CRIMSONMusic Video

EVALUATION…

Band name: CrimsonSingle: Common People

My aim on this unit was to create a successful music video, Promotional poster and digi pack for my band called Crimson and make it appealing to their target audience. The target audience are males and females from the age of 18-40 who are middle class people that love music, socialising, drinking and having great fun living their lives to the fullest and not taking themselves so seriously.

The idea of our music video is about two groups of people. Common people and

Intro...

Non- common people. The story line builds up to a big powder paint fight between the two groups. The non common people want to have fun and be like common people. We are keeping to the genre characteristics, this music video is light hearted its not a serious story line its about having fun and letting your hair down which reflects our band Crimson.

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

We have chosen to create a music video for a song sung by the real band Pulp. We have watched their music video and decided we wanted to recreate a part of a scene. Our Intertextual references was the common people music video trolley scene, as show in the pictures.

Also we got in idea to do some thing like the cash in my pocket music video where it was continuously shot in one sequence. We only wanted to do a little part of this and even that took about 12 takes. The first one is of Billy saying a line and then he goes through a door, then Archie comes through the door and says a line. Originally after that Laura was supposed to come down the stairs as Archie goes up but when the footage was uploaded it was out of sync, so we cut it and filmed that bit separately.

I looked at a lot of music videos that I personally liked for inspiration, such as Coldplay, Every tear drop is a water fall video. My favourite thing about the video is the stop motion and the text that says the lyrics. I like how colourful and fun it looks, it put me in an uplifting mood. This is how I want people to feel when they watch common people, make them happy and laugh.

We kept to the codes and conventions of a music video, such as visuals moving along to the beat, fast cuts, split screens, close-ups, extreme close-ups, mid shots, lip syncing, longs shots and a storyline.

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

As a whole the combination of the main product, music video, and the ancillary texts, digi pack and poster, in my opinion work really well together. They all have links with each other. I have kept things the same to make it clear they are for a band called ‘Crimson’. Overall I think that the music video is the strongest product, then my digi pack and then my poster. I think it is the build up that makes our video strong and how much fun it looks, it may get the audience thinking that hey want to get involved.

This is my final digi pack design that I made for my band ‘Crimson’. I wanted it to be eye catching so that someone going shopping for a CD would see it standing out from the rest. I also wanted my digi pack to reflect my music video for ‘common people’. I wanted the front cover to be simple but also look good. For my album cover I got my inspiration from an existing album called ‘Silver Side Up’ which is by Nickleback. I kept to the codes and conventions of the music video and band, which is fun, exiting and an in your face attitude. I decided not to take a screen shot from the video and put it on the front cover because I wanted to use something unique and that is not seen in the video. The reason why the face is multicoloured is to make a link between the powder paint fight in the video and the digi pack. The text ‘Explosion of colour’ was originally also multicoloured just like on my poster but I couldn't see the text because it blended in with the background so I made it all red. The reason why I choose red is because the band is called ‘Crimson’ which is also a colour (red). From my research looking at other Indi pop bands typography they all seen to be in capitals and black and white. The reason why ‘Crimson’ is in capitals is because it’s the name of the band and is most important, ‘Explosion of

colour’ is the name of the album so it shouldn't take the attention away from the bands name.

I used Photoshop to edit my digi pack. I had a rough idea of what I wanted my final product to look like when I planned out with a drawing, It looked better in my head that on paper. I have included all of the codes and conventions used to make up a didgi pack such as spines, barcode, front cover, back cover, institution logo, name of the songs, name of the band and the CD. From the feed back I got I was told to include a picture of the lead singer

Which is on the middle panel, originally I had an image of watercolours dripping down a page but I edited it which is now the background image and put the lead singer on top. I carefully thought of the names of the songs to reflect the bands personality, also on the panel is another image of half a painted face. Next to that is an image of people in the music video which would make a clear connection with the video and digi pack. On the CD I put a picture of the powder paint and also added the band and album names what I have seen from my research most CD’s have this. On the final panel I have put an image I took of my chin, this image is also on my poster promoting the single ‘Common People’. I think my digi pack is successful as I feel as though the bands personality is coming out with the bright fun colours. Also I think it defiantly applies to the bands target audience.

• This is my poster for crimson

This is my final poster design to promote the album and single. I also made this by using Photoshop. Just like my album cover I wanted it to look simple yet effective. I like how the chin is the most dominant part of the poster so it will peoples catch attention and then people will read ‘Crimson’ and the coming out date. This chin as also on my digi pack which make a link between the two. Unlike my album, on the poster ‘Explosion of colour’ is multi coloured which was my original idea. The typography is the same as my digi pack. I placed the text in the middle of the poster from largest to smallest to show importance. I think the black background makes everything stand out. From my research red black and white are the three main colours used in advertising because they all stand out from each other. In the bottom corners I have put the Rough trade logo which the band are signed to, the HMV logo and the DVD logo. Overall I really like my poster and I think that it makes a successful promotion poster.

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

I think that all of the feed back my group got was really good, by this I don't mean that it was positive feedback we took on board what people were saying was wrong with our video and we wanted to improve on the parts where it was being criticized. From the first viewing we have made a lot of changes to our video. Everything that we have been told to change we have done and now our video looks even better.

We was told that our story line doesn't make sense because there is a lot of random footage in it. So we needed to create clues in the video that the powder paint fight is coming up. So at the start the powder paint pots are introduced.

In our feed back there were a few comments about lip synching in some parts of the video where it is out of time and not very clear. We wanted to improve on this so it meant getting rid of all of our band footage and finding a new lead singer as the person we choose originally wasn't enthusiastic enough with moving his lips, also a downfall was our own fault by not playing music while filming, so we also re shot some parts after Christmas where I got an apple byte speaker which is really loud.

Also there was a part in the middle of the song where the beat gets fast but we had a slow motion part there so we re-edited it so each visual cut matches the music. Now it looks even better and more professional, I learned that a music video in the charts has over 300 cuts.

Although we got some negative feed back we did get positive feed back too. Everyone loved the footage we got of the powder paint fight. Also we got good comments on the split screens , slow motion and fast forward edits.

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

New media technologies where very useful in this project, they helped throughout the whole duration of making the music video, editing the music video, editing my poster and digi pack.

Through the construction of our music video we have used various media technologies. To film we used a flip camera and tripod to keep the camera steady while filming, the only downfall with these was that we had to keep changing batteries quite often. But you get a really nice picture from them. We also used final cut pro which is a programme on the computer that lets you edit the footage, cut it up, rewind it , slow it down, speed it up. We had fun experimenting with different techniques as shown in our music video. We used Apple Mac computers to do this on. We have also used a website called Blogger where we use it as a diary to update everything we are doing or any thing we have changed it allows us to up load images and links.

I also used my Apple Byte speaker so people could sing along to the music while filming.

We also used Facebook to arrange an event for our powder paint fight because we needed a lot of people to make up the two groups.(common people, on common people). We arranged in a week advanced to give people notice on what to wear and to meet on the field. A lot of people said the couldn't make it. In the end we had about 8 people to film with but I think the footage looks good.

To shear our video we used the social network. First it was uploaded you YouTube, then I uploaded if to Facebook because that is where we would get most comments and views. Then I looked for Pulps official Facebook page and posted it on there, I also tweeted it on twitter lots of times and also tweeted it on the official Pulps twitter page. And then I tweeted it to Jarvis Cocker who is the lead singer of Pulp. So far we have 174 views on YouTube.

THE END