Director's Commentary

Task 13 Evaluation Script

Question 1: Our media production utilizes the conventions of more modern music videos, such as "Drive By" by "Train" or "Bruno Mars’ Grenade", by telling a story about a lost love of our protagonist through the use of the song and the imagery in our production. We also follow the camera technique of handheld footage to give it a more rustic, and raw feeling for the emotion of our characters. This type of camera work is quite typical for Lost Love Music Videos, seen here in 'Grenade', and we wanted to capture that feeling of professional video-making in the same way but without the bigger budget. The use of lip-syncing by our main protagonist who "sings" for most of the duration is a trope utilized by all music video directors since it's a great way to combine the musician's natural singing talent with their acting so their unprofessionalism doesn't become too obvious for the viewer. Of course the song wasn't actually performed by our actor but it did get him involved more with the actual song and gave the song a connection to the story we were trying to tell. Black and white footage is used within our production which was inspired by the the music video of "Someone like you" by Adele which uses black and white footage for symbolism of depression, which we use as well but instead of symbolising depression we use it for symbolism of memories. We also got the inspiration to go for a long walk montage from this music video because we thought it worked well for the depressing tone of the story and the music video. The montage near the end of the video was partially inspired by the ending of "The Godfather" which also utilised a montage of contrasting imagery to highlight the difference between events. Also, as the song gets quicker towards the end of the song we paced the cuts more frequently to suit with the pace of the song which was inspired by mainstream action movies that speed up their cuts to different shots as the music/scene gets more intense.

Question 2: The combination of our main product and ancillary texts are that they are quite similar as they both feature the main actor in our production and that it contains some screen shots from our main production to our ancillary texts.  The poster includes the main actor and actress, and the text on the poster talks about how good the song is which helps to promote the song. The quotes were from famous music magazines to further cement the idea that this album is critically acclaimed by professionals. Also, it includes the other print artefact, the cover of it, as in some posters the front cover of it would be featured so that people would know what to buy. The main protagonist is in black and white because he is sad and depressed as his girlfriend left him in our main product. This effect was achieved by using Photoshop to remove the background around the boy, moving the image on to the posters background and painting thin white lines around the image. His girlfriend is on the left, the sun is shining down on her seems like he is reflecting of how she seems perfect in his eyes. This was done by painting a line of yellow across the background and her, rubbing some bits to make it look like streaks then blurring it so it merges with the background, and finally decreasing the opacity so its not too bright to obscure the girl from view. The thing is that she has her back to him meaning we cannot see her face so it seems like she is walking away from his life and he is remembering the good times. We got her image from the our main production and used the same technique that we used to get the boy's image from a separate image. The CD cover was achieved with a mixture of different Photoshop techniques and some inspiration. The colourful front cover and the flamboyant text was inspired by old album covers made during the 70's where this song was produced. The way we got the image so colourful is by adjusting the brightness, contrast, and hue so it enhances the colour more then normal. The image of our two protagonists hugging during the sunset was obviously faked by getting a stock image of a sunset placing the image of the boy and girl hugging over the top and then adding some effects to make it look like the sun was shining on them. The floating text of the inside cover images was achieved by typing out the text and then using the transform tool to make it look like it was attached to the wall. The black and white effects were simply a filter.

Question 3: To find out what our audience feedback was we sent out about 20 questionnaires to our target audience with different ages, gender and ethnicity. We asked them to watch our production, and then asked them rate different aspects of the production on the questionnaire. What we have learnt from our audience feedback is that most of our audience find the production to be in a good standard, maybe not excellent but at least satisfying enough to watch with pleasure. This may be due to some lacking qualities within the production which we will get to talk about later. People found that when observing our blog they thought the planning was in a good state of condition, which is down to our 37 posts and the detail within them. When questioned on the different attributes of our production, the sound and the music very good as 77% of people thought that that was excellent therefore most people like are song. Which is quiet surprising as it is a rock song and generally people do not listen to rock music. From our music questionnaire the type of music that generally people listen to is Pop, RAP and R’n’B while Rock was lower down. Maybe people do like listening to rock from time to time and generally they listen to other types but still enjoy listening to this type of music.  This means that our selection in music for our audience was most appropriate considering the reactions of our audience. On the other hand, the aspect that people thought was the weakest of the production was the Mise en scene which most people described as "average" and "uninspired". This might be down to our lack of research into appropriate environments to film in and the improvisational nature of the costume design because of the rushed nature of our filming time. If we had another chance to repeat this production we would make sure to dedicate more time to finding filming locations and filming in general to have a higher quality of product. All other aspects of our production got either an excellent or good review, making our production most consistent expect for the previously mentioned reception of our Mise en scene. Other criticisms that have been highlighted have been mostly of the narrative since some people found it a bit confusing, which may be down to the sudden reveal of the other man, changing the meaning of the story. It could have been handled a bit better since there was a lack of foreshadowing in the video and it’s hardly explained within the music video itself. If I was to do this production again we would probably add scenes of the other boyfriend to establish him more into the story. The general feedback, of the print artefacts, was excellent with people saying that it fits the tone of the video and the music. Most of them said that the ancillary text and the video worked well but there were a few who thought that we used many different fonts therefore we should have used basic colour scheme. The use of font was mostly good, a few people said it was excellent meaning that the people could read the text and they liked the font that we used.

Question 4: In the research stage the media technologies we used were ‘Blogger’ to type all the information in that we found. We used it week by week and as we used it before we know few things about the site. It is like a log that we kept, keeping up with everything that we did from the first thing we did in the research part, right to the end of the construction and the evaluation parts. This allowed us to research the codes and conventions of modern music video making and other  information that could be used in media production. We used sites like Google to search for images, information and other things to add to the Blog. This is how we found the stock image of the sunset for our album cover. Through the use of YouTube we were able to watch music videos and analyse them to get some inspiration from real media products, we also embedded the video so that we could watch it from our blog. In the planning stage we thought about few songs which we thought would be appropriate to create a music video under the guidelines of our research and created a synopsis against the song that we had chosen, "Layla", once this was done we drew a storyboard to put together ideas for different shots any other ideas we would want to put within our music production. We added all the information onto our blog to have some evidence of planning. In this stage we sent an email to the company, who has all the rights of the song Layla by Eric Clapton, we asked them if we can borrow the song for non-profit bases and create a music video. The cameras we used were a Sony HD Camera so the footage we filmed was a high quality and we used a tripod to get stable shots within our production. We shot a large variety of different angles and shots to give some variation to our production. In the construction stage the media technologies we used were Adobe Premiere Pro to edit our main production; to add effects like black & white, slow/fast motion and zoom in. A major aspect of the editing was the final montage at the end which revealed the twist which we achieved by cutting in sync with music to give so it looked more professional was highly effective. Another technology that we used was Photoshop to edit and construct the poster and the DIGI pack. We took a few images from the internet, copyright free, and screen shots from our main product to be included in the ancillary texts. We edited the images adding couple of images together and text from the song or a quote from Eric that links with the image that we were creating. The final piece of technology we will use for this production will be a video converter to download the videos necessary to complete this evaluation.                                                                                                                                                                                                                        

Print Artifacts

Final Production

This is our final Production, a music video Layla by Eric Clapton but acted by our actors and the characters created by us.