Evaluation Task 1 - In what way does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? (i.e music videos)

(Numbering left to right)

1. This shot shows the relationship between the lyrics and visuals. It does this by showing the couple sharing a loving moment with the audience, whilst the lyrics read 'Its always better when we're together.' This portray's the link between the visuals and lyrics to the audience clearly. 

2. This shot display's how the record company would want the artist to be represented. It does this by showing the artist is comfortable in a natural environment, we can see he is comfortable by the way he is holding the guitar. The guitar is also displayed on his album cover and magazine advert, which are also in natural surroundings, which appeals further to the record company, Brushfire Records.
3. We can tell what type of music genre is being displayed in this shot as the acoustic guitar is the main aspect of the frame. Also his clothes suggest the genre is soft rock as they are casual and simple.
4. This particular shot of the guitar shows intertextual reference to James Morrison's video 'You make it real'. This close up of the artist playing the guitar, shows that the artist has talent and plays it throughout the video.
5. This close up of the artist singing shows good use of camera as we created this shot by using a low angle on the artist so the audience would stay focused on his expressions and singing.
6. This shot focuses on the lighting, we used a lamp and the actual main light in the bedroom to make it brighter. We also opened the curtains and used an tall powerful light that made a big difference to the shot. this shot is where the sun fades into the light bulb into the bedroom scene.
7. The mise-en-scene in this shot links with the genre again as the setting is all natural and we can see all of him showing him in casual clothes, emphasising how simple the genre and he is.
8. This is a shot from one of  Jack Johnson's videos. This is a similar shot to shot number 4 as it is a low angle and is focusing on himself rather than the surroundings. Also this shot is a behind the scenes shot, we also include many behind the scene shots of our video. This was an inspirational shot.
9. This is taken from the music video called 'who says' by John Mayer. This shot is a picture of him and friends, we tried to replicate this affect by putting in still images into our video with our artist in it. 

Evaluation Task 1 - Part Two

1.  This shot from James Morrison's video 'I wont let you go' shows the link between lyrics and visuals. This is because we see James Morrision lying next to a girls holding her hand whilst the lyrics read 'i wont let you go' this visually emphasises those lyrics.
2. Here we can see the artist playing the guitar in what seems to be his home, his body language suggests he is quite relaxed whilst playing the guitar. This implies he is a very laid back 'down to earth' guy which fits with the record company.  
3. This shows the music genre by the acoustic guitar being played by the artist and the microphone in whilst he is singing into. These are the only props or instruments being used, which we can infer from that it is a specific music genre.
4. This close up of the artist singing into the microphone shows intertextual reference to other similar genre music videos as it aims to show emotion of the song coming from the artist.
5. This extreme close up of the artist frames him in the centre of the shot and also blurs the background so the audience can see the artists face whilst he is singing. They can see the emotion from the song and this gives the shot a personal touch as the audience would feel he is connecting directly with them. 
6. The video for 'Broken Strings' is shot a a hotel room. This establishing shot shows that the room is well lit and we can clearly see everything in the room. This shot aims to create a reflective shot to then show the female artist on the other side of the room.
7. This is another shot from the video 'You make it real' by James Morrison. This shot shows good mise-en-scene in perspective with the meaning of the song. The shot looks gloomy and grey representing sadness, also the artist is sitting alone on the stage this shows that he feels lost.
8. This is one of our inspirational shots, this is of James Morrison again from the video 'Broken Strings'. He is framed to the side of the shot however it is still a close up of him. We did this in our video as well from 0:12-0:15 he is framed to the side of the shot and it is a close of him singing the first verse.
9. Another inspirational shot here is from John Mayer's video 'Waiting on the world to change'. This shows a partly frontal and side view of the artist, we created a similar shot of our artist from 0:58-1:02. The camera is focusing on the side of his face however we are still able to see part of the front of his face. 

Evaluation Task 2 - How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

Evaluation task 2

Evaluation Task 3 - What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Positive Feedback of our music video:

Negative Feedback of our music video:

Positive Feedback of our Digipak and Magazine advert:

As we have improved the inside panel of our digipak comments from 3:04-3:22 do not reflect our new digipak feedback. Once we improved our digipak the feedback we received was that it looked more professional and that the inside panel of the hands, linked with the single we were promoting from the album, 'Better Together'. People also felt that a bigger and bolder font for the front cover made it more obvious to who the artist was and the name of the album, they also liked the fact that they could see the spine much more clearly.

