JR - Question 4

Question 4

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JR - Question 2

Our brief was to create an advertisement to promote our track, we had three print works to complete these were; tour poster, digipak and an advert for the track.  Our ads were designed to be promoted in several forms of advertising, from magazines such as Q. We set to draw attention by the use of bright colourful collection of colours with this it was more likely to draw attention to the product in which we were trying to sell.

The use of bold black writing allowed us to catch the eye of the reader as the dominant reading path is exploited to draw they eye to name of the album and artist. With the digipak we used a large image so it would draw the attention of the viewer to build up an enigma around the artist. The tour poster was also the image of the singer which draws attention then to the tour dates and locations.

Constructing meaning into the print work was difficult as meaning is difficult to build whilst only using still images, and the use of semiotics can help explain the meaning. In the digipak we used many different styles of hearts to connate the love and passion behind the title ‘marry you’ with the concept of marriage.

Also of the digipak there is an enigma code between the two images, the audience ask if there is a correlation between the pair or not, they ask themselves questions which are answered later in the music video therefore it acts as a method of attracting the audience. There is also a sense of cultural code in the digipak due to the ring which is representative of marriage. The ring is also a symbolic code in which shows the marriage concept and improves upon it. Analysis of the tour poster in the same way, there is little symbolic code and it is more of an advert to promote the artist rather than the track.

The track promotion poster is a lot more symbolic than the tour poster as there is lack of the artist present, therefore promotes Dyers Star image that says a star has to be absent but present, and this is apparent in our advert as he maybe in the car, as he could be in the car driving towards the city.

JR - Question 1

Using Goodwin’s critical framework we can identify the features of a music video, and see if our project can be classes and a music video. Firstly Goodwin’s framework looks at the genre characteristics of the video, our genre is Pop, this is where Bruno Mars would be placed therefore we based ours upon this genre.

In our video, we have most of the primary characteristics of a pop music video, mainly those of Bruno Mars, these are; a leader singer who has most screen time, however there is also a narrative alongside the performance. The use of close ups are also widely used in the genre of pop as the artist is selling themselves in an advertising manner. 

The next feature of a music video is if there is a relationship between the lyrics and visuals, in our production there is a clear correlation between the lyrics and visuals, for example a set of lyrics ‘Let’s just run girl’ with this we use a visual of the singer singing the line and had a fade over of the girl running. The visuals are seen to be illustrative as most of them represent the lyrics, however there is a key focus on the love and passion felt throughout the song, so with this we placed a ranged of images of relationship based narrative.

In a music video the record label demands will include; the need for many different close ups of the artist; and that the artist may develop motifs which recur across their work this could be anything from tattoos to a rebellious attitude, however in our production the visual motif is not of the same as the real artist of the song, Bruno Mars is known for his big hair style, ray band sunglass and trendy hat wear, but with our interpretation we took this image and created our own smart version of Bruno. We decided to dress Loui (Our Bruno) is a smart blazer with a casual pair of coloured jeans, this gave an indie feel to our piece with fell away from the norm of pop culture, we got this idea from another Bruno Mars video ‘Grenade’ in which Bruno is dress very smartly pulling alone a piano.

The notion of looking is to see the artist through another form within the video itself (screens within screens, through a mirror etc). In our production we did not have any notion of looking as it was not a conventional factor to a Bruno Mars song therefore we felt it would be inappropriate to place a notion of looking into our video. However our video is voyeuristic in that it has a large amount of hegemonic-relationship with a boy meeting a girl, falling in love and running off together to get married, a very stereotypical concept to society.

Our production is Narrative/Performance based as we have a strong narrative of a couple running around having fun and the artist performing in an internal location which differs from that of the external locations of the romance. The representation of the couple can be seen by a large variety of different angle and shots with this we created a narrative which people could relate to, to which followed the concepts of which other Bruno Mars video took suit.

Our media production can be seen to connote love and romance in the different shots of stock animation creating a heart; this is also symbolic in that it allows the audience to feel to relationship between the girl and boy. The text is polysemic (Stuart Hall, 2000), in that it is closed to interpretation due to strong lyrics about relationship and being together with the one you love ensuring that the audience feel the same message throughout our performance and narrative. Also in our production it can be seen that there are several binary opposition (Levis-straiss), these are: boy and girl, outside and inside. Using semiotics to deconstruct the text, we can see that we have symbolic coding with the heart and also one lexical sign at the beginning where we used stop animation to spell out ‘marry me?’.

