Finished product. WATCH IT!!! thank you
Question 1: In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Our response to the brief was to create a fun and energetic music video that could be enjoyed by viewers of all ages. ‘No More’ by Roni Size is an extremely up-tempo song; therefore we wanted to creature visuals that had a correlation with an animated feeling of the song. By having a speedy and quick creative vision, we decided to make our music video extremely fast and moving. We wanted to tastefully find our stereotypical viewers. Defining our genre was quite difficult, as the artist is heavily influenced by many genres such as indie, drum and bass, and hip-hop. I think that the song ‘No More’ is the perfect fusion of all three genres.
Although it’s hard to pin-point the genre, I think that he has more of a drum and bass background. Looking back on my research, I found out that the main convention of many drum and bass videos, (such as Pendulum’s”Slam”) was to subtly construct a narrative. The story-telling came through the lyrics and was also incorporated in the visuals to set a basic mood and tone of the video. However, another convention of many d&b music videos is the use of performance. Many d&b videos have some sort of live performance in it, for example “Pendulum 'Watercolour'. Performance may be a key element, but it is not the most important thing. We wanted the performance to only be a small part of our music video and that’s why the performance part was never shown on its own on our music video and frequently it was overlay to the main narrative part.
Our perception of the song was about getting cured and how criminals deserve a second chance. We thought the use of mask on our actors can represent that even they don’t like the person they are and they hide it from public.
We wanted to include all the violent and aggressiveness of the criminals. From our research, we found out Roni Siz’es target audience is of an average of 16 – 25. However, we wanted to create a music video and widen the target audience so people from all age can understand the story behind it and the message we were trying to send. The generic conventions of a d&b music video are based highly on the narrative structure. I feel that many d&b music videos have an essence of the concept being the most important element of the video. There is always a message being subtly thrown in, whether it is through visuals or lyrics.
Our protagonist was to show that no matter how much of a bad person you are, you can still be touched by a small song and change. This was showed at the end of our music video when all three of them start smiling. Even though we wanted to make a serious video full of action, we also wanted to create a thought-provoking one too. Another convention of any music video is the use of mise-en-scene. We thoroughly planned out our filming location. A lot like TV programmes such as Channel 4’s ‘Skins’, we wanted to use locations that are instantly recognizable to fellow Bristolians and people from our college, such as st merry Redcliffe church yard and around the college area. It was an ode to The Hit-ups, as they are a famous Bristol based band.
Our opening shot is in a high angle from Redcliffe hill, we wanted to create a tranquil and peaceful setting, and then immediately create tensions and suspense with the stranger looming. I think that the opening of our music video is a lot like the opening to a film where the scene starts showing the city and make you familiar with where the film is taking place; a lot like ‘Easterners’. We also carefully selected our protagonists outfit for example in the police man’s rapping scene the outfit shows a under cover police officer so the criminals don’t escape when they see him.
We tried to think of the stereotypical criminal look for our characters, whilst still fitting the mood of the scene. For example the use of the hoodie and mask and the whole idea of them trying to hide them set up the characters to viewer as a terrible person without them doing anything wrong. Having three different scenarios was our plan to include a vast amount of violent because it is needed to be continuous in order to be effective. As a performance is a key element in many d&b videos, we wanted to include a small amount of performance in our video. I think that the visuals from the performance scenes in our video, sets the tone of a lively song.
We used many close-up shots to make an emphasis on the instruments and Julia ‘the singer’ to show that it was a live performance. We wanted to capture the boisterous activity that our protagonist was missing out on. For the album cover, we placed a mask on the sky and changed it to a ghost look so it’s not extremely noticeable but at the same time, it is there. Then we put the name of the song and artist on top right and put the logo of the artist at the bottom of the cover.
We didn’t use generic portrait shots of the artists or characters on front cover, as it would’ve diverted the attention from the music, to the importance of them. A lot like the Maroon 5 album cover, ‘Songs about Jane’, the album cover is abstract and trippy, and it reflects the mood of the album. We wanted to create a playful, black and white with eye-catching red title album cover to correlate with our serious music video. The use of the red colour for title and a ghost mask on the foreground encourages the CD buyer to think that we are insinuating that our album is “scary”, again it adds to the violence concept of our music video. We wanted the image of mask to be recognizable.
