Representation

REPRESENTATION

• The mediators interpret the world.(film makers,editors,producers,directors etc.)
• This interpretation is informed by the mediators own background and experiences(class,race, gender, age etc.) e.g Paul Abbott's 'Shameless'
• The audience recieves the interpretation or representation, through the media texts
• Audiences interpret media texts and analyse representations with reference to their own backgrounds, beliefs and experiences

REPRESENTATIONS VISIONS OF REALITY

• Construction of reality (remember films require a script, actors, sets, locations, props- all this has to be someone's vision)
• Re-present 'the world' to the viewer
  
• IMAGE & POINT OF VIEW

Examples of different representation *Joy division 1976-1980

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

4.We used YouTube to get ideas on our video, and for inspiration. We also used facebook to get feedback on our video, which we posted shortly after we had completed it.We also used final cut to edit our video, to put the clips together and add effects to the video. Photoshop was also used to create our magazine advert and digipak.

3.What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

3. From audience feedback I have learnt that negative feedback can also necessarily mean constructive criticism, after the class watched our rough-cut video we were told that the lighting was too dark and it was hard to see what the girl was singing. As a result of this, we changed the lighting settings. We were also told that a girl walking around a town was not entertaining for the audience, so we decided to film the girl in an art gallery doing some drawings. Which implies that she’s not a stereotypical student, and this is her hobby outside work/education.The feedback from our final video was that the girl in the art gallery worked well, and the black and white effect with one colour also worked well in creating an effective music video. The feedback we were given on the digipak and magazine advert is that it makes the band seem like it is represented by a small company not a major company, we were also told that is links well to the video. We were told that our blog has got everything covered, it is visually interesting and it contains plenty of videos and links. We were told that to improve on the blog all we have to do is to keep going on it and adding to it. Overall it is a successful blog. We were told that the performance in the video by the girl was successful, the black and white effect with one colour was effective as it created a good effect, as the contrast works well. We were told that improve on the video there should be more lip-synching, it should be lighter towards the end of the video, there should have been more people there when filming, also having more characters holding pieces of paper with the lyrics written on would have been a good effect to use.
We were told that the digipak has a good design and it was a good effect that the black and white effect with one colour has been kept throughout the project. We have been told that we could improve our digipak by changing the back cover so it is more interesting, and we could have considered the editing of the photographs more. The positives of our magazine advert were that it links strongly with the digipak well, the use of the artwork went well, and the fonts and images were successful. However we were told that we could improve on this by having more effects on the images, the images should bled more with the rest of the advert and the photograph could have had more time spent on it.

2.2.How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

2. With the overall package of the digipak we were trying to achieve a simple, basic theme which linked the video to the digipak and magazine advert well. We wanted to keep the same theme throughout ,so to do this we decided that we should have our performers artwork (which she was seen drawing in her art book in the video) as the background for the magazine advert, and for the background on the back cover of our digipak. The main theme of our music video was the effect of having everything in black and white with just the girls coat standing out in red. As this was just the main theme of our video we felt that it should be quite a large part, or a main visual focus of our magazine advert, and our digipak. So for this we went out and took photographs of our performer then changed them into black and white, then highlighted the red coat to stand out .After viewing the final digipak product we realised that by trying to keep it all the same throughout, it resulted in others viewing it as simple, and the group being represented by a small basic record label.

