This year for my media studies coursework I decided to make a music video, we were given the choice of three different tasks so I chose to form a group with three other girls to complete a music video, we decided on a music video because it was a challenge and we were all interested in music therefore eager to find out how to make one. This process took a number of weeks as we completed different tasks step by step. Starting with the planning and organising, we began our planning by deciding between us what song we would use.
Within my group I took part in a lot of planning the video as I helped planning the video, I also did a lot of this filming of the shots, I took all the photographs for the ancilary tasks and then me and my partner Kate both created a front and inside cover of the CD cover and then together we created a magazine advert for the album.
All our group decided on the target audience of ages 16-24, we decided on this because we are within this age group therefore know that a lot of people within this group are interested in music and would listen to 'Alex Johnson's' songs.
Genre
- Another music video that we linked with our research was Jason Mraz 'I'm Your's', because the style of music is very similar however his music video is completely different. After looking at his music video we decided that the style of his song was completely different to ours so we chose to stick with the black and white clips and the short narrative that was included.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkHTsc9PU2A
- When we decided that we wanted to do a narrative music video instead of experimental or performance, we new that we were working with a slow calm song so that everything we filmed for this video had to fit perfectly with the song.
- We decided not to film the clips to follow the words of the song but to make up a story line to follow so that it was easier to follow, however we chose to not give the story an ending but to leave it on kind of a cliff hanger so that the audience could decided for themselves what happens with the couple at end of the story.
- The story we chose was about two teenagers that were in a very complicated relationship, however we did not explain anything more than this. We wanted to let the audience think about what was going on and want to watch the music video over and over again to have different theories. The male character that is miming the song in the video is the main character and then one member of our group played the female character. The shots went back and forth between the two with editing inbetween to show the difficult relationship. This was very hard to film and to get right but we made it in the end and I am very happy with how all our final products turned out.
Branding and brand image
When we were thinking about our acoustic brand image we thought about designing a logo that would be appropriate to this specific genre, we obviously wanted to keep it nice and simple to fit well with the rest of the designing we did for the overall product. Above are the first two designs that we came up with and then after having a think between us we came up with a more complicated logo which is below.
After careful thinking and after we placed everything together within our whole product we decided not to use a logo on our product because we decided that we wanted our artist to just be known as him, with everything plain and simple so we just stuck to the simple black, white and red colour scheme.
With our chosen artist we thought it was important to keep the photographs fresh and modern looking, when i took the images i decided to make them abit quirky looking by taking them in an old dirty train station tunnel, this turned out to look really effective in the way that this acoustic singer was in the train station clearly where he shouldnt normally be. Again keeping the images very simple yet effective this kept a close link with the video, the black and white colour schemes that we chose for the video and the style that we decided to complete all the ancilary tasks in.
When i was editing the images i decided to use Photoshop to do this because it is the best programme when editing images, I thought carefully about how i wanted to edit them to make them look professional and well done. After thinking carefully about this i decided to use a filter on Photoshop named 'dark strokes' this gives the image a black a white edit however it also gives it a really strong contrast so that the photograph looks unique and like it belongs on a CD cover rather than just an ordinary image. I was also thinking about other album covers that would be on the shelves, the customer wants something eyecatching, so even though our product is simple it still would have that edge over the others because of the colour schemes and the way everything strongly links together. Also even though the genre is acoustic we wanted to make our acoustic overall product very similar looking to say, an alternative looking album cover or magazine article, because we wanted to be more creative with what we designed and this worked very well. Below is the best image i took of the character used in the video and the ancilary tasks, and below that is the edited version showing a great difference.
The band we have closely linked our whole project on is City and Colour, mainly because of their close link in sound to our chosen artist and their overall style, which is very laid back and modern, and we think that thier targer audience would be very similar to ours so we could strongly link everything we created with this certain bands whole overall image.
As we chose black, white and red for our colour scheme we soon discovered that this is also City and Colour's colour scheme which we found very facinating because of the similarities between their style and our ideas that we wanted our artist to be like.
Above is a link to the bands website so I can interactively show the link between our ideas of what the style of our artist would be like and their overall band image.
It is good that we have strong links with existing products in the market so that the audience can link to the familiar. Another product that I have been closely looking at when creating the ancilary tasks is NME magazine, even though they do not focus on acoustic music in general, the overall style and image is perfect inpiration for what we wanted to achieve. City and Colour are with two labels named- 'Dine Alone' and 'Vagrant' These are probably the kinds of independant labels that would take on our artist for a similar artist because again it is good to stick with the familiar however having something a little different.
