Music Video Production Evaluation

Music Video Production Evaluation

Firstly, I researched different genres of music videos for many hours to get inspiration and to see the conventions of music videos, these conventions being based on the conventions of Andrew Goodwin [1]. There were many music videos that caught my eye and gave me a lot of ideas that I could use, for example videos such as Basshunter - 'Now Your Gone', as this has a narrative of a boy and girl falling in love. This song also created a trilogy of music videos that included a narrative that followed on from the first single, 'Now Your Gone.' After researching many music videos, I got into a group and we created a treatment. Whilst creating the treatment we discussed what age group our music video would be aimed at, we decided that teenager and young adults would be our target audience. Choosing the song was a difficult task as there were many songs that we all liked, in the end we all decided to choose ‘Love is Gone’ by David Guetta as it could be used to create an interesting video due to the lyrics as it is a understandable story. It is also a dance track and many teenagers and young adults are into dance music, so we thought that this would be appealing.

We then created a storyboard to show how the music video would look when it is filmed and edited. The storyboard didn’t take long to create as it was easy and there were four people to help draw, and we shared different scene between each other.

We were then showed by our Media teacher and one of the schools Media experts how to using an editing software. The software that was chosen for us to use was Final Cut Express. We had 2 to 3 lessons practising on Final Cut Express. These lessons included learning how to:
Create a split screen
Change the speed of the video
Change the colours of objects

After finishing the tutorials we made a short video based on a girl getting a drink. After filming this we used Final Cut Express to edit this video. This went well as I found that using the editing software was easy to use. It was also easy to pick up.
We then created an animatic, this is a video that is the same length as the song, and our storyboard is used so we know when to edit different scenes. To do this we scanned our storyboard images into Final Cut Express and fitted them into the music. This was to show how the video would look when it was completed.
After completing the animatic we created a shot list.

This contained a list of all the shots we needed to film and the order they would be filmed in. This list made sure that we had everything we needed and that we knew what we were doing.
My group and I then went out into Wem to shoot the footage that would become our video.We had restrictions as we didn't have the funding that a professional video would have. We needed many sessions to film as our lessons are an hour long and this wasn’t enough time to film a whole video. Our teacher decided to let us have 3 lessons to film, as this would be a substantial amount of time to film. There were some issues in filming our music video, as we decided that our video didn’t make sense [3]. Creating a new idea took time as we had already shot a lot of the video. We then made a different music video to the one on the storyboard, but we decided to make the video around the shots we had already filmed, this was difficult to do, but we all worked as a team and shot the remainder of the footage.
After filming for the first time we edited what we had so we could figure out what needed to be done. This didn’t take long as we only edited bits of the video down to show what the whole scene was about, we didn’t edit it properly as this could be done in the final editing process. [4]
We then proceeded to film our missing scenes in another 3 lessons; it took this long to film the remaining footage, as we wanted to make sure that we had enough footage to last a 3-minute song.
After completing the footage 3 lessons later we started to edit the video. This would take a while as we wanted to make sure that the video looked professional and that the transitions between each piece of footage were smooth. We then ran out of time to edit and it had to be completed in after school sessions lasting 1 hour.

My music video will be promoted by the artist being on radio stations, having interviews with magazines. It will also hopefully be on MTV One, as they have a series of Making Of. They can also produce a Video Diary of the making of the video and post this on their website. Their official Facebook, Bebo and Twitter sites can also show what they are doing. The official video could be played on the official artists website rather than Youtube, due to copyright constraints. This constraint would not allow us to put our video on Youtube.

It will be distributed on MTV Dance, The Box, Flaunt, TMF, Clubland and Youtube. These are all dance channels and Youtube is a site for all types for music. It will be used on these channels as the music is a dance genre.

The scene where Tim is in the toilet may be harmful to viewers as it looks like there is brief nudity, or sexual content due to the connotations of a young boy being on the toilet reading an 'Arts and Crafts' magazine. There was no intention for this to happen as it was just meant to look like a boy was on the toilet reading a magazine.


Altogether I think that the process of shooting the footage was successful, but I also think that if our group had worked together better we would have had more timing perfecting the editing. The sound in the middle of the video, where the song is faded, could have been recorded in a classroom in silence so you could hear it better, as when we were out filming there was a lot of background noise which was hard to drown out. I think that the final video was very good and I am proud that I created a whole music video on a software I had never used before.

Footnotes:

1. Andrew Goodwin decided on 6 conventions of music, these being:

· Music videos demonstrate genre characteristics. (E.g. a dance routine in a girl/boy band.)
· There is a relationship between lyrics and visuals.
· There is a relationship between music and visuals.
· The demands of the record label will include the need of many close ups of the artists and the artist may develop motifs which will recur across their work.
· There is frequently reference to notion of looking (screens within screens, telescopes etc.) and particularly voyeuristic treatment of the female body.

· There is often intertextual reference to films, TV shows and other music videos

The images are taken from The Scripts song Talk You Down and from Warriors Dance by The Prodigy. These are some of the videos that we researched. There are also shots from our filming.

2. The video would appeal to our target audience, as the people included in the video are the same age as the target audience. The narrative of a relationship breaking down would appeal to our target audience, as our audience is teenagers and young adults. The people in the video are also good looking and could be come a teen icon, if they were spotted by any magazines.

3. Personalities clashed during the filming and our group divided into 3 people and myself. We split as we were having trouble deciding on a new idea, and some members of the group wanted one idea when the other part wanted another story. We decided that we had to work together as this would be the only way of making sure that the music video was shot as professionally as possible.

4. When it came to editing our footage, I had to use Final Cut Express, an editing software that I had never used before and had no knowledge of. I knew editing would be a challenge, but thanks to our teachers tutorials I found that Final Cut Express was an easy software to use. During the first editing stage, my computer decided the freeze and I therefore lost the work that I had been using. I had to move computers and copy all the footage back onto another computer. After copying all footage over I edited the video down to what was missing and what we needed to film.