In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
In order to appeal to our target audience of young children, the video needed to be funny. We tried to get this across, by using the funny and outrageous dancing, that would hopefully appeal to children. We attempted to use the standard codes and conventions of a novelty song, making it funny, and having an introduction to get into the song. The standard codes of conventions try to encorporate a lot of different camera angles, which we have also tried to do.
There were a number of forms that we needed to adhere to, such as the 180 degree rule, which we tried to keep to, particularly in the introductory montage, of Elliot dancing. In terms of editing, we needed to conform to the standard option of continuity editing, which we attempted to do, however, one issue we had was that one of actors was not available for our reshoot in the introduction, which meant that our video has two different judges in the same seat. We attempted to refilm this with our original actor, however, we were not able to use this footage, as we had a different camera, and the settings were different.
Unused footage
This issue has been resolved though, and we refilmed the footage, and were able to adjust the music video so that the continuity issues were solved.
When looking at real media products, our introduction looked at the hopeless auditions of some of the people on 'Britain's Got Talent', which was being influenced by contempory media products, in an attempt to make the song as light-hearted as possible. This was an example of a pastiche that we used, by referencing other media texts in order to construct our own media text. The nature of this was to highlight the hopelessness of Michael Jamieson, our lead character, something which is standard in shows like Britain's Got Talent.
The mise-en-scene throughout the piece was realistic, as we wanted to try and create some sort of realism in the unrealistic nature of our video. Our mise-en-scene followed standard codes and conventions, as there were realistic backdrops and props. Our video follows the codes and conventions of music videos to some degree, as each shot relates back to the song in some way, whilst both the song and video combine to give a light-hearted feeling.
In terms of the actual song, the video we created matched the song and could be easily linked with the song. This was something that we found was a standard code of novelty songs. From our feedback, we found that we completed our aim of making the video funny, which was necessary in the concept of our video
What have you learned from your audience feedback?
The feedback we recieved was generally quite positive. Many commented on the humorous nature of the video, including the songs original artist, Eric Herman, who said that our video was 'very funny'. People also liked the fact, whilst the storyline was a little far fetched, it did link well with the video, which was something that we attempted to create from the start of our project. In general the video was well recieved, and was described a very entertaining, and engaging, suggesting that it would interest people in the song. The main positive feedback we recieved liked the humourous nature of the video, and thought that the piece was well edited, as all the shots were in sync, and the majority of shots made sense, for example when the song said 'Do the Kangaroo', the animals were jumping like Kangaroos.
The major criticism regarding our video was the continuity error at the start, which was clearly glaringly obvious from the amount of people that picked up on it, and given more time, we would have liked to reshoot and edit the footage, so that the same three judges were used at all times, however, despite attempting to reshoot the footage, and some errors being made in the reshoot, it was not possible for us to change this at the start. We also recieved some minor criticism for having to many mid-shots, however, we did feel at the time that this was integral to get the point of the video across, and despite this we felt that we did still use a wide enough variation of shots and angles.
How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
In the research stages, we mainly used the internet to look for other examples of music videos, on websites such as Muzu and Youtube, as these websites had a wide variety of music videos that we could look into, and try to find the codes and convetions of music videos.
During the planning stages, we used the Flip Video technology, as a means of recording the places we intended to use for the different locations of our music video. Other than that, we simply used applications such as Microsoft Word to map out and plan the different ways we would shoot the music video.
In the construction stage, we focused on using standard media technologies to capture the footage we required for our music video. We used a video camera to shoot the footage, and a tripod in order to make sure that the camera was steady. When it came to editing the footage we used an Apple Mac, with the IMovie application, this was useful as it was easy to find the footage and slot it in where we needed the clip, in relation to the song.
When evaluating our music video we used the same media technologies that we used in the other stages of production. When evaluating, we often used the Flip Video Camera, to create little pieces of footage that enhanced the evaluation stage. We also used a dictaphone to record our audience feedback, which allowed us to make use and record everything that was said about our music video.
We also attempted to apply Roland Barthes' theory on the death of the author, in that the author of the text, the music video, is not important in the overall outcome of the text, and the relevance of the text lies with the audience. This was applied in our introduction, when the janitor walked across the bac of the shot, without us realising, this started as a mistake, but we decided to keep it in the final edit, in a similar way to the scene in Resevoir Dogs when the balloon floats across the shot. In this instance the janitor can be there for a number of different reasons, but those options are available to interpretation by the audience.
Overall we used a number of different media technologies in the various stages of the music video production, all of which combined to give a good sense of each stage of production.
Here is a short film describing the editing process.
