Evaluation - Vonnie Pigott

Music video and Ancillary products
The song we’d picked for the video was ‘No looking back’ by a Cambridge band Anti-Social Burn-outs. The style of the song was quite heavy rock so it was that genre that we took most inspiration from, using lots of examples we compiled a series of products that followed conventions, mainly using dark lighting and colours.
Because of the genre, the video was going to be more about convention, as the breaking of convention is more common to indie or alternative music videos. When it comes to rock videos and products dark colours are key and are mainly about what the audience expects of it to gain more success, considering rock is a more mainstream genre.
The style of music meant that we decided the video should be very performance based rather than narrative based. The narrative was supposed to be quite vague, enough to understand a very basic plot (Guy training for a fight) but the idea was that there were a lot of pieces that the audience had to fill in themselves as is common with these kind of videos, in Animal I have become (three days grace) for example, the story is incredibly vague and feels like parts of a longer film and so the lyrics and the imagination of the viewer must fill in the gaps.
This was one of the videos we took some ideas from, mainly the performance but originally a lot more of the narrative. We were also influenced by other rock videos such as ‘Animals’ By Nickelback and ‘Afterlife’ by Avenged sevenfold which are very performance driven videos, animals especially which is all performance, we borrowed the way that they use a hand held camera and move around the band a lot. Afterlife is another example of a vague narrative but is a lot more abstract than Animal I have become.
We didn’t link the lyrics to the visuals but there were subtle hints, such as when the lyrics say ‘I am strong and I won’t be pulled apart’ at one point the female character blew a kiss towards the screen subtly hinting that this pulling apart could come from a woman, trying to distract and ruin somebody in the evil way that femme fatales are shown to do in films.
The lighting in the video itself was quite contrasting and bright at some points, such as in the beginning when the light suddenly changes when on the guitarist, but was dark and more gothic at others (Such as the bass footage.)
Though most of the performers costumes weren’t planned the guitarist was made to wear quite dark clothes and the bassist’s outfit was black and white and looked very gothic and the black makeup made her fit with the music better. The black lipstick was originally inspired by Jonas Akerlund’s (director, Papparazzi – Lady gaga) style of using makeup but it was an effect that was too difficult to achieve, I still liked the idea of using black lipstick however.
When it came to the Digipak we took a lot of inspiration from the covers of bands like Bullet for my valentine which use realistically cartooned images, the fact that it’s an illustration is contrapuntal to the sinister images they use (a bleeding woman) and we tried a similar thing, though not as violent the image of a scary looking woman holding fire is quite creepy. The woman on the cover was not meant to represent anyone in particular but looked similar enough to the one female band member to at least look like it relates, but even the idea of using somebody who is not in the band was inspired again by Bullet for my valentine’s covers who use a female character quite often despite being an all male band. The rest of the Digipak however was our own work, going slightly against convention by using quite surreal and trippy imagery with the colourful fire patterns.
The magazine advert was not very different to the Digipak, but it was meant to relate quite strongly to the Album. We used the image that was on the cover because it worked as a nice and simple image against a black background, it also worked in the way that it would make the Digipak itself more recognisable, as the point is to promote the album and not the band in this advert the audience needed to be able to find the CD easily in a store as they would recognise the advert image.
The fonts were quite gothic to fit with the theme, as a lot of elements of our band had been quite dark like this, a font called ‘A Lolita Scorned’ which looks almost as though it was dripping. The band name used a different font to stand out slightly more; it also had a glow effect behind it that added to the creepy effect (as it was a dark red.)
The Digipak used some images of two of the band members; these images were taken from the video itself and then drawn over using vectors, a viewer could link this back to the video as the images were generic and look as though they could’ve come from any point in the video. The stills were drawn over for several reasons: the original stills were very dark and bad quality, it looked brighter and worked with the surreal swirls and it fit with the cover far better. We avoided using the bands head or faces to add a sense of mystery to the band themselves, making them seem darker.
The imagery we used a lot was that of fire, the fire orb appears on the cover, the back and on the spine. This was because it related to the narrative of our video, which was meant to be quite strong and show the characters passion and hatred, the fire was a representation of this. It was also meant to help show the strength and passion that goes with the style of the bands music, as Anti-social Burnouts style of songs are quite heavy. Fire is quite common as a representation of passion, strength and hatred so it felt like an image that would work well. It was also more subtly used in the swirls, which are meant to look very vaguely like fire as well.

