Evaluation of Music Video

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

Our media product uses typical forms and conventions that other music videos of the same, or of a similar genre use by incorporating the conventional link between music and visuals. For example: The lip-syncing, dancing and in this case, enjoyable and funny visuals. Our music video is a mix between narrative based and performance based, and our interpretation of the lyrics from the song Truth or Dare is different to most other peoples, who might interpret it as being about a girl or love etc. We took it, and used it as an excuse to perform and execute as series of ‘dares’. By doing this, we challenged the conventions of many other music videos of the same genre, drawing our inspiration from such artists and Weezer, whose music video Pork and Beans made us want to do dares such as mentos & coke. Despite a lot of the stunts we attempted being cut out of the final version of the video, we still maintain that videos like Pork and Beans were our primary inspiration.

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

The main theme we decided to use for the music video was the idea of incorporating comedy into a rock music video, which included the use of morph-suits in the video as well as performing stunts to the lyrics of the song. In order to parallel with the final shot in the music video, our first album cover concept was of the three morph-men walking away from the camera. However, unlike in the video itself, the three men were not wearing their morph-suits. The idea for this was a parody of Eminem’s album Recovery, where it depicts the artist walking on a road to recovery. However, we decided to do the same but instead depicting the three men on their own ‘road to recovery’, having gotten over their sudden lack of judgement and sanity with the morph-suits. However, this idea was scrapped as it was a single instead of an album cover. Instead, because the album cover isn’t just for the song Truth or Dare, we decided to go for a more classic approach by using a ‘pink spider’ (name of the band, The Pink Spiders) chasing after the members of the band. Their shadows would instead be the colours of the morph-suits, because the song Truth or Dare would be the main song on the album. For the magazine advert, we decided to go for a more minimalist approach, by simply putting the lead singer of the band on a pink background whilst holding the morph-suits in his hands. We knew we couldn’t make the morph-suits from the music video the main focus for everything, so instead we decided to put it in the ads and album covers as a subtle reference, rather than a main focus.

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

From the audience feedback after the viewing of our music video, we learnt that they enjoyed the fact that it incorporated comedy into the video, saying that it is unconventional and keeps the audience glued to the screen and laughing the entire way through. We also learnt that it still demonstrated the genre of the song, and contained accurate lip-syncing that made the video have a more rock ‘n’ roll feel. The scenes where we sped up the men in the morph-suits were also praised, saying that they added to the humour. They also enjoyed the opening sequence, which was entirely improvised. It introduced the song and the content inside, giving a reason behind why the men were doing stunts in morph-suits, rather than just doing stunts.

However, there were things we could have improved on. For example, in the editing process, we could have used more filters to give the video a more ‘professional’ feel. Also, the lip-syncing shots where the lead singer was dancing could have been livelier; it made the video seem a little more boring at times than it should have been.

 I’ve learnt that the idea of the music video was good; the idea of incorporating comedy in a rock video worked and was successful. However, it lacked a professional feel, and I’ve learnt that if I was today do it again, then more time must be put in to the editing process rather than just the filming.

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

When planning the video, we used a digital camera to take location shots and practice shots of what we hoped to use in the final video itself. We also used blogger.com to document our progress on the video, and its construction etc.

We used Sony HD Camcorders to film the video itself, and then edited the footage on Final Cut Express, which was an invaluable resource in finishing the video. When creating the digi-pak and the magazine advert, we again used the digital cameras and Adobe Photoshop to take the pictures and edit them to our own specifications.

We then used blogger.com again to evaluate our process, video and gain feedback from other groups.