Question 1

GENRE.. 


The genre of our music video isAlternative Rock which is a bit industry at the current time. People such as The Foals and The Kooks. Both these bands consist of all men members which is what we also wants to reproduce when creating our band. The typical conventions of an Alternative rock band is to have a unique style and not to be matching like the normal Pop band. Also they are normally quite informal looking which our band was due to their costume of mostly jeans and t-shirts, this makes them more likeable to the audience and fits in with the genre of Alternative Rock. In the images we used we didn't want them to be all happy and smiling as this doesn't fit with the genre and we used bands for inspiration.

 Alternative Rock videos conventions normally consist of quite a lot of band shots to establish the music and passion, we used this idea as inspiration and brought it out in our own product. We used the close ups and various shots of the band members playing their instruments to emphasise their passion.

Question 2

Audience Feedback

This is some of our audience feedback and we also asked our main character a few questions to see how he felt the production went. Within the video we asked the main character to talk about his views of the video as an audience member too, commenting on how he felt aspects of the planning went such as rehearsal time and how he felt during the performing.
We also took a small niche of 5 members of audience to comment upon the video itself.
Because this may not be enough of audience feed back we also used Wordle.com to add some more that we gathered from our audience. Each consists of 20 words to describe our video and below are the results given by our audience.

About Our Video

 About Our Digi Pack

 About Our Actors

All of these involve both positive feedback and constructive critism all that we were given by our viewing audience. We have taken it all on board and understand all the comments that were made. We wanted to know in detail what the audience thought so we would know how to make our band and products more appealing. 

Question 1

The 1st image isn't our starting image but as it is a music video there isn't a clear title that we would be able to show so this is the chosen font we have used for all of our ancillary texts including the digi pack and merchandise that people will see. We chose this text as our font as it is retro and simple, but still looks dark so fits the genre.

The second frame shows part of our setting, it may seem strange that we chose to use this shot as the one to show our setting as it looks peaceful and calm and our genre of music doesn't portray this. However it fits our music video and we wanted to break the standard conventions of a rock video and make some of our video calm as a reflection of how people feel inside but the rock music helps them get their emotions out. 

The third frame is a screen capture of a transition between a close up of the girl applying make-up and the boy drinking alcohol and not getting ready to see his girlfriend. This shows well one of the ways we used editing to make the narrative clearer and for the video to look more professional. This is an additive dissolve meaning you can see both shots for a split second before it becomes the second shot. This shows that we have become confident in using the software to make a big impact on the video.

The camera work and editing can be shown a little through frame 4, and how we used different shots. This shot is a low angle close up of the guitarist playing the song so we can see his fingers strumming and working hard to create the melody. We used shots like the one below to get across the passion the band has for their music which can be seen by how they play their instruments with such gusto. 

The frame in the middle of the image I have created is to show the title font and style, you can see here how our title comes up in the video at the beginning making people aware of what song the video is for and what our production company is called. This is the usual amount of information that is displayed when a video comes up. 

The story and how it is opened up is shown in shot 6, this shot is a very good one for getting across the emotions of our main character in the narrative. It is a medium close up of our main character running his hands through his hair in a distressed manner showing that he is upset and getting desperate to get his life back. His costume of smart clothing shows he was once a respectable man but now he is getting scruffy and doesn't know what to do with his life.

The frame 7 shows one of the ways we introduce our characters. This is from behind so you can not see the girlfriends face; to start with you rarely see the face of the girlfriend to symbolise that she is being pushed further and further away. When we do see her face she is happy to see him and this is how we are introduced to her.

The eighth frame shows one of the ways we are introduced to the main character. We see him drinking from a vodka bottle showing his desperation to forget his problems. This also shows us that the genre will be slightly dark and depressing which matches the gene and feel of the song we have chosen.

The last frame I chose to use was one to show one of the special effects we chose to use. We edited the lighting on our band shots to make them look more professional and so they were easier to see.

Media Used

Here are some of the media products I learnt to use to complete my A2 coursework.

 
I myself have never had a twitter account so this particular social networking site was new to me meaning I had to learn the basics as I was the one to make it. 
It was very easy to use and has a very basic principle to it, I had to get used to 'tweeting' and had to edit our profile. It took me a while to find a background that fitted the page and also still worked with twitter.

I also created our myspace, which did go wrong the first time so I had to cancel the account and start from scratch. The reason it went wrong as I rushed into it thinking I knew what to do as I have previously had a myspace account only to find out you have a different set up for a band. So that was something I had to learn, I also found that the layout and editing now is very advanced and I had to learn how to add photos, edit our bio and generally become a myspacer. This was perhaps the hardest one to get used to.

 Facebook was also one of our tasks. We created a group first of all and then discovered not as many people join groups as they are hassle and you get notifications you don't want, so I decided to instead make a page which became much more successful. This was easy to use as I know how to use facebook, however for the band I had to learn how to put in all the information about the music and labels which took some time.


The Facebook Page has got many fans now and I have managed to upload images of the merchandise onto the site and of the band. We also added a little quote in the box that is displayed on your profile to add character.

Although I had to use blogger last year for my AS Media coursework, I have learnt so much about it this year. Last year I struggled to publish a post but now I publish more than one a day and am even thinking bout getting my own blog. I learnt how to embed videos from youtube and add images, make labels and move gadgets. I had to learn the whole of blogger during my coursework to enable I got the most out of it.

October Log Book

October Logbooks
Log Book 14: 1St October
We made our main character, Joffy learn the words to our chosen song today so he could do the lip syncing task. We then had to wait for groups to finish using the hall where we were going to film. We also then chose the section of the lyrics we wanted to have lip synced.
Log Book 5th October (Double Lesson)
In these lessons we edited the lip syncing video and took photos of our main character Joffy to create a mini portfolio which would reflect his image. Then edited the photos.

Log Book 11th October
Emily and Sarah created the MySpace account and set up a lot of the profile, writing who the influences were and naming the band members for fans to look at. Tom captured some of the filming we had done and starting to sort out what shots we would use and what ones we could discard of.
Log Book 19th October
Tom and Sarah went to Brentwood High Street to film the scene of the main character and his girlfriend sitting together in one of the flashbacks, this shot is only 7 seconds long and we are going to speed up the people that walk past so it looks like a lot of time has passed and they are a very happy couple, this will also add a look of professionalism to our video; we filmed for about 5minutes so we had enough footage and so that there was enough people to speed up as it wasn’t very busy at the time we went.. Emily continued to edit our MySpace page to make more use of our time as a group.
Log Book 20th October
Tom continued to edit the music video with mine and Emily’s input to make sure it was looking good for now; this takes a long time to get it perfect so this took up the whole hour of our lesson. So while Tom was busy doing that Sarah and Emily made up some events to go on the MySpace page and also edited the page so it looks more like a bands page.
Log Book 21st October
We all met at the local gig venue to film our band playing, we were able to get a variety of shots with lighting that enabled clear footage. As we knew the lighting director we had a chance to experiment with lights to get the best effects. Sarah who filmed most of the footage had a near death experiment from nearly being dragged into the mosh pit of angry teenagers. However the footage was well worth taking as it demonstrated a variety of performance based shots.
Log Book 26th October
We all got together within the half term and held a group meeting. Analysing the remaining shots that needed to be taken bearing in mind the weather conditions worsening as the months go on. This could affect our shots in a major way by it being too dark to film.

Music Video Finished