Alyssa - Final Evaluation

 Q1: In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

One of the conventions that we have used is lip syncing. Lip syncing is possibly one of the main aspects in a music video. All the lip syncing we have done is in close up shots of the face of the artist, this being Alyssa. Lip syncing is a convention that almost all music video use as a way of communicating to the audience by giving some sort of narrative and it also helps the music video to follow some sort of order, be it chronological or non-chronological. Lip syncing can be used to identify with the artist, a way to tell the consumer when they are buying the product that they have the right one because it has the artist's face on it. 

Lip syncing can be used as a primary source and can be branched off. For example, having lip syncing and then branch it off with close ups which we have done.





A convention that we did developed, however, was having camera movement during the lip syncing. Many music videos usually have little or no camera movement at all during a lip syncing scene as some artists feel it takes away some of the attention off the artist as the eyes will begin to wander and drift away and onto something else in the scene. We didn't have a lot during the scenes, only fairy lights, so we decided to do camera movement to give some depth and a sense of being in a larger space as it gave the illusions of more lights in the background as they "moved."

A convention that we didn't follow was having a dance routine or performance. Usually pop songs have some sort of performance like dance routine, this can however vary between music videos, for example, a rock or indie genre will have a band performance. "Human" is a somewhat calm and a more slow paced song than the average pop song so adding in a performance wouldn't suit the theme. However, if we did add a dance performance or a routine of some sorts, it would have to match the rhythm of the song, the dancing would be slow and graceful rather than sporadic.

Another convention that we followed was having an actress to give some sort of narrative to the music video. Many music videos have the artist as the actress too. We decided to go against this as with the type of shots and scenes that we have, it wouldn't seem to fit. However, we didn't show the face of the actress, Cat, at all in the music video as we wanted to have a sense of mysteriousness, which is another convention that we challenged. Without showing the face of the actress, it is easy to believe that the artist and the actress are the same as the two look somewhat similar, it being having the similar type of hair.




Some of the visuals matched the lyrics but most of the time it didn't. This is another convention that we challenged. The only scene that seemed to match the lyrics in some way is when Cat is running on the beach and the song plays, "I am so scared of what I'll look like in the end." We had her running as though she is scared of something and is trying to get away from it.




Usually artists have a narrative when they have an actress, the scenes matching the lyrics, almost like a very short movie more so than a music video. This gives narrative to the video, we don't really have a narrative in the music video and it doesn't follow any sort of order. The main theme we wanted to follow through out the video was to have a sense of purity and innocence, which is why there is almost no voyeurism in the video. Cat isn't showing any unnecessary skin in the music video, the only skin showing was her legs. Comparing to other pop music videos, there is a lot of voyeurism, for example in Cheryl's "Under the Sun", the camera focuses on her lower half of her body and she is wearing clothing that is tight fitting, i.e. her skirt, a loose and see through top that shows her under garments. This is appealing to both the male and female audience of a younger age is it shows young girls how to look and her image appeals to young guys.

This is our digipack that we made.


I drew the digipack using a graphics tablet and photoshop. We decided to title of the name of our album "Dreamscape" as we got inspiration from "Human." We agreed that we wanted the album to reflect the same themes that "Human" gave so we went for a surreal scenery. Originally, we were going to have a digipack with six different sides, two including the artist's face. We got rid of that idea as our star persona is that the artist wants almost all the attention on the songs and lyrics rather than herself. The two sides that were going to have the artists face would be stylized, i.e. cartoon. If we had photos, it wouldn't fit with the rest of the digipack. I made the digipack have two contrasting colours as it draws more attention and it gives it a more vibrant feel, adding to the surrealism.




This is our magazine ad that we did. We wanted to keep it simple so we decided to take the front cover of the digipack, that way when the consumer buys the product they will recognize it. We were inspired by a magazine ad that we were given in a lesson, it had a picture of the album "The Drums" with reviews on it, stating five stars from The Guardian and The Independent.

Q2: How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

Q3: What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Q4: How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?



Terrorz Movie
by: alyssahaddow

Final Evaluation - Cat

Question 1. 

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Question 2. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?



Question 3. What have you learned from your audience feedback?



Question 4.  How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

George - Final Evaluation

Q1: In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

One convention that we have followed is including an artist performance in the form of lip syncing. The shots we included were mainly made up of close-ups. we shot them from various angles to provide interest and differentiation in otherwise similar shots. To add to the shots we used some camera movement in some parts of the lip syncing, matching the pace of the music to tie them together. We included the lip syncing to help the audience connect and recognise the artist. After all, a music video is a form of advertisement so being able to recognise the artist is essential if it is to work in promoting other aspects of the artists work. 

We kept the performance scenes very basic. There were no band/instruments or extra backing dancers included in the video. This was intentional, after looking at the artists existing work and similar artists in the same genre we realised that these were not often included in there products. This follows convention ans also adds towards building a star persona.

One convention we challenged was to include a narrative in the video, or to have the video playing in any form of chronological order. As many music videos do have a narrative often following the narrative in the song itself, we felt that our song worked well without. The song itself didn't have much of a narrative and we felt that by having one in the video wouldn't be an accurate representation of the song, which is what we are trying to do. 

Another convention we followed was to have an actress separate to the artist as the subject/physical representation of the lyrics. We decided not to have anything connecting the actress and the artist, this way we could take a different approach to the second part of the video. Because of the lyrics of the song being about being different, we wanted to include something different in the video, we contemplated not showing the actresses face throughout the entire video. This is a method we have used before in our thriller opening sequences we created last year. It worked really well for us in that creating an element of mystery to the character and to keep the audience intrigued. We decided to use this in the music video and I'm really pleased with the result. 

