Final Music Video

[EVALUATION] What have you learned from your audience feedback?

So from the feedback that we've had from the audience  were incredibly successful and they've praised our video a lot, which is a positive reaction that we hoped to get. 

From the above video was a video reaction from the screening of our music video, she stresses that the video was fit for the genre and the use of mise en scene was great. She also liked the fact that we've gone far from the usual props and used dry ice which gives it a fantastic effect.

However some audiences also thought that improvements can be made to make this music video even better. For example, they thought the screen time for each character was heavily unbalanced. Even though the main character is Amy, the audience was curious about the mysterious Chesire Cat/Queen of hearts, while the Mad Hatter had a lot of screen time. 

Ofcourse at the time our answer to this is the fact that our Cheshire Cat/Queen of Hearts character was actually heavily involve in creating the mise en scene and also the filming and the directing of the music video and therefore it was hard for her to be on screen all the time. 

Another improvement was the fact that there was a cut off scene where the screen goes blank in between the song. We thought this would work well to create a hyped ending but apparently due to the reaction of the audience who MOSTLY thought that, that bit was the end applaused in the middle of the video. 

So therefore we should've thought about taking that out for next time. 

I think that by listening to people's feedback about our video we were very pleased with the outcome. 

Overall in my own opinion this video (as if I was an audience myself) I thought that there were some scenes which are obviously used to fill in the blanks. This is due to the fact that we had shortage of time to film. 

I think that if I have the chance to do this all over again, I would have planned the filming schedule better, in order to make sure we shoot EVERYTHING that we wanted, and also do other promotional issues such as a photoshoot for our digipack.

Click the link below for the written audience feedback.

http://candipop10group3.blogspot.com/2010/11/feedback-from-audience.html

http://candipop10group3.blogspot.com/2010/11/audience-feedback.html

Question 4 What have you learnt from your audience feedback

The feedback from the cinema was very positive and many people enjoyed watching it. The things that people found were interesting were the scenes with the dry ice, because dry ice is so difficult to get hold of and isn't the most commonly used student prop it looked very interesting.
Many people commented on the use of the lighting and how well we used it.

evaluation question three

 For my blog most of the information, images and videos were found using google. Youtube was a great help when it came to uploading videos such as out audience feedback which made the whole task of embedding videos on to our blog a whole lot easier.
Tumblr was also a great website that was used an awful lot when it came to finding ready made moving images to place on to the blogs.
Wikipedia was used when we were in the first stages of the project and we were finding out information about the artists such as florence. Using wikipedia we researched florence, looking at her recent releases, labels, genre and how her music relates to her audience.

Blogger was the main site that was used to log all our planning and thoughts on our work, blogger i found out of all of the technologies used was the easiest and simplest to use, embedding videos and uploading pictures only took a click. However i found that some of the time it could be slow and take a while to upload videos, which i found frustrating at times.










The equipment that we used was quite extensive.
We carefully planned out the whole day and what equipment we would need to do a whole day shoot at my house. this contained:
2 lighting kits
2 HD profesional cameras
2 light attachments for the camera
4 batteries
4 battery packs for the lighting kit
1 still camera
3 memory cards
The whole day ran smoothly and we didn't hit any problems except when we started lighting each of the set we forgot to include in our equipment the plug attachment for lighting indoors, with limited amounts of battery we had to choose to light our scenes wisely, only having them plugged into the battery packs when it was completely necessary. At the end of the day we had completely run out of light and we had to improvise with candles, torches and we attempted to use the light attachments that came with the cameras.
After a few test shits with the camera lighting attachments we decided not to use them because of the colour of the light, the light gave everything a bright white and blue look that didn't quite match our mise on scene.
Because of the amount of footage that we shot , our originally planned outdoor scene had to be scrapped because we ran out of light and memory.
Although we didn't have all the scenes that we planned i think we did the best with the equipment that we had on the day.