We have a large amount of iconic signs mainly love hearts with signify the concept of love and marriage which is represented in the girl being in a white dress and veil which enforces this connotation of marriage and love.

ZS EVALUATION Question Four

Blogger

We used blogger to store all of our research, ideas and filming updates in one easy acccesible place. Blogger was useful as we were able to embed links to video clips from websites such as www.youtube.com. It also enabled us to put pictures into our work, this was very useful when we wanted to show the rest of the group a still of a particular shot which inspired us or wanted to try and replicate.

Another advantage of using blogger is that we were able to comment on the posts which a member of our group uploaded. This was particularly useful in our research phase of production because we could share ideas and comment on each other’s work so that we could make collaborative decisions on what ideas to use or discard.

Blogger is an online site, which means that without access to the internet you cannot upload any work, this is why it is important to plan when you are going to do each piece of research and put it onto the blog otherwise it I easy to fall behind.

We also found that on blogger our background picture meant that the font was difficult to see, therefore we went through all of our previous posts and highlighted the text in white. This was not a huge problem, but this time could have been spent doing something a little more productive.

Animatic

In our group the animatic was very important, although we did not stick to the shots which we originally thought, the animatic allowed us to see just how many shots we needed in order to cover all of our track. It was at this point that we realised just how many different shots are needed in a music video,  which is significantly more than was in our film opening for AS last year.

After watching the animatic we decided that our track was too long and we did not want to have to repeat the same shots so we used a music editing software programme to cut our music down by about 15 seconds. Although this does not seem very much, in terms of shots it is a significant amount. We would have never solved this problem so early on if it was not for the animatic.

Audience

We used ICT for our audience research by making a questionnaire on www.surveymonkey.co.uk and posting the link to our survey up on a popular social networking site, facebook. The survey was available to all of my friends on facebook, this was useful because the majority of the people who had access to it were teenage girls, which is the target audience or Bruno Mars.

Photoshop

I used photoshop for my print work, which was a four pane digipak. I started by downloading a template for this digipak and opening it in a blank photoshop document. We wanted to create a cohesive star image, to do this we wanted all of our ancillary products to have the same colour scheme. To do this I opened another member of my groups’ work next to mine and used the colour picker tool to select the exact same colours which they had used.

For the front and inside left pane I put a picture inside of a locket, however I did not want the whole of picture because it needed to fit into the shape of the locket to look realistic. To solve this problem I used the background eraser tool.  To use this I simply had to click on the parts of the picture which I wanted to blend into the background colour.

I also found that the pictures inside of the locket were too bright and did not fit in with the feel of the digipak. After experimenting with different effects on the pictures I settled on (name of effect) and adjusted the saturation and amount of pixels.

Premier

This year we used Premier elements 9.0 to edit our music video. We used several different post production editing techniques which were vital in making it look like a professional piece of work. An important tool which I used was the time stretch tool, to use this you simply had to select the tool and then stretch or shorten the clip by siding the end of it either left or right. This allowed us to speed up clips such as the performance shots of Bruno Mars. He had originally sung the lyrics too slowly so that the lip syncing was out of time, but with this tool we were able to fix it. We were also able to lengthen out clips, into slow motion, such as the leaves being thrown into the air, which gave it a dreamy and romantic feel.

I also used image control to up the saturation on the narrative shots so that they seemed brighter and livelier, especially in comparison to the performance shots. The performance shots were also edited in black and white to give it a stark contrast to the bright colours of the narrative which it cut into.

To make it seem as if there was more camera movement in the performance shots we used the earthquake tool to shake the screen slightly. However, it was important not to put the earthquake settings too high or it looks to obviously shaky.

We also used a transition effect called a cross fade between our performance and narrative shots, this meant that the transition between shots was smoother. It also meant that by moving the key frames we could have Bruno Mars’ face singing in the foreground of a performance shot which looked very effective. Although we did have problems with this, if the placement of the key frames were too drastically different from one another then the white balance would change meaning the image of Bruno Mars would go from very bright to very dark.

