Liam Croft-Evaluation

1. Our song for Media was what is classed at typical Punk-Ska music which drew us to the song in the first place. The song is a fast paced, bouncy fun song that reflects on the childhood of the band and the crew they used to be a part of, the B.P.C. With this in mind we knew our video had to match the songs style and therefore used a lot of fast paced shots with visuals that corresponded to the lyrics of the song to help the video and the track compliment each other and really show we’ve thought about way they connect with each other. We wanted to make our video unique and challenge the conventions of what you’d normally find in a video. The typical punk attitude is care-free, have a good time, do what you feel like doing state of mind, and with the song demonstrating this our visuals had to also show that we didn’t care we people thought of us, we wanted to go out with our mates, have a good time, and as long as we were having fun, didn’t care what people thought of us. Our main inspiration was the video ‘What’s my age again’ by Blink 182 where they run down the street naked in a casual, careless manner as well as searching for old punk bands videos and The Filaments current videos and other tracks by them, this way we could get a feel for what kind of work they produce and we could learn more about the band. However this song was quite a medium paced and slow video compared to our song by the Filaments. So we again started searching YouTube for more inspiration, and started to come across home made jackass and pranks. These kind of videos mixed with the naked run of Blink 182 would give us enough footage to match the pace of the song and help show what the song was talking about. The lyrics to the song mentioned all the stupid stuff they did when they were younger and the activities they got up too to pass time, so with inspiration such as pranks and jackass we could relate to these lyrics.. We planned locations and costumes based on the online hit ‘Devvo’ who is seen as a grubby, chavy, council estate prowling yob, so we search for places that bands wouldn’t normally shoot in. Bands often want to show the glamorous style of their lives where as we wanted to show that this band was different, that we could have fun making due with what we had, therefore all of our locations were places we came across with people carrying on with their normal lives and leaving everything as natural as we found it. This again would help relate lyrics to visuals. Conventions of punk are usually a lot more grown up and wild than our video portrays, but this was our intentions to do childish things and just record us genuinely being us because we knew that the more natural the footage looked, the more people could relate to the song. We didn’t just match lyrics to visuals however. We also have a number of shots where music matches the visuals, for example in the instrumental breakdown there are a number of obvious, louder beats where we put footage that has something happening on the same point of the loud beat as well as using other beats and lyrics to switch to another shot that help carry the pace of the song. Finally our performance wasn’t similar to other music videos with performance in it as we did all of our lip syncing directly into the camera at a variety of locations that we shot other footage at. The way we switched between performance and our footage of general happenings helped so that footage didn’t drag on. The naked run carries on for the entire video however all together there is about 30 seconds of it on screen because of the way we wanted to keep the pace up and not bore our audience. We also looked at The Filaments current album covers for our research to look at how they attracted their audience as well as what kind of image they liked to show themselves as and how much what was on the cover related to their tracks and videos.

2. We began making our digipak and magazine advert with the intention of putting something in it that relates to our video and shows something that makes the audience notice just from that that we had a different, unique sounding song with a video to match. Our video and track showed the main conventions of punk but mixed in with a lot of fun, childish behavior, so we thought that with these two products to make we should extract one side to each one. The magazine advert showing our fun side of the video and the digipak cover showing the punk side of it, which then come together to create our music video with feel we wanted it to have. Our magazine cover was based on Annie Lebovitz’s famous Rolling Stone cover of John Lennon and Yoko Ono which was taken to show the relationship of the couple, with John Lennon naked clinging on to Yoko. When people see this image the get a lot of emotion come over them as it was taken just 5 hour before John was murdered, however if you switch the role of John and Yoko to us in man thongs and golden masks, you get the same intriguing feels across you but in a much more enjoyable way. It shows that we’re the band that dare to do, that want to make people smile. Our digipak was then focused on showing the punk side of the video. We took an original photo of us in the thongs and hockey masks out on the street however blurred it and put a more focused image on to the screen of a camera phone that was in front of us and the camera. This way it showed that people thought we might be interesting, that people want to see us again by the fact they’re taking photographs. On the back of the cover was a variety of screen shots that we thought weren’t worthy of putting in the video however did show the amount of different locations, costumes and ideas we had to represent to video we intended to make. The images are put into Polaroid form then scattered across a screen shot of a dirty cement floor to show the griminess and low-life feel we wanted the audience to have come across them. We wanted to use shock factor mainly so that the image we produced stuck in the head of the audience and so that when they saw that image, they’d remember our unique video and remember what we were all about. With these two products advertising the video they catch the eye of the viewer and make them want to see more of it, which the actual video gives plenty of.