Evaluation task 4 - How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Evaluation Task 4 on Prezi

Collage of Photoshop progression

Magazine

When I created this magazine advert I made sure I used the same effects as I did with the digipak. This is so you can clearly see the link between the two.

Digipak

This is the second version of the digipak. I created another version because I wanted to see if my audience preferred the first version or the second one. This particular digipak links with our magazine advert also. I used the same piture for both the magazine advert and the digipak, as I found that many other artists do this when promotoing their album. Also on the firstone we did we didnt link the digipak and magazine advert picture. By using our audience research we will determine which will be the final one.

Final Digipak - 4 panel

This is my final digipak. I decided to keep it as four panels. The front cover is a photograph of the artist playing his guitar which is simple yet effective as it enables the main focus to be on him. It also portrays his passion for music and his guitar. Using Adobe Photoshop I added a 'cutout' effect onto the image, which gave was able to enhance the colours. I kept the fonts very simple to represent the artists character and genre of music and also so that it was clear and readable. The bottom right panel is where the CD will be placed. We thought this fit in well with the shape of guitar. For the left inside panel we decided to place a photograph of a couple holding hands to signify togetherness. The couple used for the photograph also feature in our video.

Photographs for Digipak

 

Above is a slideshow of a few photographs that we took for our inside cover for our digipak. We used the same couple as were used in parts of our video. We did this to create a link between our digipak and video.

Rough cut

Editing in final cut express

The top screengrab shows how we made some of the shots black and white, specifically in the behind the scenes shots in our video. The other two shots show how we created the light bulb and sun effects to merge them together when we faded to the bedroom, scene of the girl. 

Rough Cut 2 Of our Music Video

Filming

Today we went filming again, we re-shot the park scene as the performance was not good in our previous shoot. We got all the shots we needed and we also included the end of the narrative scene in it as it was in the park. The weather wasn't as good as our previous shoot of the park scene, however I think it will fit in and not cause a problem for our video.

Vernallis analysis of a music video

I chose to analyse this particular music video because it was one of the many videos that inspired many of our shots in our final cut of 'Better Together'. 

Narrative: There are two locations for the narrative sections of the video, however one location is more obvious than the other. One of the locations is a church, which we straight away associate with a wedding. The mise-en-scene in these shots clearly shows it is a wedding. By the expression on the man's face we can see that something is not quite right at the wedding. The shot below shows the artist sitting alone at a bar, which is the second location for the narrative sequence. This shot suggests that he should be at the wedding and they are waiting for him to arrive. 

These two shots in the narrative sequence show that he hasn't gone to his wedding and the people at the church are now packing up. There are various transitions between the bar scene and the church scene. The narrative cuts between the performance and the different narrative scenes.

Editing: This shot on the right shows the artist playing the guitar in the video, this is towards the beginning of the song, this shot corresponds with the music as there is a guitar piece at the beginning. This second shot of his performance on the left gives us a clearer view of him as the artist, but however still keeps a sense of the character as he is wearing the same clothes. The editing keeps a good flow of continuity as we always see the artist singing every part of the song as well as the cuts to and from the narrative part. However in one of the bar shots we see him singing in what we think should be the narrative which can confuse the audience to which part is the narrative and performance. 

Camera Movement and Framing: Most of the frames in the performance part of the video the artist is framed on the side of the whole frame. Here are some examples of how this is done throughout the video: 

The narrative part of the video is framed differently from the artist, most of the shots are medium shots and the characters are kept quite central to the frame, whereas the artist is framed to the side. his is how we can differentiate between the narrative scenes and the performance scenes. These are some shots from the narrative scene where framing distinctively shown to be different: 

Diegesis: The story portrayed throughout the video I didn't understand straight away as I saw some of the shots from the narrative looked like the performance shots. For example this particular shot where he lip sings in the narrative as apposed to just the performance: 

We can see the story progressing through the linked shots of the church and the bar of where he is for most of the video. Towards the end of the video we see the two narratives come together at the bar which confirms the audience's view of what story the narrative was telling. Here is the shot that shows this: 

Feedback of Magazine Advert

 Above is our magazine advert, for our artist 'Nathan Vega' as his second album promotion. We got some feedback after showing it to our peers, some good feedback and some feedback on improvement of it. To improve the advert we asked what they thought about our font and the various writing on the advert. The font of the artist's name and album title they found to look quite childish, however said the colour  of it was good. They also said we should change the colour of our writing for the quotes from various companies e.g. MOJO because they cannot be seen easily. Some of the good feedback we received was that the image again was excellent and they really liked all the colours the photo portrayed. With this feedback we will change and improve our advert to become better and more appealing.  