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

1.In the music video there are links between the lyrics and the video we produced, one of the links is that of the pieces of paper being thrown backwards, as well as the girl (Emily) singing the lyrics, for example `student`, `housewife` or `banker`. This same effect was used towards the end of the video whereby the boy in the video holds up cards saying `leader`, `hero`.
“ 2. There is a relationship between lyrics and visuals (either illustrative, amplifying, contradicting)” Andrew Goodwin writing in ‘Dancing in the Distraction Factory’ (Routledge 1992).
The camera angles which were used in our video, that I felt effective were; the long shot when the girl is standing halfway up the grassy hill
singing and dancing, whilst the boy is standing at the top of the hill. There was also a shot where the performer of our music video walks up the street singing the song, then when she reaches the word `edge` she puts her hand over the camera revealing herself wearing a new outfit which is the red jacket, the main focus of the effects in our video.
The lighting in our video was very light and bright at the start of the video, and it gradually got darker as the video continued. After filming the footage we watched it back and realised that it was too dark, and we could hardly make out the words which our performer was singing, so using the effects such as contrast and brightness on final cut, we edited this so that we could see her, and what she was singing. I also feel that at the end of the video the lighting was used effectively, as the final scene is where the girl and boy meet at the hilltop, with the background looking like a sunset I feel that this was effective because it symbolises that it is the end of their `glorious day` and the end of the song.
The mise-en – scene in our video was used to create the effect of our black and white with one colour, which was used the red jacket for as the one colour. The black and white effect choice came from watching pinks video to `I don’t believe you` (2009), as this video was all in black and white, the song that went with it was quite sombre, and quite different to the song that we chose, we did feel that this effect in our video may work well, even though it is a relatively up beat song. Another music video which influenced our music video was that of Bob Dylan’s `Subterranean Homesick Blues` 1965, in this video it shows a man standing in one spot holding up a series of cards with the song lyrics written on, we thought that this was a very original idea for a music video, after watching this video we felt that it might work if our performer held up cards with the lyrics of the song written on and threw them behind her as she walked. As we felt that having lots of song words written on cards would be uneffective and look unprofessional, so we thought we would try out only having 4 cards with occupations written on for the female performer to throw, and 3 cards for the male performer to throw backwards and we feel that this worked well.The black and white with one colour effect idea partly came from the video to Black eyed peas `meet me halfway` 2009, as in part of this video there is a man with everything in something similar to just black and white with his red collar standing out, and we felt this looked effective. Our digipak design relates to the digipak design of oasis, we liked the 6-panel effect, so we decided to use this. Another thing we liked about this digipak was the colour design they used, which was a beige coloured theme, and how, throughout their digipak they kept the same consistency all along with the colours.

GROUP 52 EVALUATION VIDEO

GROUP Q3-52 MUSIC VIDEO EVALUATION from SATMEDIASTUDIES on Vimeo.

Plan for filming

We are going to be filming our documentary type footage tomorrow which is going to involve Natasha talking to the camera for approximately 2-3 minutes about our project.
We are hoping to be able to find somewhere quiet to do this so that we can try not to have too many noises etc. disrupting our footage.
Places that we were thinking of were

• A small office somewhere around college
• An empty classroom
• A quiet corridor

We will be filming during lesson time, by doing so we are hoping to avoid having too many people walking past wherever we decide to film.

Documentary

We have been told that we have to film a documentary type video for our music video project, which will explain the 4 evaluation questions which are;

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


2. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancilliary texts?

3. What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

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

We will not be filming these questions however! we will be writing the answers to the questions in the lesson , we will then be filming on thursday December 3rd.

We will be storyboarding how our documentary is going to be filmed, how the timeline is going to go.

Digipak

We also had to create a digipak, for this we decided to stick with the black and white with the one colour(red) theme, we stuck with this with the background and the writing as well.
We feel that this looks effective and works well.

Magazine Advert

As part of our task we had to create an advert for a magazine, advertising our band and the album that is being released
This is the final product,
having more time we would have made a few more changes, we may have added a few more photographs to it and in turn that may have made it more effective.

Magazine cover

After researching some magazine covers for ideas we really like the magazine advert for 'Friendly Fires'.




And we feel that for our advert we would like to have a photograph on the background, followed by a picture of the band, or in this case the artist in the foreground with the writing at the top of the advert.

Also, with the idea taken from this advert, we like the quote underneath the band title , so we feel that we may use this when creating our magazine advert.

