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.

Today we have been putting the final touches to our cd cover and magazine advert such as adding the barcode, track listings and the 'streets' signiture emblem of a lighter to our cd covers. We have done some research on The Streets and notcied that they usually use a urban street theme for their cd covers. So we decided to do the same, we used the image of liam leaning on the wall for the front cover and the image where liam appears to be urinating up the wall for the back cover. For the other two images in the digi pack we used two shots from the music video.

the streets cd cover research

We looked for some of the streets old covers for his CD's and after looking at some of them deduced that most of his CD's covers were pictures taken in urban enviroments the images will be included below. We felt that these images would help us to create our own unique CD cover, but also wanted to imply the importance of having an urban background.

CD Cover preparation

Having proudly finished our music video we started our next challenge of creating a digipac. We had ideas already but just as a back up I have found some of my own album covers and have seen the consistant look throughout all four of the covers sides. Some however have a similar back and front but a different look inside the cd case, this is the format we will be using. Here are some pictures of albums with a consistant look :-

Cd Cover Images

Today me liam and phil went out to take a few possible photos for the front and back covers of our cd whilst Bilal added the final touches to our music video. We have decided to use a urban location as seen in the images above. The image top left where Liam appears to be urinating up the wall has been used to show his anti social and rebellious nature, this image may be used for the back cover, whislt the second image may be used for the front cover of our CD

Green screen re-think

Having seen the quality what we have achieved with the green screen already our original idea of a lighter then darker background seemed very bland. We talked and decided that the green screen can now play an instumental role in our video, with its emotion from Liam and the background dictating the mood. We have gone for a background with his supposed girlfirend and others of the city which I went and took photos of as you can see.

These are simple shots of trams, an everyday burden on normal citylife. We will speed a median shot up, giving pace and working class feel.
Both shots are going to be similar to the tram shots. The clock will fast forward putting the emphasis on time and the amount of it Liam has wasted on looking sad, giving him sympathy. The second shot is used for the same reason this is a shot of were we will film people walking by, then speed it up, emphasising the amount of time.

These shots should be able to reflect the blurry mindset that Liam has.

The final shot I decided to film off of my phone, it is a shot from the the bench (that has dominated our timeline). Its a 360 degree upwards tilt of the bench's surroundings and once again gives a working class feel to it again.

More shots

The last week has been difficult in terms of the amount of quality footage we actually had on our timeline. It worried us that we had not foreseen this problem of lack of shots. We decided to come together and rethink our stratergy of the middle of the timeline. We did however come together as a team as we went out and decided that more of an urban background was needed in relation to the band, so me Liam and Sam went to various locations and shot Liam lipsyncing from many angles with the view of changing angle on every beat keeping an appropriate fast pace to this part of the song. Whilst Bilal stayed at colllege and managed to create quality affects to the start of our video.

editing

We worked on our greenscreen shots of our video we used a freezeframe of Eleanors face when she walks away. To do this we did a freezframe using quicktime conversion of Eleanors face as she looked back. We used desaturate to take the colour out of the video,and chroma key to take out the green screen but keep a bit of colour in me. Another background we did was me and eleanor walking in slow motion with a desaturated screen and also another filter called vignette which we used to blur the screen darken it on one side etc. For example when we changed the scene to the drum beat.

This week we finished capturing the footage filmed in the previous week and then started to put it into the timeline. we tried to keep each individual clip short, ideally less then two seconds but found that some shots were better suited to being slightly longer. During the week we filled up over half the timeline but concluded that due to a shortage of footage we would need to film some more footage. Wne of the main reasons for wanting to go film again was due to needing the original scenes from several angles and perspectives so that our idea of messing around with the narrative would work. We also decided that we would first complete the timeline and then move on to the main editing, for example black and white colour where we filmed the green screen, doing fade ins and fade outs in between clips etc. Although we had filmed the whole song in green screen, we decided against showing liam singing in a few verses per chorus as it looked too vague and only a few times throughout the song. Even though the previous post said that we wouldn't include any speed ups due to the traffic on the road we managed to get 2 speed ups, firstly of liam sitting on the bench from across the road and a low angle of liam on the bench and we found we had just enough footage for those clips. We also included a freezeframe in the timeline. we will continue editing in the next few lessons and finish of the timeline

Bench Scene

Today in my opinion was one of our more productive days not only did we, get a minute of good footage edited onto the timeline but we were also able to film one of the final scenes on a bench in the Town centre. We took numerous shots of Liam walking up to and sitting down on the bench from different angles and distance such as on the other side of the road, we decided to film on the other side of the road from the bench with the hope that we could speed up the vehicles passing up and down the road and keep liam on the bench at normal speed to give the impression that that time was moving quickly but liam is a world of his own, isolated and alone. Unfortunantly this did not work out according to plan, we did not expect so many vehicles to be passing up and down the road, this resulted in us only being able to vaugley see Liam when across the road. We decided to scrap the idea of filming on the other side of the road and use the speeding up effect at some other point in the film. When we arrived back at college we captured the footage we had filmed. Next lesson we will edit it and put it onto the timeline.

we captured the rest of the footage that we got last lesson and we needed to get a shot list for our most important scene. The scene is me siting on a local bench after being dumped by eleonor this scene needs to show my innocent side as we are thinking of using the scene twice to reveal the truth thats why we took time in designing this shotlist because of its importance.

1.Liam sat on bench- fast forwarding around me

2.High angle of lyrics on bench

3.Close up- tears

4.Close up- lyrics

5.Differnt camera angles to show vulnerability = sympathy

Lip-sync

Knowing our band choice the Streets were an urban band with the genre of garage we decided to film actor Liam lip syncing in an urban enviroment. We did a continious tracking shot of Liam singing all verses mostly tracking the front of his face going against the backdrop of Mosside in Manchester, also we filmed his side and then on the path we had been filming on we found a way to get a great high angle view of Liam walking along this path which we filmed.

