1.
In what ways does your media product use,
develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
We were tasked with making a promotional video and two
ancillary tasks comprising of a digipak and a magazine advert. To do this we
were asked to choose an unsigned band, one so we were not able to just copy a
video that they may have made already for the chosen song and two to not get
any complications with copyright etc. All three elements of the task are
promotional and are designed to promote the band/artist. The promotional video
would be something that is extremely creative and attached to a specific song,
in our case this would be specific to the song “As long as you know” by the unsigned
artist named SCAR. The video will also be very dependent on the genre of the
artist/band, having very specific content (mainly mise en scene) that relates
to the artist, and will overall affect all three final products. The digipak,
although it may be a less favoured method of purchase in the current “digital
age”, will again be a promotional piece that is aimed to entice people to make
a purchase of the album. The digipak features additional information and
“goodies” over the regular CD case, things such as artwork, bios of band
members and maybe even some specific memorabilia. One of the promotional
methods that will be present throughout all aspects of the task will be a
reoccurring theme or themes that relate each piece and will again encourage
people to have an interest in the band. Lastly the Magazine advert, again
featuring reoccurring themes from the other tasks, will be a fully promotional
piece as it is literally promoting the release of the album which again is
mainly influenced by both genre and representation of the band, something that
someone could easily recognize and even relate to would be considered a
successful promotion (along with the millions of purchases on day one of the
release).
The video itself has a repertoire
of elements that are needed to make up a promo video. These will be things such
as camera work and a mix of narrative and performance. Firstly is the
narrative, a music video doesn’t necessarily have to have narrative within it,
it could be a video that is purely performance however this is unusual of a music
video promo. This mix of narrative and performance can be of a few different
types these are amplification, illustration, disjuncture and finally
intertextuality. Amplification will be taking one idea, usually part of the
lyrics and then amplify this throughout the music video and have it as a
reoccurring idea for the whole of the music video. Illustration is what it says
on the tin, it takes the lyrics of the song and literally illustrates what the
song is about and will follow the lyrics within the narrative, this does mean
that a video can also be purely narrative however again this would be
unconventional of a promo. Disjuncture is almost the opposite of illustration
where by the video has no representation to the lyrics and did an assortment of
random shots. Intertextuality refers to the idea of taking what another video
has done and then remaking it in either a pastiche, parody or homage.
The main factor that takes both
the focus and style of all three tasks is the genre. The genre is the first
step in choosing what the digipak, poster and the promotional video are going
to look like and how they are all representative of the band. In our case we
had chosen the band SCAR, under the category of rock on the unsigned.com
website, and when listening to their music we easily picked up on the genre
being rock and instantly related them to other bands in our initial thoughts.
Bands such as Sum 41, Blink 182 and Bowling for soup where the three main bands
that we said had similarities to this type of music and we then set out on
finding inspiration from these bands, all three of these bands were a prominent
part of our research and planning and are all featured on my blog. When looking
at other similar bands or artists for inspiration we looked at the conventions
to start with, firstly we listed what we felt the conventions of a rock band
are and then we looked at the videos to add to this list and develop further on
the ones we had. The rock genre has many conventions, usually darker colours
for the more serious video which is usually associated with the heavier rock,
tattoos, punk/thug looking members and a lot of performance in comparison with
narrative is the usual rock video. However we decided our chosen song “As long
as you know” followed suit with the more light hearted, micky taking videos
that many of the bands we looked at, such as Bowling for soup, have done.
General music video conventions
are things like pace of the clips shown will be equal to the pace of the song.
