Question 4

Question4 from glennmurphy97

Question 3

Question 3 from glennmurphy97

Storyboard

Storybord from glennmurphy97

Evaluation

1. The genre of my music video is indie pop. The conventions for this genre include, music video production being low budget, live performance from the band, mise en scene is generally simple - any props or costumes link directly into the scene, there is often a narrative of scenes that tell a story, not always literally. One convention of my music genre that my video followed was low budget video. I used casual locations such as a bedroom, a hallway and the garden of my own house. I also took shots in the street and in a fenced in field. I used low budget locations like this to create a more real feeling for the music video, I wanted to story to be shown to the viewers and described by the lyrics. I feel like this way it was more natural and believable since it was clearly low budget. Another convention my video follows is simple mise en scene. I used 2 costumes for my characters. One was wearing a shirt to try and show that he had been at a party and drinking the night before. The prop I used was a bottle of vodka. I used this prop in a similar manner to the costume, I wanted to convey that the character in the video had had a lot to drink the night prior, and hint that there was some reason behind that. The simplicity of these props follows the convention of my genre, and also helps to portray the story of my music video. Andrew Goodwin states that it is important for the lead artist to be in the music video, or portray a character. I tried to apply his statement to my video by having the lead performer play two separate characters, so that the story was about him (one character) and his thoughts on the situation now that he had experienced it (the singing character). One convention that my music video challenged is live performance from the artist. In the vast majority of indie pop music videos the entire band will be performing, but almost always with a main focus on the lead singer. In my video, there was no performance from the rest of the band, but only the lead singer. You could argue that my video would follow this convention, but I would say that it goes against the convention of the whole band performing more than it follows the part where it focuses on the main artist. In my video I tried to apply Andrew Goodwins theory of ‘thought beats’. Thought beats are when the music changes or beats, and a cut is expected. If you watch a video with your eyes shut you will imagine when the cuts could be. I tried to add as many thought beats as I could because I believe this improves the overall quality of my video, and thought beats are a convention of a lot of genres, including the one I did. Another convention I tried to go against is the use of filters and over-editing which is a convention of my genre of Indie Pop. I avoided this as I wanted the story and situations in the music video to be shown by the lyrics and actions of both characters, rather than portrayed by the filters to the viewer. This is also where I tried to use thought beats to make the video more clear, and also more entertaining to watch. Andrew Goodwin involves the use of thought beats within editing to show the story. He also states that lighting and colour is used to portray importance and meaning in scenes. I tried to use lighting in some of my scenes when one character was singing outside to show that he has clarity on the situation and he his trying to convince his past self that everything is going to be okay. One convention I tried to develop was sound. Some music videos in the Indie Pop genre try to use diegetic sound such as in Taylor Swifts music video she sings “I knew you were trouble” at the very beginning. This sets the tone of the song and tells the viewer instantly what the song is about. I try to use sound in my music video in a very similar way, it starts of singing about girls and how one has made a mess in the character's life. I tried to push this in my video to really strike home the narrative of the music video to the viewer. Andrew Goodwin states this as the relationship between the lyrics and the visuals. I tried to follow his ideas that if a music video is the story the lyrics are about, they should match and aid each other in telling the story. In some cases videos are about an entirely separate topic to the lyrics, which is not the case in my video so I needed to match lyrics and sound as best as I could to the visuals. 2. The brand identity I was aiming for across my three products is that the events of the music video take place after a party. My poster and digipak have the title “After-Party’ spread across them. The title sets the scene, and the art on both the poster and digipak reflect this. On the poster is a bottle in focus with colourful party-like objects strewn around it. As the focus is on the bottle and the presumed alcoholic liquid inside of it, I feel like the brand identity that is represented by the poster is the drinking side of all my products. From the poster this could seem like casual and fun drinking but as the viewer sees the video they will notice the true effect of drinking, that the character in the video was drinking to forget, or distract him from his problems. On the digipak the focus of the art is more set on the party objects that surround the bottle such as confetti, colourful millions, and glowsticks. I feel the digipak is quite like the poster, however it focuses more on the after-effects of the party by focusing on all the other objects that are left and strewn around. The video portrays the real reason behind the after-party title and the drinking and this ties the brand identity together to show fun, then regret and sadness. The mise-en-scene in my poster and digipak are very colourful and poppy. I feel like this fits into the conventions of my genre of Indie Pop and really represents the song well. I think it represents the song very well because it is an upbeat and happy sounding song, but if you listen to the lyrics it’s about overcoming a sad situation. The bright and poppy colours represent the upbeat tone of the song and the implied situation of being an after party and alcohol represents the situation. The colour scheme in the poster and digipak match very well as there is a lot of green, yellow, purple and blue. The colour scheme is a lot different in the music