In what ways does your media product use, develop or change forms and conventions of real media products?

We decided to go for a more popular song in The Streets – Dry your eyes mate as we are all familiar with the song and video. During our research on the group’s previous videos we noticed that they generally set their videos in urban locations with a low budget this meant we would also be able to execute a video that would be in comparison to theirs as we also had no budget. We decided to follow this convention by having our actor (Liam) wandering the more run down areas of Manchester. We also researched music video’s in the indie industry to compare any similarities.
In our film we aimed to challenge people’s prejudices with our narrative. We did this by revealing certain parts of the storyline before others to give the audience the opportunity to form opinions of Liam to which later we amended by showing the full story, both before and after. This breaks conventions of a normal music video as the scale of complexity is not used in usual music videos of this kind.
We have researched numerous other music videos of this genre and discovered that most of them include similar characteristics such as slow motion shots and freeze framing which we aimed to incorporate into our video.
We planned to use the lyrics of the song as a script to the video by trying to tell a story as we went along, although this was not entirely possible as we previously decided to play with the narrative revealing certain aspects of the story as we went along.

Now we have finished our final product I wanted to get final feed back from a few people. The jist of the interviews went well as the CD case and the poster were praised as many said it was "appropriate."
The mainstream of positive feedback came as a result of our fast paced start with the variety of shots in terms of angles and the quality we captured. The storyline was highly thought of by most as it is an interesting unusual style making you think, however some did say it was too complicated and not easily understood. Another crticism aimed at us was the quality of the green screen which we are slightly disapointed in as we had a view that it would be better but it still seems to do its job. The negative feedback of the lipsincing was something we took onboard after discussing it ourselves we have checked this thoroughly and Liam is singing in time. The effects put into our video went down well though as the 360 green screen shot was credited many times as was the rewinding of the story helping to make sense of the narrative in a "cool" fashoin.

Evaluation Question 4

How did you use media techonologies in the construction, research , planning and evaluation stages?

In the construction of our video we used a variety of media technologies. this included usin different camera and editing techniques to make our music video better overall. we tried to alter the different camera shots we took as we didn't want our media piece to seem boring and too repetitive. it consisted of long shots, medium shots, close ups, zoom ins, high angles, low angles etc. for camera work we also used the tripod and in some cases we just filmed handheld depending on the scene. filming the whole song in green screen was one of the first things we did. We filmed in many different shots and angles so that whilst editing we would have more footage to work with. The editing was probably the major part in our video. Using finaly cut pro we used quite a few video transitions and filters. Throughout the video we used the effect desaturate a few times to take out the colour of green screen and keep it black and white to grab the attention of the audience as almost all the video is in colour. We used chorma key to take out the green screens and then put clips in for the background which we had filmed earlier. In one case although we had used chroma key the green still appeared as a mark in the corner, but instead of scrapping the shot, we just cropped the clip. We did many fast cuts in the middle as we had started off slowand wanted to fasten it up as the beat kicked in. After we had completed our video we did a directors commentary which consisted of phil explaining why and how we achieved various things in our video. we did this through the camera provided by the college and a microphone. Overall i think we took full advantage of the technology provided especially in the construction stage whilst we were editing and filming.

The magazine advert for the release of the single is heavily linked in with the CD case as it has the same picture used in the advert for the back of the CD case. We did this as the advert is advertising a part of the CD so we resembled this with a visual aspect of the case and onto the advert creating a clear link from the work to the advertising of it. Without us over advertising something it shows what you see is what you get and this is what the streets have always carried out within there advertising. They have a narrow but popular range of working class, anti social and youthful audience. The streets appear to this audience as almost a representative with there music and as a group we have tried to add this in as much as possible. The video was mainly about the story and our personal touch on the narrative however with the rural background constant, a rather angry protagonist, youthful actors and streetwise clothing this helped the reputation of the working class come through. Similar to this was the keys features to both the CD case and the magazine advertisement, as in both there was a picture of Liam appearing to urinate in public against a wall. The picture shows that careless angry anti social behaviour which the streets represent. In contrast the other aspects to the CD case differ with a couple of shots taken from our video that represent the story that unfolds in our music video showing a clear link again. The magazine advert is purposely not using any typical persuasive devices to attract consumers but basically uses declarative statements resembling the streets and as I have said before what you see with the advert is what you get. So the audience that already know the streets does not need a poster to spectacularly overturn opinions but with this controversial band usually you either like them or you don’t and as shown with its limited range of audience.

We had a very positive feedback with the video with people especially saying that they liked the start this made us think as a group is our video strong throughout we asked people to look at our video in detail and asked them for any suggestions on how to improve our timeline. We looked at our video and decided that it was very dull towards the end so we had to make a change we edited our video towards the end and put a reverse effect in to help the audience understand our intentions behind the twist in the narrative. We was very pleased with our progress after the first audience feedback but we wanted to make sure that this was the best piece of work that we can do so we asked people to look at our work again and see if they had any ideas on how to build on our work. The response was very minimum so we knew that we had to look for ourselves and see if we can become more creative with our editing so we look at the streets video of dry your eyes mate and looked at the editing we noticed the quick editing and the fast cuts to the beat at the end and we decided we wanted to use this in our video. We had already decided on our ending and didn’t want to change that so we used the fast cut rate on the beat in the middle of our video but the biggest problem with this idea is that we did not have enough footage to make it work. Me and Sam went out and got more footage of me lip syncing the song and walking down streets that looked run down this actually worked better than we first thought showing a passing of time and makes the audience feel more sympathy towards me before they seen the whole story. Our first ideas for this video was to twist the narrative and play with the audiences emotions and after our first audience reaction we believe that we did not achieve this and that was heartbreaking for us because we wanted our video to be special and unique. And our first edit of our video and after we put in the reverse effect we believed we achieved this but there was still something missing after the second edit we added the effects of the streets video and gave the video a personal touch and because of the strong beat in the song it made this piece of editing look very strong. After we finished this we wanted our audience reaction to be very strong so we asked people for their honest opinion on our video and if they had any ideas for improvement and I am proud to say that they all said that they couldn’t think of anything.

today we worked on our cd covers we already decided to use a picture of me leaning against the wall and also a picture of me urinating agaisnt the wall.We decided to us this as our front and back cover to convay the style of the streets and try and bring in a lower class feel to the album.We decided today that for the mid pictures we are going to use pictures taken from the music video and it was phills idea to use elanor because we want the audience to feel sorry for her and not for me.The style of the pictures we are using of elanor to try and cofuse the reader we want to use a picture of elanor crying and a picture of elanor walking away.