There will usually be a good blend of both narrative and performance and the
typical music video will be illustrative or amplification. There will usually
be a mix of many shot types but then again this will be more dependent on the
genre e.g. a more personal slow song will feature more close ups to show
emotion etc. All conventions will be very dependent on the genre furthermore
many of the music videos specific to a genre will have a specific set of
stereotypes associated with them and these will often be seen. Bands that have
broken these conventions will be bands such as Arctic monkeys with their florescent
adolescent video which features pure disjuncture right from the outset and
doesn’t follow the music. Our chosen inspiration bands also break conventions
to an extent, in terms of genre conventions the vast majority of videos made by
the bands Sum 41, Blink 182 and Bowling for soup are videos that go against the
usual conventions of a rock video however they have sort of created their own
conventions for a subdivision of the rock genre music videos, which would be a
comedy/parody music video.
When using another band for a
comparison and ideas for conventional shots we found it best to take a still
shot and base ours around these.
The band Blink 182 with their song and promotional video
“first date” had a huge influence on our overall products. We chose to look at
this band as they were in the same genre and have been extremely popular so
when looking at the responses they receive it was more likely we would be able
to find more information. The band is well known for their videos as they are
usually comical parodies of other bands music videos or popular film/TV. We
felt that this would be both easily doable and successful; however we decided
to use the concept of stereotypes to make it a funny video instead of doing a
parody. As seen above we used plenty of their ideas and conventions within our
video from the comparative pictures above. This band was our first inspiration
after we did a “first thoughts” write up when we chose our song and artist, we
thought of similar bands that we felt sounded similar to our chosen song bands
such as Sum 41, Blink 182 and Bowling for soup all came up and therefore we
based our research on these.
Bowling for soup also follows the comical parody route when making
their videos. Videos that we were influenced by were things like 1985 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K38xNqZvBJI and Bowling For Soup - Girl All The Bad
Guys Want all videos
intended to make the target audience laugh and creating strong links that allow
the audience to relate to the band. We also realised that there were some
reoccurring themes throughout all three bands that we focused on and that was
the theme of relationships, we then also realised when looking at the lyrics (Scar - "As long as you know" lyrics) of our chosen song that it was
also about a relationship, further confirming that we would be able to produce
a similar video that would follow the conventions of this sub-genre of video.
Further looking into successful videos for inspiration and ideas
to put into our promotional video, we looked at more videos that where
generally popular and not always specific to our genre for a more broad
understanding of the general successful conventions seen in them (conventions
of music videos). A huge variety of general conventions cropped up
that are all part of making a successful promotional video, things to do with
camera work such as low angles and close ups are all conventional shots within
music videos, features of the editing such as fast pace cuts and finally mise
en scene and character conventions like
popular yet representative clothing and locations that are very much related to
the lyrics and genre.
In terms of location we
were looking at local settings that we thought would be conventional of both a
general music video and a music video of the rock genre. When looking at other
videos we had seen that outside urban areas are often the setting for a rock
video. As seen in the video “florescent adolescent” by Arctic Monkeys there is
the urban environment but with some natural mise en scene in there as well, in
the picture you can see the concrete floor, metal fence and buildings that show
an urban setting however you can also see grass, leaves on the floor and trees
that add a natural feel to it. In the
picture of the outdoor stage at Tolethorpe hall that we used you can see the similarities,
we had the grey concrete and manmade structures giving the urban feel albeit
hard to see in this picture we also had the trees, natural light and leaves on
the floor giving the contrasting natural feel.
Darker lighting and colours for the more serious video.
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Many of the videos I have talked about previously feature the urban setting and it seems to be a convention of the rock genre to be set in these areas. The mixture of narrative seems to not have an effect on the setting as both are usually still set in an urban setting/ within a building. Usually these places would be slightly darker as darker colours are associated with the rock genre, however we were looking at bands that produce funny rock videos and therefore they use the lighter colours yet still in the urban setting. This is illustrated in the stills and we used this idea within our music video, using natural daylight when filming outside and artificial light when inside to make it brighter.
