Tuesday, 22 March 2011

Image Tutorial

Question 3

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

RM During the early stages of this project we used Blogger.com to store all of our research and planning. Using Blogger gave us an easy and efficient way to store any of our important pieces of research or planning, as well as storing the drafts and the final designs for our digipak and any advertisements that we had created. We had used Blogger as a means of storing our work, as it is much easier than writing everything on paper and drawing all designs by hand.

JW It is also more effective then keeping everything on a single folder on the computer because it allows everybody in the group to gain access to the anything that we need provided that they have Internet access. Using Blogger also allowed us to embed videos from youtube to display publicly to anyone that came to the blog, these videos include actual music video that we had looked at for the purpose of research – studying the conventions used in the videos, the use of cinematography, mise en scene, etc – as well as our finished music video.

RM Photoshop was used during the construction of the ancillary tasks, such as the poster and digipak. They were made in Photoshop as it is an efficient and easy way to create images, and they can also be created in a format that can be uploaded to Blogger. Photoshop also allowed us to apply many different effects to any images that we had created, allowing us to make the digipak, poster, etc. more intricate and interesting to look at.

JW For the construction of the music video itself we used Final Cut Express. Using Final Cut was definitely an improvement over using iMovie. Final Cut was a little more complicate than iMovie to begin with but we quickly got used to how it worked and all of the features that it has over iMovie. Final cut provided us with an easy and simple way of syncing up the video to the audio effectively, if we were to do this in iMovie the process would have most likely been much longer and more frustrating to do.

RM In conclusion we that we have learned a lot from the new programs that we have used and it has broadened the range of programs that we can now use and has given us more experience overall in using new media technologies. We are also happy with how our final music video turned out but think that we could have made much improvement to it had we been given the time.

Tuesday, 7 December 2010

Wednesday, 13 October 2010

Our ideas in relation to Andrew Goodwins theory

Genre Characteristics

The genre of our music video is an alternative rock song. Usually in such videos there are plenty of shots involving the band playing. We aim to follow this with plenty of shots of the band playing intertwined with extreme close ups of the band playing their instruments. We aim to also include plenty of meat shots of the singer, as this is also a part of the band shots convention. Usually in songs like this a lot of the lyrics are not taken seriously and made fun of, so we have decided to take certain lyrics and play around them. We will try to make them seem funny and have a different meaning.

Relationship between lyrics and visuals

In our video the lyrics will be represented with a literal meaning, whether it be funny or serious. For example when the lyric “It’s always cloudy” we have a shot that shows a load of clouds in the sky. We aim to provide a narrative structure of two people having a fight and realising that it wasn’t right to break up. We aim to tie it together with shots that are funny and break up the serious narrative strands. This relationship will continue for the entire length of the video.

Relationship between music and visuals

For the most part or video will be made up of ordinary cuts. However at certain points the cuts will be timed with the music due to certain sections having a lot of drum beats which are easy to sync the music too. However these parts will not have any parts of the narrative, they will instead contain a lot of shots of the band. The pace of these sections is of medium pace and will last approximately a second in length. All this should create another relationship between the music and the video.

Need to sell artist

During the video we aim to have a great deal of meat shots of the band, but mostly the lead singer. This is because it is usually a convention if music videos. It is commonly associated with selling the song. This can be shown with female singers in bands, they tend to be put on adverts and album covers in front of everyone else to appeal to a more male audience along with those that like the band. However this is rarely seen, as female singers are rare in rock bands. It also helps people to make the link between the singer and the actual band themselves.

Voyeurism

We have planned a few shots to show voyeurism such as people stood in private, having an argument. These things are not usually seen by people other than those involved, this then gives an idea of voyeurism as we are seeing a part of there lives not many others would. We did this to add to the narrative and give the audience an idea that they are looking into people’s personal lives. Our music video is aimed at teenagers so we will try and add voyeuristic things suitable for this age range.

Intertextuality

For this we are keeping our band as all male so as to be like Fall Out Boy, due to them being all males. We may or may not use similar dress style to Fall Out Boy, depending on if we manage to find a few pairs of similar clothing.