My A2 Media-Coursework was to produce a Music Video and Digipak (CD case with promotional poster). We based our project on the song ‘House Party’ by The Midnight Beast. We chose the song because of its political themes and contemporary issues that affect my life and the lives of thousands of people. With a comedic twist the video is really about the real life political situation and who to vote for in the last election; the Conservatives, Labour or The Liberal Democrats. The outcome has since changed many people’s lives, including mine as a young person as university tuition fees have risen to up to nine-thousand pounds a year. The comedic twist of the video, which I will talk about in-depth later, is there to make the song and message more accessible to the youth so more people from the 18-25 demographic, will vote and understand the change their decisions could have on Great Britain.
The song already has an original video but we were told this wouldn’t be a problem. It heavily influenced our choices and with certain shots we like to think we improved upon it.
As these two close-up shots show, we have put a lot of effort into making our shots sharp and not making amateur mistakes such as chopping off heads. Apart from this we felt the original was a very strong video which influenced us as a guide-line. We took a lot of inspiration from it as it was also made by three teenagers and showed us how good our own video could be.
To begin planning we studied the original video as well as other influential videos and began brain storming. What makes this particular music video funny is its clever contrasts in mise en scene to lyrics and actions. Our costumes are suits and locations are in work environments, mainly an ICT class room, we also use props such as our TNB (The Midnight Beast) posters and screensavers yet this is all contrasted with our comedic lyrics with play on words ‘We can sit around and have a mass-debate’ (you can guess what the play on words is referring too) and dancing. Some of the other videos we looked at included the works of Tenacious D, a famous comedic rock band, and Fall Out Boy, an American group with a similar target audience to our own. We used some of their techniques to improve our own work, such as Tenacious D's clever use of costume to provoke a sense of humour in their videos.
From here I drew up story-boards to show the narrative our video would follow and shots types we could use. We had a basic idea of a ‘house-party’ erupting in an office, while pretending to be a new political party- the TMB party. I decided, as the video progressed and the party got ‘wilder’ the shots should become more creative to represent this we started the video with more mid-shots then later used more interesting shots such as an upwards crane.
Before directing our video I started researching real-life directors and their approaches for ideas. While researching I came across the Auteur Theory which is practised by many directors, such as Phil Harder who has directed music videos for Foo Fighters and Prince. The theory suggests the director should have full control of his production and give the final judgment on everything. It reminded me of the saying ‘The camel is a horse designed by comity’- meaning if one man had a perfect vision it would be a horse, but it you let a whole comity try and re-create the same idea, it would turn into a camel. After a discussion we decided not to employ the Auteur Theory because we were a team of three and decided every decision should be made as a team, almost deciding to follow another famous saying ‘Three brains is better than one’.
Filming was a thorough yet rewarding process, consisting of lots of hard-work and re-filming of shots but at the same time it was a very fun experience. I enjoyed both being in front and behind the camera as they were both very different experiences that added together to produce our video. Being behind the camera gave me the opportunity to film the different shot-types needed for our video which went from mid-shots to two-shots to downward pans and beyond. I decided the shot types should become more creative as the video progressed to represent the party becoming ‘wilder’, these photos above show the contrast from an early mid-shot to a later upwards-crane. Then when editing later I could link my own shots together and see how the whole process contributed to the final product. Being in front of the camera allowed me to contribute to the video with my passion for drama- and also have a good laugh.
It is vital to consider target audiences when creating any media text and ours is no exception. I have talked about the importance of our video to young first-time voters, but there are many different types of people in the 18-25 year old demographic. We analysed three music videos with the same age group target as our video, they were by: McFly, Fall Out Boy and Jojo. Even though they we all had similar target audiences, we had different sub-targets. McFly are mostly targeting girls, Fall Out Boy mainly targets ‘rockers’ and Jojo is targeting a broader mainstream audience. Despite the differences, the music can be enjoyed by anyone- specifically people in the target age range and we wanted to appeal to all the people in that group. We feel we made our video accessible for most people with the comedic twist, which can be enjoyed by anyone even if they are not interested in the political message.
We edited our video on Windows Movie Maker which isn’t the best program on the market, but got the job done. With its simple controls it was user friendly and didn’t take long to get used too. In the editing process I was able to put together the shots I had filmed and add in transitions- this took me hours but I feel the final product was worth the effort. In this sequence I managed to smoothly edit together a reverse angle shot to show the journey of me down the staircase and Paige subsequently up them.
Another technique we used during the editing phase was a slow-motion effect when we’re dancing, such as then I am dancing with a tie around my neck, and the frequent quick edits that adds the pace to our video that compliments the song. This juxtaposition of quick and slow made our video feel experimental and 'fresh' at every scene. One quick edit links from Liam to me holding cheese and wine as the lyric ‘We’ll welcome you with cheese and wine’ is heard, this completes Goodwinds’ second point of ‘There is a relationship between lyrics and visuals (illustrative, amplifying or contradicting)’. We have tried to include all of Goodwins’ points in our video as he is a respected Music Video theorist and wrote in the media book ‘Dancing in the Distraction Factory’- I published a post on his theory earlier on.
