Question 4

This is question 4 for our final music video evaluation, where we answer the question through a carefully made power point.

During the last minute and a half (roughly) of the slide show there has been a fault when I have uploaded it and it goes very small.

Question 4

Due to unforeseen circumstances one of the team members responsible for this question has of yet been unable to put it in an appropriate format to be uploaded onto blogger which has held us back. I have done a couple of the programs we have used in a more boring, but still visual way on this label. 

Post

People have liked at viewed our video more times than anyone else's in our school. This makes us extremely proud!

Costume

Why A Suit?

You may wonder when you watch our carefully created music video why we chose to out our main character who is a drunk in a suit looking smart. 
We thought this would work well in todays society as many drunks now aren't your stereotypical lounging in streets in rags, many business men who work up in the city spend much of their free time at the pub eventually becoming alcoholics. This represents todays real life very well, as we know our character has come from a respectable past so this could be the case. 





Also we thought he looked more striking in a suit and attractive to get the girls watching than he would in rags or jogging bottoms. We only use the casual look when he is at home as this is the key time when no one else can see him so he does not have to 'keep up appearances' at all. Of course we kept the scenes of outside and on the street to make the storyline clear as you do not have much time to portray events or characters.

Use Of Black & White

As you can see when watching our video is that we have chose to use both colour and black and white. We didn't do this to add ourselves extra work or as we had just seen it in other videos and decided to randomly add it in. 
We chose to do this so it is easier to distinguish between the present time and the flash backs.

Above I have picked out two different shots one in colour and one that we put in black and white. The one in colour in present time and shows our main character drinking alcohol and if you watch shows him choosing the alcohol over his long term girlfriend which is what our narrative is based on. The black and white one is near the beginning of our music video and is a memory of when he was happy and not drinking, it shows him having fun with some friends which is what he cannot do now. We put the flashbacks in certain places during the lyrics so it was easy to understand they were in the past.

Visuals & Sound

Due to our video being in the alternative rock genre we decided that the use of our band shots were crucial, for this we had to match the song lyrics to their mouth movements so it looked as perfect as possible. As shots of the band wouldn't be interesting for the whole duration of our sound we added in a narrative that doesn't directly correspond with the exact words as this is more what happens in the typical pop video.

Above is an example of a song by the world famous Justin Bieber's number one hit 'One Time', in this picture he is using his finger to indicate what he is saying which is "I will tell you one time". This is a typical pop video convention and it also has a close up of the artist to promote him, in our music video which is shown to the right of Bieber is sowing a quiet road with a picturesque lamppost and ivy hanging around it but the lyrics are "do you miss the blend of colours she left in your black and white field" but we chose to have this image in colour as it is part of our present time narrative. This is just one example of when we haven't directly used our moving images to aid the lyrics which works well for our genre.

As another major aspect of our video we chose to include lip syncing for a number of reasons, one of them being that in our genre of alternative rock this is a usual thing to do but we not only included it with our narrative acting it out but we also used real time band shots which was hard to get perfect. The lip syncing was challenging as we had to get the timing perfect with the sound which meant a lot of time spend on première pro editing and moving and stretching shots so it fitted. Only once did we not have to alter the shot to make the lip syncing fit and this was our end scene that is shown in the shot of the main character shouts "I am not your friend, I am just a man who knows how to feel". I have used another alternative band to compare our use of this lip syncing in the narrative with and this is a video by Kids In Glass Houses and the man is saying "and I've been singing". 

This is a shot of when we had to stretch out of on our shots of the band slightly as the live music did not fit perfectly with the timing of our song, but it indeed does work extremely well and looks as though we didn't have to edit it at all.

Audience Feedback - Q3

These are two of our questionnaires as part of our audience feedback, we got around 30 filled out but chose ones that had both good comments and some constructive criticism to them so we could learn from it.

Overall Critisicms

Use of Actors

The audience feedback showed that they believed our actors were convincing which is always a good point to be made as while studying the conventions of a real music video, the actors have to be believable.

Locations Used

The audience found that there was a vast range of locations used which prevented the video from getting too plain and consistently the same. With a vast range of locations it gives more exicitement to the video, a mix of low key and high key lighting to portray the main character's high and low emotions, and also relating back to the song itself.

The Narrative

The narrative was percieved as understandable, but some of the audience found it hard to grasp onto the themes and message within the story. However, some were able to identify the message of the video, in which an addiction can destroy your life and those you value within it.

Band Shots

The Band shots were probably the best feature to our music video, they were so clear and complimented by a variety of people, both young and older. Most of the audience there was a perfect mix of band shots and narrative throughout, making an equal balance and fulfilling our aims of having a narrative and performance based video.

Relating to the Video

When we asked the audience whether they could relate to the video, many responded yes as they had been in the situation of experiencing alcohol a lot, however not many could relate to the actual addiction of it. They seemed to relate more to the relationship part, and the chance they lost with someone they really wanted in their lives.

To relate to the audience is a positive thing, as they will relate more to the song itself, and be more of an appeal to the mass audience of alternative rock fans.

How to Improve

A few people didn't know how it could be improved as they were not keen music video critics, however quite a few commented on the lip-syncing of the main character, perhaps if we had more preparation time for our video, we could have fitted more practice in for lip syncing.

Overall, we are happy with how our video turned out, and take all constructive criticism into consideration.

If we had the time to go back and change things it would be

- Lip Syncing of the character

- Organisation of the days we filmed

- A slightly clearer narrative

- Lighting of the last scene