Covers

For our magazine cover we decided we would have the photographs taken from the book which our girl was using in the video of her artwork as we feel there were effective. We are also going to try and put a photograph of the girl on top of this, or a screen shot of the video.After taking photographs of the artwork we were not sure how they would turn out, but after uploading them to photoshop we feel that they were a success.

Digipaks

We have been looking on the internet for examples of digipaks and here are a few that we liked.

This is one by 'Oasis' that we liked as we feel that it has a nice colour scheme and the pictures and general design fits well to the music.









We found a 6 panel digipak which we liked the idea of because it gives oppertunity to put more information and more pictures into the digipak.

For our Digipack we need to either create a track list or find Amsterdam's track list. We choose to find Amsterdam's track list and use this. We found out that the album which the song we done our music video on 'Glorious day' is called 'The Journey'. On this album there are 13 tracks these are:
1. Intro
2. Takin' on the world
3. Glorious day
4. Nostalgia
5. The Journey (Full version)
6. You're a phoney
7. The gangster
8. Love phenomenon
9. Does this train stop on merseyside?
10. John
11. Joe's kiss
12. The emmigrant
13. A curse
We will use this track list on the back of our Digipack.

Music Video

I feel that overall our music video was a success!

And although we had many problems with it !

the criticisms which we reciveved from our teacher and from our peers

was helpful to us when going through the editting and filming processes.

The main criticisms which have helped us were that

• the girl walking down a street was too boring and unentertaining.




• the girl walking around starbucks was too sterotypical
  

these were helpful as we fimed some more footage of our performer walking around an art gallery drawing some of the pieces of art, we feel that this was more effective as it was more entertaining that a girl just walking down a street, and it showed that our performer was not a sterotypical student , or a stereotypical teenager.

GROUP 52 FINISHED MUSIC VIDEO

Q3-52 MUSIC VIDEO 2009 from SATMEDIASTUDIES on Vimeo.

Finishing the project

We have now finished the video part of the project, we feel that overall it was successful even thought it was very different to our original idea and we did not use much of the original footage which we filmed.

Our original ideas consisted of the girl , Emily , walking up a hill and singing the lyrics to the song. After filming this footage we were advised that this may be uninteresting to the viewer, so we then filmed some more footage of the girl walking around Cambridge, which involved her walking around shops, and going to get a cup of coffee.










After filming this footage we thought that, this also would not keep the viewer entertained so we went to kettles yard gallery and filmed her drawing the pieces of art into a sketchbook. We felt that this was effective and worked well in contrast to the other footage. Another advantage of filming at the gallery is that it shows what the girl does in her spare time, which is different to the sterotpyical teenage life of getting a coffee in 'starbucks' as the previous footage had implied.

Finishing Effects

When editting our final footage, we decided not to change all of the footage into black and white. We decided only to change the footage where Emily is walking on the road into black and white, this is because we feel that if we change the whole project into black and white with one colour, it will reduce the effectiveness.

Instead of doing the effect for each individual clip, we did the whole process for one clip, and we then clicked on the clip, then clicked copy, and clicked onto the new clip where we wanted the effect to be and clicked Paste attributes.

Effects

As mentioned in a previous blog , in parts of our video the sky in the background is too dark for the video. When we watched the video back and found this, we were not too sure that there would be a simple way around it. After exploring the settings on Final Cut, we;

• Clicked on the piece of footage which we wanted to lighten

we then:

• clicked on effects(at the top)
  
• clicked on video filters
• clicked on 'colour correction'
• clicked on 'colour corrector'

then we moved the bar up and down to get it to how we wanted it to look.Which has changed the colour of the sky from



to








We feel that this has been successful and it works much better than the left hand side screen grab, we will be putting this effect on the rest of the clips which are this dark.

Review Of Kettles Yard Footage

Today we watched back the footage which we filmed Friday 6th November for the first time. Our opinions on the footage which we captured is that there are good points and bad points.

