Final Music Video - Tei Daratsa - Lost My Way

Ancillary task 1

Here we have our ancillary tasks which were to support our main product of our main video. We created these as part of the promotional package for our up and coming artist Tei. When creating our ancillary tasks we tried to create a sense of continuity. We did this through all of the elements with in the mise en scene section of media. With the lighting, clothing and facial expression we were able to capture all of the effects of which we captured when filming the actual music video. The reason why we have the artist posing in such ways as he is in these ancillary tasks were to give a sense of the entire song being 'bare' with him holding his hands up as if he has had no help with any of his work it makes it look like its just been him, his voice and his guitar. Audiences like these sort of things as this way they feel as if they aren't being lied to about the person having talent. That's why we have used that stance in our final ancillary task. In the first task on the CD cover and back we have our artist stood with his guitar in his hand, this was also ti give the same sort of style as on our final task. To show that him and his guitar is all he needs to create his music and pursue his career. On the other side of the CD cover we have our artist looking as if he is looking over a crowd. This was to give a sense of playing in concerts or looking into his future. As it is dark this can cause mysterious thought of where this artist could be leading in life, being a promotional package people would understand this image. Also if he does one day make it to being a well known performer then people could look back onto our CD cover and think that he was playing for a crowd of people and this was all created through the way in which we had edited the photo together. 

We had also taken the time to create ourselves a CD to go inside the case. On the CD we had taken the doughnut shape from an original image taken from the same photo shoot as our other two ancillary tasks. Ii believe that if the CD also has a design on then it looks more professional than a blank CD. Being within the target market of which Tei is trying to sell his music to I believe that I share some of the same views as the rest. So therefore by having a designed CD we would be able to entice more customers into buying  as they believe it is more professional. We used an original image of the artists guitar to show that it is seen as a very important object throughout the CD. 

Question 1

Clothing

By making our clothing scheme seem very bold and dull I believe we have stuck to the conventions of a Folk/Rock genre very well, it has allowed us to relate to the target audience in this genre. By wearing the clothes in which we did we were able to go on and feel as if we were part of the target audience. 

The clothing scheme of which we chose was full of a dull items without any other colors besides grey and black. This has led to us being able to relate to a lot of other folk/rock music videos. Many of these genre videos consist of clothing schemes that are more seen as 'hippy' or old school with chords instead of jeans but by looking at more recent musicians in the industry and the looking at the age of our artist (14) we had decided to go with this clothing scheme, one of which a lot of artists and friends of his at this age would wear.

I believe that we have stuck to the convetions of this genre as well as we could by using the same sort of shots,  clothing scheme, facial expressions and settings as other folk/rock music videos. 

Above is my evaluative video which has me speaking over all of the aspects throughout our video which apply to, develop or challenge the conventions of the folk/rock genre. Throughout the video I try to specify different examples from my work and apply them to real life text. I do this through giving examples of other music videos that contain a similr lighting and mood to them I mention two key examples throughout this video these were Dream Catch Me - Newton Faulkner and the other was Ho Hey - The Lumineers.

Question 2

We have used a lot of the different aspects in our ancillary tasks within out music video, when looking at both you will notice that there is a lot of attention towards the guitar and the actors clothing and then the same again when you visit the ancillary tasks, we did this to give a sense of continuity, by using the same stuff we make it seem like it was taken at the time and people like to see stuff that they have already seen before so they recognize it. This is why we have done this. 

Overall I believe that we have effectively linked the two tasks of which we had been set through many different aspects of the music video and the ancillary tasks. By creating a sort of continuity we have been able to capture the music videos sense of upsetting vibe within the other ancillary tasks. I believe by having an effective link between the music video and the CD cover and poster we have therefore been able to create a successful marketing campaign for the newly released single. 

Question 3

 'What have you learned from your audience feedback?. 

This question can be answered in many different sections of my work. From the beginning of this years course I have been looking into finding a lot out about what my audience wants to see in my music video and how they think it has turned out in the end of it in the final product. I believe that this helps you achieve the best results as they are the ones who are going t look at it when they listen to the song. 