Costumes as mentioned before were based on stereotypes that
we thought could be the main focus for our video that was aimed to be a funny
video based and influenced around those of blink 182, bowling for soup and sum
41. These bands had videos that still followed many of the conventions of the
genre that they are categorized as however they use humour and normally the
idea of parody videos to appeal to their audience. Many of these videos are
also based on the lyrics of the specific song made by the band, songs such as
“1985”, “girl all the bad guys want” and “first date” are all songs that try to
tell a story about a relationship and that’s what we aimed to do within our
music video. The music videos for these songs are all “Mickey takes” of
situations that happen in real life however over exaggerated, in our music
video we decided to take this idea but instead of taking either another music
video or a situation we took the ideas of stereotypes and made funny remarks
based on these stereotypes but within the context of a relationship.
Following the rock genres conventions we decided it was
crucial for this music video to be a band based music video with both a mixture
of narrative and performance that revolves around the band members. This can be
seen pretty much all rock music videos and is probably the key conventions of
these videos. In all the videos we looked at this was a prominent feature,
again referring to the same videos “1985”, “first date” and “girl all the bad
guys want” as these were our main inspirations and influences, all contain band
shots for performance with both focus on the whole band in long shots and
extreme long shots, and focus on singular band members in two shots, mid shots
and close ups with low angles and high angles thrown in on occasion. The band
members are also the prominent feature in the narrative either by playing
themselves or a character and a variety of camera work and editing help to do
this. A good example of this is the song and music video for “fist date” by Blink
182, it shows the band playing characters in both the band performance shots
and in the narrative helping to link the two and reduce confusion.
We took all of these points on board and were able to get a
band together using our media group members (Groupings
and Cast). This allowed us to have the running convention of a rock video
by having a full band that we could use to get both performance shots with the
band as a unit and singular band members, and use the same band members in the
narrative very much like in “first date” and most other rock music videos out
there. We also had to have the typical props that most, if not all, rock music
videos have in them, these of course including the instruments which are again
an extremely prominent and conventional concept that is featured in all rock
music videos. The drums, bass guitar, lead guitar and lead singer with a mic is
what we decided were the basic four things that were needed to make a rock
music video and a convincing video, all rock bands have these four things and
many have additional instruments. Through our research both by questioning
people and looking at plenty of other rock videos we noticed that we would get
nowhere without these and so we included them, the “band shot” is probably the
heart of a rock music video it will show all band members playing their
instruments and producing the song. It will usually feature quick edits between
band members and give the video the conventions that are linked to the rock
video.
2. How effective is the combination of your main product and
ancillary tasks?
All of the stills seen within the
digipak are actual stills taken on both days of filming the actual promotional
video, the only image seen that isn’t from anything is the inside centre
pattern. To us this meant that the audience would again be able to easily link
each of the three pieces we have made and then when seeing the video and the
two ancillary tasks they would be able to easily distinguish what band it is
and what genre they are in. To help with representation of the genre this track
and band are in we used themes that we had seen in similar bands digipaks and
posters. When looking at these we saw that the black and white contrasting
colours were often used thus we should use this within our tasks in some way,
using this we took it a step further and used other contrasting colour schemes.
With the digipak, as seen above, we used the sepia effect to make it stand out
from other rock digipaks but still following similar ideas and concepts. With
the poster/advert we modified the black and white idea slightly by adding in
some blue, there was no reason necessarily for choosing blue other than we felt
it added to the piece making it more aesthetically pleasing and it gave a
colder/harsher feel that we felt represented the rock genre to a degree. We also picked up on the re-occurring theme
of a full band shot being the front cover, or sometimes the lead band member
being the focus of the front cover. Our front cover design, again still using
the sepia effect, followed these ideas as we used a full band shot as the front
cover. This image was taken on the day of filming and whilst we were wearing
the outfits we had chosen to feature in the video, it is a high angle image
that features the urban/foliage mix we used throughout the video and the full
band standing in the position they were standing when filming the performance,
again creating links between the tasks.
