Brief
Visual Essay
Language
Friday, 22 April 2016
Thursday, 21 April 2016
Evaluation
Below is the full written version of the evaluation that is in the above Prezi presentation
Saturday, 16 April 2016
Ancillary Texts
I took photographs of Victoria in the studio as a large portion of the music video took place in a studio against a white background, and so this kept consistency in the magazine advertisement.
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I took the above (raw) photograph of Victoria, which is quite dark, and adjusted the levels and put it in monochrome so that it immediately resembled the music video. I wanted the ancillary texts to look similar to my AS Media work, as I'm using the same artist (Victoria) and so it made sense to keep a consistent style for her and create a recognisable aesthetic like observed in other ancillary texts (Lana Del Rey, for example, whose aesthetic is very 'vintage').
Looking back on my music magazine poster from last year, I took the same font used for Victoria's name 'Xtreem' and started by writing her name in it. However, when I wrote the name of the song in that font and placed it like shown below, the letter 'G' formed perfectly around Victoria's shoulder and arm. I changed her name to be in the font 'Vanadine', another font used on the cover of my magazine last year, and placed it directly below the song/album name.
After placing a blue rectangle that highlighted the title and some drop shadows, I began editing the main image to fill the blank space and make the advertisement look more interesting. Below are a series of four images of how I started to edit this. In the first image, I duplicated the original and created a 'ghostly' shadow to visually represent the name of the song. In the second, third and fourth images, I began adding other photographs from the shoot as 'ghosts' surrounding the main image, which was an idea suggested by a friend. I think it works quite well and I will continue to develop this.
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Whilst in the process of making the 'ghost' effect background, I added a couple of layers which I thought looked okay as a main image, and saved them as evidence of what other images from the photoshoot might look like with the title.
Below are three images showing further progress on the album/music video advertisement. I moved Victoria so that she was framed more to the left, and that placed the 'Ghosts' text more central, also making it slightly bigger.
I then added a couple more boxes across the bottom, lines around the perimeter of the advertisement in a very similar style to my AS Media double page spread (keeping a consistent and recognisable style). Victoria's name was also moved to the top to prioritise and bring more attention to it and balance out the overall advert.
Below is a template that was provided to us for our digipaks.
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I began by opening up one of my images into photoshop and cropped it to a square, later realising this was wrong since the dimensions of the digipak are not exactly square.
At this point, I decided to quickly design a logo for a fake record label that would be associated with the artist. The name written on the logo below is 'Doom' however, with the font I chose it looks like 'Doorn', which is actually an already-existing electronic house record label founded by Sander Van Doorn. Despite this, the label was only intended to be a quick mock-up of a record label logo that could be entirely associated with Victoria's 'persona', rather using a well-known, already-existing one.
I took the above (raw) photograph of Victoria, which is quite dark, and adjusted the levels and put it in monochrome so that it immediately resembled the music video. I wanted the ancillary texts to look similar to my AS Media work, as I'm using the same artist (Victoria) and so it made sense to keep a consistent style for her and create a recognisable aesthetic like observed in other ancillary texts (Lana Del Rey, for example, whose aesthetic is very 'vintage').
Looking back on my music magazine poster from last year, I took the same font used for Victoria's name 'Xtreem' and started by writing her name in it. However, when I wrote the name of the song in that font and placed it like shown below, the letter 'G' formed perfectly around Victoria's shoulder and arm. I changed her name to be in the font 'Vanadine', another font used on the cover of my magazine last year, and placed it directly below the song/album name.
After placing a blue rectangle that highlighted the title and some drop shadows, I began editing the main image to fill the blank space and make the advertisement look more interesting. Below are a series of four images of how I started to edit this. In the first image, I duplicated the original and created a 'ghostly' shadow to visually represent the name of the song. In the second, third and fourth images, I began adding other photographs from the shoot as 'ghosts' surrounding the main image, which was an idea suggested by a friend. I think it works quite well and I will continue to develop this.
.sd
Whilst in the process of making the 'ghost' effect background, I added a couple of layers which I thought looked okay as a main image, and saved them as evidence of what other images from the photoshoot might look like with the title.
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Below are three images showing further progress on the album/music video advertisement. I moved Victoria so that she was framed more to the left, and that placed the 'Ghosts' text more central, also making it slightly bigger.
I then added a couple more boxes across the bottom, lines around the perimeter of the advertisement in a very similar style to my AS Media double page spread (keeping a consistent and recognisable style). Victoria's name was also moved to the top to prioritise and bring more attention to it and balance out the overall advert.
Below is a template that was provided to us for our digipaks.
