Evaluation Question 4

Costume

Why A Suit?

You may wonder when you watch our carefully created music video why we chose to out our main character who is a drunk in a suit looking smart. 
We thought this would work well in todays society as many drunks now aren't your stereotypical lounging in streets in rags, many business men who work up in the city spend much of their free time at the pub eventually becoming alcoholics. This represents todays real life very well, as we know our character has come from a respectable past so this could be the case. 





Also we thought he looked more striking in a suit andattractive to get the girls watching than he would in rags or jogging bottoms. We only use the casual look when he is at home as this is the key time when no one else can see him so he does not have to 'keep up appearances' at all. Of course we kept the scenes of outside and on the street to make the storyline clear as you do not have much time to portray events or characters.

Use of Black & White

As you can see when watching our video is that we have chose to use both colour and black and white. We didn't do this to add ourselves extra work or as we had just seen it in other videos and decided to randomly add it in. 
We chose to do this so it is easier to distinguish between the present time and the flash backs.

Above I have picked out two different shots one in colour and one that we put in black and white. The one in colour in present time and shows our main character drinking alcohol and if you watch shows him choosing the alcohol over his long term girlfriend which is what our narrative is based on. The black and white one is near the beginning of our music video and is a memory of when he was happy and not drinking, it shows him having fun with some friends which is what he cannot do now. We put the flashbacks in certain places during the lyrics so it was easy to understand they were in the past.

Visuals & Sound

Due to our video being in the alternative rock genre we decided that the use of our band shots were crucial, for this we had to match the song lyrics to their mouth movements so it looked as perfect as possible. As shots of the band wouldn't be interesting for the whole duration of our sound we added in a narrative that doesn't directly correspond with the exact words as this is more what happens in the typical pop video.

Above is an example of a song by the world famous Justin Bieber's number one hit 'One Time', in this picture he is using his finger to indicate what he is saying which is "I will tell you one time". This is a typical pop video convention and it also has a close up of the artist to promote him, in our music video which is shown to the right of Bieber is sowing a quiet road with a picturesque lamppost and ivy hanging around it but the lyrics are "do you miss the blend of colours she left in your black and white field" but we chose to have this image in colour as it is part of our present time narrative. This is just one example of when we haven't directly used our moving images to aid the lyrics which works well for our genre.

As another major aspect of our video we chose to include lip syncing for a number of reasons, one of them being that in our genre of alternative rock this is a usual thing to do but we not only included it with our narrative acting it out but we also used real time band shots which was hard to get perfect. The lip syncing was challenging as we had to get the timing perfect with the sound which meant a lot of time spend on première pro editing and moving and stretching shots so it fitted. Only once did we not have to alter the shot to make the lip syncing fit and this was our end scene that is shown in the shot of the main character shouts "I am not your friend, I am just a man who knows how to feel". I have used another alternative band to compare our use of this lip syncing in the narrative with and this is a video by Kids In Glass Houses and the man is saying "and I've been singing". 

This is a shot of when we had to stretch out of on our shots of the band slightly as the live music did not fit perfectly with the timing of our song, but it indeed does workextremely well and looks as though we didn't have to edit it at all.

Audience Feedback- Question 3

These are two of our questionnaires as part of our audience feedback, we got around 30 filled out but chose ones that had both good comments and some constructive criticism to them so we could learn from it.

Overall Critisicms

Use of Actors

The audience feedback showed that they believed our actors were convincing which is always a good point to be made as while studying the conventions of a real music video, the actors have to be believable.

Locations Used

The audience found that there was a vast range of locations used which prevented the video from getting too plain and consistently the same. With a vast range of locations it gives more exicitement to the video, a mix of low key and high key lighting to portray the main character's high and low emotions, and also relating back to the song itself.

The Narrative

The narrative was percieved as understandable, but some of the audience found it hard to grasp onto the themes and message within the story. However, some were able to identify the message of the video, in which an addiction can destroy your life and those you value within it.

Band Shots

The Band shots were probably the best feature to our music video, they were so clear and complimented by a variety of people, both young and older. Most of the audience there was a perfect mix of band shots and narrative throughout, making an equal balance and fulfilling our aims of having a narrative and performance based video.

Relating to the Video

When we asked the audience whether they could relate to the video, many responded yes as they had been in the situation of experiencing alcohol a lot, however not many could relate to the actual addiction of it. They seemed to relate more to the relationship part, and the chance they lost with someone they really wanted in their lives.

To relate to the audience is a positive thing, as they will relate more to the song itself, and be more of an appeal to the mass audience of alternative rock fans.

