Jodi Page's Music Video Evaluation

Music Video Evaluation – Jodi Page


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

In our music video we have linked the song lyrics to our video by using a narrative. Andrew Goodwin writing in ‘Dancing in the Distraction Factory’ (Routledge 1992) states that music videos demonstrate genre characteristics and that there is a relationship between lyrics and visuals, these are two of the six points Goodwin feels is needed to successfully analyse a music video.
The narrative is of a girl thinking of the singer due to their previous breakup. Her emotions are all over the place and during the video the singer appears in locations with her to represent her subconscious thought. Our music video typifies the way a record company would want their artist to be portrayed, by trying to create a realistic and down to earth performance. The genre of our video is indie rock so we tried to present this via costume design, equipment and overall mise-en-scene, such as the location of the car park roof. In our video we have used a wide variations of camera shots from close-ups to long shot, this helps towards making the video much more varied and reduces the chance of the audience loosing interest in the video. To help with this we have also used still shots and panning to create movement and a point of interest in our video. In part on the video we created the look of a security camera, this was to add realism to the fact the singer was following the girl everywhere.
At the planning stage of our video we focused on 3 real music videos for inspirations towards the creation of our own storyboard for our video. The first video was by ‘Wyclef Jean – gone till November (1998)’ this video showed one woman’s regret in life about a man, and this man shows up a lot during her days. This influenced our idea of having the singer as the girls’ subconscious thoughts. The other two videos that played a big role in our storyboard were ‘Bowling for Soup – girl all the bad guys want (2002)’ and ‘Fountain of Wayne – Stacey’s Mom (2003)’. In both these videos they have super imposed footage onto an object, in these cases a television screen, of the band playing. We have used this in our final videos in scenes such as when the girl is looking at a photo frame, and also as she is walking past a shop, she is unaware that the band is playing on the TV screen in the shop window.
In our digipack cover we have used such features of barcodes, record labels, websites, production team and overall images of the band, this ensures our digipack is original and realistic to the audience. In our magazine advert we have included release dates, rating and reviews to provide the audience with key information.

How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

In combinations with our main products and ancillary texts we have located images of the band into both our digipack and magazine advert, we used the same image to emphasize the photo and allows the audience to automatically define that photo to the band itself. On both our ancillary texts we have used a white masking tape overlay as a background for our text. This relates to the genre of the music and also allows the band to have a characteristic in all their products that people with remember and resemble that masking tape effect with the band. This all comes down to trying to pin point areas where we can guarantee the audience will remember their band etc. the images of the band on both ancillary texts are of woodlands scenes with the two bands member in them, the woodland scenes represent the name of the band ‘I was a cub scout’ as cub scouts are portrayed to generally be around a camp fire and our in the open etc.

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Overall our feedback for our rough cut was to add more narrative, this was because our rough cut was just the basic footage of the band playing on the car park roof. However we took the advice onboard and filmed different locations of narrative. Feedback from our final video showed the class felt the techniques of super imposing were used well in our video. And also in our ancillary texts the use of the masking tape trademark was well presented. Negative feedback included that the photograph in our magazine advert came across slightly stretched, however the good points override the negative with most of the class saying the use of information and the attention to detail were really effective.


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

During the planning stage we tried to contact the band for inspiration via facebook and myspace, however due to the splitting up of their band we did not get a reply. However we found even just trying to contact the band gave us a much-needed insight into the bands life and their background. Youtube allowed us to view previous music videos the band had produced and also to watch live performances. The programmes we used to construct and edit our video were final cut, for the overall construction and editing of the video. We used Photoshop for the digipack and magazine advert. Throughout the editing process we tried to blog all our work and add screen grabs of our work to explain and demonstrate our progress. To film our spoken evaluation we chose to have Damien and Bobby creating the roles as the two-band member with me as the interviewer, asking them the vital questions. In all our filming we used a standard digital video camera, and then a stills camera for the ancillary texts images.