Question 1

We used many different types of
typical conventions of music videos.

At the beginning of our music video

it starts off with a close up of of the guitar and drums and this is similar to what most rock bands do. We did this as at the beginning of the music video as the music starts off with a guitar and drums playing for about 8 seconds before the lyrics kick in.

   When we were deciding what to do for the opening of the song we came across some ideas that included opening with the narrative or just have it blank until the lyrics kicked in although this idea we quickly decided was bad as it would just look bad. In the end we thought that this was the best idea and decided to keep with it.

Here is an example of a famous band using close ups of the guitar and drums in their music video. This is the song The Pretender by Foo Fighters, close ups of guitar and drums are often used in rock song but can be used in other

music genres.











Another popular convention we used in our music video is a close up of the singer. This is a very popular shot used in music videos as it shows off the singer but we used it to show the lip syncing as we needed to show the singer lip syncing to the song. To make sure that the singer knows what the lyrics are we played the song in the background so he can keep track of where he was.

  
This is an example of the band Foo Fighters and is the same song as before (The Pretenders). They use close ups of the singer quite a few times during the course of this song.

This is the magazine advert we created for our band this isn't as good as many other as but we did use some of the typical conventions used of magazines these were the name of the band and the popular song. Also we put on a website link so people would be able to go to our site.








What we were going to do to improve our final piece was change the background as it doesn't work with the image and change the layout of the logos and writing as it looked to cramped at the top.








 Here are some examples of magazine covers the
first one is for the song Born to die by singer
Lana Del Rey as you can see the advert is very
simplistic. This magazine advert has not much information on it except at the top the name of the singer and below is an image of the singer which takes up most of the magazine advert. near the bottom it says the name of the song which is Born to die and underneath that in smaller writing when the album is out. This magazine advert starts with the most important thing in big bold letters which is the singers name and then the less important the information the smaller the writing.













After working on our magazine we decided to start a new one and this is the end result we thought this was better than our old one so we made this our final piece. What we did to improve our magazine is one change the layout and it looks a lot better with the new layout we put the logos at the bottom and then above them we put in reviews of the song and above that is the name of the band and the song. On the side of is the website for the band and next to it is and image/silhouette of the band members we thought it looked better like this as the image didn't fit in with the magazine but the shadow does. We followed a few key conventions like the most important writing be the biggest on the page and that was the band name and song and the writing got smaller for the less important stuff like website and reviews.











This is our final digipack and what we decided to do was have images of the band members be on the digipack. The front of the digipack had the band together and the back had a picture of the sky. the disc page also had another image of the band but a different image and the other 3 pages were shots of the band members. This followed key conventions as many digipacks use images of the band on their main images.





 

Question 2

Question 3

After we had done our final piece we decided to do a survey for audience on our final music video. In the first image we asked people was there any particular high or low points about our music video.  The most common result was that one of the shots looked too much like a classroom. We believe that the shot they were talking about is either the band shot's or the some of the close ups. We could have improved it by filming in an area that didn't look like a classroom by filming in an open area.

We then asked what did you think of the product this was to see what people actually thought of our music video. The results showed that the majority of the people who took the survey actually thought our music video was okay to good and only 1 person thought it was bad. This shows us that our music video is okay.  

The next question we asked was what we could do to improve our music video and the most common answer was shorter edits this was due to some of the band shot being too long (lasting up to 8 seconds). We were going to use a different angle shot of the band but we couldn't get the shot of the camera so had to use what we had.  

The final question on our survey was would you watch the video again and the majority of the people said maybe showing us that there was things that we could have done to make the music video more interesting and make them want to watch it again. We had 1 of the 7 people say that they would watch it again and 2 said that they wont this does show us that we should have added more interesting shots and areas and a more interesting narrative.

 

This survey was very helpful as it helped us understand what he had done right and what could be improved. From this survey we learned that we should have had more areas in the video to make it more interesting and look more realistic. We could have also have improved it by shorter edits as some of the edits were too long and we could have improved this by even adding a different angle of the band shot in the longer edits of our music video. Also we learned that it looked like the people in the band weren't playing the instruments and there wasn't much we could do about that as none of us knew how to play any of the instruments. But we could have used different camera shots and different clips to break it up so it barely noticeable. But we also learned that our music video wasn't bad as most of the people said that it was good so that shows us that although it wasn't great it was okay and we learned what we can do to improve so if we do another music video we know what we can do to make it better.

Question 4

These are the hardware/software that we used when creating our music video. In this post i will be discussing what software and hardware we used and how it helped us improve our music video.