Final cut was the program that i used for the most of the project. Editing the video was quite challenging because we used a huge selection of different effects. when watching the footage back when i was beginning to edit i decided that i wanted the colours a little less bright so that it would directly contrast with the rest of the video. in order to do that i used the colour correction 3 way and lessened the saturation of the colour and added a few blue and green hues to the scene, i directly copied all of the attributes to the rest of the beginning footage of her being asleep. because of the lack of colour in the first section of the cut i brightened some of the pinks and blues in the rest of the video.
We used a lot of transitions throughout or film and the main one was the cross cut, by placing our scenes above each other and fading in from one and to another it gave it a more dreamy effect to the final edit.
We also used the cutting tool to create some very quick cuts to introduce the mad hatter in what seemed to look like strobe flashes by leaving small spaces in between the scenes. Because we had very few lip synced scenes in the whole video the first section we had to mark and also mark the song, it took a while to get everything in line and in sync but in the end it matched almost perfectly.
Many of our scenes were either sped up or slowed down in order to create a consistent motion throughout the video, with the ending being more relaxed and at a slower pace i decided to just use two images, i used the scene of amy walking away from the house and the flashing lights and a cross cut to dissolve the two together. By doing this it created a slow movement with the lights brightening and dimming at some points, the lights added a whole new dimension to the scene and by dissolving it before she turned her head it really gave a focus on Amy's expression in the final few seconds of the dreamy music before it hits the chorus.


For my digipack i used quark. Before using quark i used photoshop to change the saturation and hue of most of the images to give it a photographic look rather then a scene taken straight out of the film, i found quark quite easy to use and it didn't take me long to add the text using text boxes and change the colour and size. Images were also very easy, with just a double click it gave you the option to upload the image in the right place witch i found so much better then using photoshop.

For our storyboards we decided that we should do both a hand written one with every shot and a short description of the angle and the order of the scenes.
Our anamatic storyboard was created to give a brief outline of our video, using images from our influences such as a clockwork orange and alice and wonderland. Our anamatic was created in Final cut pro, we took photographs using a still camera from images we had collected and uploaded the file into final cut pro, after doing that we dragged them all onto the timeline and shortened the amount of time each was on and put them in order, we converted the film on to a quick time movie and uploaded it on to the blog.

Evaluation Question 4: What have you learned from your audience feedback?

The audience in the cinema overall reacted positively to the music video. As shown in previous blog posts such as this one, both filmed and written comments were published. A recap of just one comment can be seen below: 

This is a comment from Hannah and she mentions how 'awesome' and how well she thinks the music video suits the genre. This comment practically represents most of the comments we received and it was quite rare that we got someone saying something that could be improved in the video. One main thing that also kept coming up (just like in Hannah's comment) was how the mise en scene was good, especially the dry ice. This told me that  by taking some risks with the effects in the music video, it can create something amazing.
A majority of the audience had a positive reaction towards the music video when we were in the cinema and we got as big applause at the end of the showing.
When talking to other people a few suggested improvements that could be made in order to make it that much better. For example, one said that they would have liked to have seen more of Yasmin (who was the Cheshire Cat and the Red Queen together) as there are only about two main shots of her but many more of the Jasmine (The Mad Hatter).
Following this, it was also suggested that there should have been more quicker cuts when the drumming beat takes place in the song like this part of the video (see below):

Another improvement that was suggested for the music video was that in the middle of the music video, we shouldn't have had the blackness before and after the middle footage of Amy in the garden because it could confuse the audience in thinking that the video is at an end. While I accept this as a valid critisism of the video as in the beginning I thought that the audience would think this very thing, I thought it had a better effect if there was darkness at the beginning of the part as well as the end than if it was just at the end like in the rough cut.
I also recieved some feedback from other people who fit into my ideal target audience and who are not experienced in media and the technical aspects. Here is what some had to say:
Kim Francis: "The final video is so so amazing! I love the tranquil part starting at 2.10, everything fits in so nicely and it's real effective!" 
Kasia Kałosza: "I actually really like this ^^ I think, at the beginning the image could be a little steadier, and the lighting could be a bit more dramatic at times to emphasise the mood more, but that's just me ;) Good stuff! :D" 
 
Personally, I think that there are two things that I would want to be changed in this video. For one, in the beginning where there is a shot of the pink bread, I would have prefered to have kept the shotglass that was on fire (like the rough cut) as I think the 'waves' of the flames flow with the music more effectively. I would also have liked to show amy leaving the tea party in a different way, or at least used a different shot because it still seems like its a bit rushed and it doesn't follow the beat as much as the other shots do.