Feedback of Digipak

We showed these four versions of the front of our digipak to our peers for some constructive feedback. We found that they preferred the colour version better than the one black and white version. We were unsure about our font and the colour of our chosen front cover, when we asked them they said the font and colour was good and they liked that one more than the others. The feedback for the back of the digipak was that they couldn't read track list very well. They suggested to try a different colour to make it easier to see and read. 



Some of the good points from feedback were that the photo itself was taken very well, also the editing was excellent. Our peers said they liked the contrast in the photo, and they also liked how the front cover was the front of his legs and guitar and the back was the back of his legs and guitar. 

Rough cut to Test shoot

On Tuesday 25th of October we went and filmed all the shots of the main artist in our specified location. We got all the footage we needed on the day, however when we watched it back during editing we saw that the actor did not perform very well. Therefore we decided not to use the shots for our actual music video, instead we renamed the footage as test shoot footage. 
From this footage we saw what we needed to improve on and how we needed to reshoot our footage. The actor's performance in particular was what we felt did not go well, we talked about it and we came up with a few points on what we could tell him to do better to improve the shots. He needed to accentuate his lips when singing so it was more obvious he was singing, also needed to show some emotion when singing he looks too fixated or looks like he is day dreaming. Another issue was the guitar playing, it is very bad as you will be able to see in the footage below. To resolve this, we looked on youtube for the chords of the song and we are going to try and help the actor play the guitar a bit better. When we got feedback we were told we should use a guitar pick which would make it easier for him to play the guitar, they also agreed on points that we thought needed improvement on. Below is our test shoot footage put together to give you a little insight to how part of our music video would look. 

Inspirational Video

This video 'Who Says' by John Mayer inspired us too include still images of our music video into the actual video. We want to try to create the same effect as the video does when they include the still images. We are also going to try and create a tint on some parts of our video, we feel this video expresses what we want to do the best. 

Filming

Today we filmed the girls part of the video, most of the narrative. The location was at Devki's house, we used her bedroom as the girls bedroom, and we were able to shoot some good footage which we will be using in our rough cut and hopefully final version. We decided to shoot extra footage so that we would have enough to edit and for back up. The shoot went really well. 

Rough Digipak Front and Back

These are our rough digipak design's, we used photoshop to edit them. Once we had the basis of our digipak we tried out different fonts and colours to see which one looked the best. Once we had all our different versions we asked our peers for some feedback on which one looked the best. They all said that the front with the black font looked the best, however they said we should change the colour of our track list as it was quite hard to read (as you can see above). 

Original photo used for digipak

These were the original photo's we used for our digipak, we edited both of these using photoshop on the mac. 

Behind the scene of the test shoot

Magazine Advert Analysis

Magazine Advert Analysis

Magazine Advert's

Magazine Adverts

Inspiration for our Digipak

 'Born in the U.S.A' is one of the album's by Bruce Springsteen. This album cover was part of our inspiration for our own digipak cover. When we saw this album cover we didn't think we would do this, but when we were thinking of ideas for our digipak we took this picture and felt that it went well with our artist and genre. 

Storyboard

Lyrics Annotation

Filming

Today we went filming at Queensbury park to shoot the 'Park scene' where all the main shots of the male artist 'Nathan Vega' will be taken. We filmed for 3 hours, and got all the shots we needed. Today the weather was really good so the lighting was excellent and it fitted the mise-en-scene of the song/video.

Representations in my music video

For our music video by Jack Johnson 'Better Together', we have decided to be a bit more creative with the video and not stick to the conventions that are portrayed in his other videos and similar genres. Most of his videos do not include and women and mostly focus on him as an artist. The conventions of a Jack Johnson video is performance based, with the main focus on him and his performance. Many of his music videos are in black and white such as, 'If I had eyes', 'Hope' and 'Buddha'. His videos also feature a considerable amount of close up's and extreme close up's, not only just of him, but also of the instruments he plays in that particular video and sometimes the mic and his lips. However some of his videos have shown to be narratives, for example his song 'Upside down' is animated and features a well known cartoon, curious George. This is one of his different videos expressing more of the narrative of he song, as it tells a story throughout and shows a more fun and creative side to the artist.