This is the image I
mentioned earlier that we have used for both a tile on our Digipak and the main
image on the poster. The original image (bottom left) was originally taken to
illustrate where we were filming our performance however we could see this
being a good still image that could be used on our ancillary tasks that is both
easily editable and would link all three pieces of our overall task. The
digipak version of this image has been put into sepia, firstly to fit in with
the rest of the digipak and secondly because our research showed us that the
contrasting colours of black and white are often used on promotional pieces for
bands in the rock genre. Our version of this was the sepia effect, we felt we
should use something very similar however we should have something different
from the rest and the sepia effect gave us this. With the poster we did use
black and white and the posturize effect to make it something similar to the
album cover of the sum 41’s underclass hero, it is also similar to posters that
I have placed above by Kasabian and Blink 182 both in colour schemes and
layout. Again we wanted to add a difference of our own to separate it from the
rest, so in ours there is the additional colour of blue and it is posturized
making the stage almost not visible by making the light brighter and highly
posturized.
Exhibiting these pieces would also be a huge part to making
all three of these pieces successful however there are two ways in which this
could be done if this were a true scenario. There is the traditional way where
the hard copies would be sold in the shop, with the digipak having its extra
features being very enticing for collectors and true fans of the band. The
promotional video would only be seen on the original music channels and
programmes such as top of the pops or MTV and be less accessible to as big an
audience as the current methods of exhibiting the three pieces. The poster
again would only be featured in magazines and as a poster on the wall meaning
it also has a focused effect on only those who take a massive interest in music
and that would buy a magazine. In the current day this may be a popular method
as it is seen as the traditional work hard ethic that fans of bands like to see
especially in the rock genre however the current methods could prove to be a
better method as it enables the three tasks to be viewed by a wider audience.
These current day methods I am referring to are things such as social
media/networking sites including Face book, twitter and YouTube. All three of these named sites allow you to
make a channel or profile and upload images and videos; this proves to be very
helpful in promoting a band as it enables anyone anywhere in the world to view
the bands page or channel and therefore have access to the promotional video
and advertisement. This current day also allows people to purchase tracks and
albums via internet pages and download them to music devices, websites such as
iTunes, you simply click and pay then you gain access to the download of the
track/album. This is good in one sense as again it allows the bands material to
be easily accessible to many people around the world however it will undermine
the effect of the digipak as less will be sold in the shops and more will be
sold over the internet.
In terms of representation of the band it could again either
go two ways depending on the method of exhibition. If the band were to be
exhibited via the traditional methods they may be seen as a traditional rock
band that likes to interact with their fans and allow them to purchase physical
items and memorabilia related to them. However I believe that this may have
worked in the past and may still have a fairly successful effect now yet
because of lack of area covered due to reduced accessibility it would only work
for “hardcore fans” and collectors. On the other hand there is the current methods
of exhibition and distribution, this would involve the band making
announcements on social media and interacting with their fans via twitter, Face
book and YouTube allowing them to interact with a wider audience form the
comfort of their homes. The selling of hard copies would be reduced and
therefore making the digipak less effective however the potential for millions
of digital copies of albums to be sold is far too persuading and would probably
lead to this being the chosen method of distribution and exhibition.
3. What have you learnt from your audience feedback?
During the process various audience research methods were
needed to make the final three products. These research methods and the
feedback received were very important because ultimately it would be the
audience that decides whether the three pieces are successful, therefore y
using this research we could tailor the three pieces to what the audience want
and thus make them successful. In the very beginning of three processes simply
looking at the audience feedback that actual bands get and the responses they
get for their official videos, album art and posters, was a very effective
method. Looking at similar bands such as Sum 41 and Bowling for soup and what
most of their target audience expect and like from the bands was a good
starting point as we were able to get an idea of what generally works and what
doesn’t necessarily work for the audience and how successful bands of a similar
genres pieces are.
