Evaluation

For my advanced portfolio in media A2 I chose to work with the music video brief, in which I had to choose a song and produce a promo video for it, along with an album digipak for the song and magazine advertisement for the digipak.

 I first researched the history of the music video and found that the concept of a music video first came to be when artists such as The Beatles made feature length films and included audio over certain parts in the early 1960's. Before this there wasn't really either the technology required to make music videos available, nor the demand for such texts due to the lack of TV accessibility.  The sheer success of bands like The Beatles meant their performances were always in demand by the public. Initially these feature films were to satisfy the demand for an artist by providing accessible footage of the band playing. The idea of promoting a track by producing a video to accompany it wouldn't come around until later.

 One example is 'A Hard Day's Night' wherein a segment of the film depicts the Beatles trying to outrun their raucous fans, which symbolises their need to produce such films. However the majority of early music videos were incredibly simple, for example 'Help' by the Beatles and 'Space Oddity' by David Bowie. Whereas these types of early music video provided gratification for the fans and viewers, by today's standards they're incredibly boring and poorly made.

 For instance, on 'Space Oddity' the cutting of the shots is ill-timed and doesn't fit the beat of the song. There's random zooming of the camera which has no meaning and isn't necessary as well as over saturated red lighting which is of no significance. Any space themed Mise-en-scene created is also cancelled out by the fact that Bowie is sat there with an acoustic guitar.

another example of these simple and primitive videos was Bob Dylan's 'Subterranean Homesick Blues' which provided a base for many others to be made. A simple concept of showing the lyrics to the song on cards which were dropped in time with when they were sung. The whole video was shot in one go and no editing of video was required. the rise of these artists in particular signified a change in the minds of young people, as these were the first artists to write their own songs, unlike the likes of Elvis Presley who were the first real manufactured pop stars we know and are popular today.

 It was Queen's video for 'Bohemian Rhapsody' in 1975 which was seen as the first video made for promotional purposes and the first to expand the boundaries of what was possible when making a music video.

 As technology advanced and music video production became more and more popular, TV began airing programmes like 'Top of the Pops' and 'The Old Grey Whistle Test', which featured pop artists at the time performing live. This and the introduction of whole TV channels(MTV) devoted to the showing of music videos signified the popularity of videos. It only seems ironic that in 1981 the first video shown on MTV was The Buggles' 'Video Killed the Radio Star'as the video accompanying the song started to become as if not more important than the actual song.

 Throughout the 80's bands began to produce videos which had a narrative to interweave with the performance footage as well as setting the boundaries on video budget higher. Good examples of this are Wham!'s 'Club Tropicana' and Peter Gabriel's 'Sledgehammer' which proved whoever spent the most money on their video tended to have the more successful singles.

 Since the evolution of abstract music videos and videos whose visual imagery is derived from the song's lyrics  have become more prominent - (Radiohead; No Surprises and Street Spirit - REM; Losing My Religion respectively.)  These types of video now mean there are 4 major styles of music video - Abstract/Lyrical Interpretation/Performance and Narrative.

 I then decided I should use a blog to record my progress over the project. I set one up at the web address (www.joerobinsonmediaresit.blogspot.com). Next came a choice of song. I chose an Indie song by ‘The Strokes’ called ‘You’re So Right’. I then researched indie music videos I felt were relevant to the song I’d chosen.

 I first looked at ‘The Thermals’ video,  ‘Pillar of Salt’,(which can be found at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwgNMrs-i80&ob=av2e) where I found that  As well as giving me ideas for the looks of the band's costume/appearance, it also gave me the idea to have the video filmed and contained within one room and having multiple different things such as balloons and things happening. Another idea this video gave me is the shifting of the band members forwards and backwards which can be accomplished by filming two clips from the same static camera and cut editing them together.

This video also shows elements of band/rock star culture which is just the band having fun and not playing music. This brings an element of humour into the video which i also hope to recreate.
 The cinematography consists of fast paced editing along with cuts to the beat and very fast still rotations. This coincides with the rock/indie genre of the song, which also matches the the genre of the song i'm using.

The video takes place exclusively inside a plain white room, with a clock-in machine on the wall. The band clock in and begin playing. The camera is static and therefore the room and the shot remains constant wide shot of the room, exposing the band not in great detail. The band then move closer to the camera and furher away as well as doing various other things like riding a bike through the room and being on a cross-trainer. The significance of the white room is that white signifies a blank canvas which is later soiled and defected by the band. However they use many different items including paint at the end, and leave the room covered in coloured paint. I think this relates to a piece of modern art and how modern art can be anything, and isn't for most people. This further asserts their position as in indie band.