In our video we are going to try and represent the artist a bit different from Jack Johnson. We are looking to portray him with a bit more character than we see of him is his videos, the reason we wanted to do this is because we thought he was a bit dull and wanted to allow the audience to see more character. We want our artist to be represented as a more masculine person, we have decided to incorporate this characteristic into our costume, by having a signature piece of clothing such as, a hat or a scarf. Another way we are showing him as a more masculine artist is by having a girl in the video. We feel that this will represent him as a more masculine person as it shows him in a relationship with a girl. However we have chosen not to represent him as the 'sexy male' as we want a more reserved and sensitive view of him in this video. We will have many close up's of the artist as well as we want him to be more established, this is one of the conventions used in his music video that we want to keep to represent him in a certain way. He will also be acting as the male lead role, this will allow the audience to gain more information on his personality.

moodboard of similar artists album covers

Wordle of Initial Ideas

Copyright E-mail

Due to copyright issues of the track we are going to use I have to write to the record company, asking permission to use the song. I have drafted an email to the company asking permission and informing them how I will be using the song.


Dear Copyright Holder,


I am an A level student writing to request your permission to use  Jack Johnson's track 'Better Together'.


With your permission, this track would be used in our current A-level Media Studies project, which involves creating a music video, as well as producing an album cover and a magazine advert for the artist. The artist in my music video will not be using the original artist's name, 'Jack Johnson' as I will be creating a new marketing strategy for a new up and coming artist.


If I receive your permission, this track would ONLY be used in an educational context, and will be viewed by my media class, my media teacher and the OCR examination board moderator. It would NOT be used for any financial purposes or gain, nor the school or I intend to make any profit out of using your artist's track. 


The artist and your company would of course be fully recognised throughout pre-production and the final video itself. A copyright notice, with wording supplied by you can be recorded in the project. If this is required please send full details. 


I look forward to hearing from you.


Regards, 


Miss Shreyaa Pattni 


Park High School, UK

Music Video Pitch

Music Video Pitch. on Prezi

Music Director

Director - Mark Romanek on Prezi

The Evolution of a Star: Britney Spears

Britney Spears appeared in the show 'The Mickey Mouse club' in 1992 after she had been a contestant on the show star search. She stayed with the mickey mouse club show until it was cancelled. 
In June 1997 Britney pitched to various record labels, after finally being signed by Jive Records at the age of 16.

From 'Baby one more time'

She briefly joined all girl pop band, Innosense in 1997 but soon broke away to pursue her solo career. 

From 'Baby one more time'

Her debut album 'Baby one more time' was released in January 1999. It became the biggest ever selling album by a teenage artist. The video to the single 'baby one more time' also became well known and showed her as a school girl. This video became very famous because of the school setting and outfits and the dancing.

From the single 'Crazy'

From the single 'Crazy'

The single 'Crazy' was released after the album and the video was quite similar, as she was dressed in a waitresses outfit in the beginning and then changes into similar clothes when dancing. 

'Oops i did it again' was the next hit single from the album. The video to this song showed a much more sexualised Britney. It was also a change from her previous videos in which she was dressed as someone, catholic schoolgirl/ waitress and then changed into a crop top and baggy trousers. 

In 2001 her videos became more narrative and this showed Britney as a more matured woman, 'Lucky' and 'I'm not a girl, not yet a woman.' This also allowed her to change her voice from a 'pop voice' to a more adult and recognizable voice. These screen grabs on the right are taken from the video 'I'm a slave for you' which was released in 2001. Many of her videos from 2000-2004 show her as a sexualised woman, other songs include 'Overprotected', 'Toxic', 'Piece of me', 'Womanizer' and many others. As she became more famous her videos were of a higher budget and included stunts and better settings. Shown in the screengrab on the right below. From 'Toxic' to 'Piece of me' Britney had changed in her videos from being very very sexualised to a less sexualised woman after her rehab and children. 
These are screengrabs from toxic, the first two at the top and the bottom two are screengrabs from Piece of me. 
Her most recent video 'I wanna go' is a narrative based video with some elements of performance. This is her newest song and shows how she is still continuing to be successful  in her own way. Here are some screengrabs on the left.