Overall, from the audience feedback that I received, I've learned that some things that you want to achieve, don't always turn out the way you want it to and also that no matter how much time is spent in editing or filming something, there is always something that could be added or changed to make it better. If I was to make an improvement due to the feedback, I would maybe add something to the middle scene so it doesn't fade in and fade out into the blackness to avoid any confusion for the audience. Another thing I would do is have more night/garden shots of Amy and more shots of Yasmin in order to balance out the exposure of both the Red Queen and the Mad Hatter.

evaluation question two

 I think that my digipack and my music video links directly mainly because all images used were taken directly from the final video. The reasons for me doing this is because i found that the mise en scene played such a big part in the video it would be a shame not to waste the effort that was put into making all the frames packed full of interesting objects.
In photoshop i made a few changes to the images such as adjusting the lighting to give it more of a photographic look rather then the image looking like it was taken straight from the film. My front cover was taken from footage that we didn't use in the final edit, the footage was not suitable for edit because of the lack of movement in the frames, however as a still the image was quite striking, Amys was in a crouching position by a tree and with a bit of brightening of the dress and the editing out of some of the trees to make way for the text the image looked suitable for the front cover of my digipack. overall i think that the digipack was simple but effective in its use of imagery.
The links that my digipack and my advert have is that the font is exactly the same and the front image is the same.

evaluation question one

Mise en scene was the main focus when i was thinking of ideas for our video.
After looking at many videos i found myself really enjoying watching the videos that included more obscure mise en scene.

This scene gave me the idea of a very theatrical looking table, i wanted the whole of the table to be covered in candles ad lights, the candle holders and seating of this scene in particular gave me ideas for placement of props.

As a whole the video influenced the idea of a journey, our journey had Amy waking from a dream and theres had a boy being placed into a different world trying to find the end in a book.
You can clearly see the link between our mise on scene and the mise on scene in the Used Video.

 these screen shots from the original video show the elements that we picked out to use in ours. the lights were very important and i found that with the sound at the end they matched so well so we tried to replicate the effect through wrapping fairy lights around my kitchen table and using editing to brighten and darken the background.

 at the ending of the song the atmosphere changes and it gets very soft and calm and the movement in witch florence moved was very relevant and graceful, we focused in on her face however how we did it was we slowed down the motion of her walking and when she turnes we filmed her flinging back her hair, we used a cross disolve with the lights to have a more interesting and complex image on the screen.

  Florence and the machine was also a small influence when it came to the video, although this is the song we chose for our final song choice we didn't use to much of the original and we just picked out elements that we found particularly interesting. 

Alice and wonderland was also a huge element that we based our whole project on, the main characters that we included was the mad hatter (who we also took some character reference from a clockwork orange), the queen of hears witch we mixed in the cheshire cat, and alice who amy played.
we used the tea party as our main focus with cups and saucers, bright cakes and tea pots scattered around the table.

When it came to insparation for the look of the digipack i knoew that i wanted a bold image on the front cover, when i think of bold i think of lady gaga, i looked at some of her album digipacks and i liked her crouching position, i then saw a fan made cover and i loved the dark edges so i then added it to my digipack front cover.

Evaluation Question Three: How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Above are just some of the resources that I used in my research, planning and evaluation of my coursework. I used websites such as myspace, facebook, island records dafont and wikipedia to research ideas whereas I used youtube and vimeo to both research during the planning stages, but to also present on the blog these ideas. For example, when explaining about the theme of Alice in Wonderland here, I used youtube to show what part of the film was most inspirational for the music video. The main search engine I used when doing my research was google, as it presented the best matches for what I was looking for and Blogger is also the main website I used as this whole coursework project is presented using this blogging site. All of these websites have played a big part in me being able to bring ideas to the group when it came to the music video anf understand ideas that people have said. I have used other media points such as magazines and other digipaks in order for me to research the world of advertising. This enabled me to create a digipak and advert that would be able to be used if it was to be properly published in the music industry.(such as having the appropriate legal information on the digipak)