The CD advertisement came out exactly how we wanted it to. We wanted to create a blury and faded picture of one of our criminals with mask and black hoodie as the background and write the texts on top with the same font and colour. During an editing session in IMOVIE, we created still images from the video, unfortunately we discovered the quality of the still shots were very bad when we went to the CLC but when we scaled it up to fit the magazine advert, it looked just like how we wanted it; pixelated and blurry so it was perfect already.
The redness of our texts was the main thing which we focused on during the editing and we had the same effect added to all of our cd covers, inserts and magazine advert. In terms of developing and challenging the conventions of d&b music videos, we decided to poke fun at how serious the majority of d&b videos our by using the dancing at the end of the rapping scene. We wanted to create a friendly video that was original and had never been done before.
We have asked the artist Roni Size himself to comment on our music video and as he is a busy man, he couldn’t do it on time but he said he will by the next couple of days and we are going to put it up as our audience research. We wanted to make a music video which shows the reality of everyday life and things that happen around us and we don’t see. We made it real and showed the violent and it informs the audience without being too aggressive and hard to watch. The final product was successful at sending the message and audience didn’t have any problems understanding it specially the lyrics really fits with the scenes as the music plays. I think that we challenged the generic conventions of a typical d&b music video by simply focusing on the narrative more than the performance.
Question 4 :How did you use media technologies in the construction and research planning and evaluation stages? part 2
We started filming straight after we planned our story board. We used digital cameras with tapes for the filming and all the footage was converting on apple Macs with the camera’s wire fire. We bought tapes for camera and used it on tripod and free hand filming (hand held). In this post I am going to write about everything we used involving our music video such as this blog!
iMovie
We used Mac software called iMovie for most of our editing because it is so easy and straight forward to use. We imported all our footage in that software and we put the song on the line with it. Even though it is simple looking software it has the ability to do some complex work such as changing the flow of our video so it gets faster/slower depending on how we want it and this was definitely a handy tool to have because we needed some parts to be slightly fast forward to fit the song.
AfterEffects
This is a more complicated software for editing the video which I mainly used to add the CGI’s. I played with the colours and contrast of the music video quite a lot to make it cinema style and I finally managed to get a greenish tent to it where it looked more like the similar music videos. I also had to over lay the singing part to the narrative which was impossible to do with iMovie so we really needed this software and it helped us out a lot. Other stuff like the blood and cigarette was also made on this software for our video. Finally I wanted to make the whole thing look faster and kind of “dance” to the music so I wrote a code for the whole footage which made it jump around and zoom in and out randomly. This effect was very effective according to our viewers.
Windows Movie Maker
This software is just like iMovie but it can support more file types and when we had our footage all edited and finished, to put it back on iMovie it wasn’t the right size and it was hard to copy it without losing the quality. So I used this software to resize my footage without losing the quality and I also added the texts on top of the music video with it. So it might look very simple but it was powerful software which saved me time to change the size of music video.
Video Converter
On After effects the output was set to 1080p HD video because I wanted to get the most out of our video but when I tried to put it back on Mac, it couldn’t read the format of the file which was expected since Macs and computers don’t really have much in common! Anyway so I changed the format of our music video to .MOV so it’s readable for apple Macs as well as computers.
iTunes
Definitely one of the most used piece of software to listen to songs on. We mainly used this to find our song in the beginning of the course. It was easy to look between the songs and find the one we needed thanks to the user friendly interface.
Photoshop
My favourite software was Photoshop which makes everything possible. We edited all of our images with that software and turned all the stills we had to posters and cd covers with this software. It can be complicated to work with if you are a beginner but once you know how to design with it, it becomes fun! I edited most my pictures for the poster with Photoshop. It is very easy to turn a picture to black and white scale and we used that effect for all of our cd covers to have the cohesive between all of our other products.
Internet
Of course communication between the group members was an important part and sometimes it was just simply easier to use Facebook to write our ideas down and only one of us type it all out. We used Facebook to find our actors. We also used it to send each other the pictures we took while filming and the pictures of cd covers etc...
Hardware
Hardware wise we used many different types of equipment such as tripods, video recorders and tape. We also used computers and macs for editing. The data transferring was done with portable hard drivers and usb sticks.