The feedback we got on the Digipak said similar things, they said ‘the gothic style of the design suits the style of music, this is undeniably going to be heavy rock with little attempt to be mainstream.’ This in essence is the effect we had wished to achieve from the digipak, we wanted the cover to say something about the style of music contained within it so the Digipak was definatly effective. In regards to the magazine advert we were told that the ‘Colours and image blend well together, writing font matches theme of the band’ So the fonts seemed to worked, considering there were three different fonts
We were also told that; ‘The use of the same image for the magazine ad is an obvious consistency but as it's such a striking image - it is direct and effective.’ Which again what we were aiming for, there was an obvious instant recognition that the two were related by an audience and the simple image aparently worked well if it was described as ‘Striking.’ This is good as it means that our Digipak will stand out to an audience and if nothing else at least interest them in finding out what it is.
There was not much response to the video, we were told that it fit in well with a lot of conventions, again something we were aiming for as we weren’t trying to go against convention. The problems with the music video at the start however was that we lacked a lot of band footage, due to instruments bieng quite difficult to get so we fixed this by doing the instruments in all different places, this however did go slightly against convention as bands are most often shown together in at least a few shots. So because of this the video was more experimental, it worked out well, mainly because we made it very obvious that all the musicians were in completely different places. However we still would’ve prefered to have had all the musicians together rather than done it this strange way.

When it came to creating all of our media products there were a lot of incredibly useful new technologies available to help, not only in the research but the planning and the research.
Obviously the blog was incredibly helpful for recording our thought processes and the label clouds that are used were also helpful for organising and finding pieces of information when we needed them.
When it came to research, of course the internet was useful, we used it to find a lot of existing examples of videos of other bands (Hence the inspired videos) and collecting the images of other bands album covers and magazine adverts. When searching for the album images we mainly chose bands who worked in a similar genre to the genre of music we were doing, and so we picked heavy, rock bands or singers such as; Avenged sevenfold, Bullet for my Valentine, 3 Days grace, Nana Kitade and even very heavy bands like dying fetus. So working in a similar genre helped as we used styles inspired by a lot of these covers.
It also helped in finding photoshop tutorials, there are a lot of tutorials for photoshop that show you how to do all sorts of amazing effects, one of which we used in our Digipak in order to make the fire orb effect in the girls hands.
Photoshop was the most useful program of all, it was helpful in creating all sorts of effects for the Digipak and Magazines advert as well as drawing over the stills from the video to create a cartooned effect, as well as all the fonts available on photoshop. It was great for the research and collecting images together, and testing out effects found on photoshop tutorials.
When editing the video the only program we used was Final cut express. Final cut is a good program for editing, far superior to other editing programs like Windows Movie maker. Final cut is very good for detailed editing and all sorts of effects that work in a very similar way to photoshop, such as the adjustment of the brightness and contrast and even filters that can be found on it are quite similar to those on photoshop. Before we started the video we tested some of the effects available on final cut, although we tested quite a few of them we decided not to use any in the final video, mainly because most of them looked quite cheesy. However had we been doing an indie style video some of the effects we’d tested, such as the cartooned version of a video, we might have used them but it didn’t fit with a rock video.
Final Cut was also used for the evaluation stage of our product, we created a DVD commentary type video that would be designed to go with the Digipak. We each edited our own section for the commentary, for my section I used mainly the fade and tween effects in final cut to show images or videos of our products to illustrate the points I made.
All the different media technologies and the influences from other bands are what have helped create and complete all the products of our Music video project. In the end I am quite happy with how our ancillary products turned out but I’ve always thought our music video could have been much better if we had had better footage.