How Did You Use Media Technologies In The Construction and Research, Planning and Evaluation Stages?

We were able to use the internet effectively in the research of our video. It enabled us to research similar genre of videos and the video by Pink for our chosen song. We looked at in particular the song by Tine Tempah and Eric Turner – Written in the stars.

We were able to research the types of shots that are regularly used in music videos especially those in pop / rock music videos which is the genre of our chosen song and see why they were affective in attracting their target audience. We were able to use our research to produce a unique video that was different to the original yet still reflects the song lyrics and the artists unique style.

We were able to research possible locations via the internet using the Google map. We used it to plan where we were going to shoot it and enabled us to plan in advance which camera shots we were going to use and what scenes we were going to film. As initially did all the planning for the first song choice Professor Green – Just be good to green we ere fortunate to find that we were still able to use some of the same locations for the new song choice Pink – Just like a pill. Planning ahead was also beneficial as it kept u from falling behind even further when we changed the song choice shortly after filming for the first song.

To make the video look similar to real music video’s we used various editing tools on Final Cut Pro, such as transitions to make the video look more interesting and flow continuously through so there weren’t any obvious gaps. We filmed in the media editing suite where were able to switch from three different cameras to get different shots from different angles. We filmed this in front of a green screen where we added pictures of graffiti art in the background which we also got from the internet to create a unique image. The green screen’s we used enabled us to create different scenes such as the performance elements within the music video, these we very eye catching and attractive grabbing the audiences attention with the bright vibrant colours which contrasted nicely with the more subtle argument scenes between the two performers.

We were able to use the editing software Final Cut Pro to get screen grabs of our music video. This allowed us to give a visual example which helped to emphasize and explain points made during the evaluation stage. The screen grabs enabled us to refer back to specific parts of the video and expand fully on what we were trying to do and the effect we wanted. They also let us show why we used specific shots and why they were effective in our video. Reviews which we got our audience feed back from. We also used Final Cut Pro to make a short video of some of the interviews we had taken from our target audience. This was very helpful as it allowed us to look back over and evaluate the audiences feed back on our video. Which lead us to expanding on what we could have done to improve our music video, reflect on mistakes made during filming and editing as well as review positive comments which came up during the interview stage.

We did a director’s commentary over our music video by recording the groups thoughts, ideas and opinions on the finished music video, by speaking over the music video and deleting the music on it to show what the group as a whole thought of our video and why we chose to create it the way we did.

Overall we tried to use the wide range of technology available to our advantage as we were able to use it to plan, research, create, edit and give demonstrations of how we made the music video which was extremely helpful.

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

I believe that our video is similar to those video’s produced by the music artists. The shots we have used, I believe, show the quality of shots that are used in real music videos. The shots we have chosen show the emotions the performer is experiencing and gives the audience an idea of the history between the two performers. I think our music video conveys a story which can be seen in many music videos that are created by many artists such as in the video "Pink - Please don`t leave me" there is also a second male performer and they are shown arguing / fighting similar to our music video, however ours is a much more conventional, stereotypical style of a couple breaking up. I believe this gives our music video a sense of reality.

We were also inspired by the songs " wriiten in the stars by Tinie Tempah & Eric Turner. There is a particular performance on the roof of a building with the skyline visible at the top. This is reflected in our music video as our music videos main location is on a roof where in many shots the skyline is visible. Looking back at the video, we also noticed that in both music videos the performer is playing on the piano, which is our opening scene. This was purely coincidence, but shows us that aspects of our video reflect those of real, professional music videos.

The green screen shots we have used can be seen in a variety of music videos with similar and different genre’s to our music video. As we have used the green screen shots for performance scene’s it enabled us to create a background that didn’t have anything to do with the story that unfolds throughout the video but also doesn’t make it look like it doesn’t fit. We used two different background’s; one for each outfit our performer wears. This gave the video a sense of continuity as there aren’t different background’s for every green screen we used, but also a break from the story and gives it a sense of a real video as many have performance scene’s within them. I believe the backgrounds we have chosen to use fit within the genre of song we have chosen as; the two pictures we have chosen are graffiti and one of them contains the colour pink. The background containing the colour pink also fits in with our idea of a CD cover.

I believe the transition’s we have used throughout the video also reflect those that are used in real music videos. The transitions we have used enabled the video to flow continuously and like a real video it makes it more interesting for the audience to watch. At the beginning and end of the music video we have added text boxes which inform the audience the title of the song and the artist. We believe, that this gives our video a sense of a real video produced by professionals.

How effective is your combination of your main product and ancillary texts (the magazine advert and CD digipak)?

I believe that with the video, our CD cover and magazine poster makes our final product very effective as they all show some aspect of the video that will attract our target audience. As the CD cover shows a link to the artist; the colour pink included in the artwork ect, I believe this will entice the audience further as it will be easily recognised and easily identifiable. From afar I believe our audiences will be interested in the cover and will want to have a close look, enticing them to buy the single before they have seen it properly as it is original and creative.

