James Heath Evaluation

For our music video we chose the song I Feel It All by Feist. We thought this song suited an indie audience so we felt a video with a low budget feel to it would be the right way to go. We went through the process of brainstorming ideas looking for something that would stick to certain conventions but also challenge them. We eventually settled on the idea of an audition, with different people singing the song whilst various things happened around them. We thought this challenged convention as it did not feature the artist and, unlike most music videos, would all take place in one location.

We wanted to make our music video feel very realistic and make it look like it was footage of a real audition compiled together to the song. We tried several techniques to make it look real and make sure people were aware they were watching a music video but being sucked into it at the same time.

We were very lucky to be able to book a local venue to shoot our video. We had access to spotlights and other kinds of stage equipment for our music video. The setup for our music video was very basic with just two sheets hanging and on the floor. We also used three different cameras so we could shoot multiple angles at the same time. This also helped us achieve the look of a fly-on-the-wall documentary style as other cameras can be seen in the background of certain shots. This is different to convention as most videos try to suck you into a fictional world of the song whereas we were trying to suck the viewer in to the real world of making our video.

Whereas our video challenged convention in quite a few ways our ancillary texts pretty much stuck to them. When researching the different genres we found some conventions that were true for certain types of music. Most Rap artists would have a very plain cover with either a picture of themselves or some sort of symbol they are associated with. Rock tend to go for a picture of the venue or the poster for the tour the live show was taken from and pop normally goes with the album cover. Indie artists were found to have some sort of artwork created either by a member of the group or someone close to them. We decided not to try anything fancy with our digipack cover as we thought it might be too much trying to market an indie artist in this way as it would be a bit too out different. We found that with real artists they tended to try something different like that once they had established a pretty solid fan base.

We did challenge convention in some ways though. We found when looking at real digipacks they very rarely linked directly to the music video and tended to link to the album cover or single. We used a particular image from our video for both the magazine advert and DVD cover.

It was an image of Ram, the girl from our video, covered in paint. We thought this was a great image to use as it was the climactic moment of our video and was also a really striking image. The white background as well as Ram’s white clothing really made the colours of the paint stand out on the page. We used a cropped version of the image for the magazine advert featuring just Ram. For our DVD cover we tried something a little more interesting using the whole image. The image has me throwing shredded paper at Ram covered in paint. We took this image and stretched it round from the front cover to the back cover. This worked really well as the front cover had me throwing the paper and the back cover had the image of Ram covered in paint.

The digipack we used as our final image wasn’t the first draft we had. We had originally done another one which we decided to improve on as it didn’t feature any of the visual links from the video or magazine advert or video and looked quite dark whereas the video was going for a light and nostalgic feel.

Our digipack and magazine advert received really positive feedback from our classmates as well as our teachers. This was a real boost for us as we had worked really hard on them to make them look really good and genuine. For our DVD cover we added some quotes from reviews of the artist we found on the internet. We also looked at how blurbs for digipacks were worded and tried to make ours similar. We also included the logos of the record label and distributor as well as an age certificate to make it look really genuine. With the magazine advert Sam did a really good job and editing the text to make it look like a real magazine advert by playing with font to emphasise certain words. A little blurb was included at the bottom of the magazine ad. The name of the artist is in bold to help people identify as well as the name of one our special feature ideas “Feist on Festivals”. He also included an ear to let people know where they could buy the DVD.

Our music video received mostly positive feedback but there was some negative feedback. Our classmates like the audition idea and thought we had filmed it really well. They also liked the mise-en-scene of the video and thought it looked very arty, which was great as this was something were trying to achieve.

The negative feedback was for things we were aware of but weren’t able to resolve in time for the deadline. One of the problems we had was the lip syncing was little out in some places. This was due to Ram filming some more shots without access to the song so her timing was a little off. We did manage to edit most of it to make it look good but we didn’t have time to finish it all as this footage was added at the last minute.

We were also told that the pace of the video slowed down in the middle. Again, this was something that we were aware of and we made efforts to fix. After our rough cut we realised that this section of the video needed a lot of work so went out and shot some more footage for the beginning and middle of the video. Unfortunately we weren’t able to get the same venue but we were able to find somewhere in college that looked similar so this worked out really well. In the final cut it is still a little slow but it’s a lot better than our rough cut.

We also had some problems with the footage from my camera. The video we had shot on my camera uploaded as a file that final cut didn’t recognise. This meant that we had to convert the footage using some software Ryan had which took some time. It also caused further problems once we got it into final cut. Every time we moved one of the clips, even a fraction of a second, we had to re-render it which cost us quite some time.

When it came to the software we were using we were quite advantaged as a group. Ram and Myself both study film studies so we have extra experience using Final Cut Express and Ryan and Ram both take photography so had more experience of using Photoshop. This made our editing quite a bit easier and we were able to try out new things we hadn’t done before. One thing we learned to do which we didn’t know about was the colour corrector tool on Final Cut. The school camera copied onto film whereas the other two cameras we used were digital so the saturation was a little different. We managed to fix it and now it isn’t noticeable in our final video.

We used other types of media to help with our research and planning. We used YouTube to look at existing videos and get some ideas of the type of things that are out there. We used Wikipedia to learn a bit more about the artist as well as similar artists we were researching, such as Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly. On top of that we also used MySpace to try and contact the artist directly and tell her what we were doing, unfortunately we never heard back from her.

We kept track of all our progress using a blog which was really helpful as all our information was in one place which we could access from home as well as share easily with other. We had learned from previous experience that not planning enough could lead to problems later so we set out to plan as much as we could to make sure we were prepared. This was also good as sometimes we were all working on different things and this was a good way for us to share ideas. For example, Sam did lots of work on the magazine ad whilst myself, Ryan and Ram were editing. This allowed him to share his creative development easily with us. We worked well as a team like this, with all of us doing individual work and then bringing it all together at the end.

Overall I think we did a really good job and I am really pleased with the outcome. Throughout the process of making the music video I have learnt a few new tools on final cut express. I have also learnt that it always helps to plan as much as you can. This was a mistake I made last year so this year I fully prepared and it helped a lot. I also learnt that sometimes it’s best just to go with your instincts and that’s what we did for a lot of the shoot and ended up with some really great footage. In the future I would try to have a bit more time to shoot it and make sure we’ve got all the shots we need. I would also do multiple takes of everything as it always helps to have a choice for different shots.