To do this we looked at comments that bands receive from
fans on social networking sites such as Facebook and twitter and see the responses
they receive to parts of their promotional packages and what would be expected
from their work. Looking at these responses allowed us to have a starting
point, things such as running themes that link all three tasks (video, poster,
digipak) and a funny/comedic video where only two of the many starting points
we were able to gain from this type of research, and that were based on similar
conventions other bands in the same genre received good responses to. With the
ancillary tasks this was a bit harder to do as many of the fans of specific
bands in the same genre as the one we had chosen would only really comment on
things like the video and the actual song, however some comments that suggested
the extra features and panels of the digipak and how the video and digipak are
linked seemed to get a mention a few times and this became more apparent for
“hard-core” fans and collectors of band memorabilia. The poster on the other
hand was also a bit of a dead end, we were able to look at posters made for
bands and that are real promotional posters however finding audience feedback
for these was near impossible. We gathered that we could get our own audience
feedback for the poster, so asking fellow school members questions like “what
makes a poster attractive or eye-catching?” and “what sort of conventions would
you expect to see from a rock bands posters?” proved to be more helpful,
although many people said that posters/magazine advertising is a less frequent
and successful method of promoting band in today’s world especially with the
likes of the internet and smart phones around.
When creating our products we tried to keep a consistent
flow of audience feedback throughout to make sure our promotional pieces would
be on task and would become successful. Towards the beginning presenting our
ideas and plans (Pitch
for idea no.2 and Pitch
for idea no.1) for our music video and ancillary tasks to our media class
was yet another simple yet effective way of getting some good feedback from both
people of our own age group and our most likely target audience and media
teachers that would instantly have points to add and have constructive comments
that would allow us to improve and refine our ideas. Because this audience
feedback was pre-production of any of the three tasks it would give us plenty
of time to drastically change or completely rethink our plans if the target
audience didn’t like or agree with them.
We also created questionnaires to get ideas and an
understanding of what we needed to include as suggested by our target audience.
This was very helpful as it was a frequently used method throughout the
research and creation of the tasks and allowed us to be adding in factors that
we wouldn’t have done without the audiences input. Throughout the production we
would also show them each of the three tasks when they were a work in progress
and allow them to pick points they liked, didn’t like and what they would like
to see added, again extremely helpful when pushing for the completed project
that would be fitting for the target audience.
After all three pieces were finished we rolled out more questionnaires for our target audience to get a response for the final product. This was received very well and we showed them all three pieces to see if it was something that would be successful as one promotional piece. These questionnaires were again asking what they liked about each piece, whether they complimented each other and whether it would persuade them to invest into the band both as a fan and as a consumer. Another method of getting good feedback was to ask our media teachers of their opinion and professional view of the pieces as a media task, we allowed them to watch the video and give feedback. From this we were told that the video worked very well and achieved its purpose, negative feedback being that some of the framing was off and one of the intended shot reverse shots looked a bit odd as it broke the 180 rule. However all in all it was decided that the video was good and well put together and there was no confusion as to what was happening.
Another issue we had that was pointed out
was copyright issues within our original digipak design and continuity issues.
When showing the original digipak/draft digipak to both the target audience and
our teachers it was recognised that the pictures included were not ours and
therefore could cause copyright issues. It was also noticed that we planned to
use ourselves as the band members however on the digipak it showed the actual
band members on the front cover and therefore the pieces didn’t link and caused
some continuity issues.
Another method of getting feedback is to exhibit our three
pieces. We did this in three ways one by posting the video on YouTube allowing
virtually the whole world to see it and post comments if they wished to do so,
this didn’t work that amazingly as few people commented and none of these
comments were that useful. Via this they could also like the video or dislike
the video, we had a mixture of the two which made it quite inconclusive and
very people actually viewed the video because you either had to be following
the person who posted it or have searched for it, and I doubt many people go
onto YouTube looking for A level students media pieces. Another way to do so
and probably a better way to do so was to post all three of the pieces onto
Face book, this was a better method as it really only allowed our friends to
view it and they were more willing to comment, as seen by the image below. This
also allowed anyone who saw what we posted to “like it” and we received 60
likes on the first day it was posted. Another good reason this was an effective
place to exhibit our final media products was because our friends and family
were more willing to “share” it meaning people we didn’t know and were
“friends” with could view it and again give some more feedback. Finally we also
posted them on blogger (obviously as you will probably reading this off of my
blog) this again was a fairly good way of receiving feedback as people could
yet again follow your blog or view your blog and then comment on the blog. This
was mostly helpful when it came to receiving feedback from teachers as they
would view your blog and then post a comment saying what’s good and what could
be added.
