Similarities between our final music video and storyboard

After evaluating our final music video against our original storyboard, we found our music video had a real similarity with our storyboard which means our original plan was sufficient and successful. However, we did have to remove a few scenes such as the cinema scene due to the cinema's rules on copyright issues... As they would not allow us to film inside the cinema. We also had problems with our boat scene, as we didn't expect the scene to come out as we had hoped for, which caused us to find an alternative dinner scene which resulted in a visit to Bella Italia, which we found to be a suitable replacement.

Our Director's Commentary

SCRIPT IDEAS

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

• Discuss what we researched and how this helped us to develop our video - we looked at lots of Neyo's videos and other RnB music videos such as Jason Derulo, Beyonce etc, famous artists, with famous videos with similar narratives.
• What are the codes and conventions of real music products and how did we include them in our product? - we used a romantic narrative, slow pace, singing to the camera, lots of two shots of the couple together in romantic scenes or locations.
• Did we stick to/use any of Good-wins Theory points? Yes we used links between music and visuals and lyrics and visuals, demand of the record label and voyeurism.
• Discuss ways in which we used genre conventions to make our product look more professional, and make the genre obvious - using things like dance moves, close ups of singing towards the camera, and effects and filters are all conventions of RNB genre.

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

• Did all three products work well as an overall package? The ancillary texts linked well due to the idea of the hat, although the music video doesn't link as clearly.
• What concept were we trying to show?  - we was trying to emphasize the fact that the artist was in a day dream of imagining a relationship with someone he saw walking by.
• Do they attract the target audience? our video is targeted to all ages as its a certified PG due to the classification and guidelines of the bbfc, and there fore all our content is acceptable for all ages and our video uses a romantic feel, and narrative therefore attracting any age and any gender.

what have you learnt from your feedback?

• feedback on initial pitch- Our initial pitch didn't seem to attract a lot of positive feedback at first, because the idea we had in mind for the video lacked creativity and originality, so we felt we needed to make a change based on our feedback. We created a whole new pitch which had a real sense of originality to it to respond to the feedback.
• Feedback on rough cut - Our rough cut lacked enough clips and there was not enough pace between the cuts to give it a music video feel, we learnt from this and went out and recorded even more clips to add in for our final cut and also added clips on top of longer clips to allow more cuts.
• Feedback on final cut - After finishing our final product a lot of the feedback which noted the flaws of our product was about how they didn't really understand the quick reverse clips in the middle of the video. If we could improve these clips now, we would add either a clip of a clock running in fast reverse or a text box with the date/time running quick reverse.

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

• What ways did we use these products - We used photoshop to construct our digipak/magazine ad and used Final Cut to edit our music video to a high quality. We used blogger to write up our evidence and keep up-to-date with progress. 
• How did they help you create a successful product -
• What ways did/didn't the technologies help you be creative - 

Ideas for filming the script

We have decided instead of writing out a massive script with blocks of writing, we have written out the four questions we had to answer for our evaluation so that for each of the questions, we can make little notes underneath saying what we need to talk about and that way everyone can get involved and have an opinion so the audience can hear different views we may have. Also it looks  bit more professional expanding on short notes you have made rather than the whole group passing round bits of paper to read from because not only can the audience not see your face and emotion which is key, they also may find it hard to hear you properly if you are hiding behind a camera.  

Evaluation - Ollie

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.

Magazine cover

Digipak Idea

For the back of our DVD case, we will attempt a montage collection of photos in the style of polaroid camera photos. This makes it look like the DVD has had photos attached to it and gives it a stylish feel.

In order to pull off this style we will use the AutoShape tools of Photoshop, we will make white rectangles in the shape of a polaroid photo. We will then put photos on the layers above the white rectangles to give it the look of photo prints on the DVD cover, this will give off a really nice effect we feel as it seems professionalized.

Polaroid print template

Digipak

On the front cover of our Digipak we have a large photo of the artist (Christian) with a 'poster edge' effect on it, and on the front cover we will include things like the name of the artist and the song, as well as the album name we will also include things like the classification. We have also included a basic font that has become very effective for the overall front cover and makes it easy for the audience to read and understand.

On the back of our digipak we will include a number of small images that will be positions around the page to form some sort of appealing pattern. This will bring more attention to the digipak. A number of quotes and song lyrics will also be added in our digipak, these will be positioned beside the different images located around the Digipak.  We have also added some reviews and star ratings, so that the viewers are more likely to be interested in buying as it would have good reliable reviews from reliable sources. From looking at other professional Digipaks, we found that the back generally includes barcodes, classification ages, and also a little about the producers etc, but in very small print at the bottom of the back cover.

22nd November 2011 - Progress

During this lesson we continued to work on our magazine ad, adding the "OUT NOW" banner and other typical features of a magazine ad, such as a review quote along with it's source to encourage the magazine readers to give the artist a listen. We also added the release date for the album and the name of the album below the information for the new single.

To give the artist more recognition we have put a picture of him on the front cover. However, we are looking to change this picture for the next lesson to suit the typical portrait of Ne-Yo (wearing a trilby hat for example).

Next lesson we plan to finish our magazine ad by adding a few small details and having a new picture added.

Digipak ideas

When thinking about our digipak, we thought about the front, the back, and the 3 sections of the inside.
We thought about having the front a long shot of the artist wearing the hat, looking to one side. we then decided to use the inside sections as pictures of the artist putting on the hat in different ways, and the back using either a black background with the shot of a hat, or a similar photo to the one below, however we may use this idea as one of the inside shots.

