Audience Feedback Sheets

Key images from our video.

Here are some key images from our music video.

Reflective Evaluation Sarah Carter

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

Our video for the song "Natives" by Blink-182

 The video for "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" by Green Day

The video for "Adam's Song" by Blink-182

Shown above are the videos for three songs - "Natives" by Blink-182 which is the song that Ewan and I created a music video for, "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" by Green Day and lastly "Adam's Song" by our chosen artist, Blink-182. The two existing videos show the genre conventions of pop-punk very clearly - the use of lighting, location and subject matter all point towards the more serious, melancholy side to the music genre of pop-punk. Although the genre lends itself to the more humorous and fun side of music, it also tends to dabble in the more serious side occasionally and to good effect. I believe that in many ways, our music video has also stuck to the conventions of a pop-punk music video through the connection between its subject matter and mis-en-scene.

As seen in the previous Blink-182 video, the subject of suicide is addressed in the lyrics of the song, and the entire mood is generally quite morose. We thought that our song choice was also based around the same sort of topic - the idea of loneliness, isolation and depression - and therefore we decided that it would be best not to challenge the genre conventions to avoid creating something that was inappropriate and inevitably ineffective also. By having a serious approach to the video, I feel we have conformed to the general conventions of a pop-punk music video in a way that benefits our video significantly. Similarly, the video for "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" demonstrates the same sort of mood and subject matter which is typical of a ballad-like, sad pop-punk song. In this way, the two videos has several similarities in their mise-en-scene qualities, including their use of dull and muted lighting/colours and run down environments and locations, such as the warehouse in "Adam's Song" or the deserted town in "Boulevard of Broken Dreams". The idea of homelessness and isolation is something we incorporated into our own video and I think the locations we used were sensible, appropriate and effective in making the narrative of our video look convincing and visually appealing. I especially feel that our band performance location is very effective.

Another aspect of pop-punk videos that we thought we should conform to is the split of narrative and performance - as seen in the two previously existing videos and our own video, there is almost an equal split on performance and narrative, which gives a good amount of variety and a sense of reality to the video, to ensure that the viewer is fully engaged throughout and also, the band themselves are being promoted/sold in the video. We used differing shot types to keep the video interesting and dynamic whilst also taking into conideration hwo these shot types would work best with regard to our actors and performers.

With regards to postmodern ideas, we decided to use a slight sense of intertexuality in our video, but in a discreet and appropriate way. We incorporated a Blink-182 poster into our video, which is only seen briefly. We also got the actor to dial the number "182" in the phone booth, which we believed was a sneaky way to fit the band name into the video.

I thought another way that we used genre conventions is within the narrative itself. We made a conscious effort to ensure that the main character in our video is treated badly from start to finish, with no real care and attention being paid to him at all. This can also be seen in the video for "Adam's Song" where we see still frame shots of the band coming across the characters who are 'in trouble' and yet they pay no real attention to them whatsoever. We thought this was interesting, as usually music is seen to be people's 'saviour' whereas in this case, and in the case of our own music video, we see that the music treats him just the same as everyone else.

More public feedback

I've once again reviewed the feedback that we received on Tumblr from our video. We got some positive thoughts back:

Reflective Evaluation Question One Ewan Moore

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

Our video for Natives

The official Blink-182 video for Up All Night

Sum 41's music video for their single, Pieces 

All three of the above songs deal with a dark subject matter. Natives deals with running away and isolation. Up All Night deals with angst and the fears of growing up and Pieces deals with depression and isolation. Up All Night and Pieces both have moody, dark lighting, something we wanted to achieve with our video and for the most part have. Usually Pop Punk doesn't look like this, but as we have mentioned in the blog before the genre can do "mature" and it always looks like this, dark lighting and old, run down urban/suburban locations. The emphasis on suburban life as seen in Up All Night is something we wanted to do mostly because it was easier to shoot in suburban areas, as well as the fact it follows the conventions. Our choice of location for the performance was taken from Up All Night. We wanted an area that looked fairly ruined and desolate to represent what homelessness is. The point was to try and show that it isn't a nice thing and that they are alienated from society, the band are playing in an isolated area surrounded by junk and rubbish. In the Up All Night video, they're playing in a ruined street, but we obviously couldn't afford to make it look quite so cinematic. In both Pieces and Up All Night, the entire videos are shot at night. This is something we considered doing as it may well have suited the tone of the song better. In the end it just became an impossibility as our actors had work/other commitments etc. Arguably in that respect we have challenged the standard convention and still managed to give the video a dark style through editing and playing with exposure on the actual camera. Many in our media class did comment on liking the distinction in lighting between band sections and narrative points. In this way we again challenged the norm as in Up All Night there isn't a distinct switch in light or tone. As for Postmodern concepts, we have indulged in intertextuality by showing a Blink-182 poster in Rory's room, and Rory dials 182 when in the phonebooth. Besides that, we show no sense of awareness as that might have underplayed the seriousness intended in the video. The same is true of Up All Night, which is played straight, despite a quick flash of the Blink logo on a fence. Pieces is different, having some arguably light moments of comedy with the people in the vans, though it might just be me who finds those scenes funny. Everything is subjective in the end. 

