Evaluation: Q1

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

ANCILLIARY TASKS:

For question 1 we needed to be able to evaluate how the product(s) we created utilise the codes and conventions of real media products. In order to evaluate my products to the best of their ability I would need to look back on the products which I created for the coursework and then compared them to some real products. I started off with my ancillary products; the digipak and the album advert. 

FINAL PRODUCT:

Final version

Although at times, rather stressful and hectic, this coursework hasn't been half as bad as I had assumed it to be, and I can actually say, I did learn a lot about the editing of a music video and the importance of certain conventions of a music video, and on the whole it was (at times) fun!

It has been a great learning curve for myself and my fellow group members, in the sense that we stumbled across many obstacles which the other groups had not encountered; such as the lip synching, the darkness, the location, the constant postponing of the re-film of the lip synching and the anxiousness that we may not reach the final deadline (but we did!) etc. But we got there eventually in the end,  and I therefore think we can safely say that all these mistakes paid off and that the we are exceptionally proud of our final edit of the music video. 

For the schedule of our production, we stuck to the Dipity timeline which we had created, apart from the last few weeks where we went off schedule and decided to spend more time on the first draft to perfect it as much as possible, as opposed to making several drafts and editing each one - we preferred the idea of putting in more hard work for the first draft and resulting in very little editing to do once feedback was received, which I think paid off. 

There were times in the music video when the acting can be perceived as a little 'over dramatic', although during the editing process, I actually felt that this was indirectly a genre convention, in the sense that many music videos within the indietronica genre are almost mocking either themselves, the genre or other genres - therefore this over dramatic acting can indirectly be seen as a genre convention - working out in our favour. It is also important to note that we are a bunch of sixth form students which practically no money or high - tech equipment, so obviously our music video wasn't going to turn out like a Beyonce music video would. however, for a student effort, we think that we did a pretty good job overall, and made it as professional looking as we possibly could.

Here is our last and FINAL version of our music video - Constant Conversations: 

Enjoy!

Feedback from teenagers

Since the first draft it is important to gain even more extensive feedback so that we can make sure the video is to the best of it's ability, therefore Zach went round and asked some teenagers (The lower end of our target audience) for some more feedback, which can be viewed below:




It seems that most people who have given us feedback for our music video say the same things, both adults and teenagers. They both comment on the cinematography and professionalism of the footage and understanding of the narrative which are the most important things which we tried to get across in our video. There was however, repetition on how the acting could've been better in certain scenes of the video and that it looked very staged and almost fake at times. This was the only strong criticism throughout the audience feedback and the majority seemed content with the video.

Second lot of feedback

Since the feedback from our first draft, we have obviously changed things about our music video. Therefore it is important that we are able to gather some more feedback in regard to the latest (and hopefully final) version of our music video. 

Therefore we asked our fellow peers in our form to comment on what they thought of our music video, and also our form tutor:




The main thing which we picked up from this feedback was that the cinematography, colour grading and the style is very strong, especially the 'haziness' of the scenes. They felt that the narrative was relatively easy to understand, although there was the odd comment about there being too many characters at the start, making it slightly confusing; however at a later stage it is mentioned that actually the more the video progresses, the easier it is to distinguish the characters and its meaning.

Finishing touches

It seemed that time was running out and was unfortunately not on our side, and therefore the finishing touches of our video needed to be finalised. In most cases, there would have been approximately 3 drafts, however as we have already discussed, we wanted to perfect the first draft thus spending far longer on the first draft than probably needed in order to allow for minimal changes on our video after feedback. 

The feedback which we received from our teachers and our form class were easily solved and manageable. 

Problem: Again, one media teacher commented on the first 40 seconds looking like a short film. Especially the display of the artist and song name across the screen.

Solution: We will put the titles along the bottom (instead of over the top of the footage) and immediately it will connote a music video.

Because of this, we very reluctantly decided to remove the existing titles; 'Passion Pit' and 'Constant Conversations'.  We then decided that we would just use the traditional display of the artist and song title - in the bottom left-hand corner, which is of course, a convention of music videos anyway.

Ultimately, this removes the 'documentary' feel to the music video.

