Evaluation by Charlotte Timm

This assignment consists of evaluating our media projects that we have created during the last few weeks. Those projects were a music video and two ancillary texts;one being a magazine advert of the band and the chosen track and the second being a Digipak of the music video and track.
To evaluate the music video we are using Goodwin's Music Video Analysis Theory factors.

First of all I should explain what our music video consisted of.Our chosen track "Lights & Music" was by a current Australian band named "Cut Copy". This band would probably be associated with the "Indie" genre as it consists of multiple members in the band and have a soft rock theme, however this band uses upbeat and electronic sounds to differentiate itself from other popular bands.
We chose this track as it had a "happy-go-lucky" feeling to it, and creates a friendly/humourous theme in our minds. This may have been our biggest influence to what our music video narrative would be.

Our narrative was a basic concept of a male individual getting ready for a night out, to have a good time. Throughout the story it demonstrates the character being intoxicated and demonstrates a stereotypical youth's habits. It is often seen in music video's to have a narrative following a particular character throught the song to unravel their mission/adventure/day or life.
However in this case, we had been previously watching popular music video's and had viewed one that stuck in mind. The famous British band "The Prodigy" had a chocking and explicit music video for their track "Smack My Bitch Up" not only did the track's name find to be offensive but so did the video's context.
What we liked about this video is that it followed a character through the whole video and unravel a story.
In our music video we failed to bring much performance, which would have probably been expected for a Indie type song. But including performance to our narrative proved to be hard to find relevance. Instead we used minimal characters but the one.However to captivate the audience we used the idea of looking through someone else's perspective. We did so by filming a large percentage of our footage at eye level as to represent the camera as the character's eyes. And of course we needed typical music video genre characteristics such as close up's of the main character;this also helped us to demonstrate the characters intoxicated state. We also demonstrated this by using medium long shots to show the characters body language and movement.

After completing the music video we had to create a magazine advert, so in effort to create a realistic magazine advert we looked at already existing magazine articles and advertisments and found that they used minimal visuals and less information then expected.
However we create our's by including an image of the band; to create recognition, it's name and a few of their track's names, a release date and areas to buy or download the album/tracks. Including where the tracks can be bought such as stores (Virgin,HMV,Amazon) or Itunes premotes stop to illegal downloading. We kept the advert simple,hopefully intersting enough to grab the reader's attention and encourage them to pursue more intrest to the band and it's music. Our second ancillary text was a Digipak, digipaks are a patented style of CD (compact disk) or DVD (digital video disk) packaging. Our Digipak was bright and vivid,captivating the audience. However it was only so because of the band's logo,which we chose to use. Not only is this logo used in posters but it is used in every item available for the public to purchase. Therefore we only felt it was aproppriate to use it to create a theme. We used the logo in the front cover and inside the Didgipak,to clearly demonstrate who this Digipak is by and what it is selling. We used the same colours used in the logo into stripes to list the tracks available in the Digipak. We also added the DVD logo to our product to make it more realistic and to inform what the Digipak consists of to a potential buyer.

After completing all of these products we had audience and peer to peer reviews. As expected this gave us an evaluating perspective to clarify what was good and bad. This was incredibly helpful as it emphasised our strengths and weaknesses of our project. For example, as expected our peer told us that we missed performance in the video and that our Digipak should have used darker writing to be more ledgable. This gave us the chance to correct what could be corrected.
Peer review was deffinatly the most important as the comments given were valid and precise.
Through out the whole making of our product we relied and searched for all our information on the Internet. We constantly blogged our progress,and meeting deadlines.Sites such as Youtube, to watch already existing video's and to load our own helped us. Wikipedia gave us information on the band and where they were from alos giving names which we used in our magazine advert.We also used Myspace to contact the band asking permission to use their track for our project, unfortunatly we had no reply. We has access to great programs such as AS Photoshop and Final Cut Express to edit and create our music video and ancillary texts.

Audio Commentary

To complete our project we have been making an audio commentary of the whole package it involves discussing what we have done and achieved during the last few weeks. This includes commentary about our music video and our ancillary tasks; most of the commentary was describing how we completed our tasks and how they had a connection with one another. It is essential to have this completed correctly and up to standards as this is worth around 20 marks.

We decided to have all of us involved in the audio commentary, simply because we have created it as a visual commentary. For example: We all had discussion topics to individually evaluate, and the commentary ends with all members evaluating the project. Making the audio commentary a visual was easier then expected as it is basically a discussion topic, even if our environment which we had to film in was not visually attractive, it was a familiar area so it kept us at ease. However even so it was hard to not have unnecessary pauses during the middle of a description but we realized that was going to happen with or without practice. Editing filmed footage that can be used is tougher then we predicted as some material simply wasn't appropriate or good enough to use, however cutting some parts out meant that we didn't have a continuous flow in the video. Trying to make this task seriously was challenging, because most of us were not use to being filmed.But this was predictable and we just had to have a few trials in filming until we got good material.

Digipack Template

We searched the web to see what kind of digipacks were available, we came across a few templates. Usually they come in different shape and sizes to fit the amount of CD's or DVD's required.

Digipacks

Digipak is a patented style of compact disc or DVD packaging, and is a registered trademark of AGI Media, a resource,MeadWestvaco.Inc which acquired the original trademark holder, IMPAC Group, Inc., in 2000. MeadWestvaco licensed the name and designs to manufacturers around the world.
Here are a few digipacks available on the market either in stores or on the internet these were found on Amazon.

The Roughcut Filming Procedure.

After booking our camera and meeting on Sunday evening, we were slightly disappointed with the lack of people in town because of it being Uni Freshers we'd thought there would plenty of night life activity. However we then realised it came to an advantage to us because we didn't have the problem of having people protest in being in some shots of our film. Which can effect the pace of work we could do with our evening, we were willing to stay till we had what we wanted and luckily for us we managed to make most of the footage in an hour.

As for our location we chose the shopping area of town and the bus station, the bus station has plenty of lighting which helped us make the footage clear and reinforce the concept of night time. The shopping area gave us the chance to film in-doors, as we filmed some of our footage in the "Grand Arcade" we realised that this could be the end of the characters wild night.

Planning of Filming session out of College grounds

We have decided to book our camera for the weekend, as we need nighttime footage for our project. Plus as another bonus we get to spend as much time as we want to film our project, with no restrictions to where to go. We have decided we need to consider what areas to film at and what props we need. We think we should use most of Cambridge's hot spots where we can find a few people during nighttime, to be part of our ambient feel.
I.e: lighting, costumes, characters, and props.

For example we think that we need objects that people use on a day to day basis such as mobile phones,wallets and keys. So our main character needs to have these type of objects with him and to look at it. Because in some scenes the main character checks his phone so he can meet his friends on his night out.
For costumes we feel that we owe to the band to have some indie influenced outfits, however because it is a night out we want our characters to looked dressed up, i.e: nice shoes, smart jeans and smart jacket.

Because of our choice of night time filming, lighting is going to be one of the trickiest elements to the filiming. Not enough light can be very restricting, so we have come up with a very basic solution to this problem. We are going to strap a torche to the camera so it creates a spot light for when the character focuses in and out of people and objects (as our filming technique is point of view). Not only will this be practical but it will also give the effect we were wanting to our film sequence.