Coursework Ending

This is a blog which is stating that our blog is closed now and that no further blogs will be made. We have enjoyed this period of creating our music video and have learnt and developed alot through this period. Our skills and abilities have improved significantly in terms of our editing skills and also the actually filming of our music video in London.

Final Draft of Our Music Video

Will and Louis Final from Caroline Birks on Vimeo.

1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

The first thing we did at the beggining of this coursework was too research music videos themselves and also adverts/posters and digi-packs. We also analysed them and the characterstics of which they have and different concepts and ideas that make these products stand out from the rest. The research for our digi pak was not that easy as we can only base our research on what we saw. However, this was sufficient as we still wanted to maintain that urban feel to the whole concept of the digi pak and advert poster of which we used an old wall, which again adds the urban mise en scene to the whole concept of it aswell as the hoody of which the artist was wearing on the front cover.


The first major part of our media product was the research of the genre (dubstep) and the different kinds of music videos that are usually associated with certain genres of music, for example, pop songs usually have a dance routine and sometimes a slight narrative theme to it such as "Baby One More Time" by Britney Spears.


We also did a textual analysis of a song, mine was "Shot Yourself In The Foot Again" by Example and also "To The Stars" (Break the Noize and The Autobots Remix). I noted the ways in "Shot Yourself In The Foot Again" depicts a very well done narrative storyline and the way the beats and lyrics of the song match the way the song is edited and told. Another aspect of the textual analysis is how the audience percieve the artist both in terms of the music video but also in the public eye. Aswell as just analysing the music video it also gave us an oppurtunity to develop and create ideas.

We also researched the history of the music video where we made a timeline of the crucial and main events/parts of the life of the music video and also made notes on the "100 Greatest Music Videos Ever", which was a documentary of which we watched in class and took notes on the music videos and how they incoporated a huge variety of ideas and effects to make it in the top 100 music videos ever.

As many real dubstep videos, the artist usually doesn't make any appearance in their videos but sometimes they make a cameo appearance, where they only appear in the background of the video for one scene and for a very short amount of time. We did do this in one of the flash back scenes, the one where the main character is with his friends.

One convention that we did go against is the fact that most dubstep songs show live concerts and performance from festivals and gigs. Not all dubstep music videos are like this but the majority of them are, however we took more of a narrative approach to our song because our song is not a "live" song which means that it wouldn't necessarily be a song that would be played live at a concert and therefore ,would be difficult to film. As you can see we have incorporated many of the ideas that we have posted in our blog. Since dubstep is a growing genre, coming from the underground world of music in London, we decided to use "urban" stytle text and this has been consistent throughout our blog. However, we have gone through different styles of text and font and we have also used many different sites and programs to find a good font and one of the main websites we used was called "Da Font" which offers a huge variety of fonts.

Da Font Logo:


This is the link to the website, "Da Font": http://www.dafont.com/

2. How effective is the combination of your media product and ancilary texts?

3. What have you learned from your audience feedback?

4. How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

The Blogger service is what we used to construct our online blog about our music video. The service is easy to use and we were able to input all our research which we built up to the blog. We were also very familiar with the concept of the blog and how it worked because we used it last year during our coursework at AS- Level. The blog automatically saves all our information at certain times while we are on the blog and we could relate back to it during the preperation of our video. Blogger made it much easier for us to save our work as it did not fill up our hardrive and automatically saves our posts. We would definitely use this software for future projects as it is easy and reliable to use.

The software we used to make our video was 'Final Cut Pro x' which is exclusively a Mac editing software. We were able to input professional effects and transitions using this software. It allowed us to make well timed cuts so our music video flowed well with the beat of the song. This software also helped when coming to the lighting of certain scenes, for example one of our clips were too dark and this software let us change the brightness and contrast of this clip in order to make it more visable. As some of our scenes were flashbacks they needed to be noticably different from the rest of the video, this software allowed us to use black and white effects and blur effects to emphasise the flashbacks and therefore give the full effect of them. This software was user friendly and easy to use, however we felt as if there was a lack of good quality effects and transitions within the programme.

To research alot of other music videos we used online software such as YouTube and Vimeo. Via the website "Vimeo", we were able to look at other media A2 students videos from not only within our class but other A2 students and learn from their ideas. As well as student videos, we found looking at professional videos of real and professional artists which gave us ideas of different effects to use, which would look good in our film. Looking at other videos of the same genre as ours which is mainly electronic music (more specifically dubstep) we found that most of these songs change scene with the beat of the song so we used this when coming to the editing of our video. YouTube gave us a chance to look at past students work and also upload our own video on the site in order to get feedback from the public.

The camera we used was our teachers Nikon 550 HD camera. We used this for taking the shots for our CD covers and poster/advert. We have never used this piece of equipment before hand but we found this camera extremely easy to use and function and it produced high quality pictures, which however were ruined a but when it was uploaded onto photoshop and they became slightly distorted and blurred.

To film our project we used Panasonic Standard definition cameras. Although these were not high quality as we would have liked we made do and were able to get some good quality shots for our video. We were familiar with this camera due to the fact as mentioned before that we have used this piece of equipment last year in our AS-level coursework.

The other piece of software which we used was Adobe Photoshop CS5 . Photoshop allowed us to alter the contrast of our images and insert text and images to make them look more professional and to the best of which we can make them including the digi pak and poster. Our skills in photoshop have definitely benifitted and improved from using photoshop as me or my partner have really used it before and therefore found it difficult to use at the beginning of the task but after a bit of practice we were happy with using the software and got to grips with it fairly rapidly.

Each of these programmes, hardware and pieces of equipment has given us more skills in the editing process aswell as general comuting abilites. We are happy with all of the equipment which we used and have found these as a great help to the creation and development to our media coursework.