Advanced Portfolio: January 2011

Advanced Portfolio Critical Evaluation

Ellen Hunt, Jenny Gibbon & Amelia Ellis

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

In our music video, we stuck to the general conventions of music videos, and more specifically, we looked in detail into the genre conventions of Kate Nash videos and extracted features we liked for our own one. For example, we enjoyed the upbeat pace, vintage mise-en-scene, and how it doesn’t take itself too seriously. We tried to incorporate these features into our video. We used ideas associated with traditional pop videos such as fast editing and a narrative to create a personal tenor with the audience.
As well as keeping with general conventions of standard pop videos, we also attempted to challenge conventions with post-modern ideas. The main feature of our video which I found is not similar to our music videos is a contextual factor- that we used a skeleton as a main character instead of a boy. The narrative of our video depicts a traditional love story in that the girl (Kate Nash) is tired of her ‘boyfriend’ but knows that she can’t leave him. The fact that the boy is a skeleton (to coincide with the lyrics and title ‘Skeleton Song’), I believe challenges traditional music videos; I have never seen a skeleton in a music video before.
I think that incorporating and challenging the conventions that we did has enabled our video to stay traditional enough to not be excluded by our target audience, but different enough to be remembered by them.

How effective is the combination of your main project and ancillary texts?

I feel that we have done a good job of maintaining a clear image throughout our campaign. Our singer Kate Nash I well known for her kooky indie style so we tried to use this as a theme for our project. The name of the song we are made our video for is ‘The Skeleton Song’ we also used this as inspiration for our website, CD and music video. We used a real skeleton as one of the characters in the video, this was used to create comic effect as we were treating it as a real person, and we feel that this gives a fun feel to the video and links in with the song very well.

To link the music video to the website and CD we used skeletons as a running theme. The CD cover contains an image of a skeletons hand holding a heart which also links in the song because she says ‘I could never let you go’ as if the skeleton will be holding onto her heart forever. We also scanned in blankets and cushions that we felt had an indie look to them for example the image of the birds. We felt that to link our entire project in effectively we should reuse some of the images in the website and CD which helps the audience recognise the artists work easier. We also reused the idea of crumpled up paper and handwriting in the CD cover as I scanned in hand written titles and the music video when Kate Nash is doodling on a piece of paper.

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

In order to gather our target audience’s opinion on our music video, we asked them to watch our video and fill out a questionnaire. From this we were able to see what they thought of our production so far, and know of any problems and improvements which could be made as a result. We used both open and closed questions in the questionnaire to make sure we had detailed responses. Some issues which were raised covered some of the editing techniques we had used. Our target audience suggested that the editing should be less erratic and more continuity based. Therefore we have amended some of the transitions and effects to ensure a more linear sequence, which is easier to follow and understand. Another point which was made by our target audience was that the lip synching in parts and the singer we have used doesn’t always look at the camera, as a result the lip synching wasn’t well done. Therefore we arranged a re-shoot of this scene, ensuring the singer had a more confident look, singing into the camera. We then edited this again and we feel it has amended the problem.

Whilst we agreed with the problem of the lip synching, we felt that by leaving out some of the fast paced editing and transitions this has resulted in less effective fast paced cutting, reflecting the faster pace of the song in parts. Therefore we have tried to compromise through using some transitions and effects, however leaving out the least effective elements.

How have you used media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

We used technology by looking at similar artist’s websites and social network pages. This gave us a good idea of the kind of look we wanted to go for. Kate Nash’s website and music videos gave us inspiration on the vintage look we wanted to portray in our project; I think we achieved this look by editing our project very well. Looking at the comments that have been written on out music video on YouTube will be a very effective way of gathering audience feedback as it is instant, the commenter’s will be impartial as they don’t know us and can be of any age group so we will have a wide range of opinions.

Online media has enabled us to distribute our music video via placing the video on social networking sites such as Facebook, and also popular video sharing site; Youtube which has allowed us to reach a wide audience. Through placing our video on websites which are notorious for gaining millions of visitors our music video has been exposed to a wide and diverse audience. However social networking sites have made it possible for us to distribute our video further through placing ‘suggestions’ and ‘invitations’ to our page enabling the users of such sites to easily forward the link to our video on to their friends.

As we aimed for our video to be fairly simple, complex technologies were not frequently used in the making of our video. In the planning stage, we used many websites to identify and research conventions we could use. This was a successful technique as looking at official websites of Kate Nash for example help us understand what our target audience would like to see. Also, watching at other pop videos such as Miley Cyrus helped us to understand what slightly different audiences (but who would still see our video for example on television) would relate to.