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I began by opening up one of my images into photoshop and cropped it to a square, later realising this was wrong since the dimensions of the digipak are not exactly square.
At this point, I decided to quickly design a logo for a fake record label that would be associated with the artist. The name written on the logo below is 'Doom' however, with the font I chose it looks like 'Doorn', which is actually an already-existing electronic house record label founded by Sander Van Doorn. Despite this, the label was only intended to be a quick mock-up of a record label logo that could be entirely associated with Victoria's 'persona', rather using a well-known, already-existing one.
Thursday, 14 April 2016
Ancillary Text Research
For the music video brief, we are to make two ancillary texts from a choice of three:
- A website homepage for the band
- A cover for its release as part of a digipak (CD/DVD package)
- A magazine advertisement for the digipak (CD/DVD package)
I decided to do a cover for a digipak and a magazine advertisement, and started research with simple Google searches into digipaks, film posters and music video posters. This brought up a variety of material that could be used for references, and was helpful to get a general idea for the typical conventions of these products from first impressions.
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The majority of music video posters were made for the pop music genre, however, they were not legitimate advertisements but were labelled as 'fan made'. They're still very helpful references though into how a magazine advertisement should look. I found that any google searches that contained the word 'advertisement' along with 'music', 'album' or 'magazine' brought up a lot of A-Level media work from past students, which could also be helpful in my own research.
Below are three PowerPoint presentation slides showing detailled research into album/film posters/advertisements. Since I'll be advertising a music video, looking into a variety of media advertising provided a wide scope of ideas for my own product.
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| Digipaks |
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| Film Posters |
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| Music Video Posters |
The majority of music video posters were made for the pop music genre, however, they were not legitimate advertisements but were labelled as 'fan made'. They're still very helpful references though into how a magazine advertisement should look. I found that any google searches that contained the word 'advertisement' along with 'music', 'album' or 'magazine' brought up a lot of A-Level media work from past students, which could also be helpful in my own research.
Conventions Analysis
Below are three PowerPoint presentation slides showing detailled research into album/film posters/advertisements. Since I'll be advertising a music video, looking into a variety of media advertising provided a wide scope of ideas for my own product..
Above is an analysis conducted on an advertisement for Madonna's 'Celebration' album. I chose this poster because of the use of bold, bright colour and link to my own artist/product due to the genre (electronic). I liked the unusual edit of the main image best, and thought that there were aspects of this I could carry over to my own ancillary texts as they could work well with the overall aesthetic, such as the blending of other images and bright colour contrast.
The second poster/advertisement which I analysed was for an artist by Jessie J. Although the genre isn't quite the same as my chosen genre, it's still variably similar and there are conventions of this genre which closely tie in to electronic house music. It gave me more ideas into potential layouts, colour schemes and makeup/costume elements.
The final magazine advertisement/poster which I analysed was one of a Lana Del Rey album. Although the genre is the least similar out of the three analysed media to my chosen genre (Lana Del Rey is described as a baroque/indie pop artist), the photograph and general style of the advert I thought was quite unique interesting and so I wanted to analyse it. The main image was a particular point of interest, as it's a simple head-and-shoulders photograph that still manages to catch the audience's attention, and so this is something I could look at recreating in my own ancillary text.
Fonts
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An important feature of any digipak, advertisement or poster is the text written on it as it tells the audience vital information about the product you are selling. For this reason, use of font can make a huge difference with your product.
Last year, I used DaFont for all my music magazine fonts. It has a huge variety that are easy to download, and a handy feature to be able to test the fonts with your own words before downloading them. I used this feature to write the title of the album 'Ghosts' and screenshotted a number of fonts and presented them with their names below. Keeping a track of their names was helpful as it made it easy to go back and find them.
I collected a variety of fonts, including ones which didn't fit with the conventions of my chosen genre (Jerantet 1977 and Kickstop, for example) because I wanted to compare a number of different styles of fonts before choosing ones to use.
Vanadine and Xtreem are two fonts that I used on my music magazine cover last year, and since I'm using the same artist, using them again would create a consistent style that would make the artist recognisable as observed in the above ancillary text research.
Digipak
Tuesday, 12 April 2016
Audience Feedback
After posting my final music video, I uploaded a link of the video to Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr. When I conducted a survey for audience research, it was evident from the responses that the quickest way for people to hear about new music video releases was through social media and so by uploading my video link to multiple places, this would hopefully reach a wider audience.
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On Twitter, I tagged the artist of the song Higher Self in the hopes that he would see it. I was really fortunate that he did and he retweeted, liked and replied to it. This and the response I got from my personal Facebook meant that the video received quite a lot of views only hours after posting it on social media.