Even though we had made some posters and sleeves from the start of this year, Tuesday was the day to finish them and produce the finals. So we all went to Orchard school where they had advanced iMacs and best of all, they had Photoshop there! This was a group work and we all had to make at least two CD inserts and a front and back cover + a sleeve and magazine advert.
I had to come make the front and back cover and Aiden and Oscar each had to make 2 CD inserts. They used the still’s we’ve had from earlier but I wanted to stick to the idea of having a simple cover. Teachers kindly helped me to develop the old idea and design the final covers; I had to get rid of the knife, flowers and the tree. This had changed for a more minimalistic look with the title and artist shown in red in the top right corner and just a mask in the middle removing the knife and flower.
As you see on the picture above, this was the first cover I made but on the final cover, I had to change almost everything. So I started with a picture of sky for the background, then I added a new layer and I put the mask on it. Then I changed the opacity of the mask so it’s just slightly visible and have a ghostly look to it and I positioned it right in the centre so half of the mask goes on the back and half on the front cover. Then I added the title and artist’s name on top right of the poster with a red font to stand out from the black and white background. We had decided to go for a black and white look with red font and so enhanced all of our images so that they were cohesive. This also was similar to “Sin City” style. Anyway so after all the texts on the poster I added the band’s logo, websites and songs. The final product was simple but effective.
We were asked to record everything we did from the start to the finish so we can put all the steps on our blog so the technically here’s exactly how I achieved the final poster. First I had to log into Mac to be able to use adobe Photoshop CS3 because the windows had the element and I find that slightly limited and I’m used to work with full version. So on Photoshop I opened the template for the CD cover and I used a picture of sky as the background but it was in colour so I changed the picture to grey scale and it looked very shiny and unrealistic so I added the noise filter to the picture to make it more pixelated and CD cover style. Then I changed the contrast on the picture and made it slightly darker so the mask stands out more.
To add the font I played with the size and position of it then I added a shadow to all the text so no matter what colour they are and what’s underneath them they will still stand out over the black shadow. And for the final touch I cropped the artist’s logo from their previous poster and added it to mine with a slight reflection under it. Final picture was made out of 6 layers.
We originally hadn't planned for the front cover to be black and white but for the sake of cohesion we did. For the inside of our sleeve we decided to input the details of who would have produced, arranged and mixed our album if it had ever been released into stores. Two of our images inside were of two of the criminals as they are a main part of the whole campaign and these two images were stylized using "Dark Strokes" on Photoshop which made the contrast brighter and made it look more like art although still showing realism and grittiness. For the inside we chose to write on each picture a small phrase relating to anti-crime such as "walk to the light" which is written in red so that they are noticeable and emphasised immediately. To keep with the cohesion of the artist we had to find the logo used by Roni Size and add it to our sleeve, which was placed on the inside in the top left corner.
We also changed it slightly so that it would fit our style.Lastly we came up with the idea for the magazine advert together, Oscar and Aiden were writing the quotes from magazines, website address and availability of the song and I was designing and bringing their ideas on the screen. We changed the font size and style for each line to make it look more efficient but the main black and white background didn’t change and the red font was still the same colour. I played a bit with the style of the main title but for the rest of the text I just added shadows to make it more visible over the lighter areas.
I have been busy lately trying to edit all the scenes and footage that we had that’s why I didn’t update my blog but thankfully the editing is all done now and the final product is almost ready!
We had five different footages, three scenarios, one rapping and one of the main singer. Although the scenarios on their own were more than the length of the song so I had this idea of putting the main singer over layer to the parts so everything is still happening in the scene but all behind the performer and the viewer will be able to watch both footage at the same time.
To do that I had to take all the footage home and start editing it on my computer where I had Adobe after effects because I find iMovie so limited and basic. Although I did use iMovie to put the song in line with the footage then imported it all in Adobe after effect. This was the main program that I used for all the editing.
There are some screen shots of the final footage and as you can see, the colour looks more dramatic and studio like. All the special effects are also done with after effect such as the blood and cigarette. I also added some lens flare and shake to the footage so the video will connect more with the dram and bass song. Because our song was fast and we mainly had slow narrative parts I wanted to somehow make the video faster and when I watched some similar dram and bass videos I realised the use a lot of flash lights, random zooming on the screen and shake. As a finishing touch I wrote a formula for the footage which made the whole footage flashy and shaky as I wanted!
