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 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?
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 by adding more fillters and 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.
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