For editing the advertisement and digipak, both Photoshop and Quark Express were used. With Quark, I used features such as the resize tool and the text tool in order to get the text on the digipak. Final Cut Pro was used in order to edit the music video. The first image shows the group deciding what footage would be best to put after the part where the artist is in the garden (middle of the song). I learned how to do advanced editing such as the use of markers an the razor tool (which allowed us to edit the video on beat). An example of this is when the footage of Jasmine flashes to the drum beat at the beginning of the music video (see below)

We also learned in a tutorial how to edit our music video using base tracks, however due to the nature of our video we decided not to use this process. The second image shows how I created the layout for the digipak and the third image shows part of my editing process of my photobook.


Livetype was used when we were experimenting with putting subtitles on the music video, but as a group we decided that it didn't suit the video and could take away the audiences attention from the mise en scene and story of the music video which is not our intention.

When filming the music video, there was quite a bit of equipment that was used. We as a group used three 16GB SD cards, 2 lighting kits, a tripod, 2 over the camera lights and a HD JVC semi professional camera.
This year I learned how to do more handling of the camera and how not to use the tripod for everything like I done when making the thriller title sequence last year. I learned how to do panning freehand and create the correct type of lighting for each scene. However, in the video a lot of the light was natural because our charged batteries ran out fairly quickly and there was no plug for a proper power supply.
For the storyboard, the whole group produced two types of storyboard - an animatic storyboard and also a drawn one. Below is the animatic storyboard that we used Final Cut Pro for and two pages of the drawn storyboard.

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

Websites used for planning, research and evaluation

These sites are the main sites that I used for planning and research. I use blogger obviously for blogging my work from start to finish. This site is important because it allows me to virtually keep my work in place and store it. I use Youtube to research music videos of other artist and give us inspiration for our music video. This site is useful because it gives us unlimited videos for any artists. For uploading our music video we have used Vimeo because the quality of their videos are significantly better than any other video providers. 

Technologies used for filming

Editing Process

We used Final Cut Pro for editing because this is the best editing software for amateur film makers. The effects that we used were slow motion, cross dissolve and also we played around with the colours of the video. 

You can read a full analysis of our editing process here editing process

For creating my ancillary texts, I used mainly Photoshop CS5 Extended 

Plainly because this is the main software I use a lot at home. Also the fact that I can do a lot more than the normal Photoshop Ellements which are available college, for example creating an effective edit of a low quality picture takes a lot of skills to make it decent, and working with Photoshop Ellements does not work well enough to be able to do that. The reason why I decided not to use Quark Express is because I think there was no need to edit it there when I can use photoshop using a template and on photoshop I am fully in control of editing the image and the font. 

Using Photoshop CS5 Extended version I was able to make a high quality GIF animation which would not be available if I used Photoshop Ellements or other photo editing softwares. 

Digital storyboard.

[EVALUATION] How effective is the combination of your main product (video) and ancillary texts (digipack and advertisement)?

Screen shots from our actual music video

Evaluation question two: How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

As you can tell by my digipak and advert, they both have direct links with each other. My advert (image two) is the same with the inside panels of my digipak, therefore creating a distinct link between them. However, even though the image is of the same thing, the picture had been flipped vertically in order for it to go better and not to have amy covered by the mini photobook which is inserted on the other panel where the CD is not there. Following this, the same font used in the front cover of the digipak is used not only on the advert, but also at the first and last page of the photobook (which can also be seen below).

 

Also, with all three of my ancillary products, the main reason that direct links were made so clearly, was because most images were taken from the music video. For example, the image that is on my advert and inside panels of the digipak was taken from the middle of the music video (see below) and the picture of the teapot was taken from the music video. However, some pictures were not from the music video, such as the front panel of the digipak. But all pictures were taken when on that day we were filming.