4. How did you use media technologies in the construction
and research, planning and evaluation stages?
The first step of the task was to find a band to make a
promotional music video for. One problem that faced us when looking into this
was the idea of copyright issues; obviously we couldn’t just take an artist’s
song that they have made and claim it as ours, make a video for them and two
other promotional pieces and treat it as official as the task asks. To overcome
this issue we used media, in this case the internet, and a website that is used
to get unknown bands recognised and become more successful without their songs
being copyrighted and “un usable” due to copyright issues as these issues are
very prominent when we exhibit the pieces via other media. This website is
called www.unsigned.com and is a fairly
basic yet useful piece of media for both bands that are trying to become
established and for us media students trying to avoid copyright issues and
actually help promote artists songs. This use of media not only allowed us to
avoid these issues but it also allowed us to easily navigate and distinguish
the different genres and sub genres, this is because the website design has all
these different bands in their categorised genres making the task that little
bit easier. This was mainly the key component for our research but the
categorisation of the genres also allowed us to start somewhere with our video
ideas and conventions. Another extremely useful part of this website was the
social media additions to it, seen in the image below, you can browse not only
the artists but also browse fans and there are featured artists giving a good
idea of what music is popular and upcoming. The “browse fans” was a very useful
feature allowing us to research the responses to songs and the artists, get an
idea of how the bands and genres are represented and the fans perception of the
bands.
Another more popular type of media in recent years is the
social networking apps/sites that allow people to view and communicate with
each other. This proved to be very helpful in research, exhibiting and feedback
as it allowed us to see what our target audience are watching and liking within
the music industry and base our plans on these
YouTube was probably
the heart of our research. It allowed us to view any video from any band and we
used this to see what response they received and get ideas for general music
conventions and more specific rock conventions. On this we were able to see
what people liked about the videos we researched by looking at the comments
that have been left and see whether a video was overall successful by looking
at the viewing numbers and numbers of “likes” or “dislikes”. This became a very
useful and by the end of the project a well used tool because of the research
capabilities it allowed us to do. It quickly became apparent when looking at
the videos what conventions lay within a music video and this allowed us to
begin planning and constructing our music video.
Other research facilities included
using the web for searches on bands to get an idea of their reception and
representation, search engines like Google quickly gave us lots of information
on the bands we were influenced by and gave us a good idea as to what their
genre was and how they represent that within what they do and wear. This
information could then be placed into the construction process, for example we
discovered the idea of comical videos and numerous parody videos within the
genre we had chosen and we then felt that this would suit our chosen song from
unsigned.com and applied that to the planning and construction.
Other sites such as Face book and blogger
were the most useful tools for exhibiting our media production. As I have
previously mentioned the capabilities of receiving feedback was excellent due
to the capability to comment and “like” what you’ve seen allowed us to see if
other bands were liked and what was liked about them, and finally allowed us to
see if what we made was successful and if the overall feedback was good.
Editing software was also a vital part of
the construction process. We needed it to make all three final products and
without it we wouldn’t have been able to do any. Firstly was Adobe Photoshop,
this allowed us to edit still images and text for both our digipak and
poster/magazine advert. There were numerous amounts of tools that could be used
and were used to make both products. The image to the left is a list of the
entire alterations made to just the poster on Adobe Photoshop, these include
changing the hue/saturation and using the posterize tool to give our poster the
look that it now has. Magazine
Advert - Ancillary task. We also used this program to edit our photos that
we used for the digipak. The theme of our digipak was the sepia effect that was
provided by Adobe; it also allowed us to cut and crop images and edit the text
to make it what we wanted. Without Adobe we would have been extremely limited
to what we could do with the digipak and we may not have been able to design
our poster and digipak to not only have its own look and style to separate from
the others out there but to also please the target audience.