We also needed to make sure that the images’ opacity level was the same on these cross fades, we did this by selecting copy on the edited clips then right clicking on a unedited clip and selecting paste attributes, this was a lot quicker than editing each clip individually. If the opacity had been too low it would make him look like s ghostly figure which is not the romantic look we wanted.

Cameras

The HD cameras were easy to use for the majority of filming and the shots were of a good quality when we uploaded them to premier, however we did have a few problems with them.

It is nearly impossible to shoot at night with these cameras as they need a decent mount of lighting in order to pick up anything in the shot. Being winter it meant that it got dark very quickly so we needed to plan well ahead of our shoots so we could get all of the footage we needed well before it started to get dark.

The cameras also have a zoom button, however this is not very useful because it looks jerky and tacky. This meant that we had to shoot several of our shots from different lengths away to get the shot we originally hoped for.

Evaluation

We again used web 2.0 for our evaluation by putting a group of closed questions onto another questionnaire on survey monkey. This is also being circulated on Facebook so that people of the teenage age group can answer and we can compare them on survey monkey as you can see the amount of different responses and these can easily be transferred into graphs and charts. 

ZS EVALUATION Question one

Media Evaluation - Question 1 on Prezi

CR-Evaluation Question 2

The brief of our print production was to create a series of three print adverts; one digipak, one album poster, and a tour poster designed to be consumed in a magazine promoting a similar genre to that of our genre.

We set about creating a cohesive star image by sticking to a rough colour scheme of sunset orange and cream. We also stuck to the same title font so that audiences would be able to instantly recognise a black swirly font on a vibrantly coloured background as part of Bruno Mars' image. This colour scheme was similar to the colour scheme of Bruno Mars' previous album. I also used silhouettes of a cityscape and a car with the use of shadow following previous conventions. The images of the cityscape and car are disjunctured images from our song as neither feature lyrically or visually.


Text and image anchor each other with the colour of black and shadow on both text and image are similar and so anchor each other. As well as this the text fits around the images. Whilst conforming to the rule of thirds.


The leading line of my advertisement is the name of the artist, which is fairly post-modern as we are using the artist himself. The secondary line of advertisement is the title of the album to which our track belongs to, the third line is advertising the track as part of the album therefore using the music video to also advertise the album.


Using Dyer’s critical framework, my album poster follows his paradox theory, for example the poster does not feature an image thus the artist is not present however the visual motifs suggest the artists presence thus conforming to Dyers first paradox. The cityscape of New York makes the poster looks extra-ordinary however the cityscape was a silhouette thus making it seem more ordinary, creating a star image through my album poster.

CR- Evaluation Question 4

We used media products that allowed us to produce numerous presentations and online surveys using Prezi and Survey Monkey, we then distributed using Facebook to our target audience.


Some advantages of using the blog was that we were able to upload web based work onto it such as videos from which we took inspiration. However when uploading texts and image posts it was difficult to change the layout of the post because it has a web based format.


We used social networking sites such as Facebook to target our audiences and asking them what sort of product they would expect from a Bruno Mars music video.


Our animatic allowed us to place images from our storyboard onto our soundtrack, which allowed us to determine our cutting rate and variation of camera angles to keep the audience interested, this allowed us to plan our filming shots.





We used premiere elements to edit our music video using several editing techniques to make our final product. These editing techniques included time stretch for which I shortened the length of our stop animation sequences to make it look more professional. For shots with a lack of camera movement we used a function called earthquake set to a very low tremor. I also used some black and white effects on some performance shots helping to create distance between the performance and narrative.






Whilst editing, the editing software we chose found it difficult to render our project when our stills were added for the stop animation, on one occasion caused our computer to crash. What we decided to do is to carry on with the editing and save before we rendered, thus any potential of losing our work was minimalised, and the problem gradually sorted itself out.


I used techniques such as changes in level of opacity in particular of the shadows of the city scape and the car. I also used the layer style spray brush on the title 'Doowops and Hooligans' which is a vast improvement on my first draft because it is more transitional with the colours. I have also added a show effect on the other titles to help them stand out from the page. This poster follows the rule of thirds to an extent as titles begin in the furthest left thirds and continue towards the centre of the page. The city scape is also in the top right third thus conforming to the rule whilst also drawing attention to the text below.

