Music Video Analysis

Jessie J - Price Tag.
ANALYSING SHOT TYPES



JessieJ-musicanalysis

Paloma Faith - New York.
ANALYSING EDITING

Pa Lo Ma Faith

How effective is the combination of your main product and the ancillary tasks?

A common convention in Katy Perry's work is most of her music videos consist of her looking very natural and her album covers are the complete opposite. For example the two pictures above: The first picture is a still from Teenage Dream, and next to it is her album cover. This is a convention that we didn't want to follow. We wanted to stick to most Indie Pop artists and keep one theme throughout. We kept our video very natural, as for our ancillary we kept the artist looking very natural however we were quite artistic with the background and the font.

I created our font to be very similar to Katy Perry's as it is her signature font which she uses on all of her albums. We didn't have it identical as we wanted to have some originality to our work. I think this font compliments our project very well as our music video was a lot of fun especially throughout the narrative shots. I wanted the font to contribute to the kind of artist we wanted to create. The font is colourful, bold and quirky which is exactly how we wanted our artist to be.

                   

This example of one of Katy Perry's album covers has appeared frequently in my blog as this is where we took a lot of inspiration for our ancillary task. We used a similar colour scheme to her cover as we liked the 'candy' look it had and how eye catching it was. A lot of her album covers and music videos involve the background being clouds which is why we chose the background we've used. To keep the continuity between our video and ancillary task, we took all of our photos in the studio as most of out video was filmed there. We wanted the pictures to be crisp and clean so we used SLR Digital Cameras. 

Throughout the ancillary task I am wearing the same costume to keep the same look running through it as we want it to look like a compete package. One mistake we did make was the costume being worn for the ancillary isn't featured in the video which if we could go back and re-film we would make sure was in it. I kept my hair and make up the same for both pieces as we wanted the artist to be recognisable and to keep a theme running through the whole project. We wanted the ancillary to be full of bright colours as the music video we created is very happy and I am always smiling so we wanted to reflect that in our other practical work. 

We have followed the conventions of our research very well with few allowances. I wanted to ensure that all the inserts of our digi-pack fitted in nicely together and I think I have achieved that. I have cartoonized the album cover slightly, and to keep this I tried to make the digi-pack look also 'cartoony'. I have achieved this mostly through the font and the choice on colours - candy pink and white. We feel that our ancillary task backs up our music video 100%. We have created a clear artist which the target audience will be able to relate to.

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

Technology has played a very vital part in every part of our project.

Probably the biggest part of technology towards our project was the internet. Without the internet we wouldn't have been able to create a project anywhere near the standard that we have. The internet was very beneficial during our research stages as it allowed us to analyse existing music videos via YouTube which is where we gained most of our ideas and how we learnt about codes and conventions for our chosen genre. It also allowed us to view existing  products in relation to our ancillary task which also helped us in creating a suitable product that followed the correct conventions. The internet also gave us access to social networking sites such as Facebook which we used to advertise our products and also use as a tool for feedback.


Without the internet we wouldn't have been able to create our blogs using Blogger! It is a fantastic and easy way for us to display all of our work and the processes we've been through and how our project has developed over time. The easy accessibility to our blogs made it easy for me to look back over my work and know what I needed to do next and where I left off.

Power Point Presentation came in very handy when doing our research and evaluation as it was very easy for posts to become too 'wordy' power point allowed us to make our work look more effective and made us use different ways of displaying our posts. A website that follows on from Power Point is Scribd. Scribd allowed us to upload all of our power point presentations and upload them onto our blog making it easier to view as it uploads as an actual presentation.

One of the main ingredients in our project was the video camera we used to film all of our footage. My partner did most of the filming so unfortunately I wasn't able to use the camera to its full ability as I only controlled it when filming the focus group as I was the one performing in the music video. Before this project I had never used the video cameras as for my AS project I chose to do the print option meaning that I have had little experience using them. Fortunately my partner was very able in doing so and was very helpful to me throughout the experience. The editing software we used to put our music video together was fundamental. My partner was very used to this program whereas I wasn't so some of our time was spent in teaching me how to edit. The program allowed us to crop and chop our footage exactly where we wanted it and also add in special affects such as spotlights to brighten up the shots and things like blending to shots together to create montage affects.

We used digital SLR's to capture all of our ancillary task photos. I had taken a GCSE and AS Level in photography so I was very familiar with this equipment whereas my partner wasn't. I had to teach her how to use the cameras to their maximum potential before she could begin shooting for the ancillary. The SLR's were very affective as they ensured that we had clear crisp photos which were easy to Photoshop and edit. 

 

To edit all of our ancillary task photos we used Photoshop. I am very capable on Photoshop therefore it made this task easy and enjoyable. I was really focused on making sure that our ancillary task followed the conventions of Indie Pop albums, especially Katy Perry's. Photoshop allowed me to create amazing affects with the fonts, change the style of the main photo to a cartoon affect, add in creative background and change the colour of it to suit our scheme, and to work with several different layers to create something that looks really professional. 

Most of the technology we used during the project was digital which was a help to us, it made it quicker and easier. When taking the photos for the ancillary tasks we would know straight away if what we had was any good because we could view it instantly on the view finder. The same goes for the music video. When filming we could just play back our footage to see what we think and re-film anything we weren't sure about. The beauty of digital technology was that it stored everything we did therefore by the click of a button we could revisit anything we had previously discarded. 

Without Web 2.0 and all of the digital equipment, we would not have been able to create something as great as we have, and it also would have taken a lot, lot longer.