Problem: No record label

Solution: Put at the end of the video

For this, we needed to go back over our initial record label research in order to discover who is responsible for our artist - Passion Pit. In which, we discovered that Columbia Records, which is a conglomerate of Sony Music Entertainment. Therefore we decided to put a black screen at the end displaying the record company. 

Problem: A few lip synching shots were out of time

Solution: Re-time them in Final Cut

For this, we just shortened or lengthened each clip as necessary and moved each one forward or backward by several frames in order to match the duration of the lyrics. This did however, take a while because most of the lip synching shots were actually fine so it became more difficult to find the ones which were not fine. However, of course, we did eventually find the out of synch ones and made sure that they were now in synch. 

After most of the final editing was finished, we decided that we wanted to connote the 'film look' despite this being a music video, and despite being previously told to take things out of the video because it was too 'documentary' like - we wanted this look. The main thing we wanted to add was a 'letter box', which is essentially two black bars - one at the top and one at the bottom of the screen. This then gives the video a more cinematic feel to it and adds a touch of professionality. 

In order to do this, we simply cropped the footage by 65.0 px on the top and bottom and it then revealed the black background underneath. However, one problem we encountered was that some of the clips needed to be moved higher or lower in order to ensure that nothing important was cropped out.  For example; on the final shot, half of the girl's head was obscured by the black bar, so we therefore needed to move the footage lower to make the rest of her head visible and so that it doesn't look tacky and careless. 

Before:

After:

The final change made was that we decided to extend the smile at the end of the video for another 5 frames. The reason we did this was because when showing the video around for feedback, a few people hadn't actually noticed the smile at the end, so therefore if we extended it's duration then people should hopefully notice the smile.

First draft feedback

Once our first draft was complete we wanted to show it to our media teachers and see what their opinion was and listen to their feedback. We filmed their response to our video, and they gave us some really valuable feedback:

Here are some of the key things which were mentioned, which will need to be changed in our video:

Problem: Again, one media teacher commented on the first 40 seconds looking like a short film

Solution: We will put the titles along the bottom (instead of over the top of the footage) and immediately it will connote a music video.

Problem: No record label

Solution: Put at the end of the video

Problem: A few lip synching shots were out of time

Solution: Re-time them in Final Cut

Overall editing of our music video

When it comes to editing the footage, we are using a software called 'Final Cut Pro'. This software is thankfully quite straightforward to use and therefore doesn't require much practice or tutorial before fully getting the hang of it. 

Throughout the process of creating and editing our music video in Final Cut, we took some screenshots which explain how to use the Final Cut software. 

We put a section of the clips into the timeline in order to see if they flowed and if they fitted well together, we then made sure that it fitted in with the music and the beat.

We took certain sections from each clip and put it into the timeline. We didn't use all of the footage we had filmed and we chose which section we wanted from each individual clip, as we did not need the full duration of each clip. Previous to the editing, Zach had colour corrected these clips; this therefore sped up the editing process for us once the clips were on Final Cut.

Our timeline began to look rather messy and compact. But thankfully, regardless of the messy display of footage, all the group members were fully aware of the stages we were up to and could understand what was going on.

Once the editing was in full swing, obviously we were getting feedback for what had been produced so far, and as a group we were also able to notice and point out little flaws with the editing so far. One flaw which had been pointed out was the fact that we lacked footage and we needed to use up as much footage as possible in order to cover the full duration of our video. Therefore for certain clips we decided it could be a good idea to slow down some clips in order to fill up screen time and to also fit in with the overall atmosphere of the video. Luckily for us, our clips were filmed at 48fps rather than the standard 24fps which means that the individual frames wont be seen when the clip is slowed down as it was filmed at a higher frame rate.

We decided that the speed of the clip needed to be slower than 50%, but this unfortunately meant that some of the frames then became visible. Thankfully, Zach has good experience and skill with Final Cut and has actually experienced this exact incident before and he therefore knew how to prevent the frame visibility from happening. He used a new tool to Final Cut Pro; the 'Optical Flow' with extrapolates and the bits in between the frames preventing them from being visible.