The first time I used audience feedback was  when we wanted to know what to include in our Folk/Rock music video. We set out to make a video that answered many questions about the Folk/Rock genre and how people saw the genre as a whole. Once we had compiled all of our information it turned out that a lot of people believe that when creating a music video to an unusual genre it's best to stick to the conventions of the genre. It was shown in the video that everyone expects to see the usual setting being an unusual setting such as a forest, in a field, or a car park for example. We were told that to make a successful music video that people can relate to you must stick to conventions. In the genre of which we had picked it was difficult to try and incorporate different settings into the music video as things didn't seem right when we did it. This is why we stuck with what our audience had to say and stuck to the conventions through the use of setting. We also asked in our first compilation of questions what people expect to see within a genre of this sort and got replies that were all very similar and also stuck to the conventions of the genre, with dull colors and baggy clothes. When looking into these replies we thought that we could challenge this convention of the genre as it was easy to do and could make it look normal. Once we used a different clothing scheme with skinny jeans and a colored jumper we were able to make it look good due to the modernization of clothing. Overall we found out that the audience feedback of which we collected was very much based around the overuse of conventional factors when we could be using our own swing on specific things. 

The next part of our audience feedback was to do with the storyboards of which we created, on this storyboard we were able to plan out an opening sequence to our music video. To gain audience feedback on this we sent the images of our sequence to 5 random people and then asked them to tell us what they thought with any changes they think we should make and our findings were as shown below.

''I believe the opening sequence to the music video you have planned is laid out very well with good focus on how you are going to edit and incorporate cuts into this sequence but I also believe that you need to focus more on the story other than the guitar and artist playing instruments as that it what is asked of more in this modern day.'' 

''The sequence you have created looks good but there is too much focus on the artist and his instruments, try to get more shots of the narrative piece in when filming.'' 

''Very well laid out planning, keep up the good work. Try to think of new and improved, unique shots and angles you could find to make it more YOUR work and not a conventional piece.''

As you can see from the quotes I have provided above people believe that I should incorporate the narrative side of the video more when it comes to filming the film. This shows that in a modern society there is a much higher want for interesting videos than ever before. A decade ago there were more people who's music videos consisted of them singing and playing the guitar but now they all want interesting and well designed videos. This audience feedback led to us changing the film sequence opening when we cam to filming to including more of the narrative story and less of the artist, this turned out to be a bonus to us due to the lack of our lead artist Tei who had issues with his mobile phone and decided not to turn up when we needed him, therefore leading to us needing to find an actor to replace him and mime lyrics.. averagely well. 

The final way in which we gathered our audience feedback was once we had completed the final media product and had a group of people to evaluate it. We did this by giving out a sheet and having people handing it in. On the sheet we asked a question on how we would be able to improve our work. We asked this question as we thought It would lead to us being able to look over what we could have done to improve our work and think about why we didn't do this when we were making it. When it came to light a lot of people noticed that there was a lot of miss edits on the lip syncing but when we were creating the video we knew this was going to be a problem as our actor did not know the lyrics and had to try his hardest to make up for this. Another thing of which the people who filled our questionnaires out said that they think we could have focused more on the frustration of the actor with expressions and what he does, once looking over the music video I agreed that this could have been done a lot better but it at the time it seemed like we had enough. 

Overall I believe that from using audience feedback we have been able to create our final product well and with extra time and extra feedback we would have even been able to make it even more realistic and better. By sticking to the conventions more and spending more time searching for a more appropriate setting we could have made a masterclass. 

I have also created a PowerPoint presentation explaining all of these factors below. Containing images and screenshots of everything I have used to get my audience research. 

Question 4

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

This has a long list of different answers as nearly everything we use to create our product on was a media technology. With the rise in technology being rapid we could do almost anything asked to with a piece of digital technology. The project was always going to require a lot of different media technologies so we could complete it and here is an explained list on how we had used each of these. 