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Before and after producing and completing our music video we arranged a number of tasks in order to gain information and feedback from our target audience. We used websites such as YouTube and Facebook to gain information from our audience which we would use to help us with our project. 

During the production stages of our project, feedback was critical. We needed to make sure we weren't wasting valuable time in getting conventions wrong because we weren't taking note of our feedback well enough. Throughout all the editing of our video we were constantly asking for people to view what we had so far to give us constructive criticism and what we had done well. This linked in with some of the theory work we had been doing in class towards our exam. By having direct contact with our audience it gave us the best possible chance to satisfy the needs of the consumer. 

A comment that came up frequently when asking for feedback was that our music video lacked consistency. We have such a variation of shots, however the shots had no different angles and therefore making the video look very jumpy. We took this on bored and decided to re-film shots to add more variety into the performance shots which we think worked. One of the comments we had prior to doing this was that as good as it was, it didn't really look like a music video. After we altered the video to meet these comments it flowed a lot better. 

A lot of our feedback told us that we had paid very close attention to detail which we were really happy about. Myself and Shannon spent a lot time making sure shots cut from one to the next on exactly the right beat and word. Our synchronisation is perfect and have edited the video very cleverly in that when certain shots we cutting from one to the next, things like hands movements were the same. We were really pleased to know that our hard work had paid off. 

The feedback we received for our ancillary tasks were also very positive. I am a very capable user of Photoshop therefore we as a team we able to use the program to the best of its ability. I feel out ancillary task is the strongest part of our project and someone noted that it looks very professional. 

At the end of all of our practical work we were both extremely happy with what we had produced. We had nothing but positive comments. If we were to re-visit the project there are certainly things we would change however we feel like we have worked very hard and in doing that producing a very strong piece of work.  

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms of real media products? (How does it fit, or not fit the genre?)

For our A2 media course this year, we were asked to create several practical pieces. This consisted of a music video, an album cover along with all the inserts and a magazine advertisement for the album.

Part of our coursework was to create an artist we had created. We were to create a fan base and target audience for this artist also. With this, we also had to decide what genre to place our artist in. We created the character 'Jessie A' an artist within the 'Indie Pop' genre targeting audiences of both boys and girl (however predominantly girls) ages 13 - 25.

Before beginning any kind of production work myself and my partner Shannon spent a lot of time researching into the genre and the artist behind our inspiration - 'Katy Perry'. We conducted a survey for the public to gain a general insight to what 'Indie Pop' fans looked for in music videos, we researched in to real music videos to assess conventional shot types, shot angles, mise en scene, narrative etc. Alongside this, we also researched into the artists of the music videos magazine adverts and albums so we could fathom what sort of thing we would need to create. We wanted to asses how creative their artwork is, colours, background etc. We were very keen to follow the typical conventions we'd found out quite closely, however not so close that we couldn't branch out on our own creativity. We chose to re-create the music video to the song 'Teenage Dream' by 'Katy Perry'. We chose this for several reason.

• She is a strong example of the genre 'Indie Pop' 
• We are both very familiar with her work therefore it wouldn't be a struggle to portray it
• We both liked the song and found the lyrics easy to come up with ideas for narrative

In the official Teenage Dream music video the narrative is very simply and not very complex in relation to the lyrics. It follows the lyrics like a story. The narratives shows the relationship between two teenage lovers and is predominantly about how the young man makes her feel. The narrative is shown through a stream of different performance shots and establishing shots. 

This is an example of one of the stills from the official music video. Throughout Katy Perry's music video there are a lot of performance shots where she is surrounded by other people (which adds to the narrative) and is also set on a beach. My partner and I loved the whole idea of a teenage dream however we knew that we wouldn't be able to create something as elaborate as filming on a beach with lots of other actors. We knew that because of our age we could easily relate to two teenagers being in love therefore we decided to simplify the narrative. We chose to base our video around two teenagers who have fallen for each other and just show them in different scenarios. We realised that this wasn't as creative that the original however we did feel that it captured the intention, mixed well with the lyrics and also followed along with the results from our survey. 

This is an example of a still from the original video. Through our research we also were able to pick up on conventional shot types. one of the most frequent shot types in Katy Perry's music video is a close up and mid shot. We wanted to follow these tendencies as we didn't want our video to look odd and out of place. We worked very hard on our performance shots (which we filmed in the studio) to ensure that we had a lot to work with and also worked with several different outfits. I wanted to ensure that I was really strong when performing to make our video more affective. When syncing our music video together and choosing which shots to use we wanted our editing to be very clever. E.g. continuity being sharp.One way to improve our video would have been to add different angles to each performance shot. We had several different clips with different outfits however we didn't play about with different angles with the same outfit which would have contributed to the continuity within our video. 

Our music video, as well as Katy Perry's consisted of both performance shots and narrative shots. Through all the research on our blog you can see how we analysed the different shot types and narrative setting related to our genre. I feel that we captured the common conventions very well. My knowledge of camera shots etc was not as strong as my partners as I hadn't needed to use this skill in my AS project. I feel my understanding has severely improved because of the requirements of this project. 

Overall I feel we stuck to the conventions associated with our genre well and didn't stray too far from them. We did not try to challenge any of the conventions as we felt that it wouldn't be appropriate given the genre that it is. 

 

Time Plan

This is a time plan my partner and I created. The purpose of this was so we could have a rough guideline to what we needed to be doing and when, and when things needed to be completed. Time management is important during this project as we have a limited time to do a lot of work.