The cheating scene

Having found an actress and a cafe we decided to film the cheating scene. With already seeing Liam having a girlfriend this date shows him to be unfaithful, we established it was a date through using flirtacious acting by both characters for example hugs, holding hands and seemingly flirty communication.We shot a close up to show Liams guilty conscience, a medium shot also a over the shoulder shot to show both actors enjoying the date and point of view shots to exaggerate the closeness of the date. Liam also sang lyrics from the song whilst in a Olivia's point of view shot as it was appropraite for his thoughts when on this date.

Here are some photos that we took when filming such as the establishing shot of the cafe, point of view and over the shoulder as you can see :-

Today we Decided that the office scene we filmed last lesson would not be suitible for our music video. So we have decided to have a cafe scene instead, we went to local cafes to an available area for our next lesson.

Cheating Scene Shot List

Due to some complications, we decided to get another actress to play girl B (Olivia). This is our shot list for the cheating scene

Filmed in An Office

• Over the shoulder shot of olivia on computer.
• Medium shot of Olivia on the computer.
• Tracking shot of liam with his folder
• Close up of folder thrown on to desk.
• Low Angle tilt up to Olivia's face.
• A shot from Olivia's point of view of Liam to a tracked close up of the folder.

Filmed outside the toilets

• Long shot of Liam waiting outside toilet.
• Tracking shot behind Olivia.
• Medium shot of Olivia pushing Liam into the toilet.
• Medium to close up shot of liam going into toilet and looking into camera.

We have also started to edit our footage using Final Cut Pro. So that we can determine which pieces of footage we are going to use and cut out the unneccessary parts. We also changed the green screen footage of Liam singing by taking out the colour and making it more black and white

We decided to reseach the streets and there albums to learn more about the style of music we was using to create are music video. We learnt that the streets is the stage name of Michael Geoffery Skinner a rapper from birmignham,england and it is said that he has a variety of genres from UK Garege to Electronica so we decided to do most of our filming on the streets to resemble the rapper mike skinner. We looked at three other videos from mike skinner we looked at fit but you know it and blinded by the lights these videos had very precise lyrics and we didnt want to feal like we was being obstructed by following the lyrics after we picked dry your eyes mate and we came up with some ideas for a storyline for a music video. We learnt that the streets use differnt styles in their videos and dont stay with the same format so we want to do some differnt to the other groups so we decide to change the order of the scenes to change the audiences reaction to the lead charecter. Here is a link to the music video of our song choice http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHOf3s70w-c

Shots for 7th October

The scene where girl 1 Eleanor (girlfriend of Liam) dumps Liam

Shot list

-A long shot of Liam and Eleanor walking in a park. Showing a strong relationship.
-A medium shot of Liam checking his phone and smiling. Shot of phone with a message from another girl (split shot with both takes on either side).
-A medium shot of Eleanor taking the phone and shouts at Liam.
-Over the shoulder shot of Eleanor slapping Liam.
-A medium shot of her pushing Liam. A point of view shot of a push on Liam.
-Point of view shot of Eleanor walking away.
-A close up of Liam looking down (hurt) but then a phone shot of him texting the other girl.
-Close up of Eleanor turning to show sympathy.


We can give the interpretation here that Liam is hard done by with Eleanor attacking him and finishing him whilst he can be made to look sorry, but at the end of the narrative we will reveal him to be the bad guy by showing him texting another girl and when he is looking "hurt" he is acctually looking at his phone showing a bad interpretation of him.


We are happy to report that we filmed most shots well in a slightly different order and having Eleanor throw the phone making us alter our planned shot as we had to track Liam going to pick up the phone, we also added in other tracking shots. The only things we missed out were the close up of the phones as of our limited time but this can easily be done another time.

Monday 5th October

Liam learnt the song “Dry your eyes mate” by the Streets and sang it all while being filmed with a green screen backdrop.
We took numerous shots and filmed from numerous angles such as filming it all with a medium shot along with various low angle, high angle, close ups, multiple wide angles and did side angles throughout.
We edited the footage down and the majority is satisfactory. We are looking into using a clear white background and adding the shots in throughout the song.

Today we made our way to town to view and photograph some possible locations for our music video. We found numerous parks in which we are contemplating filming our bench scene where Liam (the main actor) resides to after being dumped by his girlfriend (Eleanor).We took pictures of the bench from numerous angles as when filming it will be done from different perspectives. The shot of the 5th avenue is a possible location for our club scene.The Park picture is where we will do the breaking up scene (between liam and Eleanor) Here aresome pictures we took

This is the drafted timeline of our music video

1. Liam on bench

2. Slap

3. Stumbles to bench

4. Liam gets dumped

5. Slap

6. Stumbles to bench

7. Liam on bench

8. Liam cheating

9. Liam getting dumped

10. Slap

11. Syumbles to bench

12. Liam on bench, Liam meets girl that he cheated with

we have played around with the narrative by repeating specific scenes.

In the first few lessons we decided that the main protagonist would be liam. We researched a few different songs and came to a conclusion to use a slow song such as, "The Streets, Dry Your Eyes" or "Just Jack, The Day I Died". However after looking at the lyrics we decided that the first song would be better suited to what we wanted to do. We have also been looking at other "The Streets" videos to compare contrasting styles. First we looked at "Blinded by the lights" and "Fit But You Know it". From this we learned that the videos themselves portrayed a story and it helped us with how we wanted to film it.