Evaluation of Music Video

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Our aim was to show the humourous side of music video's we took inspiration from existing video's such as 'Fluorescent Adolescent - Arctic Monkey's' and 'Stay Awake - Example' . I believe this idea challenged the concept of real media products, as no other existing music video has used morphsuits. Therefore, I believe this supports the claim that we challenged the forms and conventions as instead of intepreting the single as a song about love, we used it as an excuse to perform daring and humour-based stunts. Despite many of our stunts getting cut, such as the mentos and cola took from 'Weezer - Pork and Beans'.

How effective is the combination of your main product and ancilliary texts?
The main project centred around morphsuits, so they figure alot in our music video, however we could only hint at this in our magazine advert and digipak cover - as we needed to show a full reflection of the band and not just about the single. In order to parallel with the last scene in the video of the three morph-men walking away from camera, we used 'Eminem's Recovery' album for inspiration. This showed the artist walking away from the camera, indicating his road to recovery after his drug problems. We wanted to parody this with our own road to recovery, shedding ourselves of the antics performed in the morph-suits for a final time. However, this approach was scrapped and replaced with the idea of incorporating a spider turned pink in keeping with the bands name. We knew, the digipak and advertisement couldn't heavily side with the idea of the morphsuits as we had to show the bands image as a whole.

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?
I have learnt how vital the lip-synching is to the music video, and also the importance of having a structure to our work and filming as well as a contigency plan if anything goes wrong. This is where we fell down in our project, as we were rushed to finish by the deadline. To develop our idea, we were encouraged to include more daring scenes with the morph-suits if we were to do it again. Time constraints restricted what we could include, therefore it didnt look as good as we hoped. Furthermore, to be more creative with the lip-synching, because with lack of time, the background looked quite bland. Whereas with a bit more thought and time on our side, we had ideas of filming in Cambridge town centre and places around college.

How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
When planning and taking test shots/footage for our initial ideas we used a digital camera, this enabled us to take multiple pictures to use in the planning stage. We also used 'blogger.com' to document our progress and post relevant images and test footage we had taken. We used a Sony HD Camcorder to film our video and then edited our crafted these clips using Final Cut Express, this became an invaluable piece of software for us, especially when cutting and editing our footage as the deadline approached. Lastly, we used Adobe Photoshop we created both our digipak cover and magazine advertisement.