This is a screenshot of the band using balloons amongst other props in their video ‘Pillar of Salt’ and the plain white room in which the video’s set.

 The second video I looked at was ‘The strokes’ with ‘Taken for a fool’ (which can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0U_jGVEKr9s&ob=av3e).  I found that The Strokes are an America Indie/Post Punk Revival band from New York. They're signed to RCA Records(Sony), and Rough Trade in the UK. A five piece band, they consist of two guitarists, a bassist, a drummer and a singer, and are known for their retro appearance and stylings reminiscent of 70'sand 80's music.

This is another video which I will use in my research. The aspect of this video I want to concentrate on is the cinematography and editing. Whereas the shots are very long relative to the pace of the music, the editing of adding multiple copies of the band members doing different things makes the video seem a lot more busy and chaotic. This is similar to a technique which I want to implement into my music video.
 the camera motion appears to be circular with the camera facing inwards. The camera makes many revolutions over the course of the video and remains continuous despite the cutting of shots. The imagery created by the multiple overlays of the band members helps to keep the editing visually fast paced despite the relatively long shots which may otherwise be dull and boring to watch.

The background of the video also seems edited. Many colourful lights which first resemble a park, with trees etc, move in jumps and jerks in the style of a soundboard(?) and them go on to form a parking lot and more of a city/concrete jungle image. I can tell this has been edited in however due to how it appears the whole way around the 360 degrees of the circle. Whereas the technology is a little more advanced than the chroma key effect that Adobe Premiere Pro has, it's the same principle of hiding the original background.

The general Mise-en-Scene is however unrelated to how I would imagine the Mise-en-scene of my video would be. whereas this is very colourful, reminiscent of various 1980's videos, mine will be more plain and regular. Same goes for the band's costume. Usage of leather jackets and tight, skinny jeans, sunglasses, a sleeveless puffer jacket etc. all give the retro feel associated with the music from the album in which the song comes from. The lighting is also heavily tinted for this same effect. The flooring of the set is black to contrast all of the light and right colours used in the video and to replicate neon lights- a major part reference to the 80's when neon lights were widely used. Seeing as The strokes also produced the song I had chosen to make a promo for, this video was a big influence on my video.

This is a screenshot from ‘The Strokes’ video ‘Taken for a fool’ showing well the interesting images behind the band, made of different coloured lights

 I also then researched Muse's track 'Undisclosed Desires' (which can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8OOWcsFj0U&ob=av2n) which is Progressive rock/indie/rock/techno genre - a variety of genres. Muse are a British Prog rock/rock band who since 2009 have focused on a more wide audience and become more soft in their music. Contracted to WMG, they have 5 albums and instruments include guitars, bass, drums, synth and Pianos.

This video focuses on the band performing in a large room crammed full of technology, wires everywhere, lights everywhere, screens everywhere and amps everywhere. I think the emphasis of this video is to display and mock the overproduction involved with making a music video, because of various shots like where the usage of internal frames representing future shots foregrounds the behind the scenes of production of a music video. Strip lights and various other lights flash on and off in timing to the music and mini-TV screens with lyics on switch on and flick between lyrics as they're said. This is something which I want to incorporate in my video in the form of lyric boards. Another play on the production of a music video is the sheer amount of technology which can be seen in the video. an example of this is all of the cables which are hanging from the ceiling and trailing along the floor, as well as a shot close to the end where the lead singer clicks his fingers above his head, the sound of which is caught by 5-6 microphones solely dedicated to that single sound. It's this over the top style which makes the video seem parodic of music video production.

The band are all in similar coloured clothing (red and black) which are associated with negativity and anger - the theme of the song. This is also mirrored by the set and the screens which show the lyrics - The words are red on a black background. Lights on the floor are white to create as much contrast and draw as much attention as possible from the viewer.

Cut into shots of the band performing are shots of a dancing woman. She is also in sync with the look of the set, having large frizzy red hair (possible to simulate static) and a black costume. She, like the set has lots of cables and wires etc. hanging from her, and dances in an overly enthusaistic way, even during the quieter parts of the song. I think this is once again having a stab at how ameteur of a look the video has to it. To top it all of, the dancer's white shoes are incredibly worn and dirty, giving the effect of 'they just found her and are in a rush to produce the video not care how she looks' to the video, because she really has no purpose whatsoever.

