Challenged
In her music video ‘love song’, she is shown playing the piano; we challenged this concept as the piano was incorporated into the narrative of the video. The whole music video takes place in a coin operated duke box, and this is where the artist performs the song and plays the piano. For this particular video it work wells because a duke box plays music, but for ours it wouldn't as we wanted our artist to be an observer of the characters around her at the station. Because of this we decided to have separate cuts of her just playing the piano, as we felt it was important to show that she is a musician, and is not constrained by genre. The two images selected from our music video show the two different cuts that were frequently used in the video, cutting from the miniature railway station to our artist on the piano in a different location. Challenged
When researching our artist’s image, we looked at similar female artists such as Lily Allen, Kate Nash and Ellie Goulding. We came to find that there was a vast use of bright colours in their music videos. We researched many indie music videos, one in particular being ‘wonderwall’ by Oasis. The video had been edited to be in black and white and we found this was a popular use of editing with many other indie music videos. Although our track has subtle elements of the indie genre, we felt bright colours suited the image we were creating for Jose Vanders and part of the way we emphasized on her being a British artist was through the colours of her costume and the location, red white and blue (the union jack). We also challenged the convention of editing the video to black and white because we felt our song was upbeat and cheery, and bright colours seemed to suit this well being the typical connotations of positive things.
Developed
Once again we looked at female artists similar to ours to decide on the costume our artist would wear in the video. We had a rough idea of the type of image we were aiming for and Kate Nash and Lily Allen suited our ideas very well. We got a lot of our influence from Lily Allen’s costume in her music video of ‘The Fear’. Her dress in this selected image is very British; it is a peter pan dress, a style of dress very in at the moment. The dress was colourful and high cut something which we wanted in our artist’s dress as we didn’t want her to have an obvious sex appeal. Although Lily Allen is dressed rather modestly in this video, as a whole she has a more obvious sex appeal, the lyrics in this certain song being ‘And I’ll take my clothes off and it will be shameless, because everyone knows that’s how you get famous’. We didn’t want this image for our artist in our music video or as a whole because we wanted to emphasise her love for the music rather than the attitude of 'doing anything to be famous'. We eventually found a vintage style dress which was red, white and blue, high cut but with subtle sex appeal. We felt our target audience would respond well to this, as the costume made her seem more relatable, avoiding the typical star image of artists such as Lady gaga and Beyonce who separate who they are as a real person to who they are as an artist. Developed
In one of our lessons, Miss Mapp suggested we look at the video for ‘another chance’ by Roger Sanchez if we were aiming to show the visual meaning of the lyrics in our music video. We had previously decided we were going to do so after looking at some of Kate Nash’s videos, a female artist similar to ours. By doing this, it made her seem more alternative to other artists, it was fun which suited her style of music and it appealed to the younger ages of the audience as well as the older ages who would appreciate the whimsicality. In Roger Sanchez’ music video for ‘another chance’, a girl is carrying a heart, which represents her actual heart. It got bigger and smaller depending on the love she feels. We really liked this idea but did not want to use it exactly, our track wasn't entirely based on the issue of love and being loved and therefore it would be unnecessary. However, one of the characters in the lyrics is looking at another woman’s heart and we needed to find a way to show this through visuals. We thought like the women in ‘another chance’ we could have the girl who’s heart is being looked at, either holding or wearing a heart shape rather than showing an actual human organ. This would have been extremely difficult to do, and would not have fit into the positive feeling of the song. Used
It was required that if the artist is playing a musical instrument in our music video, we should have to show this. We therefore researched all artists who played the piano, despite of their image, in order to see what camera angles were used to show this. The conventions we used exactly, were from Vanessa Carlton’s video of ‘A thousand miles’. The video included a range of camera angles that showed the artist playing the piano and we really liked the variety of shots used. We used both the bird’s eye view of the artist’s hands on the piano and a side angle which we used alternatively in the beginning sequence of our video to fit in with the beats in the music.
Used
We decided to use Andrew Goodwin's theory that lyrics in a song are either illustrated, amplified or contradicted and came to the decision that we would illustrate the lyrics as it seemed to suit the image of our artist well. We looked at Kate Nash’s music video ‘foundations’, as we had previously found this was a great example of a video showing lyrics visually. Although we had already come up with a few ideas for showing the visuals of the lyrics, we were still unsure for particular parts in the song and we looked to this video for inspiration. The top two images were shown to convey happiness and how someone feels in a relationship, we felt we could use this exactly when showing the visuals of the lyric for ‘a woman with a basket full of all her eggs, she’s counted them too quickly she’ll wake up and they’ll be dead. We drew smiley faces on the eggs and swapped the faces for dead ones when the lyric changes.
How did you use media technologies in the construction and research planning and evaluation stages?
What have you learnt from your audience feedback?
We annotated this video, based on a questionnaire we conducted for the sixth formers at our school. We showed our video in an assembly for the sixth formers, who had an average age range of 16 - 18. They received the video quite well, and we gained a lot of positive feedback and little negative feedback, which we annotated into the embedded youtube link above. We also included audience feedback from other sources such as friends and family who were able to see the video on youtube, as well as our teachers who's comments we used to then change the video and make it better. This is all also included in the video above.
How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
Part 1
Part 2
Our main product links to our ancillary text as we have used shots from our video in the digipack, we have also had the same scheme of colours running through from the video. At one stage in the planning process we had ideas to create a separate theme within the digipack, but after many discussions within the group and an obvious time limit we felt it would be best that we stick to our original idea and continue the theme of our music video in the digipack. This actually ended up being far more effective as it linked the two products together and became more suitable for our artist, who we were introducing to the music industry for the first time.
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