3. From our rough cut audience feedback we found that our product didn’t actually match the intensions we had for our video. We managed to get good shots however a lot of people said that the pace of the song was much higher than pace of the video. We knew a lot of our shots dragged on and towards the rough cut deadline we began filming in locations not suited to the punk genre and shots that didn’t follow suit of any of our other footage. So from this feedback we gathered discussed together the shots we knew were too long and the shots that didn’t match our intended genre and replace them with something that was a lot better than what we had. Our main problem was the performance side of our video. The song itself is more rapping than singing so it was fairly difficult to get lip syncing in time with the track and the way we shot it with angles and backgrounds was poor compared to what we knew we could do. So we went back out and carefully chose the location and outfit for the 3 sections of performance we needed to improve. We also changed the angle a lot and tried to keep it varied throughout the entire video, so after receiving the feedback we began using low shots, mid shots, panning shots and close ups for the performance which ended up looking really good and the fact there was variety helped to keep the same interesting feel throughout the song. Another negative comment we received was that some of the video was good, random, feel-good footage that we wanted, however that dies out in parts bringing the pace and feeling down. So we thought that if they wanted random footage, instead of planning and filming shots, we would plan shots, but keep recording footage during the time we weren’t shooting an intentional shot. This way we had a lot of footage that wasn’t intended and that was just us genuinely doing stuff when looking for a new location or moving to the next shot. We had a lot of footage that we knew we couldn’t use however we did have a lot that was naturally us messing around as well as shots that could be used during the instrumental to fit with beats or to fit with shouts and lyrics. However we also received plenty of positive feedback from our group, a lot of it complementing the video in ways we intended it to be complimented. People said they’d never have the guts to do what we did, or never $thought they video could work as well as we’ve made it. Another compliment we received was the way people noticed the music fitting the visuals throughout the song. This kind of feedback helped us a lot because we knew what people liked and what people didn’t like, therefore we could go back out onto the streets and film more and more to please our audience as well as create something that we were happy with.

4. When making our products we relied a lot of new media technologies to help us through it. Our main source of inspiration was the internet and particularly YouTube. With a website made for posting videos about anything and everything there was no end really to finding inspiration for our video. We could use this to search music videos, to see how general and more famous punk bands like to portray their image with their video. We could also search for the pranks and stunts that we wanted to combine into our video and look at what worked well on camera and what didn’t. We also used Google and Amazon a lot when researching our digipak and magazine advert. We wanted to create the same unique feeling that our video did therefore we had to look at existing products and saw how they much they related to the video and how much they promoted the band and what the band represents. We mainly looked at albums and DVD covers by the likes of The Clash, The Ramones, The Madness and The Sex Pistols to get the idea of what we wanted on ours, as well as looking at more famous and modern covers to take the best bits and cram them all onto our digipak cover. For our magazine advert we came across a website with all of the most controversial covers of all time and the John and Yoko image really stuck out to us. If it wasn’t for the internet we’d never of had anything to inspire us to create the video. We also used the internet to blog our work and keep a diary of what’s happening and what needs to happen. With this at our hands we could really plan and develop ideas without forgetting any important information. We also used Final Cut Express to edit our entire video. This program helped a lot by the fact it was easy to find what you were looking for, the controls weren’t too complex, you could manage your clips and audio really well and pin point it down to exactly how we wanted it to be inch by inch. We filmed across 3 days and by the end of it our footage was all over the place, with no structure and different clips having tiny fragments of clips that we needed to use in our video, but with the easily manageable way FCE is set out we could locate clips and structure our footage in order too cut down the time we waste looking for the clips. The final main technology we used was Adobe Photoshop to create our digipak and magazine advert. Photoshop is a bit more complex and cramped up than any other media technologies we used however it was worth the effort because we could manipulate images a lot and change what would be an ordinary photo into Polaroid form which is what we did with our. Without these kinds of tools our final products wouldn’t have had the effect we intended them too have and we were lucky that we were given such technologies to create our final products with.