IDEAS FOR OUR MAGAZINE ADVERT

This is our idea of how we want our magazine ad to come out.

Final Edit Of Our Music Video

This is the final edit of our music video that we have been working on. We have made a lot of changes to our video. Examples would be that we have made most of our video into black and white so it looks more of a dream, it is a lot loner than it was before and also the shots we have used are a lot better quality.

Feedback from rough cut

After Andrea and Amar looked at our rough cut video, they gave us some feedback.

• They told us that we should change our black and white parts of our video to colour and change the colour parts to black and white so that maybe that would make it look more dream like. 

• We also need to add in some more shots of the artist (Christian) so it also adds as part of Goodwins theory, and also some close ups of the other characters (Saffy) so that it almost introduces them, and shows off expressions more clearly, and emotions between them. 

• We need to add some short clips of the artist singing so it will make it look more like a music video, and more professional. 

• We also need to cut up the existing shots that we have and make them shorter, and also muddle them up a bit so it shows a variety of locations and it doesn't look boring when the shots carry on for too long.

• We need to change the split screen to two separate shots, and then use the split screen at the end, so there's a shot of him texting, then a shot of her texting, then the split screen showing them both texting, 

FEEDBACK FROM ROUGH CUT

Goodwin's theory-
Lyrics and visuals- you and me together- two people together
Music and visuals- nothing really, apart from the speed of the song is quite slow and goes with the visuals.
Voyuerism- shots of the people walking
Genre characteristics- love scenes, girl and boy, dancing, romance.
Intertestuality- nothing


Editing-
Not enough cuts, shots are too long, good use of split screen, the black and white is effective.


Mis en scene- very good locations with romantic feel, lighting in resturant is very good with dark reddish light which looks romantic, good use of props, candles and drinks set a good scene, but cant see what is on the phone.


Camerawork- good variety of shots close ups with phone and split screens lots of mid shots of couples, lots of facial shots to show expressions, steady camera, need more different shots and more shots in general as its too short.

ROUGH CUT

Idea's for our music video

This video is an example of how we want to make our video similar by changing from black and white to high contrast colour, however this video has a lot of changes where as we only want black and white at the beginning and end of our video. 

Neyo-Sexy Love Analysis- Goodwins theory

Following Goodwins thoery, during music videos there is meant to be a clear link between lyrics and visuals, and in the case of this video 'sexy love', Neyo makes it clear the lyrics are about a female, there are constant shots of the actor and the female in intimate situations, which is usually when hes singing the lines 'sexy love' or   'just one touch' and other lines such as 'making love to you' there are lots of links between lyrics and visuals and also links between music and visuals, as the beat of the song gets faster the shot transitions get quicker, and because of the genre of the song being RnB there's also areas of dancing in the video which are also a link with the music and pace/tone of the music. As well as these another point of Goodwin's theory is the voyeurism of a woman's body, and in the video the woman is wearing revealing clothing and with the use of mirrors and other elements it makes it apparent that voyeurism is being used. The demand of the record label comes from the use of close ups of the artist and in the video there are mainly close ups of the artist singing into the camera or singing towards the female, although alot of the shots have the female actress in, its mainly concentrating on him and her body, not as much of her face, in comparison to the amount of close ups of Neyo. When watching the video it was hard to find any obvious intertextual reference. 

Re-filming.

19th October, re-filming.

After uploading our footage on the 18th, we realised we had to re-shoot a lot of our film, so we decided to go back to our locations and re-shoot, unfortunately what we hoped would work in our boat scene was unsuccesful, so we re-visited 'Bella italia' and asked for permission to film in their premises, thankfully they agreed and me managed to film what was needed, although we still have some more to do. We found that it was alot easier to film as there was not as many people in the restaurant, and also the staff gave us a candle and drinks so we could get the 'romantic meal' look we wanted, which we had problems with in the boat on our previous filming day.

We also managed to get a lot more shots of our first location at the 'bar' and we decided to shoot each shot about 3 or 4 times so we had more variety and could make it look as good as possible. We did this because if we were to only take the shots once, they may not come out as we wanted so we did it a number of times to make sure we were happy with how it looked and that it wold fit in well with the final video. 

17th October Filming.

On our first day of filming, we met at Cineworld to start our first few locations, some members of the group were late which lead to incontinence when wanting to film in 'Bella italia' as it started getting busy, however we tried to film quickly, but efficiently, we got the shots we needed and moved onto our next location, but in the rush of it all we forgot a few shots. 

Shots of the boat

When moving onto our next location, we had to go to a nearby park where we had a 'romantic walk' shot, which worked fine as the weather was good and it was quiet. Our next location was a boat in Wicken Fen, which we believed to be a lot bigger then it actually was, therefore we was restricted for space, but we tried to carry on filming. When we went back to college we uploaded our footage and found we was not happy with the outcome, so decided to make another filming day.

Goodwins theory analysis of music video

Because of you - Neyo, analysis.

We think that this video of Neyo is one of the music videos that conforms to most of the conventions of Goodwins theory. Mainly because its location is set in a nightclub/bar, and also uses dance routines, miming towards the camera, and also showing a relationship with neyo and 2 different women. 

Voyeurism plays a big part in this video as its used through mirrors, behind doors, and overlooking intimate situations especially when looking at the female body, for example in the swimming pool. There is an obvious objectification of women. There are a few links between visuals and lyrics,  there is a moment where he is talking about his obsession and in that moment there are lots of fast paced cuts of him and the women in bed, and its obviously trying to show, thats his obsession.