A2 Media Studies Music Video: Evaluation

Evaluation:

Transcript:

Hello, we are James and Rich and this is our evaluation for our Media music video project. The song we had used for the video was Darling by a Metalcore band called Eyes Set To Kill.

Question 1: In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

The genre we’re working in is Metalcore, which is a subgenre of Metal, that focuses on the heavier side of the genre. Metalcore is made up of  various elements from hardcore punk and extreme metal. Bands in Metalcore include Killswitch Engage; Bullet For My Valentine; Bleeding Through; and Trivium.

Metalcore, or Metallic Hardcore, emphasizes on certain hardcore elements such as the heavy guitar riffs, and a punk established base of musical variety through the genre. Highlights of this music genre include various sounds such as ‘Breakdowns’, on which tends to be a similar sound followed by a burst of instrumental heaviness using guitars, bass guitars, drums and sometimes techno symphony’s, on which the audience tend to show their enjoyment by ‘moshing’, which is a form of ‘dance’, in their own way, allowing the participants to push and shove each other in aggression to the musical genre.

Our video of Darling, by Eyes Set To Kill, has a wide variety of characteristics, which is common in the Metalcore genre. We’ve kept to the dark surroundings, making the video stand out by highlighting the key features, such as the silhouette of the male vocalist which is in the dark, but the bright backlight to emphasize loneliness, along with the corded telephone which is used in a variety of music, such as ‘Silverstein – Apologize’, which we thought was a nice touch overall, which adds a sense of loneliness.

Finding the female vocalist was difficult, but we managed to persuade an individual that would perform the song, as she fit the basic characteristics of the dress sense for the lead singer of ‘Eyes Set To Kill’, and would fit into the genre of metalcore nicely. We used a diverse range of effects for the video, some Video Transitions we used included ‘Dip to Colour Dissolve’, and ‘Fade In and Fade Out Dissolve,’ other than that we tried some Video Filters such a ‘Earthquake,’ ‘Overdrive,’ ‘Fresh hold’ and ‘Black and White.’ Therefore, we attached some Text Generators onto the video, displaying various emphasis on the profiled words, for the Female, we used Edwardian Script ITC, and for the Male text we used Cracked, which fit into the genre perfectly.

Eyes Set To Kill tend to use various effects, such as a hand held camera in some of their footage, which displays the raw effect of their music, whilst implementing editing features to darken areas, aswel as overlaying images with text which shows the lyrics, bringing a lot of emphasis on certain feelings or drama within the music.

For the casting, we’ve managed to film a female for the female vocals and a male for the male vocals, which keeps in context towards the video and making it as real as possible. We’ve aimed this as the metal/punk/rock audiences, ages 18 to 25, in which the music fits, and in our opinion, so does the music video for the genre. Using darkening techniques and locations, we’ve managed to reenact the typical surrounds in this genre, using spotlights and plain back drops to allow focus on certain areas during the video, such as outlines, text and the vocalists.

A theorist we looking at was Richard Dyer, whom bought in the Four Notions of Representation, he talks about ideology, conventions, gender, the audience and the individuals within the music genre. Looking deeper into this, we came to the conclusion that we’ve addressed the majority of these in various ways. An over and covert message within our video shows the basic display of heartbreak to certain individuals, and how they react. The idea of items breaking show represent a breaking heart came across perfectly whilst maintaining the focus on the genre. Furthermore, showing the gender, usually the male is the more dominant sex, where as in the video it displays the male being the inferior due to the heartbreak. We also stereotype the metalcore genre, showing dark clothing, and emotions that usual sexes tend to hide.

We kept the parts of the male and female vocalists to show realism in the everyday world, that females and males are equals, with no superior or inferior sex, however the video displays the male as being the more inferior sex, with the female being the more superior sex.

Question 2: How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

Our overall products, such as the digipack, poster and the music video, all have various items implemented within them, such as dark surroundings, red throughout but not over the top, and sections of white. Surrounding the focus points, including the title, text and logos. The fonts used were as close to Eyes Set To Kill’s fonts as possible, but in which we slightly improved for the better result, for the music video, we used Edwardian Script ICT or the female vocals which followed through onto the digipack on the from cover showing a delicate side to the music genre. Alternative fonts we used included Cracked, which was used during the male vocals of the music video. These fonts make a real impact on the band, showing their softer side along with maintaining the fierce genre stereotype of the music.

Question 3: What have you learned from your audience feedback?

To gain audience feedback on our final product of the music video, we sat down amongst 15 to 20 people, whom watched the final outcome, and presented us with an open and honest opinion of the video, this included what was good, bad and improvements which could be taken out to enhance the final outcome of the video.

Various Good points that were implied starting with:

·      Shadow/silhouette – fits with music.

·      Split screen/looking at each other, separate clips mirrored.

·      Screaming at end = stronger screaming, effects.

·      Smashing items – fits with music.

·      Guitar angles – fade in / fade out.

After the positive feedback, we moved on to the negative feedback, which we tended to agree with. These points were:

·      Female Costume – Needs to fit the genre, darker clothing, fit appearance of genre.

·      Lighting – More consistency, female lighting, effects?

A final overall view of what improvements could be taken out include:

·      Guitars – Fill more of the screen

·      Darker Lighting – more consistency

·      Fit text onto screen

·      Female – effects, costume, various angles,

·      Smoother transitions between effects and overlays

Question 4: How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages? 

·      YouTube(research, ideas, effects, improvements)

·      Blogger(documentation, display, influences)

·      SLR (Nikon d3100, Photoshop - digipack)

·      Photoshop (digipack, logos, editing, final production)

·      Final Cut Express (clips, editing, sync, colour filters, transitions, colour scheme)

·      Phone (communicate, play song for recording, share ideas, feedback – text others on opinion)

·      Google – Search engine, which allowed us to search for items, products and research quickly and easily.

