When researching music videos I noticed that a various amount of the performers in the videos were those of the real band, such as the “Billy Talent” video to “Rusted in the rain”, so I set out to make this one of my priorities when creating my music video, this way there would be a more natural, realistic feel to the video as they would know how to play the song all the way through with ease.
When filming the footage I decided to go down the path of making the footage darker than normal, this would then help create an over-exposed look when I changed the brightness and contrast, this was then turned into black and white to balance out the colours, after doing this the graininess left from shooting the video in a dark location created a good effect for the final version of the video.
Also, I tried to make the footage cut between band members relatively fast paced, to fit the music, but also slowing down the cuts whenever the song’s tempo dropped, this gave the video a better feel to the footage with the amount of cuts created a good flow with the music.
The repeatability factor is also included in the music video with the video going back to certain camera shot multiple times, this was done to create a simplistic approach to how the video looked, which works quite well.
The video contains elements of youth and aggression, this follows typical conventions for the music video industry, with all of the band members being bellow the age of twenty one. The music fueled the way to include aggression to the music as there is a screamer in the band, a shake effect was included to increase the aggressive style of the video.
During the music video shuddering is used to create wildness to the band members, this links to one of Dyer’s theories, “The star must be simultaneously ordinary and extraordinary for the consumer”, this extraordinary shaking effect is a feature ordinary people cannot do, create a difference between the band and the viewer.
The visual effects follow Pete Frasers guide to teaching music video, as he stated that adding digital effects into music videos create a different kind of pleasure to that of normal video.
When looking at ways to shoot the music video a big influence was that of a live video for a song by Queens of the Stone Ages song “Little Sister”. The energy given out from the performance by the way the video was edited was quite high, this worked quite effective with quick straight cuts throughout, I decided this would work well for a music video and based my music video on a full performance video.
Another theorist whose work applies to mine is Andrew Goodwin, who wrote, “There is a relationship between music and visuals”, this is the case in the final version of the music video, as when the screamer screams in the music, most of the time the screen has an over-lapped effect to show the aggression of the screamer. There is also a section near the start of the video where the scream shakes up and down to display the voice of the screamer. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
The ancillary texts worked well with the main product overall, as all products had a similar style to them overall, with the digipak having a dirty look to it, linking to the style of the music video and song. The website was given a mainly black, grey and white theme to it to link with the music video as well, however there was also a burst of blue coming from behind the website, this created a bit more interest to the image, and also relates to a line in the song where the singer mentions the word “explode”.
For the digipak, there are muscles as the main background, this links to a line in the song “until my muscles tear away” I included this so that was there were links from the song to the digipak. There is also a digital drawing of an x-rayed shoulder, this was done to link with the muscles and give the digipak cover a dirty style look to it. 
For the website, there is a link between the video and website by there being a picture from the video at the top centre of the page, I included this to create a link between the two pieces and also because the website lacked interest without it. There are clear borders around each section, splitting up where each piece of content is on the page with rounded rectangular objects, this makes the website easier on the eye, helping the user distinct between different pieces of information that’s contained on the website.
The video helps promote the band by only showing them, this increases awareness to who is in the band by only letting the viewer see who plays what part in the band.
What have you learned from your audience feedback?
The feedback was gained through showing a group of people from within the class to view the final video, digipak and website. Then they were asked to send myself feedback through the college’s emails, from then I was able to read what was written and evaluate my own work.
Overall, the feedback for my music video has mainly been positive, with people commenting on how they liked the style of the video, including the use of close ups to show the band playing, and how each band member has a different angled close up, to give them different depth. However, they did mention that the performance was a bit weak in some areas, include a mid-shot of one of the guitarists, as he isn’t moving, just stood on one spot playing the guitar, making that part of the music video more lifeless then the rest of the time.
There was also a part where the male singer of the band is miming to a voice which isn’t there, this makes the video seem out of sync for this section until the voice starts and he manages to sing along to it properly. This unfortunately, was an error that I couldn’t go back to correcting as the parts he sang didn’t go to the editing stages until late into the project, this meant there wasn’t enough time to be able to go back and change any of the footage that was shot for his role.
Moving onto the digipak, the feedback was mostly positive for this as well, with people commenting on how they liked the song “Granny Miggins” linking to the digipak front cover, with one of the lines saying “until my muscles tear away”, the digipak contains a background of muscles going down all the way through. This also created a good flow between pages as the backgrounds were the same, they didn’t stand out too much, removing the users eye on the rest of the items on the pages. There was a suggestion on adding pictures of the band onto the inside of the CD cover, however this wouldn’t of worked in my opinion as the images of each band member would have distracted people from the style of the muscle background.
For the website, the feedback was quite positive comments included that of the layout being well structured and simple to follow, also they mentioned that the blue glow bursting out the back of the website worked better than the draft version of the website, which didn’t include any colour to it. However, a few sections of the website were slightly rushed as, unfortunately my time keeping wasn’t brilliant, most of the time was spent ensuring that the video was a good enough standard for me to be happy with, this meant that I had little time to create the website, meaning I wasn’t able to implement some features which I originally thought about including, such as an animated banner for the band’s name at the top of the page, instead of the blank, still one that is on the final version.
How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
For the research stages of constructing the music video new media helped quite a bit, using sites such as youtube.com to be able to find a music video to analyse. Without the internet being available this task could have been more difficult than it is currently. I was also able to do the same thing with digipaks, I used 2 digipaks to analyse, 1 that was a real copy and one from a digital source.
Trying to find a track was quite a simple process, I’d asked three bands for permission to use songs and each replied back with a positive response saying that I could use the song I’d asked for, it was then decided that I would work on the band that was least known, this decision was made because I wanted to help out the bands promotion so that more people would hear the music and know who they were by them being able to promote their music video. Opening up chances for viewers to see them on websites such as YouTube, instead of having to go to just their live shows to see the band perform.
For the planning stage, focus was mainly on using new media, this would speed up most of the processes that would sometimes be done by hand, the creation of each piece of planning was done of a computer in Microsoft word, or adobe flash, however the storyboard was done by hand, as doing at least 50 pictures on the computer would have taken a longer time period to produce. The layout for the website and digipak were created on the computer, this way the time taken to create the actual digipak and website would be a shorter process, as I would be able to fill in the colours with the outlines already provided.
For the actual construction of the video, adobe premiere pro was used in order to edit the video footage that was taken. This was a long, but steady process, the time that was used creating the video was mainly a long process due to the rendering process of the music video taking a long time to be done.
Also, the making of the website was quite an easy task, thanks to previous experience creating websites in Adobe Flash, this helped speed along how quickly the website could be created and developed. When creating the digipak, the designing process of making the packaging look good seemed to be quite an easy job also, this was due to having previous experience in creating images in Adobe Photoshop. However, the harder part was thinking of items of text to include onto the covers and where the placement should be of those texts, however I went back to the research that was done previously and managed to insert text into appropriate areas of the digipak.
When trying to upload my video onto the internet so I could embed the footage on my blog, website etc, there were problems with YouTube, I then used previous experiences with having problems with the website to be able to quickly fix the problem by moving onto Vimeo, this uploaded the final video without any problems, unlike YouTube which scrambled uncontrollably for reasons unknown.
Finally, for the evaluation, technology helped throughout, I used my blog to look back at the work previously done by myself and then was able to write about sections from that. Emailing also was useful for gathering audience feedback, after showing a group of people the finished products I asked each of them to send me feedback so then I could write up what views that had and be able to evaluate my own performance better.
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