EVALUATION

Evaluation Q1

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

        Generally, our music video has stuck to the typical conventions of the Indie genre. Many music videos within this genre comprise of a narrative in which there is some form of interaction, usually love interest, between a male and a female. The song Mardy Bum focuses on fallouts and arguments within a relationship, so we converted this into a conventional narrative in which the basic lyrical content is acted out. To keep interest in our music video we tried to script the acting of the narrative as close to the actual lyrics as we could get. For example, during the lyrics “And you’ve got the face on” we have a close up of the female character’s face looking rather mardy. We didn’t really want to stray too far from our genre’s conventions because music videos that stick to conventions are generally popular and look good. The only real convention we broke was the band’s image during the performance shots. We decided against having the whole band featured in the video, for fear of making it too complicated, and instead focused on one musician. We felt that having a vocalist during the performance shots would draw too much attention away from the actors. We wanted to keep the man and the woman from the narrative shots as the main characters and so decided to use a guitarist instead.

Evaluation (questions 2 & 3)

How have you maintained a clear image and theme throughout your campaign?

In terms of maintaining our bands image we have used a simple theme including black and white and an overall minimal use of colour, the only colour present being red. From looking at other bands we saw that they have a sometimes clean looking image and dull, muted colours with the exception of another bright one. However they are also quite bold in doing this, so by using black, white and red stripes we have succeeded in giving our band an image that although is something the Arctic Monkeys probably wouldn’t have themselves, it is still clearly in keeping with the genre and isn’t out of place. We feel that it keeps within the target audience of young males and isn’t too ‘pop’. Everything that has been created from the CD cover to the website all share the same stylized, bold and somewhat functional theme. The website is perhaps more elaborate in terms of imagery but we feel it is definitely in keeping with the rest of everything we have done. The video itself is related to all of this due to the storyline being in keeping with the lyrics of the song (young male argues with his girlfriend, a.k.a. the ‘Mardy Bum’ of the video) and due to the fact that it is all in black and white. The use of the singer from the video on the CD cover is an example of synergy between the cover and the music video.

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

To gain audience feedback for our video, we made a pitch on powerpoint including all things such as genre of the band, the storyline of the video, location and much more. After we made our presentation the audience would discuss what they liked and disliked and then after a few minutes we were called back in and told the good and bad points of our ideas. The main concerns about our idea were that the house we wanted to use for location wasn’t rough enough and that the video had to have a slightly grittier feel to it. We took all of this into account but disagreed slightly with a comment made about it saying it wasn’t ‘East Midlands’ enough as we felt this that the simple change of location to a grittier setting would be enough. Other than disagreeing with that one comment, there were no obvious problems with the audience feedback and everyone understood what we wanted to do with our video. To answer this we changed the location to another group member’s house, which was more ‘common’, but at the same time big enough to film in.  Another comment was made about how the mingling of performance and narrative in the music video wouldn’t work, but we went ahead anyway and it turned out all right. We didn’t have any logistical problems for the location as although the house we filmed in was smaller, we still had more than adequate room to change equipment around. 


William Larkin

Video completely finished

Tom

Finished website

William Larkin

Finished CD cover (inside)

William Larkin

Finished CD cover (outside)

William Larkin

Filming Completed

Filming of the rest of the performance shots are now complete, which means the whole video has now been shot.

Carys Bowen-jones & Tom Chamberlain

Updated website

Here is a screenshot of our updated website using the hand-drawn pattern that was scanned in. We used it liberally on our website, framing the text boxes and overall making the site look more interesting and less empty.

William Larkin

Website design

We have a new pattern to put onto our website that has been hand drawn. Although it hasn't been put onto the CD cover that has been virtually completed, it is in keeping with the image of our band and makes the website look a lot less empty

William Larkin

Filming last performance shots

Although a large majority of the filming has been completed, there are still some performance shots that need to be filmed and edited into our music video. We are doing this after sunset today (4/1/11) at the same location that our video has been shot. The fact that the snow has melted won't be a problem as it will be shot indoors, and we are filming after sunset so the lighting will match the other performance shots.

William Larkin