Right now I am recording my blog posts on a piece of digital technology called blogger. It is a website upon my computer which enables me to record different posts and keep them all in one place. This would be the main piece of technology I have used in all three stages as it is the one of which I have used to record everything I have done on. Without it it would be a lot more difficult to store all of the work. Blogger has been used for years to make sure that people can either store work or just their own opinions on and will be used for time to come. It has allowed me to share all sorts of media such as pictures, videos and PowerPoint presentations and single slides. 

The next major piece of media technology that has been a significant factor overall in this course was the video camera. The video camera is what has allowed me to do many of the tasks of which we are set throughout the year. The first thing of which it helped me to do was film all of the people answering my questions about the audience research. This allowed me to find out what people expect to see in a Folk/Rock genre music video, without the camera I would not have been able to find out peoples opinions on what should be included in our music video and what they would expect to see in terms of conventions of this genre. The video camera was then used obviously to film the actual product itself, it allowed us to gain our variation of shots and allow us to create a new piece of media which will exist for years to come. Without the video camera I would not be able to gain a very good grade in this piece of work as I would not have been able to film any of the clips I used in the music video.

Another major piece of media technology of which we used was a Dictaphone, a Dictaphone is a piece of technology that allows you to record sounds and voices to then use again at a later date. We used the Dictaphone when we were recording the song for Tei, by having him sing into one of these we were able to keep the song and then upload it to the computer of which we used to put over the video we ended up having and then edit it to make the video and the sound match up. Without the Dictaphone we would not have been able to get the sound very clearly and would have ended up having a bad quality recording leading to the song not sounding very good and making the entire project look like it wasn't up to scratch. 

The piece of digital technology of which we used was Coral Video Studio Pro, this is a piece of software found on the computer which is used solely for editing clips, putting them together, adding sound and effects to each of them to make an overall piece. This piece of media technology allowed us to cut clips to make them go in the correct order we wanted them to go into and also allowed us to put the song over the top. A lot of different features of Coral were  used by us when editing the clips such as:

• Splitting clips - turning one clip into two
• Multi trim of clips - more specific cutting
• Muting clips - take away background noise from narrative clips
• Changing the colour correct to make sure that it looks the same sort of light all the way through.

  Shortening clips and making clips longer.

All of these different attributes allowed us to make our final product happen. 

Another piece of media technology of which we used in our production of our ancillary tasks was Photoshop, Photoshop allowed us to do many different things with the images of which we had collected ourselves and therefore made them look like we were in a better place. For example in the back of our CD cover we were able to make the actor look as if he was looking off over the edge of a stage. We did this by changing the lighting of the photo and leaving one end light as if he was under a stage light and the other end dark as if it was looking over a crowd of people. Without Photoshop we wouldn't have been able to create a lot of our ancillary tasks as this was the piece of technology of which had been using for these.

A piece of media technology that was vital in the planning of our music video sequence was the still image digital camera. When we were planning to create our music video we looked into how we could plan what the shots of which we used were going to look like and to do this we we created a storyboard on a sheet of paper which had a grid on with 10 slots, we drew what we believed would be in the shot and then wrote about what was happening in each shot. When we recorded this on our blog we needed to be able to transfer this information to the computer and that's when the digital camera came into the picture. To do this we took still images of each of the images in the storyboard and then annotated them, this allowed us to show you and keep in our minds what we were planning on doing in the project.

The final, and key media technology of which we have used over and over again in many different areas of the project we have been asked to do is the internet. This has been vital to everything we have done throughout the year. With it being the place of which we store all of our information that we have found whilst using the internet it has turned into the leading form of media technology to grace the planet. It has also been used for research into our chosen genre, with the introduction of Youtube we have been able to find out what the main conventions of a Folk/Rock music video are and have also been able to find out what theorists have affected music videos in the past, therefore leading to us abiding by there theories and creating the best music video we can with our resources. This has also been where we have been able to store our final product for the rest of time. Now we have uploaded the video to youtube it will be able to stay there forever and will also keep all of our song research on.

Overall I believe the key to success in not only this project but to education and examining is media technologies, without them a lot of things become poorly marked and poorly kept. With information being able to be stored in one place people are able to see them whenever they want with a click of a button. It has also been the key to success in the fact that if none of these technologies existed then we would not be able to create the products.