Everything about the website is inspiring also including the magazine from the images incuded inside from the layout and fonts, it is all very original and modern and this is what we wanted to find when looking at existing products.
Audience
In our group we decided that our target audience would be 16-24, because of this certain age range, we thought would listen to this type of music the most, the artist is within this age range also. From decided this, this is when we went on create the brand image, always thinking about the target audience. From deciding on this target audience we then chose to investigate further into our audience by looking at, teen music magazines such as NME as i mention earlier. We wanted the audience to be specific,
sex- either male or female but probably mostly female
age- obviously between the ages of 16 and 24
occupation- probably mostly students
As I mentioned earlier we used a group of students that are in this age range to question about all of our finished products, below are the questions that we asked.
Q1. What gender are you?
Q2. How old are you?
Q3. What is your occupation?
Q4. On a scale of one to ten how much did you enjoy this music video?
Q5. How appropriate are the following for an acoustic music video?
- Location
- Editing
- Music
- Characters
Q7. Do you think enough effects have been used?
Q8. Does the magazine article and the album cover suit this particular music video?
Q9. Do you think it was effective to put the memories in slow motion?
Q10. Out of ten how believable does the character's relationship look?
Q11. If the album cover was to be sold in a shop would the cover attract you to buy it?
We handed the questionnaires around the group of students and filmed their responses, read the questions aloud and different students out of the group answered different questions. Unless the questions needed everybody to answer. Looking at the answers we were given, all the ones that needed a mark out of ten all got 7 and above by the students, this was very good in helping us with the results from the target audience that we wanted.
All of the feedback that we gained from handing out these questionnaires was very positive and this helped us with our products because we knew that out target audience were pleased with the finished products and this is what we wanted to achieve.
- Technologies used- To create all of our media products we used a wide range of technologies. For the music video we used an Apple Mac computer to do all the editing on and a handheld video camera and tripod to film the different clips, this proved very difficult!
- After we got all of the clips together we then decided to use Final Cut to edit the footage, this was difficult because slight problems kept occuring with our scences so at points we had to re-upload them. In Final Cut we used a few of the different effects on the programme to finish our music video such as adjusting the speed, changing the clips into black and white for the memories and then using the fading tool to fade the clips in and out. In the end using all of this technology proved very effective and worked well together with our other products.
- When creating our album and magazine advert we used In Design and Photoshop, this was not as difficult because I have experience in using both of these programmes before, especially Photoshop which I have used a lot. I used Photoshop to edit the photographs after I had taken them taking advantage of the different editing techniques that I had previously learnt. I used a filter named 'dark strokes'.
- And then we used In Design for the rest basically putting the album and magazine article together, using the sizing on this programme and the different colours and fonts all came from this programme. With help from 'www.dafont.com' for some of the fonts that we chose. This all appeared very effective in the end and pleasing to the eye, all these forms of technology were really good when preparing our tasks. We did have dificulty with images not uploading properly and computers crashing but in the end we came over these issues.
- Looking at the overall products I dont think that I would change much in our overall prodcuts, I really liked how they all turned out and was very pleased with the audience feedback.
Creative Technologies
This was the final magazine article that me and my partner Kate created, we stuck with the black, white and red colour scheme and used our lyrics idea using In Design and Photoshop to create just what we wanted and we were really pleased with the outcome!
These technologies have allowed us to achieve just what we wanted, a calm looking and simple three coloured colour scheme set of products, they look artistic and creative and I am very please with the outcome!
Conclusion
This is an example of an album cover of an artists closely linked to ours however this album cover is bright and colourful and detailed, showing the different acoustic/alternative music can be.
Looking at our overall products I am very happy with what we have all achieved, it was not hard to work in a group with three other girls as I worked alone last year however I found it this year that the challenge was good to work with. It was a very big challenge from having the snow affects our days for filming, one model that we were meant to use could no longer take part so we had to find a new one. And there was a lot of disagreements but I am really glad that in the end we got it all done and it turned out as good as it did. I am very happy with all the finished products and glad that they clearly link well together even when we split up into pairs from out group of four then came back together all our seperate work linked really well!
The ancillary tasks were hard to complete but it made it a lot easier that we split up into pairs to complete, the creative side was really difficult to come up with also.
Overall I think we worked well as a group and we got everything done to a high standard.
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