Of course the editing was impossible without the good old Photoshop! Even thought Photoshop is a 2D program, I still had to use it quite a lot for our video! For example on the picture above I had to change the cigarette then animate it with after effects.
This is the day we filmed the rapping scene and as you can see on the pictures, we found a “rough” area where there are graffiti on the walls and looks kind of empty and where “gangsters” are more likely to hang out. This will add to the realism of the film and will make more sense.
On this picture I’m doing a panning shot of the 3 criminals as they take their masks off and because I wanted to have a steady shot I put the camera on the bike and used it as a tracking device.
Rather than have Joe wear the common uniform for British police, we decided his clothing to be in the style of those worn in cop films/tv shows (such as Miami Vice) - this included the use of aviators and smarter clothing.
We modelled Joe's appearance on this kind of policeman look
rather than this one
Our actor Joe He was involved in acting out the rapping part of our song which was given as a speech to the criminals showing them the errors of their ways.
For this scene we took a variety of angles to make it more arresting. I think that Joe did a good job of imitating a policeman and also learning the verse to a good standard on such short notice. For the policeman costume we had him wear quite typical things such as aviators and smart casual clothes which take reference from such films as "Heat" and "Miami Vice". During the speech which is being rapped the criminal characters start to feel remorse and they begin to stop their ways. this is shown by them first removing their hoods and then throwing their masks away. And we used his hand movements to fit the words and look like what he is rapping.
To show the process of the characters' understanding, we first take off our hoods (towards the end of the rap verse) and once the policeman finishes the lecture, we go all the way and throw away our masks. Because there is still a minute left of the song after the rap, we thought we would fill some of the time by having Joe give a thumbs-up to the camera after he sees us take off the masks (as if he was saying "mission achieved"), this is a post-modern element as the character breaks the fourth wall by doing this. The three 'cured' youths then start dancing briefly as a way to represent their transition from anti-social actions to starting a pleasant lifestyle, as well as a way to inject some silly humour into an otherwise somewhat depressing video.
We made a questionnaire – people thought our music video was original, they hadn’t seen anything like that before. They were shocked by the horrifying scenes but at the end they really understood the message we tried to send and I’m really happy that people said that because that’s what we were aiming for! One person said: “It was incredibly unique and a brilliant performance”. I’m unsure whether or not it was a performance from the singers they were referring to, or a performance from our brilliant actors.
Many of the viewers were impressed by the amount of special effects on our music video and they thought it was “amazing and looked real” but some said the CGI was not realistic enough for example we used to much blood for when one of our actors gets kicked in the face. I was happy that we did get a few negative feedbacks about the editing because now we know what to add or remove next time we start another project and it helps us get our future results as natural and real as possible because audience feedback is crucial to the media and music industries. It allows producers, directors and even the artists to reflect on their work. It outlines the flaws and what is needed to improve, and it can also encourage people to work harder. Positive feedback allows producers to acknowledge their success, so they know what they're doing right. It also helps in terms of research for their target audience.
If they’re pleasing their target audience, it means more money for the media and music industries. More sales from artist, more demand from the press, more concerts being fully booked, more money being spent by their fans – it’s a vicious circle and it all benefits the musicians and their team. A consequence in ignoring audience feedback, whether good or bad – means that the production companies, managers etc do not know the views of their target audience and they don’t know if they are pleasing them or not. If the audience feedback is bad and they don’t act on it, they risk losing money, endorsements, fans and of course respect from the public. Once an image of an artist is made, the artist has to stick to it to please the fans and the public. I wasn’t surprised by the positive feedback, because we knew we had made a good video. I had all faith in our product and we followed our creative direction through and succeeded. However, I was aware of the weaker elements in our work. I feel like the mirror scene referring to ‘taxi driver’ wasn’t clear enough because most our audience didn’t get it (maybe they haven’t seen Taxi driver in the first place) also the whole story fixed up really fast and we didn’t have time to include some of the footage such as the criminals meeting up at the end before the rap starts. It still made sense but it would be much easier to understand if we could put everything together under that limited time.
Thankfully Aiden and his uncle Mr. Roni Size made a video of him commenting on our final music video which is always a nice thing to know what the artist think of it and here is the video:
Alireza | A2media
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Alireza Hemadani.
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