Task 1

This shot shows one of our dancers being lit purely by laser pens, this shot is a challenging shot to make and it seems as if it would have been done in the after effects process. The shot shows a woman’s body which is the sexual element of our video along with the other dance shots, this attracts a male audience and conforms in that in a lot of music videos use woman as sexualised as ours is here. Through our video women are shown as being sexual. This conforms to many music videos in dance and rock genres. For example kid Cudi vs. Crookers. ‘day and night’. We used visually challenging concepts in our music video, like the use of uv paint on our dancers body, this gave it the feel of techno once again as it links in with rave culture and the use of uv light and body paint. We used uv paint in this case so that there was very bright, rich colours on the screen, this again contrasts the white performance room where the band played and again grabs the viewers attention from the change in the mise en scene. The shots were generally cut with a shot of the narrator cutting shots and throwing them away. In the techno genre, sexuality can be used a lot as it is part of the clubbing lifestyle. Many videos from all genres use sexuality as a main focal point to a video. So our video is typical of a music video in the sense that we used sexual magnetism. This screen shot is a shot of our band in the smoke and dark room, this gives our music video the feel of a club and introduces more dance music elements to the video as the club feel is one used in many electro music videos. The darkness on the band also means that there is a sense of mystery and intrigue and cutting between a very bright white room and a dark room with smoke will attract an audience member’s attention as there is great contrast between them. e have placed the lead singer with a more colourful guitar than the bass and gave him a bright green guitar lead to make our viewers eyes be drawn to him. Tiny tempah uses contrasts like ours in his video with the Swedish house mafia, ‘Miami to Ibiza’. He shows a bright white room and then contrasts it with a narrative in black and white then changes his performance element to effects such as film print. This is our first full band shot and is the only room that allows vision to all of the members, the clothing style is pretty casual for the band members, one in a tank top, one in a t-shirt and one in a no sleeve coat, this draws our attention to our main character and lead singer as he Is dressed more formally and shows that the focus should be with him as he is the focal point of our video, in many music videos the lead singer of a band is the focal point and we conformed to this by having him centre stage on all band shots and we show him as the focus of our narrative shots. He is what dyer would refer to as a star image, not a real person, but one that is constructed out of a range of materials. This is different to a performer who is more organic and real. This next screen grab introduces our band element as every member of the band is on the screen at this point. This shot also shows how the main character controls and cuts a music video. It shows how he controls and is in power over the band members, he plays an almost god role in the video as he decides what is cut in and what is not. This gives the video, what keith negus would call a synthetic ideology of creativity as the image of the band seems to be synthetic and made by the record company. It is also aimed a relatively younger audience. We used a shot of our singers face and hands to establish the narrative aspect of our music video, which is often shown in music videos, in our music video we decided to mix the narrative aspect and the performance aspect. The shot of our main character, lead singer and in the narrative starts the sequence, we used this because It immediately establishes him as the focal point of our video. The shot shows that there is a very technical visual effects side to our video, like many electro/rock music videos.

task 2

Ritalin – we are rockstars

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task 3 audience feedback

male
4
age
0-16 17-25
2 2
music
taste ska indie d and b jazz
1 1 1 1
make you listen
yes no
1 3
fav dance
uv nude laser
3 1
band dress
yes no
0 4
attractive singer
yes no
0 4


female
6
age
0-16 17-25
4 2
music taste
r n b/hiphop dance d and b rock
2 1 1 2
make you listen
yes no
4 2
favourite dance
uv nude laser
5 0 1
band dress
yes no
5 1
attractive singer
yes no
2 4

Q. What do you think the video was about?

Male:
‘main character making a video’
‘lead singer makes music video’
‘wasn’t very clear’
‘i didn’t think it was clear but was about lead singer making the video’

Female:
‘a guy editing a music video’
‘I don’t know’
‘the creating of the video’
‘the creation of a music video’
‘about putting together a music video’
‘the main singer was making the video’






Q. what element of our music video did you like the most? And why?

Male:
‘the special effects’
‘sfx were good and Felix’s and the bands miming were perfect’
‘special effects, set’
‘the group shots, the set was well constructed and looked good’

Female:
‘I liked the bit with the dancers with the uv paint because it looked cool’
‘I liked the special effects’
‘the beginning, I like when felix said ‘yeah’’
‘the special effects’
‘the special effects’
‘the fact that it sounded computer generated, went well with the video editing in the video’


Q. were there any aspects of the video you did not like?

Male:
‘the narrative was not strong enough’
‘clearer narrative’
‘I thought it was a really good video’
‘the narrative of the video wasn’t clear enough’

Female:
‘if the story was clearer would have been fine’
‘too many different scene changes’
‘didn’t really understand the story’
‘no’
‘there was too much of the guy editing and the parts with the band in the studio because they didn’t seem enthusiastic’


For our music video we created audience feedback data by a number of methods, we uploaded our video to youtube where we gained positive feedback: comments consisted of ‘love this. great effects and nice mix of media resources.’, as well as ‘Great video really well made. Is that a real band? and how do you do all those effects.’ And ‘Love the after effects, work really well with the video!!! Good job!!! . we also put our product on facebook and receive positive feedback. While carrying out the questionnaire, we learned that our narrative wasn’t as strong as we though it was. By carrying out these methods, we learned the strengths and weaknesses of our music video.

The aspects of feedback with made us the most happy was that the audience enjoyed the visual sets and the special effects in which we used. After effects and UV paint was the favoured aspect of out video by the majority of the audience. As well as this, we gained positive feedback on our lead singers lip syncing. This was really good for us as this is not easy to get right.