A positive point is that there was good lighting in the gallery which we went to, this helped in our video as lighting is a problem which we have had in the past ( the light at the end of our video being too dark).
A negative point however, is that there is too many clips which are too similar to eachother, such as in these three screen grabs, although very different they are also quite similar.

We feel though, that the footage which we captured on Friday November 6th was successful, fits in well with the rest of the video , and looks much better than the previous footage which we had.(as shown below)

Kettles Yard Filming

We went to Kettles yard gallery to film for our music video, when we got there we were met by a lady who showed us around the gallery and told us the rules and regulations behind filming in the public gallery.

Whilst filming we had to be careful of the photographs/ pictures around us when we were using the tripod, as they are valuable pieces of art. Also whilst filming we had to try hard not to get our reflections in the shot when we were filming, we solved this by getting the camera at the right angle.

We felt that we had a variety of shots, we included some over the shoulder shots, some close up shots, and some long shots, we felt that each of these were effective in their own ways.

The filming for us , was a success , this is a VERY good thing as it was the last day we could do any filming ! We got some clips of Emily drawing the pieces of art which we felt was effective as this showed what she does in her spare time! :)

Filming

Tomorrow on 6th November 09 we are planning to go out and do some more filming. We are planning to do this at 9am at Kettles yard near castle hill. We telephoned them to find out if it was possible for us to do filming here as it is a public gallery. The lady who we spoke to on the phone said that this was fine as long as we attended when it was not public opening hours.

By filming at this place, we are hoping to capture Emily drawing some of the art pieces around the gallery, this is to show that she does something else outside of the stereotypical student life( getting a coffee from Starbucks etc.). This also adds another element to the music video, which is something different to her just walking around.. we feel as though this adds an `artistic` element to the video.

Editing

We fell as though lots of things are going well in our editing, however we also feel as though somethings aren't going as well as planned.

Things that are going well:
1.We have managed to get Emily's lips moving in time to the song lyrics. This is important as it makes it more believable to the audience that Emily is singing the words. At times this was difficult and took alot of time however once we got the hang of it we found it easier. Having the background track from filming also helped to make lip syncing alot easier.
2. Near the beginning of the song "were crazy" is sung. During this part Emily is walking along a street. At this specific part she looks to her right hand side and her eyes looks to her right hand side. We feel this is effective as it shows she has a bit of craziness about her.

Things that aren't going well:
1. In the chorus Emily is walking along a street singing. Everything is in black and white except her jacket. This was effect was put on through editing. However the red is also on Emily's lips. This is something we need to try and change.

Editting Time

We felt as though we need some extra time, outside of lessons to finish editting our project.
The times that we are going to dedicate to our project is today, November 4th from 12.25-

If this is not enough time for editing we will be editting tuesday evening from 4.10-8pm.These extra sessions will be as well as our three weekly lessons. We are hoping that this will be enough time for us to edit our video.

filming problems

As we were filming in public places we had to be awawre of where we were and were not allowed to film. When filming in `Starbucks` we thought that we would need permission to film here so we asked a member of staff if this was acceptable, he told us that we were allowed as long as we filmed in the corner of the room quietly, ade sure that we did not disrupt anyone, and made sure that we did not film anybody who did nto give their consent to be in our video.

The filming in starbucks was overall successful.

The other problem we had was that we were filming in the Grand Arcade when a security guard came along and told us that we couldn`t film there, but as we began to pack our things away, he told us that it would be okay for us to film there as long as we did not get any shops in any of our shots.

Filming.. Again!

We went out filming today (November 3rd) as we needed to film the parts which were not of a high enough standard for our music video. We only filmed small cutaways for the video which we may use to `cover up` footage which was not very successful, in our roughcut.

