Evaluation

Our music video was put together using a variety of ideas which we have thought of and we took ideas from actual music videos. The conventions we used match the ones suitable for the song and genre of the music that we based our music video on. Also we used the lyrics from the song to give us influence for the actions of the character in the shot. We wanted to make the plot of the video clear to the viewer so the project was not confusing and the audience could see that the character is visiting a house where he had many memories. We attempted to make the video so that it would carry on the atmosphere that the song already created. A number of the shots capture light from windows and doors which creates an uplifting feeling. The song carries a positive feeling about it which influenced our decision to focus on the sunlight.

In the video a worm-eye view shot is used to make the character look more in control and increase his presence whilst he is singing. The shot towards the end of the video shows the character singing with the sky in the background which is very effective in showing the character as being strong. There is only one character in the video so it was important that he was the focal point in the video. The tempo of cuts match the speed of music in certain places in the song. Towards the end of the video, where the song starts to increase in speed, the number of shots increase as it comes to the end of the video.

The photographs in the house show the viewer that there is a lot of personal history that the main character has wrapped up in the house, this helps the audience in being able to relate to his emotions. We concentrated on the emotions of the character by using close-ups to view the facial expressions and feelings. The clothing was chosen very carefully, we chose a casual dress code as it represents the 'indie' genre.

As the song is emotional, we have slowed some clips down as we have seen this done in many other music videos from this genre. This gives the audience time to take in what's happening in a certain shot allowing the audience to make more sense of what's happening.
This idea was inspired by a video by the 'Killers – Smile Like You Mean It', this video also shows a band visiting an old house. The band are shown performing in the house in different rooms and it shows events from the past.

The combination of the music video and our ancillary texts contain a lot of character and colour. We tried to use the same colours on the web page as the ones used on the CD cover. The album, 'Black Swan' is what both the ancillary texts are based on and the music video further promotes the release. The CD cover uses bright colours with a simple portrait of a swan on the front which is very eye catching. We have also edited the image to give it more of a glossy effect. To match this, the web page also has a glossy effect. The heading on the page, 'Black Swan', promotes the new album.

From the audience feedback I have learned that careful planning and detailed editing is essential to producing a good final piece of work. Fortunately we received mostly positive feedback from our peers upon watching the final product. The shots used in our video were liked by everyone and were considered to be aesthetically pleasing. The parallel narrative that was continued throughout the video was well put together and was liked by our peers. We only received a couple of pieces of negative feedback on the video, the first bit of negativity came towards the end of the video when the lip syncing goes slightly out of time with the music as we had trouble editing the music to be perfectly in sync with the video. Secondly, was the zoomed in shot of the characters left eye, most felt that it was slightly uneasy amongst the rest of the video, however, we decided to keep this in as it increased the wide range of shots that were already used throughout video, we felt this added to the texture and kept it flowing.

Overall, I am happy with how the project turned out. Despite a few negatives, the music video definitely lives up to the expectations we had during the planning stages. I think the song by Athlete is perfect for the ideas we had decided to follow.. The amount of footage we had to work with is in my opinion the reason why we were successful when putting the music video together. We filmed over 30 minutes of footage that we thought was worthy to be included, therefore all we needed to do is select our favourite clips to use in the video.

Certain features such as the flashing lights when the character walked up the stairs was effective in going with the music. I was also impressed with how the shot when the camera moves down stairs then out of the house looked. We sped up and reversed the clip to match the increase in tempo of the song. This effect works well as it isn't noticeable that the clip was edited in the way it was.


Planning

During our planning stage we used media technologies such as 'youtube' to gain ideas for our own video and see how to meet the needs for certain genres. We looked a various other music videos to gain a better idea of what conventions to follow and what effect this can have on the audience. Once we began our production we used a digital camera to take photos of our storyboards and were then uploaded to an 'iMac' and was made into a short film. We then set out to do the same thing but with photographs of the actual shots that were going to be used in the music video. We imported the song that we were going to be making a music video for onto 'iTunes'. We then took a HD camera and a tripod to shoot the music video. We used the tripod to create more professional shots by preventing the camera shaking during shots. The High Definition camera was a big advantage in creating a high quality music video.

We used storyboards to help us create an image of what we wanted to achieve. This allowed us to sketch some initial ideas down on paper such as camera angles and scenarios that we could use in the final video. In total we drew over 30 drawings of suitable shots. This helped us to develop the narrative of the story as well as realise what would work in the video. It was important to do as many sketches as possible at this stage to keep an open mind to more ideas and to help us when actually filming the footage we needed. These drawings included specific close-ups and establishing shots that we decided to include.

After we had filmed all this, we uploaded all the footage to the iMac using the iMovie software. After we had done this we transferred the footage over to iMovie HD which was better suited to the HD camera we used. iMovie HD is the programme we used to edit the music video, on this programme was a large variety of special effects, we used some slow down and speed up effects on some of our shots as we felt this became a major convention of the genre. We uploaded the song from iTunes and then we exported the video form quicktime.

We created the CD cover and web page on the latest Paint programme which allowed us to create the 'glossy' effect which made them stand out against the overall project. Also the programme offered a wide range of font which helped us to choose the most suitable font for the two ancillary texts.