Evaluation 1

Where have your ideas come from? How were you inspired to do what you did?

As a group we decided to use ‘Cala Cola’ by The Miracles as we felt that this song gave a truly indie feel, and was typical of the range of songs that we listen to. After looking at music videos produced by bands that offered the same sound as The Miracles, such as Vampire Weekend, The Wombats and Noah and The Whale, we found that the beach was a common theme throughout the genre. So therefore we decided to plan our own music video around this convention. We brainstormed a number of ideas, and planned to document a road trip to the beach within our music video. However due to our location, we decided that the beach was not a feasible option as it was too far away. We therefore adapted idea and decided to keep the idea of a road trip but with a different location, camping in a forest. The idea of a forest came from Noah and The Whale’s video ‘First days Of Spring’. We felt that this idea would conform to the tastes of our target audience, as through research we identified that road trips were an interest for the genre. In order to document our brainstorming ideas, we compiled them all onto a prezi, in order to present to our fellow media students in order to gain some feedback on our ideas, which proved to be successful.

For my print work I researched a number of indie digipak’s and adverts in order to identify common connotations used throughout the genre that would link with my own project. Each piece of print work represented the style of the artist and reflected parts of their personality, which I tried to produce within mine also. I realised that each digipak/advert had strong links with the music video, which I also tried to incorporate within my print work. 

How did audience research direct your creativity?

 Throughout each stage of my project I have used audience feedback in order to identify possible improvements I can make to my work in order to make it appealing to the audience and to make a professional product. I have used the opinions of my target audience to improve the music video by firstly allowing them to identify the problems which we would face when filming at the beach, followed by then allowing them to identify that the performance element of our music video needed to be improved. Alongside this the target audience have helped me to decipher which fonts/colours schemes would be best suited to my print work. Throughout the whole project I have referred back to my mood boards and audience profile in order to ensure that my ideas for each stage would appeal to the target audience, and to ensure that the theme of my project was consistent in order to ensure a professional product was produced at the end.

How different are your products to ‘real’ media products?

Due to factors such as time and budget, our video was not able to look as professional as ‘real’ music videos as we did not have the money to cast professional actors, nor to use top of the range cameras and editing footage. However we were able to use an extensive range of camera angles and shots, lip syncing and editing in order to try and represent ‘real’ music videos to the best of our ability. For my print work budget and technology also restricted me on being able to produce a product that had the conventions of a ‘real’ media product. However I feel that our photo shoot portrayed a slight essence of professionalism, and that I was able to use ideas that I had identified through researching print work earlier on in project such as positioning of text, filters, copyright logos and so on in order to try and portray a typical convention of a media product. 

To what extent have you been ‘original’?

I believe that our video has a mixture of entropic and redundant elements. Within our genre a range of artists sometimes use very entropic videos that can often be complicated and not necessarily make much sense to the audience. This can be a risky option as unless the band is well established, it can often have a negative effect on the brand image. Therefore we decided to conform to the redundant theme that other artists in our genre have used by following a journey within our video, which is used in many music videos throughout many genres. Therefore by basing our video around a redundant plotline, we were able to use a few entropic features in order to differ ourselves from other music videos to make it interesting, but not so much that we were at risk of making the video to complicated or diverse for people to not enjoy. We wanted to create a simplistic theme that would appeal to the audience due to the fact that it connoted some of the activities in which they participated in. we have used entropy slightly within our music video as despite the fact that a journey very few videos have documented a road trip. The use of entropic settings such as within the car, the petrol station and picking the actors up all make the video relatively different from others as they are not a general convention of music videos. This therefore makes our video different and from what we have gathered from our audience feedback, very successful. For the performance element of our video we tried to produce an entropic theme by performing within the settings of the road trip, which we show in our rough cut. However from our audience feedback we established that this was not appealing to the audience. In order to make our video more professional we decided to use redundant performance elements by having them in a performance setting with a blank canvas behind them.