Planning stage
During the planning phase we use planning sheets to organise when and where we will meet. Also we created a storyboard and animatic, the storyboard helped us decide how our music video will look and what shots will we use and how long the shots will last. The animatic showed us what our music video would roughly look like when it is completed. The most common hardware we used when working on the planning is a camera and Mac and the software we used is blogger.

Camera
The camera was a very important piece of hardware for our music video as without it we wouldn't be able to film our music video. We did have a few problems with the camera as when we were filming the SD became full half way through filming a shot and we had to leave the filming for another day and we didn't get a warning message so some footage was lost.

Tripod

The tripod was a very handy tool for us when we were filming as when we were filming it was in the beginning of the year so it was very windy. The tripod was very handy as it made each shot still so when we rewatched the footage the shots weren't shaking. The only disadvantage to the tripod is we had to walk long distances in the rain and cold.

Mac

The Mac was very helpful as we used the mac for many things such as blogging and editing our music video. But there were a few problems with the Macs with the software as some of the software such as Photoshop as it was very difficult to find out to use some of the simple tools such zoom as there is no zoom function. But it is very helpful when coming to editing as we use adobe premiere and we were used to using the mac for editing.

iPhone 

We used an iphone to take the pictures for the digipacks and the magazine adaverts. The pictures came out very well. We also used the phone for the song this helped us film as we used the song so the singer knows what to sing.

Adobe premiere 

We used adobe premiere for editing for our music video this was very helpful as we have used adobe premiere for a while and got used to using it, also we have learned how to use most of the tools so editing was easier. Adobe premiere is much easier to use than final cut express.

  

   

 

Final music video

Styles of music videos

Narrative:
This kind of music focuses more on the music video than the singer and the lip syncing. Some songs do this as the music video is more entertaining and would make more people want to watch the music video even more. Also the lyrics of the music video generally reflected on the music video. A good example of this is Lady gaga's song Bad Romance.


Cinematic:
Cinematic videos are music videos that are basically short movies. Some music videos do this as it would get more people watching and listening to the music video as they may like the story that is in the music video and start to like the song because of it. Some of these songs can be an average song length or even longer some are even 20 minutes long. A great example of this is Stan by Eminem which had 2 version a short version which was about 4 minutes and a 8 minute long version.


Live:
Live music videos are music videos that are made when the band in on stage performing live and they use shot of the band and crowd for the music video. A good example of this is Guns N' Roses song Paradise City.


Studio:
A studio music video is when the band record themselves in a studio doing the singing. A good example of this is rule the world by take that as in the music video it switches between them singing in the studio and clips from the movie it was used in stardust.


Parody:
A parody is when someone takes a song and makes fun out of it or makes fun of it. A good example of a parody is Weird Al Yankovic's  song Fat which is a parody of Bad by Michael Jackson.



Animation:
Animation music videos are music videos that use animation instead of live action. This can be better sometimes as there is things that they can do with animation that they cant do with live action. A good example of this is Feel Good Inc. by Gorillaz.

Filming the music video

Filming the music video was a difficult and time consuming process. this was because it is hard to create a good music video that includes key conventions. We also had to overcome things such as weather and lighting difficulties as well as travelling to locations at a convenient time for everyone.

We also had to take in consideration how congested the place was as we didn't want random members of the public in our shots. Another difficulty was transporting the camera equipment, as we were travelling on crowded buses it became a nuisance to try and keep things such as the tripod out of peoples was.

The filming process was made a bit simpler by the use of high quality cameras and basic camera accessories such as a tripod, this guaranteed steady shots that would have been otherwise impossible. Even though we got good shots when we got to the editing stage we found that we did not have enough shot variation. This meant we had to go out again to get more footage in more locations, When we came to uploading our new footage we found that the camera didn't catch any of the footage, we later found that it was because the camera had ran our of storage however we didn't get no warning message so all of the footage from that day was lost. At this point we had no more time to film so had to use the footage we did have to the best of our abilities, this can be seen as our video has some repeated shots, mainly band room footage.

Below is an image of the group members just before filming commenced.

A problem we had whilst filming outside was the noise level, as we were playing the song in order for me to lip sync the sound became unhearable which meant I had to learn the song word for word and time it perfectly. The inside shots, the band scene, was much easier as it was a quiet environment with loud speakers.

Before creating our final piece we made a rough cut and showed it to a small audience, the feedback informed us that overall our video was good however they didn't like the video transitions and effects that we had on as it made it look more like a story instead of a music video. soin our final piece we had to video transitions, this gave our product a faster pace and look more convincing as a real music video.

Below is the rough cut;

Overall the shots we got were good thanks to a high quality camera and some smart camera positioning, this gave us the ability to create a quite convincing music video. We also knew that any problems we had with the footage could later be fixed during the editing stage, such as poor lighting.

Below is our final product.