Nadia Skalli A2 Media Blog

Q1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Initially when thinking about how I would like to create a music video, I knew that I wanted there to be a performance in the video but not necessarily telling a story, including the singer herself and other people involved in creating a video that would express the emotion in the song, as a few of my friends are dancers I decided to would be able to use them in parts of the video dancing, choosing a setting for them to dance in was quite difficult as I wanted the focus to be on the body movement but also show a sadness like in the song. I decided to film the dance scenes in the college theatre as I was able to have a black back drop for the majority which allowed me to focus solely on the dancers themselves.

In order to plan video following the brief I researched other music videos seen in the media in modern popular culture. I looked at some popular artists that have large budgets to create videos and some with smaller budgets to compare the contrast shown in the quality of the filming, editing and the final video. After researching into a few videos I planned my video and decided on the cast of the video, most videos seen today do show a performance from either the artist or just others. I decided that in my video I wanted to show both. Although the audience does show performers it isn't necessarily a narrative and doesn't show a clear ‘story’. When looking at other videos created by Sia I realised they were all a bit strange, the video for ‘Breathe me’ shows the artist (Sia) in a house, the video is made up of a series of Polaroid images dropped onto either a floor or a table. I think that the original video for the song is too fast and distracts the audience from the song itself.

I decided not to use short fast clips in the video as I thought that the song itself is quite slow and a video with hundreds of short shots would be too distracting for the audience not giving them the opportunity to concentrate on the lyrics of the song itself. Although some of the shots in the video are only short I believe that they work well allowing the audience to focus on the performers which allows them to relate the performers to the lyrics in the song creating parts of the story in their own minds.

I started the actual video showing the performers rather than the artist, the song starts with an instrumental so I decided that I wanted the performers in the video to have more of a part performing rather than the artist performing in the majority of the video, the second clip in the video shows a close up of the artist singing the beginning of the song. My chosen song is a ballad meaning that my video must tell a story to show the emotions in the song. It is typical for a ballad to have the artist in the video singing and telling the story to the audience. In my video I decided to show the dancers in a dark room with black floors and walls using lights in the studio.

Usually in pop, the music videos are very bright and show dancing, partying and other social events. The music usually contains a dance beat with a synthesiser melody.

In the video for ‘listen’ by Beyoncé, the artist is stood in the centre of the shot with a simple white or black back drop singing into the camera, the medium close up shot shows the singers face clearly to see her emotions as she sings the song to the audience.

In Katy Perry’s video ‘Thinking of you’ the video is more of a narrative piece which tells a story. This video has many different scenes which shows the audience what the song is about. In my video I used a few different shots but rather than give a story like this video does I filmed more to show the performers/artist and scenery outside.

This is another video for a song by the same artist I have chosen, Sia. This video she has created is like an animated puppet, most of the videos that have been created for her songs are a bit ‘strange’,

In a video for a ballad the shots used are usually close up shots showing the faces of the artist and the lyrics being sung. When filming my video I decided to use a lot of close ups of the artists face in the studio to show facial expressions and emotions. The use of long shots is usually to show the audience the setting and area around the artists, The scene on the beach shows a long shot of the artists walking on the beach but the majority of the shot just shows the beach itself, this part of the song says ‘breathe me’, I decided to use a wide open space like this relating the video to the song itself. The camera movement is important in a music video, I didn't want to create a video using one shot the whole way through so decided to use a number of different shots, angles, zooms and tracking throughout the video giving the audience the opportunity to focus on one thing at a time.

There are two main types of editing; Montage editing and continuity editing. Continuity editing shows the audience a neatly put together video, which is fluent and is created by using transitions linking the shots together. Montage editing shows the audience multiple things at once by using different shots to show many different things, this type of editing is sometimes used at the beginning of a video to give the audience an insight of what is about to happen. When editing my video I used montage editing and repeated some shots, reversed some and shows things happening in a different order, I didn't want to create a clear story for my video as some of the main lyrics in the song are ‘I am lost’ creating a slight confusion for the audience when the watch allowing them to make a story in their own minds.

When planning my video I thought that I would film the majority of it in the dance studio at college, I used a spot light on the performers so that the audience can only see the performers themselves with nothing around them. Because the song is quite a slow ballad I decided to take film some outside showing the beach, large open spaces and natural areas like the forest I visited with Steph to film some of the dance scenes creating a sense of loneliness showing the audience what the song is really about. Costume and make-up is extremely important in a music video as these two things alone can tell a story about the artist, in my video the two dancers wore different clothing, one in light costume and make-up and the other in a darker costume and make-up

Since uploading the video and my ancillary texts my blog has received a lot more views this is good for me as it shows people are interested in seeing the video and will also have the ability to give their comments which will help me to receive peoples thoughts other than those given when I interviewed people for audience feedback.

Q2. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

I think that my ancillary pieces link well with the song and video, the cover of my digiPak shows the main performer (Emily Straker) sat against a simple patterned backdrop which looks like a grainy faded wallpaper, this effect works well as it has a slightly ‘shabby’ look to it. I decided to create an image and played around with the text on the cover which made it look as if the model is breathing out the words “breathe me” which is the name of the song linking the two together.