The HD camera's were fine to use however if a shot location had a lack of lighting even in the slightest, the footage became grainy and dark making it hard to use in an attempt of a professional style.

During our evaluation we used ICT on many occasions. For our audience feedback we embedded our video onto Facebook as well as our questionnaire for which we used Survey Monkey which enabled us to reach a viral audience, however when we received our results we were unable to use the software's charts because we had not paid for the full version. For our collaborative post we used Prezi an online presentation software which enabled us to use web based software however it is quite temperamental and refuses to save and closes down without saving, and Facebook which allowed us to organise our workload virally and acted as a distributer for our audience research however it didn't give us much control over who took our survey. For question 1 I used Microsoft PowerPoint and Slideboom to get it into a web format for use on the blog. However this was very basic and allowed very little ingenuity, but it was very simple to use and reliable.

CR-Evaluation question1

Evaluation question 1

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Closed Questionnaire

This is the layout of our closed questions on our questionnaire. The questions inwhich we have asked are all the do with if we met our target audience or not.

Questionnaire

Click here to take survey

ZS Open questions for focus group

1. What aspect did you like the most?

2. What could be improved?

3. How authentic is the performance?

4. Explain the narrative

5. What is the meaning of the video?

Final Cut - Bruno Mars - Marry You

CR- Shot Feedback

Where, when, who, how long?


On the 30/11/2011 we went to our school field to film Zoe in a wedding dress costume running and spinning around in an attempt to produce some filler shots for our video.


What did we achieve?


We successfully achieved filming some filler shots which we have now integrated into our production. Thus giving us more footage to choose from.


What problems did we come across?


We were unable to film for too long because weather conditions were too cold to do extensive filming. We were also challenged with Mise-en-Scene as numerous sports facilities were present which we had to carefully frame.

CR- Final print production

With changes to my first draft I used techniques such as changes in level of opacity in particular of the shadows of the city scape and the car. I also used the layer style spray brush on the title 'Doowops and Hooligans' which is a vast improvement on my first draft because it is more transitional with the colours. I have also added a show effect on the other titles to help them stand out from the page. This poster follows the rule of thirds to an extent as titles begin in the furthest left thirds and continue towards the centre of the page. The city scape is also in the top right third thus conforming to the rule whilst also drawing attention to the text below.

ZS Printwork Construction Three

This is the third and last stage of my Digipak construction using Photoshop. I changed some of my original ideas from the first sketch because once on Photoshop it is clear to see that they did not fit in with the rest of the Digipak.


There are now no lyrics on the inside right panel because the font would have to be too small and the colour of the font meant that it was too hard to read. Instead I have mimicked the front panel where there is a picture of Bruno Mars in a heart shaped locket. I have used this idea but changed the picture for that of the girl who features in the music video. I did not want the pictures to look too like a photograph because the rest of the album cover is covered in doodles and is more playful. To change the look of the images I selected the film grain effect and adjusted the contrast, grain and threshold levels.


Instead of using block colours I texturised the background by using the eraser tool and mixing in the other colours from the different panes. This gives it a lighter feel and fits in with the stylised pictures. 

ZS Digipak Construction - Second stage

The second stage of constructing my digipak was to start putting my original sketch ideas onto photoshop on a digipak template. I started by selecting the colours which i wanted to use and applied these shades of orange and cream/yellow to each pane using the paintbucket tool and selecting the same shades with the colour pick option. I chose these particular colours because they also are the theme colours on Bruno Mars' previous albums. Our groups album advertisement and tour poster also use these colours meaning all three advertisments are linked and easily recogniseable to audience members as advertisements for Bruno Mars .

ZS Digipak Construction - First stage

The first stage when making any piece of media advertisment is to mock up a draft piece. I sketched out a copy on a digipak template. The Digipak is made of four panes:

The front pane, usually with the name of the album and artist on the front, also usually with a picture.
The back pane, with track listings which appear on the album.
Inside left pane, where the CD is held.
Inside right pane, usually displaying lyrics or another picture.

INSERT SCAN OF SKETCH