Amanda Champion A2 Media

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

When we began the process of creating our music video, there were many different factors that we felt we needed to focus on. Once we had decided on our definite track, we looked at how we could make our video convincing enough, and how it would withstand in the media industry. For it to be successful and follow in the footsteps of other videos in that genre we used a certain criteria. We researched a lot of other videos in the indie/rock genre, and had an advantage as we are all fairly familiar with this kind of music. We took inspiration from videos by bands such as the Arctic Monkeys, Franz Ferdinand and MGMT.

We wanted the target audience to be young teenagers of both genres. We felt that the video would appeal to girls because of the emotional value and connotations of the video, which relates to heartbreak. Also, boys would enjoy the video because of the music values, and the fact that the band is quite masculine. We also thought very carefully about the different locations and the type of shots that we chose, in order to mirror the videos from that genre in the music industry. It was also necessary for us to think about the different effects that we created on the editing suite, so we achieved the style of video that we felt would reach out to our audience accordingly. We also, however, wanted to make our music video unique and memorable, and through the casting we believe that we have achieved this.

Content:

As opposed to a concept style of music video, we decided that a mixture of narrative and performance would be the right balance for our music video. We wanted to make sure that we had enough band shots so it would be easily seen that we were promoting a new artist into the industry. This therefore did involve an adjustment to the storyboard, as when we had begun the editing we did not feel that we had enough shots of the band. The narrative was necessary to draw the attention of our audience by focussing on the idea of something that all teenagers can relate to, which is relationships and heartbreak.

The majority of the time, the media industry matches the visuals to the storyline in the video, and this is where we collected our inspiration from. To make our video match the style of those in the industry, we decided to have the couple getting back together in the end, to show the normal conventions of a young person’s story.

When conducting our research, we looked at many videos; however we did focus on “Teddy Picker” by the Arctic Monkeys. They show a wide range of band shots, both of them playing the instruments and them walking down the road together and just generally having fun to show their relationships. We took this idea and then expanded on it by adding the narrative as well to make the video more interesting for our target audience. We therefore took the inspiration from the real media, and used it as a template for our own media product.

We used stereotyping to create our main characters. We had the main boy in his room doing his hair in the mirror, and his room was very sensual with all of the colours and the decorations, such as red walls and a lava lamp. This portrays to the audience that the boy is a bit of a player. With the girls bedroom we chose to focus on the pictures on the wall and the colours of the decor, which shows that she is a typical teenager with pictures of her friends on the wall.

We chose to make the band stereotypical through the use of their costume, which also showed their age and made it easier for teenagers to relate to them because of their dress sense, as they were wearing hoodies and jeans for a lot of the time. We focused in particular on the image of the main singer, as we had a lot of close ups on him, and it felt as if he was selling the band more than the others, which can be reflected in the amount of close ups that we decided to use of him. The style of a shirt with a tie and a cardigan went perfectly with the genre, and meant that teenagers would feel a connection to the individual, and in turn, the band as a whole.

Target Audience:

As our target audience are teenagers, we used conventions that would directly relate to them, such as the mise en scene. This incorporated the use of costumes of all the characters and the lighting of the different locations. The inspirations for the costumes were taken from the media industry, such as the bands costumes, which show them wearing hoodies and cardigans with shirts.

We designed our band image to specifically relate to the target audience.

We were confident that the audience would relate to these characters because we focussed on examples from the industry. The girls and boys costumes were their own clothes, and we decided that we would keep it this way because it would be more authentic.

The locations also would attract the target audience because we filmed in locations that teenagers would be able to relate to, such as their bedrooms and a local music club in Brentwood called The Hermit, where many teenagers choose to go for social evenings.

The use of technology within the video such as texting helps to relate to the target audience. The narrative related directly to the target audience, as the relationship in the video can be related to by teenagers; because many young relationships are very unstable and people break up and get back together because they do not really know what they want from life. This matched the lyrics of “Those dirty girls, girls are gonna have their wicked way with you”, because a lot of boys believe that girls are just out to get them and just use them, which also juxtaposed with the narrative of the video because it was in fact the boy who was hanging around with other girls.

Locations:

From our research, we concluded that location would be a very important part of our video. The location had to represent somewhere that young people could relate to, as well as somewhere that they were likely to hang out in real life. From our knowledge of the area, we decided on locations such as the field in our school as it was easily accessible and meant that we would not be disturbed by members of the public whilst filming. We also chose this location because it was very light and we felt that this portrayed the happy and youthful side of the band. We chose the Hermit as another location because it added a contrast of colour with the band shots, and young people associate with parties and music. The external shots of the bands show that they are friendly as we can see them mucking around with the trolley and things. The variety of locations helped to keep the audience intrigued and also to make sure that they did not get bored whilst watching the video.

Visuals and Sound:

With the genre, we decided that a lot of the time we would had the visuals to match the lyrics. For the majority of the video after each time the song said “Those Dirty Girls”, we had a shot of the main girl doing something to show that the narrative was mainly focussed on her and her relationship with the main boy. Although a lot of bands and celebrities use dance moves in their videos, we decided that we would have the band singing and being friendly as we wanted to portray them as musicians and a light hearted band, not for their performance factors. We used a lot of close ups of the main singer as we felt that the emotion of the song could be seen in his facial expressions, and he had a great ability to connect with the audience.

Throughout various points in the video we made sure that the shots cut in time with the music and the lyrics, so to keep the pace and to enable us to get all of the shots that we wanted in the video. Near the beginning of the video with the lyrics of “In the trendy bar at the worlds end”, the shots fade in and out with the beat that is in the background of the song. Nearer the end of the song there is a section where the words “With you” are repeated four times, and these notes are elongated. We felt to contrast with the rest of the video and to show versatility, that we would have these shots as longer and with slower cuts to show different locations of the video. For example on one of the four times we had the main girl running down the road, and on another one we had a close up of the lead singer to yet again show emotion. The variety of shots and cutting techniques such as fade in and fade out helped to keep the attention span of our target audience who are known for losing interest very quickly.

Evaluation 3 - What have you learned from your audience feedback?

To gather information and opinions regarding our music video, we created a questionnaire consisting of 10 questions, and handed them out to our peers, who were all members of the target audience. We had a viewing of our video and once they had filled out the questionnaire, we created a spreadsheet of all the different responses that we got from the questions so we could compare opinions on things such as the quality of the editing, the song itself and how clear our storyline was. The need for audience feedback was huge, as we needed to make sure that we had correctly got across the point of the video and to make sure that the narrative was clear enough, and if they could relate to the song. We received a variety of answers, both praiseworthy and providing constructive criticism, and all opinions were taken into account as we wanted our audience to be honest with us. The majority of the questionnaires said that the video was good and that the narrative was clear. We were told that the quality was good for the equipment that we had, although we could have had more band shots. The video features some of the opinions that we gathered from our friends and other media students, as well as members of the cast.