The cutaways had to be of what our performer would be doing in her spare time so after much discussion we thought we would film a cafe or a coffee shop, we then decided on `Starbucks Coffee`. The other places we decided to film were in the local shopping centre, the `Grand Arcade`, and then we used public toilets to film our performer applying make up to her face, as this is something that , in her opinion she does regularly.

Feedback

The rest of the media group gave us some feedback on our roughcut

The overall view from the group is that we could improve by;

• Having a variety of shots
• Make the transitions sharper
• Make the shots less shakey
• Make it less dark at the end

We should change;

• The variety of shots
• 'The beginning'
• Give the other character something to do or not include him

What we still have to do;

• Cutaways
• More editting
• More Performance
• Re-do with strong light

The strengths of our music video were;

• Lipsynching is good
• Good effects
• Good use of locations
• Original
• Performer did a good job
• Black& White and One colour looks good.

We are pleased with the feedback from the group, and we will be trying to improve on the negative points that have been brought up about our roughcut video.Although on some of the points it is quite difficult to do so, for example with the points about it being dark towards the end it is hard to find a time where we can all film and it is still light as the clocks have been put back now so it gets darker earlier, and we finish college at 4.10pm.
However we will try to film in any frees that we have.

What Needs To Be Done?

After watching our roughcut we decided that there are many things that we need to do in making it into our final video here are some ideas that we have had.

We feel that there are some parts of the video where our performer looks convincing, but there are some bits where unfortunately, she either forgets the words or does not look convincing. So, to fix this we are hoping to re-film these parts, most of these scenes are highlighted in our blog post " Unsuccessful shots".

A problem that we had whilst filming, which could also occur again if we re-film parts, and lose track of time is that it got dark quickly, and due to the fact that we were busy filming, we did not notice how dark it had got until we watched over our footage again. We can try to avoid this by going to our location earlier, thereore catching more daylight in our shots, and less darkness.

The problems we could have with this though is being able to find a day/ time that all of us( group & performers) are free to film, due to having very different college timetables.We are going to film most of Emily`s parts either on a Monday(when we finish college at 3.25) or a Thursday morning, when the earliest one of us starts college is 10.50am. Unfortunately Tom can not make these times so we will have to film at the same time we did last time, but due to Tom only having a small part in our video we will be able to get his filming done on a Friday afternoon at around 4.30pm-5.00pm.
This week is half term, so we will not be able to film this week, we will however, be able to film the week afterwards, on Monday 2nd and Friday 6th November.

ROUGHCUT MUSIC VIDEO

High Quality:

GROUP 52 Music Video 2009 ROUGHCUT(H.264) from SATMEDIASTUDIES on Vimeo.

Mp4 Quality:

GROUP 52 Music Video 2009 ROUGHCUT from SATMEDIASTUDIES on Vimeo.

Blog

After a small feedback session from our media teacher, on the blogs he told us that we have the "best blog" in our class. Obviously we are very pleased with this comment, as we have put in a lot of hard work, and a lot of our spare time.
We hope to be able to keep up this standard in both the blogs, and the video.
Although it has seemed difficult at times, we now feel as though it is paying off!


This was a quick overview of our blog, and the blog posts that we have done.

Email

We e-mailed the band again via http://www.myspace.com/
as we wanted to know what they thought about our blog! We also wanted to know what they thought about the final project!
Here is the e-mail that we sent to them

" Hi again , we have produced our video, however at the moment it is just a roughcut. The final piece will be posted on our blog when it is finished which should be around November 12th 2009. The link to see how our project has gone, and the roughcut is http://www.blogger.com/home?pli=1
we are group 52.
We would greatly appreciate it if you could give us some feedback on this, and let us know how we have done in your opinion! Thank you! Natasha & Abbie x"


We are hoping that the band will contact us with their view on our video,whether this be compliments, or constructive criticism.