A convention we have developed/sort of followed but not a lot was to match the visuals to the lyrics. Obviously the lip syncing matches the lyrics but when looking at the shots on the beach with the actress not many of the shots even relate to the lyrics. One shot in particular had a reference to one another, its around the time where the line "i'm so scared" is sung that we cut to a low close up tracking shot of the actress waist down running down the beach in slow motion. We did this as if to say she was running away. Apart from this shot none of the rest of the video has any strong connections to the lyrics. However, when initially researching music videos we noticed that in many cases the video never matches the lyrics and the visuals are often very different to reality but being a music video it didn't seem to raise as many questions as if they didn't have to make sense. 

Another convention we followed was to cut on the beat. Cutting on the beat provides the video with more of a flow and makes it feel less disjointed. This technique is used throughout the whole video but might be hard to notice as that is the plan, if its done well you shouldn't be able to notice it. One particular part of the video makes it easier to notice, nearer to the end of the song its the last few shots of the actress running down the beach we cut many shorter clips together in a short space of time. Clips got shorter and shorter as the musics pace picked up. 

Q2: How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

Q3: What have you learned form your audience feedback?

Matt - Final Evaluation

1) In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Demonstrating genre by characteristics: The main characteristic that we followed was the close up shots of lip singing. For example in this still image, we can see a close to mid shot of Alyssa singing.  We followed this convention to make the video have more feeling towards the artist who is singing. 

We didn't follow the conventions of having a dance routine or band performance scenes, mainly because these feats do not suit the feel for Ellie Goulding’s song Human. 

We also didn't follow the convention of there being a narative behind the shots. There wasn't really much of a story line apart from a girl who wanted to be considered as human, but that was as far as it went. The video's lacking narative doesn't link in with the lyrics, which is unconventional.  

Lyrics & Visuals:   There is a small relationship between lyrics and visuals in the music video. The lyric 'Ocean' is said and there are many oceanic sea shots that can represent the ocean. Also the mention of 'Human' and 'I would give my life to be human' has links to the actress in the video. The links made are that she is human and that she never faces the camera. The fact that she never faces the camera adds intrigue and mystery to the character and reinforces the lyrics 'I would give my life to be human' - this concept can provoke the audience to think about the possible mystical aspect of the actress.

There are other instances of links between lyrics and visuals. The line 'I hope I will get the chance to be someone, to be human' has the actress striding boldly through the sea. This could make the audience think that this is her chance to prove she is human and give off the impression that she will use the sea to prove that she is human. 'To be someone' could be suggesting that she wants to be human but a bit more than human, not just your average Joe. She may want to be recognized by people as someone, an influential being, instead of just a wall flower. This is shown in the video by the actress walking into the sea with a certain ambition in her strides.

Also the lyrics 'I would give my life, I would give my life', at around 3:19 in the video and the actress is shown running along the beach. I think this is representing the fact that she is running towards something that will make her human or maybe running is what she believes will make her human. The concept we have shown is fairly abstract, meaning it isn't completely obvious and to the untrained eye, it is a girl walking around on the beach for no reason. But when you look deeper into the video you will see that there is a girl who is doubting her existence of being human and she is saying she would give her life to be human.
There is another link between the 3 products: the name of the Album is 'Dreamscape' this has a link with the Human music video because the beach is quite a dreamy scene. It is helped by the fact that the actress is wearing a cream knee length dress. The dress is relevant because it helps to make you believe that its a dreamy place because you are unlikely to wear a summers dress at the beach when it's foggy. Also the beach is empty, taking the belief that it is in a dream not reality. It is a fairly picturesque scene with an empty foggy beach in a summers dress. The actions that the actress performs are relativity dream like or abnormal for reality. For example running along the shore, this would be normal for a summers day but for a cold foggy morning it isn't, this reinforces the idea of it being a dreamscape.

.    Music & Visuals:  There is a relationship between the visuals and music. For example at the final chorus there are some jump cuts between 2 long shots of Cat running up the beach. This shot was effective because it cut on the beat giving a more lively edge for the end of the song. However I think that the clips could have been better positioned due to sometimes the cuts went from left leg to left leg again instead of right leg left leg right leg. This made the clip look less professional, we would have changed it but we didn't have time.

  

Another way in which the music and visuals have a relationship is that the lip singing visual is in time with the music. This makes the product look professional and makes it harder to tell that the singer isn't singing the song live.

5    Voyeurism:   In Human we don’t have much voyeurism happening or emphasis on the female form. The video is seen as much more pure, gentle and natural, rather than about sex, love and modern culture. If we compare Human to videos such as Beyonce or Brittany Spears.  Beyonce and Brittany Spears  often wear provocative clothing to suit their song’s fast rhythm. They often have dancing semi-naked men around them to show that they attract the opposite sex very easily due to their attitude, looks and personality. In Human, Cat is wearing a dress, but she is not dressed showing unnecessary skin like Beyonce and Shakira.

Intertextuality: We didn't know this at the time but midway through the post-production stage we found an Ellie Goulding music video similar to ours.

B    Both take place on a beach however ‘Anything Could Happen’ has other shots of a couple of vehicles but they do their lip singing on the beach where we do it inside in a lit environment. However both videos challenge pop music conventions but the Ellie Goulding video does have a strong element on a love story.

    We have a couple of similar shots to the video of ‘Anything Could Happen’ for example, on the beach:

    

         

 

2) How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts.

3) What have you learned from your audience feedback?

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

Finished Magazine Advert

Finished DigiPack

Digi-pack checklist