How to Improve

A few people didn't know how it could be improved as they were not keen music video critics, however quite a few commented on the lip-syncing of the main character, perhaps if we had more preparation time for our video, we could have fitted more practice in for lip syncing.

Overall, we are happy with how our video turned out, and take all constructive criticism into consideration.

If we had the time to go back and change things it would be

- Lip Syncing of the character

- Organisation of the days we filmed

- A slightly clearer narrative

- Lighting of the last scene

Question 1

LOCATIONS..


All in all we used 12 different locations, which is quite a few for one music video. We wanted to use a selection so it looked more high class and professional and kept the audience interested. We used ones that weren't full of the public or had lots of distractions such as cars going past as we thought this would make the video look cheaper and be confusing. We didn't plan to film in all these different places but we are extremely happy that we did as it adds more dimensions to our filming.

This is at the Hermit on the stage. We used the hermit as it is a good setting and realistic for the band playing a gig.

This is an ally way we had easy access to by our main characters house. We wanted to use an ally way in our video to show he is becoming worse and now wanders down back streets and ally ways which a drunk does in the usual stereotype.

This was in the woods we have opposite our school so have access to this so were able to take a re-take shots many times, we felt it contrasted the peaceful setting in which he used to have fun with his raging anger and wild emotions he has now.

This is another woods in Brentwood and we used this for the loved up couple scenes as it looked picaresque and happy. The woods is romantic and with the fallen leaves we thought this created a happy peaceful look.

This was in a street near the main characters house called Somans Mead, this isn't busy so we wouldn't be disturbed by the public. Sitting on a street is very low and we wanted to show he had sunk to this level through alcohol.

On a street we came across when going to another filming location, we chose to use it as we needed a dark scene and there was a street light we used to film under as not to be too dark.

This is at our main characters house, we used this as his bedroom in our footage so he felt more natural acting in it, also we had easy access to it at any time. It also showed he was continuing to be an alcoholic even when in the comfort of his own home.

In another room in our main characters house we used the on-suit and the bedroom area as the girls bedroom. We chose this as is is obviously girly in the footage.

On the dance floor in Hermit which was hard to get footage of because of the aggressive nature, but we felt it fitted our genre so chose this location.

Used for one of our end scenes we used The Chase in Brentwood as its easy for us to get to and looks nice in the shots. It also doesn't have any distractions, so the audience can focus on the video.

This is a road near the main characters house we chose to use for him crawling, we used this road as it is quiet so would be safer and also as we could easily get to it if we needed to re take the footage.

We also used a lake and surrounding wooded area's to film the shots of friends, this woods looked happy and peaceful and doesn't get busy which is why we chose it. we used a lake, and we showed the reflection of the water in the flash back scenes to symbolise reflection of our character.

Question 1

CONTENT..


As opposed to a concept style video we decided that a mixture of performance and narrative was best for our video and genre. As it is a rock band we had to use quite a lot of band shots like other successful bands do such as Nickelback. In this photo ofNickelback performing you can see that the lead singer has a lot of passion for his music and that he wants people to love it as much as he does. We also wanted to get this convention to be apparent in our music video which we did by capturing video footage of our lead singer being very passionate like the photo below. 

The narrative to the music video is that of a typical alternative rock bands, following a relationship between a boy and a girl whilst watching the boys downfall. The story is about an alcoholic who's life is destroying him slowly by alcohol, this may seem hard to relate to but the idea of our video was to be a bit extreme like the music our band creates. Our audience wasn't meant to directly relate to the alcoholism but to lesser problems and relationships. Relationships play a large part in young peoples lives so our music video appeals to our target audience well which is what we intended. We got the idea of using a relationship from various other music videos such Shayne Wards 'gotta be somebody' featuring the start of a relationship, but we added in another dimension, being the alcohol and his friends. This image shows a girl waiting on a boy and this is one of the videos we took inspirations for our narrative.

Below I have put two images together to show how we took the idea's from real media products from our research and tweaked them to create something that works in our own video. The image taken on the right is from The Kooks video of 'Oh La' which at the start focuses on close ups of the guitar and guitarist, we thought this was effective so also used some close ups of the music being played. However as our music is more striking we chose to have it in a gig environment with the strobe lights to create more of an impact.

Below is another example of how we took an example from a real music video that is successful and in the charts and used it in our media video. Here is the idea of the man being angry at the girl and we can only see his anger not her face at all. We liked this idea as it allows you to imagine how she is feeling but at the same time we managed to get across the emotion of anger and despair of our main character.