAL ALBUM ART

I decided that we wanted to have a very clean, and simple digi-pak, similar to the things I’d seen other female pop singers use. So I opted out of having a colourful background and decided instead to have Lois Lame wearing a Superwoman outfit on the cover because I thought that the colours would be very eye-catching against a plain background.

I decided that Lois Lame needed a signature font like many contemporary artists, so I tried out many fonts till I decided on the one on the cover.

EXAMPLES OF ARTIST’S SIGNATURE FONT

HOW EFFECTIVE IS THE COMBINATION OF YOUR MAIN PRODUCT AND ANCILLARY TEXTS?

Digi pak

Album advert

When we created our star, Lois Lame, her name became part of her image and thus we decided to include the SuperWoman motif in all of our media products to create a ‘house style’ so the audience could recognize that they were all linked.

When we had our photoshoot for the star, we used both outfits from the music video and we also took some pictures of Lois’ signature glasses to include in our ancillary products. All of this plus the overall ‘look’ helped to shape our house style.

We think that we appealed to our target audience of young teenage girls by adhereing to the pop music genre conventions and by following in the footsteps of other pop artist by for example making Lois play a ‘character’ (SuperWoman) similar to example Miley Cyrus playing Hannah Montana.

Both my digi-pak and album advert have a plain white background which is common for artists who want to focus on star image like Beyonce and Miley Cyrus.

This can however be linked to the music video when Lois performs in a studio in front of a white background.

SUPERWOMAN/MAN MOTIF The song that we picked helped influnce this, one line in the song

goes as follows- ‘‘And caught you staring at me…But now you're gonna have to take

a number.’’ this is referring to the boy that Lois loves in the song, after she transforms into ‘One of the girls’ and changes her appearance she decides she’s too good for him so we thought that portraying her as SuperWoman showed that she was a strong, independent girl who didn’t need a boyfriend to complete her.

WHAT HAVE YOU LEARNED FROM YOUR AUDIENCE FEEDBACK?

We screened our music video to an audience we thought would be similar to our target audience young people (mainly girls) under the age of 18.

After we screened our music video we asked them the following questions-

1. What do you think was successful?2. Can you think of any improvement that could

be made?3. Who do you think the target audience is, and

does it appeal to them?4. Does it fit the genre?5. What is the narrative? Is it clear to the

audience?6. Do you really like my work?

We asked three groups of four people to answer our questions and here are the results-

They all found the narrative easy to intrepret and understand and found that they plot was similar to other pop music videos

They identified and could relate to our character

They said it was evident we had a variety of different shots and locations

It was pointed out that we needed to improve some of the lip synching and guitar playing because it could have looked better

They identified that the target audience would be young people/teenagers and that we had interpreted the song well.

HOW DID YOU USE NEW MEDIA TECHNOLOGIES IN THE CONSTRUCTION AND RESEARCH, PLANNING AND EVALUATION STAGES?

We used Wordpress to present our media portfolio. It was simple and easy to use and is a well known platform that was available on our computers, smart phones and tablets.

During planning and research we used Youtube extensively to watch music videos when we were studying music video theory and when we were looking for genre conventions and influential videos.

During production we needed a quick and easy way to communicate, and to send each other links, files, and pictures, so we created a Facebook group for this purpose.

We used the social networking site Twitter to ask Katy Perry for permission to use her song-

During shooting we used two different cameras to film our video- For when we shoot out of the studio we used a Mini DV camera –

Canon Legria HV40, this was useful as we could easily carry it to our locations like the park.

We also used a used HD Camera, the Canon XF305. It was great to be using more advanced equipment for things like extreme close-ups and also to be able to review our footage straight away as it was a digital camera.

During editing we used Adobe Premier Pro to cut our music video together and add music and any after effects or transitions, I have experience with it from our AS Media coursework so I found it easy to use.

To create our Digi-Pak we used Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, we had a photoshoot in a studio and used a Canon 600D to take the photographs, we then edited them in Photoshop and then created the Digi-Pak using Illustrator.

During my evaluation, I used Microsoft PowerPoint to present my evaluation questions in a slide show.

I uploaded our music video to YouTube and used the link to embed it into my blog and take screenshots for the evaluation.

For the director’s commentary side of the evaluation we again used the HD camera in the television studio and also green screen to show footage of our music video behind us as we evaluated and discussed our video.