Cinematography in this video is quite strange, as it's a mixture between hand-held camera shots and professional looking still shots. I think the purpose if this is to demonstrate the difference between the two and like said earlier, mock the whole ameteur music video production process. The handheld shots are voyeuristic and noticably unsteady. A mixture of wide and close up shots are used, especially the close ups of the singe, for instance when he clicks his fingers. Close up shots help the audience recognise the institution and wide shots set the scene and give a feel of comfort in knowing the surroundings, so a combination of both is needed and often works well.

The video is also quite heavily edited. Shots cut at irregular rates although the cutting always matches the beat of the song. In some of the longer shots, there's continuity whereby slow mothion effects are added to the clip. These are all typically found during the slower parts of the song at the beginning, end and around 3 minutes. Another notable thing in this video is the use of subliminal 'slides' which display lyrics but instead of showing the screen with the lyrics on, what's actually on the screen is the shot. I want to use a combination of these two types of lyric exposure, for the subliminal full screen slides add a technological feel to the video, something I'm trying to acheive.

This is a screenshot from ‘Undisclosed desires’ with the plastic slides in front of the singer, very self reflexive of the process of producing music videos.

 I found by looking at such music videos that the main codes and conventions of indie videos included having the band perform the song, and building around that, as well as using experimental techniques both during and post-production. I planned to follow some of these conventions, such as using experimental techniques, but also break some others.

I then used the ‘Polls’ option on my blog in order to get a feel for my particular audience, by asking some questions with multiple choice answers and asking people to select the one they could relate to the most.

I asked the following questions:

What’s your favourite aspect of a music video? (Cinematography ;0 votes – Performance;3 votes – Visual imagery;6 votes – Story/Narrative;2 votes)

Have you heard of ‘The Strokes’? (Not heard;3 votes – Heard but don’t like the music;4 votes – Heard and like the music;4 votes)

What type of music do you prefer? (Rock;3 votes – HipHop;0 votes – Indie;6 votes – House/Electro;2 votes)

Gender? (Male;16 votes – Female;3 votes)

Which age bracket would you say you’re in? (<16;0 votes – 17-20;16 votes – 21-24;2 votes - >25;1 vote)

I then began planning my music video by producing storyboards and taking test shots of a couple of locations. I also researched into The Strokes a bit more and found that they’re strongly influenced sound and image-wise by the 1980’s which caused me to plan the use of overly image distorting effects and bright colours as well as neon style text and cheesy lyric pop-ups.

I annotated the lyrics of the song I’d chosen and deduced a possible narrative in which someone has a breakdown and is failed by the technology which has took over the modern world, and so pursues a different life. I summarised this using an animation created in www.goanimate.com to add another dimension to my blog.

 I used Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5 to produce an Animatic using the storyboards I made, cutting the images to match the relative time of the shot within the song. I did this by scanning each individual image into the computer using a scanner, then saving them as jpg files and importing them into Premiere Pro. This helped me gauge how close to the storyboards my video actually kept, which I will discuss later.

Before filming my footage, I made and printed a disclaimer for my actors whom are under 18 to sign. I chose my actors carefully. I tried to make sure none of them fit into any broad negative stereotypes, and were mainly middle class in appearance. This middle class look is seen in the clothes they’re wearing. They wear mainly casual clothes such as tracksuits, jeans, T-shirts, hoodies and various other everyday garments. I feel that this also helps to reflect the lax attitude to producing videos that my video’s aiming to portray.

I began filming the footage for my video. I used a Canon MiniDV tape camera to capture my footage.  I filmed and transferred my footage multiple times as I shot on multiple days. First I visited a wooded area near the college site, which I‘d chosen instead of a larger woodland area ‘Humber Bridge Country Park’ for convenience, as this was closer both to college and myself and the actor’s homes.

Other locations I visited include Marlborough Avenue (The suburban look of the street, complete with large houses, grass verges and large trees really contrasts typical inner city locations), A Friend’s house, and the College’s Green room. Whilst driving to the locations I also tasked one of my actors to film the street as it passed by, making for some interesting clips to use later in the editing process.