The video will entice audiences as the song is a well known song and the video is such that it will be easily identified and will stick in your head. I believe it is a video that is fun, creative and attracts all audiences not just our target audience. I believe that with the different shots we have used and the different aspects of the video will ensure that it is effective and will stay with the audience long after they have seen it. With the piano at the beginning of the video, I believe this makes the it unique and allows it to stand out from others. With one of the performers running throughout the video I believe this makes it fun and makes it stand out as something to be remembered.

Detailed analysis of your music video

We recreated the music video for Pink – Just like a pill. We used a variety of shots including
mid –shots, Close – ups, Panning – Shots, High angle shots and Long- Shots as well as effects filmed in different locations. Our three main locations were; Shudehill car park, Urbis and Loreto College.

For the very begining of the music video we decided to add a title. It makes the video look more realsitic and professional as ths type of effect is seen on television music channels when inroducing the music video / song.

We used a variety of mid -shots and close -up shots of Sarah as she performed in this scene. This enables the audience to see expressions of anger and frustration on her face as she sings. Also the rainclouds are also darkened and exaggerated in some shots as we used the editing effects that defines them and adds a new dimension of shades. Also as you can see from the screen grab, the rain adds a dreary element to the music video, which is exaggerated through some shots having naturally low-key lighting.

We were inspired by a rooftop performance of the music video of written in the stars, where the performer is on a rooftop and there is also a city skyline visible in the backgrounds.

We thought this was a great shot of Sarah as the background through the window is blurred from the rain keeping the music v

ideos continuity. It also makes Sarah stand out more and is also quite a dark and gloomy shot.

Here we did a mid -shot of John and brightened the shot up using the editing effects adding a very high key lighting effect. Making just so his face is visible as if he is disappearing into the clouds and is barely there. We feel this shot was particularly good as it also allows the audience to identify who the person stood behind Sarah in future shots is, that she keeps looking back at. There is a sight shallow dept of field in this shot in particular as the foreground is mainly in focus yet t

he background is slightly blurred.

This shot was filmed inside in front of a green screen background, which was replaced by a graffiti wall background. The graffiti gives the video more of an edge. It helps represent the pop rock style of music that the video was made for. It was filmed mainly in mid- shots so that expressions are visible as well as the background.

The video has an amplification narrative such as parts of a break –up in flashback shots which fit in with appropriate parts of the lyrics. The extra performer –John – is quickly identified as the ex- boyfriend within the storyline.

Most of the music video is lip synced with the music video except for the two shots of John and Sarah in the flashbacks. It has both performance and narrative elements however there are significant amounts more of performance shots in our music video.

Research into Magazine Adverts

We have looked at a few different adverts for musin in magazines like NME and Kerrang, one of the examples we found was from a band called All Time Low.

This poster is taken from Kerrang! It helps us understand what a poster for the genre of Pop-Rock usually looks like. The poster is simple yet affective, which we like. We have also found that all Music Adverts have dates of when the CD Didgipak and song are being released, so we are looking into what font this could be.

Another poster that we have been looking at is Gwen Stafani


With this poster we liked how it was eligent yet a bit rock and roll. We also liked the fact that it contained aspects of the colour pink. Looking at this got us thinking about how we could add a bit more rock and roll into our poster to show that P!NK is more rock and roll than the colour pink, which is stereotypically associated with girls.

After we looked at two different adverts of different artists we decided it'll be best if we looked at some adverts from P!NK herself so that we can see what distiguinsh P!NK for who she is, however we found it very hard to find at least one advert fir the artists, so we decided to look at P!nk posters instead to see if we an get osme ideas of these, some of the posters we found were,

This is a poster from one of P!NK's tours. When we saw this we thought of how it was like Gwen Stafanis advert it had a bit of rock element in it, so we thought that we should definatly have the rock elemnet within our advert.

This is another good poster that is really colourfull and it stands out alot, and also you can tell that it is pink.

CD Digipak Research

As we look at the different examples of CD Covers we see that alot of bands have used different designs. Some have used animation throughout their CD and some that have used real life pictures;

We have also found some that have used alot of panels, this one has used 13 Panels:

Aswell as looking at different CD covers from other artsist,we also looked at a few pink ones. This would help us get some ideas of how pink's covers look so that we can hopefully get some ideas of our own, here is what we found;

On all three of these covers, we have found that no matter where it is, there is the colour pink somewhere. We liked this idea becuase it shows that it is related to the artsit in some way, we are also going to be taking our own pictures and then editing them in photoshop which when looking at pink's cover looks like they have been edited. Another idea that we liked were that they have a simple picture that has been jazzed up in some way when edited, so this is what we are going to do becuase we can make a more effective looking picture in photoshop, than if we try just use a simple photo.

