Our media product uses real media product’s forms and conventions in the similar way of how most music videos for a song about love or dreaming love look at a scenario of having many locations where the couple/dream couple are spending time together happy. These music videos inspired us to base our media product on a similar scenario because the song and dream-love image of it fit together almost perfectly, the idea of this lonely man seeing the girl of his dreams and the lyrical relation of “I can see my future in you” is perfect for the scenario because this lonely man loves the girl so much he wants to spend the rest of his days with her. We developed our media product on real media products by adding a new style to the dream-love scenario. We achieved this by adding a scene where the lonely man has to watch in pas the woman actually has a boyfriend who takes her away from the location right in front of his eyes, this then leads on to all the dreams the lonely man having running in quick reverse (another feature which we felt developed on real media products) to give a sense that all those dreams will never happen to the lonely man and he must now forget everything he had hoped for. We found this to be really interesting because this style has rarely been used in this genre of music videos, so it comes across as original which always brings more interest to the product. Finally our media product challenged real media products as it was heavily based on a couple of existing music videos which had more to do with remembering the memories between the couple with black-and-white scenes, which we really liked but we decided we’d perform the opposite action by having the man looking into his hopeful future as he wasn’t actually with the girl in our video. This challenged by adding a new sort of style to the romantic music video genre.
To make our main product effective as well as ancillary texts, we thought it would be best to keep consistency in all three products. We did this by making sure we matched our products in a similar way to those of our actual artist’s media products. To accomplish this, our music video was based on love and couples just like the artist (Ne-Yo)’s videos are commonly. For our other products we tried to match them to similar styles Ne-Yo used for his products. Our magazine ad had a still image in black-and-white with our artist looking away into the distance wearing a hat (Ne-Yo commonly comes across as a hat wearer, which influenced us to do the same), this makes an image of interest because the viewer feels a sense of calmness but also wonder as to what the artist truly is staring at in the distance. Our digipak was of a similar style to the magazine ad as we again had our artist wearing a hat in a big open-spaced area; however this time the artist is looking down. The concept all three products were trying to create is that although our artist is a love-struck man he also comes across as a calm and heavy thinker to the viewers. The image this creates of the artist is they are a hard-worker on their music, with the idea of a heavy thinker given to the audience, but with also an element that our artist is very romantic and likes to get his point out which is emphasised in our music video. We feel these products are successful at attracting the audience because they show to sides of our artist in an emphasised way which shows that the artist wants to deliver obvious notes of his music genre and personality to this audience which helps them realise what kind of artist he really is. The imagery of all three products gives off a predictable element of the artist for the target audience to easily understand.
At first our initial pitch for our video idea received little positive feedback so we decided we would change our pitch to our backup pitch we created in case of the initial pitch being poorly rated. From this we had learnt that our initial pitch was perhaps not so well planned and was far too overused as a video idea, which made it lack intrigue and therefore this perhaps put our audience off. We decided that our back-up pitch had been rarely used as a real media product idea so the originality of our back-up pitch would do a lot more to intrigue our audience than we thought our initial pitch would originally. After creating our rough cut we discovered that perhaps the idea of having the dreams in a hazier, bright picture would give off the wrong effect as these were just dreams, not colourful memories. Our teacher highlighted this and we concluded that perhaps making the dreams black-and-white would make more sense, as these were more what the man was wishing for rather than knowing he experienced them in reality. After making this change we found the black-and-white dreams gave off a much better understanding than the colourful images did. Also, we had peers check our rough cut who noticed we didn’t really have a variety of shots and some shots just lasted too long. In response to this, we went out and recorded more clips to add into our video and also added more clips in between clips we wanted to last long (e.g. walking down countryside and then sitting down clip). After completing our final cut, we received more feedback from peers who noted that the rewind of the dreams section of our video didn’t initially make sense without reading up about the part of the video on our blog, perhaps next time to emphasise that the man is trying to forget about his dreams we could implement a transition and perhaps a time in the corner of our shots going in reverse to make it more clear that the man is trying to forget the dreams he had hoped to become reality.
In order to make our media product stand out more and result how we wanted it to we used new media technologies to develop our product to the best of its ability. One of the main technologies we used is the video editing software called Final Cut Express, this software easily saw the most time spent on it and helped us create the final music video from our raw clips. We prepared ourselves well with this product as most of us already had quite some experience from it and made sure for our rough cut that we got the majority of the shots which we knew we would edit in Final Cut to make them more impressive (e.g. black-and-white slow down clips, colour changer effect applied to certain clips). This technology was indispensible to us and really made our final clip show our real creative talents with video editing as there are so many filters and transitions to work with on the clips. Final Cut Express allowed us to make the most of the raw clips we had. Another technology we used was Photoshop, which was our second most used software on the computer and was the major playing point in making our digipak and magazine ad look really professional. The creative threshold you have with images on Photoshop is almost endless because of the tools available and also the high amount of effects you can apply, whether complex or simple. You can make a photo look like a poster with just 3 or 4 clicks of the mouse and your image already looks that bit more professional. Photoshop enabled us to develop such high creativity levels and we found it a comfortable and easy software package to use, without it we would have failed to reach the creative levels we intended to with our digipak which really stood out. External devices we had to use were the HD cameras and also the still cameras. We used the HD camera to of course record all footage for our music video, and we found them incredibly easy to use. Recording was one simple click and if you wanted to zoom in for a clip you just had to adjust the slider on top of the camera. One flaw with our creativity was the disk space of the camera tended to be very small and if we ran out of space, we’d have to go through the painful experience of tapping each clip we wanted to delete on the touch screen which was a lengthy process and wasted us a lot of time, this was unfortunate because apart from the lack of space and deleting process everything else for the HD camera was perfectly fine. The last external device we used was the still cameras in order to capture the photos for our digipak and music video. This device was incredibly easily to use, with quick speeds and high reactive capture shots which turned out to be high quality images looked very professional. With the zooming feature and burst capture modes, our creative possibilities were endless with the device because it just ticked all the boxes for us. We took all the photos we wanted and they always turned out in high quality and if we had a good idea to inherit the burst photo effect, we could have easily used it, as the photos were never blurred by an object moving which made the camera even better.
In conclusion, we felt our media product was well-made and well-thought out, and had sufficient effort put into it to make it successful. If we had more time on our product, we would probably have added a few more effects to our magazine ad to make it look more professional and also finish off the final part of our music video.
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