Following this, the digipak shows a variety of bright colours which not only runs through these three products, but also throughout the music video. One thing that had been mentioned when the audience saw the music video was that they liked the great use of colours and I wanted to carry that on through to the other ancillary products. These main colours were the use of pinks, reds and pastel colours.
Personally, I think that my ancillary products could have been better  and I could have done better with the images in order to make it more suitable for this type of genre. For example, I could have used a different picture of the front panel of the digipak because it looks like Amy is blindfolded or something, when really its the contrast that made her black bow in her hair that made it look like this. Also I could have created the digipaks so not all pictures were taken from the music video.
I decided to talk to people who are within my target audience to see if they would buy this product if it was in the shops and these are the responses I got (see below):
Juliana Amaa - 18 years old: "I really like your digipak because of the bright colours and things, I would really want to know more about the artist. I must say that I don't really know if I would be able to link the advertisement and the digipak instantly because the image of the advert links with the inside image in the digipak. But with saying this, I think I would definitely want to buy it, if not, at least find out more about your artist."
Kim Francis - 17 years old: "I really love the contrast of colour in your advert with the bright lights - its very eye catching. I think you grab the audience in a good way with your digipak and the photobook tells me that this album is a story that hasn't fully finished which makes me curious about what the artist has to offer in the album. I'd be the type to buy it from HMV if it was featured there."
Kasia Kalazoa - 16 years old: "Woah, the whole thing just looks so pretty! I love all the colours and settings and the way everything looks! The teapot on the back is amazing, I'd buy the digipak just because it looked so awesome - if it turned out the music wasn't so great I don't think I'd be too bothered. I'd still have something that looks nice in my room! :D"
This shows that there are some flaws in my digipak and advertisement, however, they do not seem to be so severe that it would result in the lack of sales for the artist if it was to be put on to the market.

Evaluation question one: In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

There are a few video's that had influenced the final video. For example, the way bright colours were used in Florence and the Machine's video for Cosmic Love and how it could be seen as 'eccentric' by the audience. Pictures of the music video which represents what I am talking about are below:

These pictures (especially the pictures one, two and five) shows how bright colours were used throughout the whole video whereas pictures three and four show how eccentric the video in terms of the mirrored room, light bulbs and her dress which can light up. Following this, an iconic feature of this video is the light bulbs which features well through the whole video, just like our teapot features well in ours.


Our video shows that it has been inspired by this video by many things. (see pictures below showing this.)

 


Also how everything calms down in the middle of the song just like it is with our music video. (2:09 - 2:38 of the video below)

Another music video that inspired the final music video was Orange Caramel - A~ing♡ (아잉♡)  due to the use of costumes, bright colours and how things are over exaggerated. The video also shows another element of Alice in Wonderland, but in a different medium. Below is the actual music video and images that show these features.

Our main theme throughout the whole music video was the film Alice in Wonderland by Tim Burton in terms of visual style and the tea party scene especially. It also has the element of how out of the ordinary the scene is in the film and us as a group were deeply inspired by this. Video of part of tea party scene and pictures of it are below:

The colours of picture two which is from the original Alice in Wonderland also inspired us in our usage of colours.
Below is a video of me summarising the main elements of the music video that was inspired by something else.

The music video didn't challenge conventions too much as when researching indie music videos, I found that you can create whatever you want and things can be anything you want them to be. The video doesn't have elements that are out of the ordinary for the genre, for example, we don't have elements of mise en scene which would be in an rnb video such as big sets/houses, lots of gold, girls and money.
The music video sticks with the basic technical convention in terms of the music video sticking with the beat and footage being changed on beat. The music video also sticks with conventions such as having close ups of the artist and the other characters, establishing the relationship of the characters and story with the audience. With this, we made sure that the audience was aware of the key star (the artist) by concentrating more on her throughout the video.
Following this, the music video fits comfortably within the disjuncture convention of Andrew Goodwin's theory as it doesn't really connect with the lyrics of the song is has a separate story to the actual music.

The digipak and advert is kind of conventional as it shows strong, distinct references with the music video like most digipaks. However, you do get some digipaks in the genre dont show links to the video. For example, the digipak by Friendly Fires (seen below) does not show much of a link between that and their music videos.

There is one main digipak which influenced me with my digipak and advert because of their use of bright colours and direct links with their music video in one way or another.
This digipak and advert influenced me in terms of linking the two together in terms of imagery of the two products. For example, the background of the advert is the same as the digipak front cover.

The colours in my digipak are very bright which can be shown in other digipaks of this genre.