Some of the ideas that we had about our cover was to have a hand stretched and tipping some pills onto the ground. By using this image we can add some bigger pills, so that we can write in them. Also we were thinking of having a slash of pink paint at the top, so that people who look at our cover can identify straight away who the artist is.

Another suggestion we had was having our performer lying on the floor; as the lyrics suggests, and having her look sad and depressed, this time we thought about having our performer wearing pink.

One more suggestion was having, a glass of water and some kind of paracemtamol next to it, we can the add effects to the glass and the tablt to make it not seem more interesting.

As a group we all came to the decision that our CD cover should have pink somewhere on one or more of the panels.

Filming Schedule

Tuesday 19th October

We went filming today at the CNS car park in Town. We first thought the dark, wet and dreary weather conditions were going to be a problem for us. However it turned out that the depressing weather worked well with our chosen song. From the amount we have filmed today of Sarah singing the song on the roof we are confident that we are getting back on track and will not fall behind with our project.

Friday 22nd October

Today we stayed in college and captured all that we had filmed previously. This time we are much happier with how the music video is looking so far and with the parts we have filmed. We all still stand by the decision of changing the song to Just like a pill by Pink. We have found that there are some important scenes that we cannot use and will have to re-shoot as others were in the shot when they weren’t meant to be. We will be re filming these scenes next week.

Tuesday 26th October (half term)

We filmed during the half term to ensure we won`t fall behind with the project as we wasted a lot of time filming for the song we had first chosen; Professor Green ft Lily Allen – Just be good to green. We finished some scenes at the car park and thanks to another wet and dreary day continuity of the video is not affected. We got two shots of Sarah and John on the roof together and apart. We also filmed in front of the Urbis Centre, again capturing both Sarah and John walking together alongside a stream which we thought would be a good shot and got some shots of Sarah running down the streets which we plan to usew for the chorus of our song.

Tuesday 2nd November
On this day we filmed in the chaplaincy. We filmed two of our performers arguing in a kitchen, we used the sink in the chaplaincy to make it look like a flat. The argument relates to song as it is about a break up. After this we went back to class and captured what we had filmed that day.

Friday 5th November
Today we have looked back at all out previous footage which we are very happy with. We have now decided that we are going to film some scenes of Sarah playing the piano for the opening scene of the music video. We have booked one of the music practise rooms and plan to film there next week.

Tuesadey 9th November
Today we filmed in a college music room. We filmed one of our perfermomers; Sarah, while she played the piano to the music of the beginning of the song. We were able to get the sheet music to the song and Sarah was able to learn the notes and play along in time with the music.
We also filmed Sarah on the floor lip synching with the beginning of the song. We were able to film her from different angles by standing on chairs and filming her from the side.
We then captured what we had filmed that day and started to edit the music video together.

Friday 12th November and onwards.
From the 12th November up until the 18th November, we edited all of the shots we had into a smooth running music video. There were times where we all got a little frustrated because we found it hard to get the shots in sync with the music, but in the end we were able to correct it. Another promblem we had was tryin to find the right clips to go at each part of the song, this was a long process but as a group we picked the best clips and put them into our video. We are all proud of our video and now we are just adding the finish touches to it by adding effects etc.
One on my favourite parts of the video is at the begining of the second verse, we decided to use alot of different clips that had our performer singing in it and put them together to make it fast cutting and show the different locations we had shot. As a whole, our group is happy with what we have produced.

Friday 26th November

Final day of editing. We added a new version of the song as the other version skipped. This made the lip shyncing of the video shift and it was no longer in shync. Therefore we had to put a few shots back in the right place, add video trasitions for effect as well as adding green screen backgrounds and add colour disortation for certain scenes such as the flashbacks. We finished the video in time and managed to tidy it up, as a group we are happy with the finished video.

Tuesday 07th November

Today, we finished off the CD Cover today, and started on the media advert. We felt that we made great progress today and we feel like we will be finished by Friday, with time spare to improve things.

Here is our front cover so far.
This is a draft of our advert so far we are hoping to add more logos and put abit more wiritng on it.

Friday 10th December
Today was our final deadline for the Digipack, we worked as a team to make sure that everything had been done, and that all the items of the digipack were in one folder, because we had already created the CD Cover and Back Cover, we created the two insides and finished off the advert. As a team we thought that everything turned out well, and we were proud of our end results.

Tuesday 14th December
Today was our final lesson to make sure we had everything we need, we made a directors commentary and added it on to the blog, we recorded our voices talking about the different scenes and shots that are in our video and we re-placed the music with it. After we edited the video and added it to the blog, we looked over everything that we did to make sure the english was correct and that everything that we needed on the blog was there, we found that it was all done and so we decided that the blog didn't need anything else adding to it.