Secondly was IMovie on the Macs we had
provided to us by our school. This program allowed us to put all of our shots
together and make the final music video product. It is a software that is
designed to string together all of your shots to make a video that makes sense,
it also allowed us to add sound to the clips, remove the original sound the
clips had from recording, shorten/crop clips and shots to the length we wanted
and finally add In any specialist transitions such as our blur effect. Because
of iMovie we were capable of making a video that worked well and both followed
some conventions and broke other conventions. It also allowed us to make a
video that fitted what the target audience wanted from a video of that specific
genre, without this program we would have had an unprofessional looking video
that wouldn’t get the response we wanted and overall fail the task we were set.
Shooting the actual video also required a
certain amount of technology. We used a high quality SLR camera for shooting
the actual footage; some shots may have seemed bad quality in the video though
due to editing and the process of uploading, this was our own camera meaning we
didn’t have to rely on cameras from school allowing us to have a more
accessible camera. This camera also had many different lenses for both close up
images and images at a distance. We also had the charger ready for instances
when we ran out of battery as we were filming for lengthy periods of time, this
included with tripods and extra SD cards allowed us to not have any issues with
the actual filming and also allowed us to get the most out of our two filming
days. Other pieces of equipment included lighting equipment and rig borrowed
from our schools drama department, these along with our gallant efforts of
making a dark room allowed us to get both stills for the digipak (top left and
top right) and footage of each band member alone for a more personal feel and
focus on a specific member. This lighting equipment improved the quality and
professionalism of the video, especially because we had two very powerful
lights including a profile that is used in various productions.
My final point of this evaluation
is the skills that I have learnt and improved throughout the production.
Preparation and planning skills I feel has been the biggest improvement, my
last production in AS media wasn’t as thoroughly planned and wasn’t as
successful because of this. We had far fewer influences and research methods
and far smaller storyboards and shooting scripts, this led to unplanned and
unprofessional shooting which then further affected the rest of the project.
This time round a lot more planning and research has taken place and I feel
this improvement has led to a more successful media production than the last.
Lengthy storyboards and shooting scripts have been made, location planning was
more thorough and we even had a daily planner for our filming days that meant
we were on schedule and on target with the production. We also used our
research and feedback more effectively and re-planned or designed accordingly,
allowing us to reach the target audiences expectations.
Actual shooting skills were also
developed. We had to use a larger variety of shots and angles this time to get
a video that worked and would impress in terms of shooting skills. We could no
longer have minimalist shots that were pretty standard for any production but
have shots that are more impressive and have more thought behind them. Because
of this larger variety and a greater amount of thought behind each and every
shot I believe we made a successful and skillful production.
Editing skills were again
developed. I believe this was probably the least developed skill as once you
can edit you are able to do it again just as effectively, however throughout
this production we definitely planned each and every transition and effect more
efficiently and made sure that each shot had no continuity issues with the shot
previous to it. The largest part of the editing skill that was improved was the
timing of each and individual shot, we played around with this for hours making
sure that the music synced up with the video and each shot was the right length
to show what we wanted but to also fit in sequence and timing.
Research skills and exhibition
skills were another hugely developed skill. I have learnt to use a variety of
sources for researching each part of the task from the video to the ancillary
tasks. It has also come apparent that
many of these sources can be used in more ways than one and a lot of the ideas
from them, such as the influential videos, can be taken and recycled or added
to. Exhibiting the production has also been a more prominent feature of this
task as it allowed us to receive feedback and without YouTube, Face book and
blogger (plus many more) it would have been much harder to design the products
around the target audience and achieve a successful production.
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