Music Video Evaluation

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

After researching other music videos which accompany the artist, John Mayer's music I noticed that each video included him singing - therefore our video was a direct removal from this as we decided to do a narrative style video - simply to be unique but also because we couldnt get the original artist to mime to it therefore we felt it would look tacky and unprofessional. Although in similar ways, we have used a variety of panning, long and close-up shots which feature in many of his videos.

I suppose we have, in a way, challenged the convention of normally featuring the artist in the video - we didnt. We felt we could get away with this because John Mayer's music isnt considered mainstream and therefore neither should his videos be - therefore we had quite a wide creative scope.

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

As the video is the main product, we used it as the inspiration for both our digipack and our advert - for example, the moods & expressions present, the colour scheme and the mise-en-scene. Therefore it was an almost foolproof way to insure they were linked and where effective as a combination as well as when they were viewed seperately. Finally, I feel that altogether they promote each other effectively.

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

Again in terms of research I used the internet to look at videos of other music videos - for example, on the website called YouTube, and looked at the features of each one but also how I felt they could be improved or how they could inspire my own video. During the planning stages, we created and storyboard, we then took photos of each possible shot and uploading them to form an animatic - a series of moving images formed from our original sketches, over the top of music. This helped us to see the order our video would be in but also to work out how the shots would fit to the music. During the construction we used a camera and tripod, but alternated between using it handheld or with the tripod depending on the shot type. Before each shot we checked and often altered the camera settings e.g. white balance and aperture. After filming, we used Final Cut Pro to edit the film we had taken and add the music - it allowed us to shorten or lengthen shots and alternate where we placed each shot, so that we could create our own unique order to form the video. It also meant we could add certain effects e.g. fading together two shots which we couldnt do using the camera alone. Finally, like the other ancillary products I used blogger to document my ideas for the music video, from 'conception' to 'birth'.