Another thing I did at this stage was produce my lyric boards which I would get actors to hold I deliberately chose two fonts for these which linked heavily to 1980’s neon signature, a heavy influence of the video.  The 2 fonts I chose, Neon and JDJessica, I feel accurately portray this link.

I made sure that the actors held lyric boards which didn’t match each other, or the actual lyrics. This is conforming to the theme which I wanted to make the video in, the idea that I’m mocking the idea of the music video, along with the conventions of typical videos. Amongst the clips were stills of various pieces of technology which I’d edit together in a montage during the solo section of the song.

 I made sure to record multiple times each clip and to choose the best one once the footage had been transferred.

I captured the footage from the camera onto the Editing suite using Matrox Media tools. Then, using Adobe Premiere Pro, I exported certain clips and uploaded them to my blog as examples. The first is a clip of a machine’s LED display pulsing through numbers. I felt this is a great clip as it has many typical 80’s connotations. The Second is a still of two actors in the green room, holding lyric boards, with a pile of lyric boards on the floor. The actors look bored to show their frustrations at the process of creating a video and the boards on the floor show their laziness and the laziness of the production ‘team’ to not clear them up. This same ‘don’t care’ attitude is also expressed by the mixing up of lyrics.

I then began editing my footage.  I once again used Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5 and began by importing my track along with all the footage. I created a basic cut of the video, minus effects and added extras.  A few techniques I used when editing were to reverse certain clips, (which would give a surreal look to the video, as well as distort the narrative, a typical non-feature of a music video of this genre) adding visual effects such as Chroma key(an effect which allowed me to overlay 2 clips and have the back video show through in certain places, essentially blending the clips together visually. This also gave a surreal effect reminiscent of the 1980s) and invert, which flipped the colour of the clip, making for some interesting results. I wanted the video to have elements of post-modernity and I feel I achieved this by including cheesy looking title slides which overlaid the video. I then made it so they appear in some places at the complete wrong times, reinforcing the idea that the video’s going wrong. The idea that I made the narrative aspect of the video very subtle, broken, hard to follow and minimal also suggests post-modernity. I did follow some conventions that I’d researched however, such as cutting to the beat, which gives each cut more visual impact. I also used a technique seen in some videos in which I extended the narrative so it began before the music. I used sounds taken from my clips to simulate the pressing of a remote and then lined the beginning of the music up with a section where an actor is shaking the TV to try to get the TV to work. I also used a technique called match on action, for instance when the actor points the remote control at the TV, and where the car passes by my actors, before cutting to a moving shot of the background. The clips are cut together in a way that the momentum of the action is maintained. This is often seen in music videos.

 I then began work on my Ancillary texts. I first found a net online for a 6 panel digipak, then started researching other digipaks that are out there. I found that the conventions of digipaks are to have a large title in order to attract attention to the product, a track list on the back of the digipak and especially for indie genre music, to be brightly coloured. I used Adobe Photoshop CS3 in order to create my digipak, and Adobe Illustrator to create the hand-writing like text which would appear on my digipak. Both of these programs gave me immense freedom while creating and the ability to add many great-looking effects and styles to my work.

I used the same style of imagery in my magazine advertisement, my second ancillary text. I found from researching existing adverts that the main conventions include having reviews from existing media texts such as newspapers, having a release date shown, and having imagery associated with the digipak on the advert, which is what I did.

I then made a questionnaire to give to people when watching my video and got them to assess my project as a whole.
The questionnaire is as follows:

Gender :    MALE / FEMALE   (6 Votes/4 Votes)

Age :     16-17      18-19      20-21     22+   (4 votes/6 votes)

What style of music is your favourite? (Responses include 'indie rock, metal, and pop (variations of)

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How well does the Magazine advertisement work with the digipak as a promotional campaign?

1    2    3    4    5    6    7    8    9    10 (Average score from 10 votes = 8.5)

What could be improved about the Magazine Advertisent? (As well 2 'Nothing's responses included the colour scheme being too plain, and the font of the text being not legible enough. Also one pointed out the lack of reviews going all the way down the right side as opposed to just near the top)

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

What could be improved about the digipak cover? (Main criticism was the ease of reading the text, on the front and back of the digipak, as it was believed that the track list was too jumbled up.)

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

What style of music do you think this promotional campaign represents? (9 out of 10 responses were 'indie rock' and the other 'Pop'

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How clearly presented and organised are the magazine advert and digipak?

1    2    3    4    5    6    7    8    9    10  (Average score from 10 votes = 8)