What I learned from this production?

·      Photoshop – first time using properly, overlay, opacity, layers, cropping, blending/smudging, effects.

·      Final cut express – cropping, editing, zoomed, effects, layers(opacity)

·      Filming – tripod(first time), angles, day light filming.

·      Lighting – during filming(dark room, spotlight), outside(natural)

·      Editing – Experiment with effects (V Trans – Dip To Colour Dissolve, Fade In/Out Dissolve) (V Filt – Earthquake, Overdrive, Fresh hold, B/W) (Text Gen – Female = Edwardian Script, fit to screen. Male = Cracked, conveniently placed)

·      Layouts – Music Video, YouTube, Screen Fillers.

·      Crop/zooming – Close Ups, Crop scenes, etc.

·      Speed of clips – Sped up Phone Throw sped up. Slowed down phone break.

·      Missing scene section – Reenacted original video, flickered effects, colour distortion, off-centre.

·      Split screen – Fills screen, 2 sides to the story, multiple instruments.

·      Opacity – Text (slightly faded, fit into background image) Clips (overlay, opacity ontop image lowered)

·      Fade in/Fade out – smooth’s transitions between clips.

A2 Media Studies Music Video: Our Video

Our Video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UP4t-gscUo0

We had picked this song, 'Darling' by Eyes Set To Kill, because it was a pretty simple concept. All we needed to do was to film me, as the male singer, get some props to smash up safely, and to film our actress, Kirsty, as the female vocalist. We had also filmed me and my group partner, Rich, playing guitar. It went quite well, apart from that we were trying to imitate the original video to the exact angle, etc, but it would've took too long to create.


The audience reaction to the video is mainly positive because of aspects like the split-screen section where the male and female vocalist are looking at each other singing; and also of the sections of the video where there is stuff being smashed up because it fits with the song; where-as the downsides to the video include that the lighting has to be consistant and also the costume of the female vocalist wasn't that consistant with the conventions of the genre.
The guitaring in the video needed to have a darker lighting technique and they also need to fill up more of the screen when they are playing as the split-screen sections of the video.
The text also had a bit of a downside to it because it needed to be squashed more onto the screen so that it could be read perfectly.

Picture Examples.

This shows the 'Thresh-hold' filter that we had used for these scenes. What this does is it turns it into black-and-white and then the dark colours get darker, whilst the light colours get lighter. We had used this because it shows how emotionally dark the song is and to reinforce how harsh the male vocals are.

This is showing one of the scenes where an object gets smashed up. We had put these scenes in black-and-white because it represents flashbacks.

This scene is showing the text on the male vocals scenes and also in the female vocals at the end. This font is 'Cracked' with an 'Earthquake' animation to the text.

What we had done for most of the guitar sequences was we had cropped them so that we didn't have any unnecessary scenery in the background, and we had them stretched the sequences to fit fully into the screen, so it looked like we hadn't cut any bits off the scenes.

This text is used mainly for the female vocalist. This is to have a softer look at the song, and also to show the female vocals are sung melodically and clean. The font is 'Edwardian Script', to also comply with the typical conventions of the genre.

 With this guitar sequence, we had inflated the image to see the guitar technique being played. This is to keep up with the continuity of the songs rhythm.

With this guitar sequence, we had shrunk both guitarists so we could see them both play and also to put a cool background onto it. The filter we had used was 'Caustics' because it had a relaxing feel to it and it fitted well with the style of guitaring that is in this sequence, which is lighter and more melodic than other sections in the video.

This guitar scene, however, is heavier than the one that's described above. The filter we had used for the background is 'Clouds' for the texture and 'Overdrive' for the colours. This was used because we wanted to reinforce the heavier section of the guitar style and to add a stylistic view into the background, instead of it being plain black. The guitar at the top wasn't supposed to be there because we had planned to have some drums in that space, but we didn't find the time to get a drummer to perform for the video.

This scene is of the two vocalists 'looking' at each other because of the double vocals. This is useful because it allows the audience to see both vocalists performing and also to show that the lyrics are about a break-up in a relationship, which is about a guy and a girl.

This snippet of the video shows a guitar crossing up into another guitar. This is something we had done to make sure that the guitar sequences in this instrumental section of the video didn't drag on a lot. We had also done this to the female vocals because it makes sure that there is a break in the vocals, so that it doesn't drag along.

This sequence was left alone because of the emotion that the male vocalists facial language conveys. This is a strong point for the video because it keeps the emotional atmosphere of the song.

This scene is at the end of the song. The reason why we had done it was to do something different by shooting some footage of a piece of paper that we would drip wax onto. Another reason why we had chosen to put this into the video is because it relates to the lyrics to the song.

Theories.

Our video theoretically mainly relates to the 'Uses and Gratifications' theory by Blumler & Katz. The broad needs that are useful to explain the video are Diversion and Personal Identity. The Diversion aspect of the video relates to how the lyrics and the song itself is used as a form of emotional escapism. This is used by the audience to get away from everyday pressures either physically or emotionally. The use of Personal Identity in the video is to let the audience compare their life to the lives of the persons involved in the video and how that no-one is on their own in this world.


The other theory that could be used to describe the video is Richard Dyer's 'Four Notions of Representation' theory. The reasoning for this is through the typical representations of sociological groups. The typical representations of the Metal genre in the aspect of gender is typically male-dominant, even-though there are female members in some of the bands, mainly playing keyboards at the back of the stage. The stereotypes of the Metal genre include the use of dark colours, mainly black and red; wearing jeans, T-Shirts, chains, etc.; tattoos that relate to other Metal bands; and also singing about personal pain.