Public Feedback

After posting a link to our video on the blogging website Tumblr, we received some feedback from the public about the strengths and weaknesses of the music video. We received two individual 'likes' on the video and were also given an in depth response from one person, to which we replied with our thoughts and answered his questions.

Here you can see his response. We very much appreciated his thoughts and he later commented on Tumblr that he did really like the video and hoped it went well for us both, which we thought was nice of him.
I think this shows that we have taken into consideration what the public would expect from a Blink-182 video and have tried to create something that we think would appeal to fans of the band.

Public opinions on the video so far.

I decided that as a way of getting a wider, objective and more varied opinion of our music video so far, that I would share a link to our video on my personal blog on the website Tumblr.

I will post any responses we get at a later date. Hopefully this will enable us to get some good, honest feedback from the general public and fans of the band.

Final Music Video 1

This is the first full edit of our music video. The quality is bad due to compression. Oh well.

Editing Update

In today's lesson, we made some final adjustments to our music video, ready to show Mel on Monday so she can give us feedback. We changed some of the lip-synching so it was more accurate and added in some more performance shots to break up the shots of vocal performance.
We also thought that the narrative shots of our main character outside were too sunny for the sort of feel we're going for. Obviously, the weather is something we can't change, so we decided to look into some effects to change the mood and tone of these shots. We found one that adjusted the colours and midtones of  the shots, so used this to create a more gritty feel. We adjusted the saturation levels and increased the darkness slightly, which helps to remove the sunny glare you initially got from our narrative shots. I think it looks much better because of it.

Filming and Editing update

Over the past week, we've been busy trying to get all of the filming we needed out of the way so that we could focus on editing over the next couple of weeks, before the deadline. On Sunday, we finished filming all of the narrative footage that we needed to complete our music video. It went pretty well, with very few glitches and I think the footage we captured was all very usable. We have decided that next weekend, if we have the time, we are going to re-shoot some footage to make sure that all of the shots we have are of a very good standard.
Over the past two days, both in lesson and in free time we have been editing our music video, to the point where today, I have finished putting all of it together. No doubt, there will be a few things that may need changing when our teacher looks at our work, but overall we're very happy with what we have so far. We hope that now we have finished a first edit, we will have plenty of time to try out effects and really perfect what may need tweaking. I will upload a rough version of the music video soon.

After Midnight: The new blink-182 video.

I thought it would be relevant to look into the new video by blink-182 to look at the current direction they are going in and see how it relates to our own music video from the same album.
After Midnight is a slower, more ballad like song and therefore the pace is quite different to ours. However, the split of narrative and performance is quite similar and their use of a grungey, desolate and isolated environment for the setting of their performance is similar to the approach we were going for, which I think shows our knowledge of the genre and the band themselves.
I think that the performance side to this video shows some classic blink-182 features. We captured the same sort of characteristics in our band members that are reflected in blink-182 themselves, such as their interaction with the camera and their performance styles. There is very little direct eye contact and they don't seem to have any awareness that the camera is there, which is something that we have also included in our performance.
Another thing that I feel we have related to the band is the se of costume and mise-en-scene. The band have a very distinctive image that we have tried to mirror in our actors:

Feedback from Mel

After having our first review with Mel, she gave us the following feedback:

• Adjust the framing of some of the performance shots. There is a particular close up of our frontman which is a bit off.
• Make more clear the relationship between Rory and the band. The intention is that the band is essentially apathetic towards him, but this could be made clearer.
• Use more shots of the drums. The song is very driven by drumming, because Travis Barker is God. For this reason we need to put more emphasis on the heavier drum rolls and such.
• Get the frontman to look down the lens more often.

That's pretty much it.