Evaluation - Michael

Our media product uses standard forms and conventions of real media products. As a result, it does look like a real music video. We achieved this by using and following Goodwin's points of music video analysis. I shall look at each of Goodwin's points individually and compare our product to them.

Our video conforms to the characteristics of the indie genre by being filmed in black and white, and looking fairly amateurish.

We were inspired by professional music videos by the Kooks, trying to keep to the formula that has been developed in the genre. Looking at videos from different genres, including spoofs, proved worthwhile. We also looked at previous examples of student music video projects for inspiration.

There is a strong relationship between the lyrics and the visuals. Our video for the song “Walk Away” certainly does contain a lot of walking. We took the story told in the lyrics and visualized it.

There is some relationship between the music and the visuals, some things happen in time to the music, and there is footage of actors portraying the artists playing along.

As in a real music video, there are lots of close ups and shots of the artist and the band. In a real product, the record label would expect this.
There is very little to no voyeurism of the female body in our product. In this sense we have deviated from the standard practice of many music videos. I believe we didn't put any voyeuristic scenes in because there was never an appropriate moment for one in our plan.

Intertextual references are also notably lacking in our video, this was largely due to the fact that we focused more on the story of our video.

We made promotional media materials for our video, including a magazine advert and a digipak cover. After analyzing professionally made digipaks, decided to use the media industry standards set out by doing them in the same style as the video, and adding things appropriate to the medium to sell the idea, such as text, logos and images.

Other groups working on other products viewed our media product and gave constructive feedback. We learned of some areas we could have improved upon, such as the instrument playing, the quality of the shots taken in terms of steady filming, the storytelling etc.

We also learned of areas that our peers thought we did well on, such as the quality of the lip syncing, the good emotive acting, the good use of locations, the strong connection to the lyrics, etc.

We used the internet for most of our research and it proved to be a powerful tool, offering much information on the area. Using this research, we were able to learn the themes and conventions of music videos, so that we might conform, or not conform, to them.

Digital camcorders were used for filming, and proved to be much easier to use than the old tape-based camcorders, as footage could be copied across when it was needed, rather than capturing all of it at once.