In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Our music video is for a song called ‘All at sea’ by our unsigned and local artist Ally Newbigging. Ally Newbigging is a young, upcoming and very talented acoustic artist, and so we really wanted to put this across in our music video. Conventions for this genre can easily be found by looking at music videos for the similar sounding acoustic artist Ed Sheeran. For example, Ed Sheerans music video to the song ‘A Team’ is typical to the genre as it consists of black and white imagery that depicts the lyrics and the artist with his guitar.
In this part of our music video where we see the real Ally we wanted to conform to the conventions of the acoustic genre, firstly to make our audience aware exactly what sort of music Ally Newbigging will be producing and secondly as to be a contrast between this and our stop motion. As stated in our treatment, we wanted the video to reflect the simple and blissfully naive happy nature of childhood through our colourful and childlike stop motion in a soft yet obvious contrast to the more grown up and real feeling to our footage of Ally in the flesh as he reflects on an easier time while singing about themes concerned with a more mature person, in this case, love.
Like previously mentioned above, we conformed to the conventions of the genre, as displayed in existing music videos by artists such as Ed Sheeran, by putting our footage of Ally in black and white. I think this gives the footage a softer and relaxing tone, a feeling also associated with acoustic music.
We also used a lot of soft, fading transitions and overlays, which are another convention to the genre, as artists want to give a modern edge to their traditionally simple, yet amazing acoustic music.
When producing our stop motion, we challenged conventions by making everything used in our stop motion by hand using acrylic paint instead of using computer graphics. This was to reiterate the mood of childlike memories.
Like previously mentioned above, we conformed to the conventions of the genre, as displayed in existing music videos by artists such as Ed Sheeran, by putting our footage of Ally in black and white. I think this gives the footage a softer and relaxing tone, a feeling also associated with acoustic music.
We also used a lot of soft, fading transitions and overlays, which are another convention to the genre, as artists want to give a modern edge to their traditionally simple, yet amazing acoustic music.
When producing our stop motion, we challenged conventions by making everything used in our stop motion by hand using acrylic paint instead of using computer graphics. This was to reiterate the mood of childlike memories.
How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
I believe that the combination of our main production and ancillary texts are effective because of the way they link together to promote our artist Ally Newbigging. Firstly, we took into consideration the style and genre of music Ally Newbigging fits into. Again, looking at similar artists such as Ed Sheeran, we can see that the conventions of the genre are to keep the promotions, such as music videos, adverts and digi packs simple yet effective, as this reflects the genre of acoustic music, therefore, mainly conforming to these conventions I think the combination of our main product and ancillary texts becomes effective as it appears it would be a successful, real media product.
When creating our advert and digi pack, we used original images of Ally looking out to Sea to reflect, firstly, the title of the song we were promoting, and secondly the action of looking slightly behind him and out to the vast ocean echoes the theme from our music video of the narrative through looking back at childhood memories.
Furthermore, on all the images used of Ally we tried out different effects on them such marker, chalk sketch, pencil grayscale, pencil sketch, line drawing and pastels smooth. We wanted to use these effects because of our stop motion being hand painted and drawn so it fitted together perfectly. Apart from these effects, we wanted to keep our advert and digi pack simple to compliment the simplicity of our music video, but still be enticing.
When creating our advert and digi pack, we used original images of Ally looking out to Sea to reflect, firstly, the title of the song we were promoting, and secondly the action of looking slightly behind him and out to the vast ocean echoes the theme from our music video of the narrative through looking back at childhood memories.
Furthermore, on all the images used of Ally we tried out different effects on them such marker, chalk sketch, pencil grayscale, pencil sketch, line drawing and pastels smooth. We wanted to use these effects because of our stop motion being hand painted and drawn so it fitted together perfectly. Apart from these effects, we wanted to keep our advert and digi pack simple to compliment the simplicity of our music video, but still be enticing.
What have you learned from your audience feedback?
After the audience feedback from our treatment, we learnt that the audience wanted more to relate to than just 2 minutes of stop motion; therefore it was from this particular audience feedback that we decided to incorporate the real life footage of our artist Ally Newbigging in our music video. Originally, we wanted to put snippets of Ally in amongst our stop motion, but a general consensus was that we should have the footage of Ally separate to our stop motion, and only at the beginning and the end of our video, and I think this worked out really well.
How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and
Evaluation stages?
Firstly we used new media technologies when completing research and planning by using the internet to view existing real media products to take into consideration when deciding how we should create our own music video. Firstly, we watched several videos by our biggest influence, and one of our artists Ally Newbiggings musical influences, Ed Sheeran. We viewed videos such as ‘A Team’ and ‘You need me, I don’t need you’. Via Youtube, we were also able to view music videos in a similar genre such as songs by the Script and You Me At Six.
Ed Sheeran, A Team
You Me At Six, No one does it better
The Script, Breakeven
During construction, the biggest new technology we used was a software programme called iStopMotion. iStopMotion enabled us to make the already lengthy process of creating a stop motion sequence a lot more efficient, constant and professional looking video at ease. This new technology was really helpful because each time you took a new shot, an onion layer of the previous capture remained on the screen, meaning we could make our stop motion as smooth as possible.
Another new technology we used was Final Cut Pro. As we are in our second year, this time around we were a lot more confident in using more styles of editing within the programme to achieve better results in our video. For example, we used a lot more transitions, corrected any lighting issues with colour correction to improve on the continuity and experimented with overlays to give our music video an edge.