Unsuccessful shots

Although we feel that our project went well,after producing and reviewing the roughcut of our project , we feel that there are some shots that did not go as well as we had initially thought;

This is the main shot that we feel did not go as well as it could have, this is because our performer forgot the words, but tried to improvise, resulting in her looking very confused!(as shown in the photograph). Due to the fact that, at this point it was beginning to get dark, we thought that this shot had gone well enough, and we could cover it again at a different location.Unfortunately due to being rushed, and having to fit in the rest of the song as well , we did not have time to re-film this part of the song, at this location or another.We will however, be re-filming this part for our final piece.

This is another shot that we feel did not go too well, we think this because our performer is looking to the side, which we think implies that she feels nervous, or scared about doing this video for us. We will be re-filming this bit, so that our performer does not look as awkward as she does in this shot.

Best Shots From Filming

We like this shot as it is close to her face, and you can see her mouth clearly moving to the lyrics, we feel this is effective because it is necessary for the audience to believe that the performer is singing the song , and in time to the track.

We also like this shot as shortly after this she puts her hand across the camera on the word 'edge',wearing work clothes, then pulls her hand away, reappearing wearing a red jacket, and a dress(trying to show that she is getting ready for the weekend to begin, and for work to end).Although we had to film these shots over about 20 minutes, the way that we have editted them to fit together it looks as though we have filmed it straight away.




We also really liked this shot, this is the ending to our video whereby the two performers are standing at the top of the hill, close together with the building in the background brightly lit up and at the very end of the video the camera moves up pointing at the sky.We feel that this is effective because the song is called 'Glorious Day', and we feel that it is showing that she has had a brilliant day, everything has turned out the way she has planned, and that now(in this shot) it is the end of her 'Glorious Day, but a very good ending :)


This was the final shot of the video !

Effects-Sin City Effect

To create this black and white effect with colour, on final cut we chose a clip , and selected it, we then copied it , making two of the same clip. The first clip was then made into black and white, using the black and white effect. The second clip, we clicked on the chroma key effect button, chose the colour, (which in this case was red as this was the colour of the coat).

It then needed to be adjusted to mask the whole item that was going to be in the one colour(the coat). We then had to select revert. As we couldn't do this all in one clip, we had to do this in two seperate clips, clip 2 was the left side of the coat, and clip 3 was the right side of the coat.

Filming Overall..Evaluation

Do we feel that we made the right decision on the song?
Definitely, when we first heard the song we thought that we could come up with a good video for it, we hope that we have done that! We also really like the song as we feel it has a good upbeat rhythm to it, although some of the words do seem a bit strange!
What did we find difficult?
Due to having a particularly small group, we found it difficult to initially come up with ideas, but once we put our minds to it we came up with what we feel were some good ideas. Also, due to having a small group it was very hard to go out filming as we had many jobs that needed doing at once, such as; filming, controlling the camera,taking photographs for the blog,and directing. Because of these problems we found ourselves taking on more than one job, but this wasn`t too bad!
What have we particularly enjoyed about this project?
We feel that this project overall has been really fun to do, and has been very interesting, we have learnt techniques for filming, for using the camera, and we have picked up some techniques for editting. We have really enjoyed it and feel it has been very interesting.

Expenses !

We had most of the materials for our music videos, however there were some items that we did not have that we needed for our video, so we had to buy these!

They are as follows;

We had two of these Berol permanent markers, these were for marking the occupations, from the song lyrics onto pieces of card

price:£0.70 per pen

= £1.40

We wanted a necklace for Emily to wear,for after she had got changed into her `weekend, party ` clothes. However, we forgot to take on with us, so we bought one from the local supermarket.

Price :£4.00 per necklace

=

£4.00

We used these batteries(8 X Duracell Plus, size C)
to put into the C.D. player which we took with us, as the C.D. player needed 6 of these.

Price:£9.99 per box=

£9.99

We used these cards to write the occupations mentioned in the song, on the cards, so we could use them in the video.

Price:£0.15 per Pack of 5

=

£0.30

The total costs for mise-en-scene for this video was £15.69