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.

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.

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.

So we started with filming the scenarios and as we finished the narrative part, we had to do the performance part of the music video. We filmed the first part in the photography room and the rapping scene was the last to complete.

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:

Audience Feedback (finished)

Did you enjoy the video? Answer honestly

Did you feel there was a message being conveyed, if so what?

How did you feel about the violence displayed on the music video?

Did you understand what the mirror scene was referring to; if so what correlation do you see between our video and its original source?

Which of the three scenarios do you find the most effective?

Which part of the video did you enjoy the most?

How clear was the meaning of their taking off the masks at the end?

How well do you reckon the visuals matched with the audio?

What is your opinion on the shaking/distorted effect used throughout the video?

How conventional is the video for its genre of drum and bass?

Would this video encourage you buy the album (which would be filled with other social themes)?

What would you have changed?

What would you have added?

Please rate the video out of 10. Do it!
1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 – 6 – 7 – 8 – 9 – 10

The main motif that links our music video, CD covers and advert together is the use black and white background with only red showing. This seems to be a universal element in all three products. We wanted to get an sin city style effect on our music video because it is about violent and only having red in our products really shows the violent. Even though the music video itself is not completely black and white but you can notice it immodestly that the whole scene is an artificial colour and the red really stands out which was what we wanted to achieve in the first place. All three products are cohesive, because of the style they’re designed in. The bold colours in the music video correlate with the bold CD cover and advertisement. The use of colourful props such as the green area the rapper is in had to fit in with our vibrant music video.

We’ve had one continuity error where one of our characters is wearing different pair of shoes in the second part of the film and Oscar thought he might be able to fit in a 5 seconds footage of him changing the shoe but as I was checking through I realised you can’t really notice the shoe because it is from a long angle on the second shot and as we have more than enough footage to fit in the time, there is no point to add the shoe changing part.

This is a screenshot of software I used "Adobe Photoshop"

So we decided to design 8 posters for our project to get the highest mark and we could design 4 each and choose the best ones out of all the posters for our final outcome.

I’ve used Photoshop to edit some of my stills that I took from the footage and I’ve turned them into posters. I just need to add the title on each individual poster.

here are the 5 CD covers which I designed and I tried to use different technique for each so they don't look all the same.
added light, smoke and blood on this picture

I changed the contrast level on this picture and added a slight glow over the brighter area

I changed the picture to black and white and added noise to give it an old effect, then I added red blood to it which stands out and the title will be in red also.

On this picture i just wanted to make him stand out a bit more and I changed the brightness and contrast as well as turning it to grey scale.

Mixed media

This is more experimental CD cover that I attempted to make and I have added the typical colours and speakers to the cover with music waves.