video as it is showing the sad emotional state of one of the characters and the bright poppy colours aren’t necessary. I feel like my products will be easily recognizable to the audience as it uses the same art style in both the poster and digipak. The bottle will be a symbolic object that represents my product as a whole as this will be something the audience will know. I think the poster and digipak are successful in creating a brand identity that will be easily identifiable to my target audience. I think the music video is slightly outside of the brand identity I was aiming for but should still be identifiable. The conventions of digipaks often involve tracklists, barcodes and copyright information. I have included all this in my digipak, following that typical convention. I have also followed the convention that Indie Pop digipak and posters often have thought provoking and strange art on the cover, rather than the artist or band. This is represented through the mysterious party objects which make the viewer think about what could have happened at this party. The mystery effect is also why I didn’t include the artist on the poster or digipak, I wanted the music video to be anticipated and thought about. 3. I had feedback from two people, my friend Hannah and my friend Ron. Hannah mentioned some strengths were that the lip sync was timed well. She also said the thought beats were at good times. Another strength she said was good use of performance as well as narrative. She said some of the weaknesses included not enough variety of shots, more different scenes could have been used and the character that is being sung about could have been involved. Ron mentioned some strengths were thought beats and that he understood the story because of the lyrics. He said some of the weaknesses were I could have involved more thought beats, shortened the performance footage because some was too long and to have a variety of shots. Through this feedback I can clearly tell that my weaknesses in the creation of my music video was that it lacked ambitious shots and backgrounds. I could have scouted for more interesting places to shoot and created a much better music video that way. I should also get more long shots and different range shots of my characters as the vast majority of shots were medium close ups. The weakness about performance shots being too long was something I was thinking about during the creation of my video, and they definitely ended up longer than I intended. This goes against my idea of showing off narrative as much as possible because the performance might intrude on the narrative. My strengths being thought beats and the use of performance shows me that I am going along the right lines with the shared narrative/performance screen time, I just need to learn to even out and balance these things better. If I was going to create my product again I would try to have a wider variety of shots for the narrative and shorter performance shots. 4. One technology I used was Photoshop. With the software Photoshop, I created my poster, record logo, and digipak. The layers feature was extremely useful in Photoshop as I could create a professional looking product by layering my text nicely over the background art, as well as the barcode, tracklist and iTunes logo, on both the poster and digipak products. Other features I used on Photoshop was the fact that it allows you to download your very own font and use them within your creations. I used this to my advantage by going with a font I found on a website called Da Font. This font fit perfectly into my poster and digipak stylistically, and I feel it really complimented the colour scheme and images within both products. Another feature I used within Photoshop was the colour picker feature. With this feature, you can select a part of your product and it will copy the exact colour of the area you selected. I used this tool to select the yellow colour for my title from the yellow millions that are littered on my image. I feel like this aids the colour scheme and improves the style of both products. I also used it to pick a purple from the liquid in the bottle to colour the track list on the digipak. I believe like this achieves the same thing as the title, it brings together the products to form the brand identity. Another technology/software I used was Final Cut. This is the editing software I used to create my music video. One feature I used within Final Cut was the trim feature that you use to drag raw footage onto the editing timeline. I would play the song until the point where the artist would be mouthing a certain part of a word, then I would watch the footage until that exact point and trim the footage to the part I required. I would then drag it onto my timeline and play around with the timings until I got the lip-sync perfectly in time. Another feature I used in Final Cut was for my final scene. It was the crop screen feature. I had to use this feature because I had two characters played by one actor in the same shot. They walked in from the left and right sides of the camera shot and looked at each other, then the camera. To create this shot I had to film in exactly the same place and change outfits and film either character’s actions. I then used the trimming tool to get my footage in the right place, but then had to use the crop screen tool to make the left side characters footage cropped so that the right side characters footage fit on screen at the same time which made it look as if it was in one shot. Although I did run into one problem with this as the lighting from the sun changed in one character’s scene so it looks normal at first, then one changes to be darker than the other, but I can’t fix that as it is a limitation in the software. The strengths of Photoshop were that it allowed full flexibility and with the right skill in the software I could create any product I could imagine. However in the same idea, it is also a limitation because to have full fluency using this software it takes a long time to learn how to do things as you need to. The strengths of Final Cut that it was very easy to create a video and the software is simplistic to use, however it allows a range of complex things to be done to the video such as filters. One weakness was that I couldn’t match the lighting in my final double/split shot.

Final Video

Video Current Cut

https://youtu.be/5IKWXHWz2gI

Poster Final