I have created a 6 panel DigiPak which shows a front cover, back, 2 inside images, 2 binders and 2 CDs', I decided to create a front cover which wasn't too overwhelming and instead showed an image of the artist and her name, I think the text used on the cover of the DigiPak was appropriate as. The back of the DigiPak is based on a light grey background, I researched different album covers to find out more on how popular bands at the moment display their DigiPak, I liked the idea of placing the names of other songs included in the album dotted around the centre of the back which allowed space to show the name of the Artist and include colour and small images on the back showing a bit of colour which brightened up the panel. I decided that I wanted each panel to relate to each other by adding either a butterfly or bird on each of the panels. I decided to show the image on the cover on the pack on one of the CD's but I didn't include these images of the butterflies or birds on the front cover or the CD because I thought that these two would work well alone. The binds of the album use a simple block text reading "Amille Bea", on the panels I added a yellow block which matched the yellow colour of the butterflies, I didn't want my binds to be a boring 'black and white' so decided that the block of colour may stand out well.

My magazine advert shows an image of my artist, this is the same image shown on the inside of the DigiPak, and also an image of the performers in the 'Breathe me' video as this is the main song on the album. The advert tells the audience when the album will be released and that it will be available to download/ CD. I included reviews on the advert from NME and iTunes, when looking at adverts in magazines for music releases I have noticed that there are usually reviews well known media companies. I believe that this would be good advertisement for the artist as a large image in magazines usually catches the reader’s eye wanting them to learn a little more about the artist and their music.

As on the CD the audience will not be able to view the music video, I didn't want to link the video and DigiPak together too much, although the artist is involved in the video I don't think that the audience will be able to relate the album to the video if they have not seen it. The audience will have the ability to watch the video on Youtube if they wish to.

Q3.
What have you learnt from your audience feedback
I received audience feedback from different people that had seen my music video and ancillary texts. Everybody that I received feedback from said that they thought that the video was good and that it fitted well with the genre of music. I think that the audience feedback allowed me to see what people did enjoy about the video and would help me to make any changes that needed making to the video, receiving good comments about the video was very rewarding as I realised people appreciated the hard work and effort I had put in to create the media text. I am very happy with my audience feedback as all of the comments given were very positive and made me feel a lot of confident about my work. There were parts of my video that I felt weren't very strong and needed changing but receiving comments from others about how they thought these pieces were really good helped me to become more confident about the work.

Other than recorded pieces of feedback I have received a lot of comments from my other students in my classes and friends that have seen my video, I have received a lot of constructive criticism and this has helped me to improve my video a lot.

A lot of people said that they liked the locations used, people liked how they could link the lyrics to the settings. "I am lost" and "breathe me", the open spaces used linked with the settings. People also said that the characters used in the video looked professional and the dancing was well choreographed which is not only positive feedback for me but also for the performers in the video who worked hard to choreograph a piece which worked very well with the song. I also recieved feedback about my ancillary texts which were very positive

This feedback says that the digiPak looks professional and eye catching and the the advertisement also looks professional and the images stand out. I also recieved feedback about the bold colours used which catched peoples eyes drawing them to the DigiPak and advertisment. Like with the video I recieved a lot of positive feedback about the ancillary texts which made me feel very positve about my work. Some people said that they could see I had spent a lot of time creating my ancillary texts and that this made them feel confident about the video as they felt that if as much work had gone into creating the ancillary then the video itself should be good.

Q4. How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Whilst planning, researching, constructing and evaluating my music video and ancillary texts I had to use a lot of different new media technologies. The editing software I used was Adobe Premiere 5, I have used this technology before but only for small projects, learning more about using the software allowed me to edit my media text using different tools and gave me the ability to cut and place footage at just the right place over the music.

To film the majority of my footage I used a Panasonic SDR-S50, when opening the footage on editing suites I found that the image didn't fit the full screen, I had to alter the scale of the clip which slightly effected the quality of the footage. This was not a major issue and did not effect my video much but it unfortunately meant that I had to waste some vital time altering the size of the footage. I took some images on my mobile phone during filming which I thought I could upload to my blog showing some of the work I had been doing, to take these images I used an iPhone 4s, I thought that the quality of the images uploaded was fine and gave people the ability to see some of the things going on 'behind the scenes'.

When researching other videos seen in the media I used 'Youtube', this gave me the ability to search over a whole range of videos and allowed me to see different ways that people interpret their music. I also used the Internet for a lot of other different things when creating my media text, the Internet allowed me to create 'Prezis', which mapped all of my thoughts when planning my media text, this allowed me to look back over these thoughts and gave me the opportunity to save of my thoughts and emotions in one place that would help me later on when filming and editing my work. I also used the website 'Goanimate' to show my audience feedback, this allowed me to create a fun way of showing the questions and answers given.Using Blogger was an effective way of recording all of the work I have done over the year and allowed me to look back and refer to pieces that I wanted to.

Again this year I used Photoshop quite a lot to create my ancillary texts, I took the things learnt last year (when creating a music magazine) and tried to use the skills learnt to create a much better piece of work this year. I used Photoshop to create both, the DigiPak and the DigiPak advertisement where I was able to layer photos and text together to show all of the information needed to show my audience what the ancillary text was advertising. Throughout my ancillary text I used an image of a butterfly which I scanned from a notebook I owned at home, this was a simple procedure, I had to scan the notebook and use Photoshop to cut out the images I wanted.