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At the time of writing this blog post, the tweet got 3 retweets and 9 likes; Facebook had 19 likes and Tumblr had 3 notes. The views on the video certainly rose in response to social media interaction, and the video has over 90 views.
In regards to my audience research in which I asked people what devices they tend to watch music videos on, I came across the YouTube analytics which tells you what devices your audience are viewing your videos on and thought it would be interesting to compare. As shown in the screenshot above, the majority of the views on my music video were from a computer, which supports the audience research survey which had similar results.
Feedback
I asked a few people to watch my music video and give feedback on it, including things they liked and things that could be improved.
Two people commented that the story wasn't entirely easy to decipher, and that they would have liked to have seen why the main character started drinking in the first place, for example a reaction to heartbreak, coming to resolve that issue and eventually stop drinking. Another suggestion for improvement was that, whilst they enjoyed the studio clips which put across emotion, they would have liked to have seen more narrative clips of Victoria. I definitely agree with these suggestions for improvement and think they are fair. When filming the narrative clips, I underestimated how much footage would be needed and ultimately, a lot more of the music video became studio shots. If I were to do this again and improve my music video, more narrative clips would be shot and replace a portion of the studio clips. I would probably also shoot more interesting scenarios, and maybe things that hint at a background story such as heartbreak.
However, many people commented that they liked the cinematography, the fast-paced editing, and that Victoria's lip-syncing was perfectly in-sync with the audio. I asked a friend to write up some feedback on the music video and they sent the following message:
"Good use of shaky cam, with black & white overlay and blurring effects it helps set a tone for the video. Makeup shows the singer's distress, which is good and done very well! Use of slow motion/jerking motion is good, shows the singer's conflict. Beer/alcohol is good, looks very realistically placed (looks like she's actually drinking, very good acting). Narrative is clear and straightforward, and it's easy to denote the moral message from it."
Sunday, 10 April 2016
Process of Editing
I did all the editing for my music video in Final Cut Pro because it's considered as a 'professional' video editing programme that I'm familiar with and was the easiest to access.
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Below is a small video I put together when trying out different ways of editing one particular sequence (Last line just before first chorus, "That is old news I'm not entertaining that, baby!")
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I tried out three different ways of editing this sequence but the differences are very subtle. In the first edit, I left the portion of clip where Victoria says "That" (before 'baby') unedited. In the second edit, I chopped in single-frame clips from her sitting at the table so that they rapidly flashed and in the third edit, the clip of Victoria singing stutters like it does when she throws the paper at the end.
In the final music video, I went with Edit 3 because I thought having the stutter twice worked well and made it look less like it was a technical error, however, I swapped that clip with one of Victoria with tear streaks down her face because it put across more emotion. The editing technique is still the same.
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I revisited the opening sequence of the music video to make amendments to the studio shots after filming more footage. The opening lyrics are as follows:
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"I don't need no, no
No, no, no (no)
I don't need no ghost"
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Below is a screenshot from an early edit of the video showing how these lines began (MVI_3202)
However, this didn't look right, so I changed it to open with the 'tear-streaked' version (MVI_4114) and then cut to a different 'normal' version (MVI_4113) which I think works better.
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Below is a small video I put together when trying out different ways of editing one particular sequence (Last line just before first chorus, "That is old news I'm not entertaining that, baby!")
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I tried out three different ways of editing this sequence but the differences are very subtle. In the first edit, I left the portion of clip where Victoria says "That" (before 'baby') unedited. In the second edit, I chopped in single-frame clips from her sitting at the table so that they rapidly flashed and in the third edit, the clip of Victoria singing stutters like it does when she throws the paper at the end.
In the final music video, I went with Edit 3 because I thought having the stutter twice worked well and made it look less like it was a technical error, however, I swapped that clip with one of Victoria with tear streaks down her face because it put across more emotion. The editing technique is still the same.
*Epilepsy Warning - Flashing Images*
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Opening Sequence
When I recorded more studio footage, the lip-syncing for these lines improved, so I went back to change them. I started by adding in an additional clip that cut in the middle to a shot of Victoria with tear streaks down her face (MVI_4114). I wanted to introduce that 'side' of her from the very beginning, so that it didn't seem like a continuity error when it kept switching later on.
I then went to change the following line "I don't need no ghost" and added in another clip of Victoria with tear streaks down her face that faded in and out. However, I don't think this looks very good and so I will probably leave it as it originally was.
Below is a video showing all the above described changes. Edit 1 is the original, earlier edit (seen in my mock exam draft). Edit 2 shows all the changes I made. I will keep the changes to the first line, but not the second.
Friday, 8 April 2016
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