Yet another editing technique I used to morphing us into different background as we danced to ‘Nick Clegg Nick Clegg Nick Clegg Nick Clegg’ we achieved this by filming us dancing in the different locations (being careful to start in the same position we’d ended in, in the previous location) and overlapping the takes later on.
Despite how proud I am of our final product I do feel it could have been improved. While loading up the final video we found the screen being covered in green and yellow dots for a few seconds at the start of some scenes. This was due to the video being too high-spec for the computers and needing a moment to adjust. There is not much we could have done here, but if I was to do the project again I would try to borrow a higher specification computer to avoid this issue. Also in our final video I noticed our lip syncing was slightly out while analysing it with my media classmates- by reviewing our videos as a class it allowed us to get an outside perspective and to pick up on issues we may have missed. Obviously, if I could go back I would make the lip-sync perfect but still feel it’s quite good in our final video.
Another issue was the size of our cast. The original video has a large cast of office workers and public that we didn’t have. I do think there are also positives here, as being in a small group allowed us to bond well and work better together as we similar ideas on how to improve our video. In the end I am very happy with how our final video turned out and am grateful for the experience of creating it.
As I earlier mentioned, during the process of making our music video we also designed as Digipak. I have done a separate evaluation for that with annotated diagrams of it in an earlier post. It links in with the humour/political themes of our music video and again is work I am very proud of.
I will now answer a few evaluative questions:
In what ways does my media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
My music video follows the conventions of music videos and it’s genre in many ways, and then not so much in others. In relation to camera work we do follow the conventions as we use a variety of shots to show us the artists and to establish location. In keeping with genre, we use a close up with flashing lights during Liam’s rap while he acts out the appropriate rap genre hand gestures.
Our Mise en Scene both follows the conventions of a music video and challenges them. We wear suits, as media theorist Richard Dyer said 'How we treat others is based on how we see them', and use work environments that complement each other, but then our actions such and dancing and the lyrics played are a stark contrast. This, as explained before, is to get our real world political message out to the young generation that will be effected. As I explored in my Star Analysis of Tenacious D, this technique has been used before in a music video but it is not the normality.
Our Lighting and Editing both follow the conventions of a music video. Our editing is fast using Jump Cuts and Quick Edits to fit in with the flow of our song. We also use some creative editing techniques to represent the party; these include the background morphing and upwards crane. The lighting is mostly natural but we also use synthetic lighting during our rap scene and all indoor conventional lighting.
Our sound is also conventional as we use our track and not natural sounds. There are examples of music videos having ‘movie’ style clips before or after the track that use other sounds, the most famous of these being Michael Jacksons’ ‘Thriller’.
How effective is the combination of my main text and ancillary text?
Alongside my Music Video I created a Digipak and Poster. From the beginning I knew I wanted to link all my work together to give it purpose and reliability. If we look at the syringe theory, my audience will be more inclined to view my work if it’s everywhere and all looking similar- artists thus frequently use signature aspects in all their work such as Michael Jackson and his single white glove. For my poster and Digipak I used an ongoing black and white + colour theme to represent the two mise en scene themes of my video: a serious political message and humour. For the inside covers of my Digipak we posed at the three political party leaders and imported those images onto the corresponding party colours. I think it’s important to keep this political message prominent throughout my work because that’s the key goal; to get this message out to the young people that can or soon will be able to vote.
What have I learnt from my audience feedback?
In my next post I explore audience feedback and the way media consumers might analysis my work; as there are many theories on how they could take it in. But how have I gone about questioning people to find their answers? 1st off the blog in publicly available on the internet and a large unknown audience may have seen my work, but for friends I specifically asked them to have a look and report back to me on how they felt. In class we also looked at each other’s work in a peer assessment exercise. What I learnt from this feedback was that my video received largely positive reviews, with my audience liking our up-beat tempo with complimenting edits and dancing and that they found the jokes funny. In class it was brought to my attention that the lip syncing was slightly out in places which I would definitely correct if given another opportunity.
How did I use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
Research:
For initial research we went online to analyses professional Music Videos and Digipaks. Thanks to the age of Web2.0 this was a lot easier to do then it would have been ten years ago as we can watch videos on websites such as Youtube and look at Digipak’s on artists official websites.
Planning:
Planning was very paper based, making brainstorms and storyboards. Despite this I did take screen shots off the original video and uploaded them onto my blog to study their work.
Construction:
I used the most technologies for this section of my work. We filmed ourselves on the school video-recorders and uploaded the footage onto Windows Movie Maker. Using Windows Movie Maker was basic yet user friendly- consisting of dragging and cutting clips and then editing them together. While creating the Digipak I used Photoshop to add the background colours to our political poses and to get the black and white effect of out outer covers.
Evaluation:
My whole back-catalogue of work including this evaluation is on my blog; a relatively new media technology that just wouldn’t have been available a few years ago. It allows for people with internet access to view my media text and evaluate it for themselves, whether they’re involved in my course or not. We have evaluated each other’s work using the blogs and have become comfortable using media technologies.