We received feedback which suggested that the narrative of the video was not as clear as we had hoped it was. Comments such as ‘the narrative was not strong enough’ and ‘if the story was clearer would have been fine’ suggested this weakness in our video. As well as this, one participant in the questionnaire said that the band ‘didn’t seem enthusiastic’. This was not surprising to us as we also thought this, particularly with the drummer

The encoding-decoding model comes from Stuart Hall. It is a theoretical model and is based upon the idea that the audience do not act as a ‘mass’, but rather as a group of smaller groups defined by social and ideological elements. Media texts are ‘encoded’ both consciously and unconsciously with the values of their producers, who are usually white, middle-class, men. the audience is not made up just of these groups but different groups are likely to ‘read’ the text in different ways. This ‘decoding’ process has 3 outcomes: preferred reading, negotiated reading and oppositional reading.

Our audience gave feedback of preferred, oppositional and oppositional , most of our feedback was preferred or negotiated readings as most people enjoyed the video and could see how it went well with the music.
We received negotiated readings as the audience understood most of the video but the narrative needed clarifying to them, they did not see that he was making the video even though they all said they enjoyed the video.
An oppositional reading is when the members of the audience disagree with the intended messages we tried to convey in the concept of the video. – we didn’t have an oppositional reading.

task 4 directors commentary

Digipak final

account of rough cut

We have completed our rough cut of we are rockstars, we made a narrative thought the video of Felix, our singer editing the video on minority report like screen, we cut this together with the dance and performance aspects of our video. We are workingh on green screen effects now, as all of our shots of editing will be from the green screen shots. The first cut that we made was a cut without any green screen shots, jusrt the dance and performance aspects, we were planning on adding the green screen shots in after we had completed this. We stopped this idea after a while though because it was hard to cut the green screen shots in, we then started from scratch using some of the shots we had already cut together but with a different feel, this is when we decided that he should be editing the video instead of looking for a girl at a party.
The basic idea of our new cut was that we would have felix at the green screen adding different aspects slowly into the viseo, so starting with the white performance room, then the black smoke room and the dancers shots. We had kept the beatmarkers already set down from our first cut and this meant that it was a lot easier to edit as we were cutting to the beat of the music or sometimes on off beats. Because of this however the shots seemed very fast and jumpy so we decided to elongate some of the preferred shots so that they spread out across the time more. We now have a variety of longer shots and groupings of fast short ones.
Now what we need is to do our after effects on the green screen room, making it look as if felix is editing the video on his own screen. This takes a lot of time and I think it will be our hardest task yet because of how complicated it can be. We had to have completed our rough cut before we edited the green screen room because the shots have to match up with the shots on his minority report like screen. When we have finished this it will add a lot more sense and flow to the video.

account of shoot day

On the morning of our shoot day, we gathered all of our dancers and band members after breakfast. We had already prepared the set for our performance room the night before. The dancers were sent with Megan and Cat to go through basic dance sequences, most of our dancing was however improvised. Me and george were in the studio preparing our band and doing the last touches to the set, we had a few dry runs with the band so that they knew the feel of the song as a group and how we wanted them to perform. Most of our band had learnt the song on their chosen instruments and our singer felix had learn the lyrics, this made the whole performance much easier to conduct.

Our first room was the performance room, this was a pure white room with the instruments and speakers set up. We found that setting up the speakers and the instruments was the easy bit of filling our set but plugging all the wires in to all the speakers and synth was time consuming. We managed to wrap up the performance room in about an hour, and whilst we were finishing up, megan and cat started to paint the girls in uv body paint. They wanted to achieve a mix of different patterns with a tribal underlying theme. The girls came back into the room and the paint looked good but not incredible, then we turned on the uv lights and they just lit up. It looked incredible. The paint had been placed so that as our dancers moved and contorted with the music the bends were elaborated. This looked incredible. Megan directed the girls dancing from the sequence she had prepared and the freestyle element. Some of our dancers could perform tricks such as jumps and back bends which looked very effective in the uv.

After a short 30 minute lunch break we gathered felix, our singer and our dancers and we had set up our laser room, we had six red laser pens and 6 green laser pens, we got our dancer to stand and dance with the lights off and smoke machine on, we then lit her up from both sides with the laser pointers. This looked very good in the room but I was doubtful about what it would look like on the camera as it was not me filming at that time. But looking back on the footage, it really looked amazing. We had to slow the shutter speed down very much so that the effect could be amplified which gave it a blurry movement look but still very good. We then did shots of all the girls dancing with the lasers on them in the room but it was hard to illuminate all of them at one time as we only had 12 laser pens. But this still worked very effectively. We shot a variety of different shots in this room to give us more room when editing for change.

We then set up a green screen room and had our lead singer do hand movements as if he was in a minority report type computer, this looked quite funny as it was just green screen but once we have edited it and added sfx then it should look amazing.

Our final room was a dry ice room, this was a dancing aspect again and we gathered the dancers. We had had great problems earlier on in the day as we were not sure whether the dry ice was going to arrive, due to their being a problem with the delivery. But in the end it came. This did mean that we had to save this room until last when we had planned on shooting it earlier in the day. But it worked out being the best order of shooting anyway.

I felt that the shoot day went incredibly well despite some minor problems with the dry ice and the uv paint on the girls starting to crack. It was a very successful shoot and I look forward to the editing process.