Our music video of Athlete - The Getaway uses many of the conventions used in popular and emotive music videos. For example, the use of close up shots which we used to portray the emotion of our lead character, photograph shots and a variety of different locations. However, we have tried to add our own unique touch to many of the shots, such as, using our own houses, and props e.g. personal family photographs.
We decided early on that we didn't wish to completely conform to a stereotypical style of music video. So we decided, even though our choice of song is fairly slow in tempo and create a rather upsetting atmosphere, we aimed to keep the pace of the shots and the action fairly upbeat to try and challenge the conventional style found in similar music videos.
Another convention we did use was that of close – up shots, these help add to the emotion felt within the video and which emotion is portrayed to the audience. We tried to keep to this convention as much as possible because we felt that perhaps trying to challenge or change the aim of the convention would take away the meaning that we would be trying to convey. In this sense, a close - up shot helps portray emotion, convey a sense of what atmosphere is being represented within the shot.
In association with this, we also shots such as worms eye view and birds eye view, which along with close – up also help the understanding and help emphasise the emotion and feel of the scene because these shots create a feel of authority or in contrast a sense of belittling. These are typical characteristics of the music video and can be found in many a video.
A music video is meant to aid the storyline that is being depicted within the song, as much as we tried to keep with this, at times became a challenge, however, reflecting upon this we feel it adds a sense of unpredictability to the video which overall does entail with story line of the song.
Our subsidiary tasks include a web-page for the band and a CD cover.
We aimed to keep the theme the same throughout to keep the continuity feel. However we did adapt each one to their means. For example, with the CD cover, an audience would want to be able to recognise it without having to read every CD case in the store, so making it recognisable is one of the key aspects. However, the web page is more a method of advertising, the band, the single and the album. Rather than selling an individual product unlike the CD.
This is an example of our webpage, however if this was created it would encompass drop down menus and movable features.
Overall, I think our 3 different products link well together but keep their individual characteristics. When designing the 3 different products, at first we kept the same design throughout just making it larger or smaller whenever or wherever needed however when looking at them collectively we felt this did not give a professional feel or look to any of the products, obviously for the video when bounced ideas of the original but when looking at Athletes own orginal CD cover and webpage we were not thrilled by their ideas so thought it best to come up with out own. Which I think overall this method benefited our project and looks as though we put a lot of effort in to it to create our own ideas.
From our audience feedback which was both positive and negative we gained a lot of knowledge as regards to our projects. For example, with the video it was quite obvious that at time the syncing with the voice over and mouth was very tricky and when showed to our peer group this was picked up, meaning that we had to pay more special attention to this issue. We took all negative comments on our projects as positive criticism rather than negative, seeing as the comments were to benefit us in the long run. Another issue bought up when an audience viewed our video is that some of the shots didn't quite turn out how we would have liked for example there was an extreme close - up shot of our actors eyes moving quickly we after viewing for our selves we didn't think looked professional or added anything to the video so we decided to remove the shot.
This is the shot previously mentioned however we kept this section but this example shows what the clip we removed looked like.
In contrast to this the positive comments were very positive. For example to video all seemed to flow and a sense of continuity was felt throughout, our video was very well understood. We took all of the comments made into consideration and did try to address all them by either editing them, emphasising them or removing them all together if we felt they would not benefit our project.
Media technologies have greatly aided our project. Even from the start of our project we used media technologies such as youtube which we used when researching music videos that we could use ideas from and when studying the actual band who's song we used, Athlete - The Getaway. We used a number of other media technologies throughout our project for all the tasks as well as the music video. For example without the use of an Apple Mac,we wouldn't have been able to put together or edit our video to the standard we have achieved. The programme we used was called imovieHD, as we used an HD video camera this helped us bring the best quality out of having the chance to use an HD camera. On the Apple Mac,imovieHD, we were able to change almost everything we wanted to,from the effects on the video such as lighting or black or white and even down to sound as well, as we used a popular song we obviously had to sync up the lyrics with our actors, which did pose as a challenge, however, on the imovieHD programme we were able to slow down and speed up the pace of the video when our actor was singing which meant we were able to sync the singing with the lyrics better. However, as previously mentioned when it came to the peer evaluation we did encounter a few criticisms but we did take these as constructive and then went to smooth out and improve on the syncing and timing in our video. The Apple Macs even helped us when doing tasks like this evaluation, using the programme 'Grab' so take screen shots to implant on our evaluation to help express and emphasise the points being made in our writing. As regards to our subsidiary task, media technologies really helped us, for example when designing the webpage, having programmes that we could change colours on, cropping images editing images was a great help. Meaning that we could create a much more professional look for the task. Also, this helped with the CD cover as we could create a blank canvas which was the exact size we wished for a CD cover which meant when designing it we knew what space we had left and if it looked like a real genuine CD cover would.
Overall, our project was an overall success taking criticisms from others was probably the most influential part as we could see what others would think not just us as we would obviously be bias so meaning that we could improve and our projects for the better. There are plenty of things if we did this again we would perhaps address in different ways or perhaps evaluate our ideas however in the basis on what we have produced I regard all our projects as successes.
