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Media Studies Advanced Portfolio Evaluation
The fictional artist I have created to be featured in my texts is a female artist named ‘Cherry Red,’ so named because of the connotations it unwittingly draws to the colour of blood. The song that I chose for the music video, ‘Zombie,’ is performed by a band called ‘The Pretty Reckless’ which features a female lead singer. While this is conventional for alternative rock, having a female solo artist in the genre of alternative rock with an uncredited band clearly playing a multitude of instruments to accompany the female’s vocals, is not. I purposely chose to create a solo artist rather than a band to challenge this convention.
In my music video and digipak I have represented ‘Cherry Red’ as quite a dark character, with an interest in blood and death, which is conventional for alternative rock artists. I have directly opposed this representation of her character with blog posts personally made by the artist when I created the website. These blog posts are friendly and address the fans, asking them to give feedback on whether they like her music, which is unconventional for a lot of alternative rock artists.
My music video could’ve been one of three main types of music video (blog post: The Three Main Types of Music Video), as argued by Sven Carlson, and they are, the narrative music video, the performance music video or the conceptual/experimental music video. While each have their own strengths and weaknesses, I opted to use an entirely narrative driven music video in which the actress portraying ‘Cherry Red’ (Leann Randell) discovers over the course of the video that she is either a zombie or is possessed by some malevolent force. I purposely left the narrative open to interpretation because I feel that a music video’s narrative should not be as straightforward as to simply tell the audience what is happening, they should look deeper into the video and try to work it out for themselves; this is also conventional of alternative rock narrative music videos as is seen in the music video for ‘Silvia’ by ‘Miike Snow.’
The narrative also adheres to Todorov’s narrative structure and includes an equilibrium, a disruption, a quest, a climax and a resolution. The equilibrium is the opening of the music video which features Cherry waking up in an unknown location with her hands and face covered in blood; the disruption is when Cherry suddenly starts throwing up blood on her walk home; the quest is when Cherry seeks out help from a church but cannot cross the threshold leading her to attempt suicide (unsuccessfully); the climax is when she is drowning in the bath tub; and the resolution, albeit an upsetting one, is that Cherry drowns and dies.
While my music video is conventional for using a common narrative structure, it is unconventional in the fact that the actress in the narrative, who is also the artist herself, dies at the end of the video. Even for alternative rock this is still unconventional and I chose to do this to provoke an emotional response from it’s audience and to purposely be controversial to generate publicity, something that many music videos of all genres aim to do but rarely admit to.
The look of the actress portraying Cherry Red is important too so I chose to use my friend Leann who has styled, short blonde hair with streaks of purple in the fringe. This type of hairstyle would be less conventional for a pop music video but is commonplace for female alternative rock artists. In the video she wears a variety of stylish outfits, for example a fur-lined hooded jacket, a plaid shirt and black skinny jeans, however the style itself is not particularly mainstream and the plaid shirt, especially, holds strong connotations of alternative and grunge artists, for example, Nirvana and Blood Red Shoes.
Music videos are postmodern texts and one feature of postmodernism is the use of non-linear narrative, which I did originally decide to use in my video. The first concept for my music video was to have the narrative ending at the start and therefore making a loop, however I decided against this as the ending wouldn’t have been much of a climax and the audience may have felt cheated by the lack of one.
A common feature of all music videos is editing the cuts to the beat of the song (blog post: Music Video Conventions), something I strived to do for almost every cut I made, to create a visual rhythm for the song. The audience can begin to anticipate the next cut and feel more engaged with the music video. I also tried to make the footage look more filmic by applying video filters in Premiere Pro, namely ‘RGB Curves’ and ‘Fast Colour Corrector,’ as this will make the audience take the video much more seriously if it looks like an actual music video rather than a low budget student video.
Before creating my music video I also analysed three existing music videos, each belonging to a female-fronted, alternative rock band (blog posts: Textual Analyses of ‘I Wish I Was Someone Better,’ ‘The Only Exception’ and ‘Miss Nothing’) to further discern music video and genre conventions and to help me decide what kind of music video I wished to create. One of the most useful of these analyses was my analysis for ‘Miss Nothing’ by ‘The Pretty Reckless’ (the same band who sing the song I chose to use, ‘Zombie’) because it made me think deeper about unspoken narrative in music videos. In this particular music video Taylor Momsen plays a version of Mary Magdalene at a debauched version of The Last Supper the day after Jesus’ crucifixion and it made me think about using religious themes in my own music video but using a contemporary setting.
As my video focuses on quite a dark theme, one of possession, it is more likely to appeal to and represent young adults and students aged from sixteen to early twenties. Although possession is not something students and young adults can identify with personally, they can use their media literacy to link my video to films such as The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973) and more contemporarily, The Exorcism of Emily Rose (Scott Derrickson, 2005). I have chosen specifically students as they are typically known to be more active in watching films, especially horror films. The video and digipak will appeal to them as they are both gory in their own right. There is also an element of vicariousness to the music video and digipak because although the audience will not want to be possessed themselves, many people who watch horror and supernatural films are doing so because they want an escape from a normal, boring life and can live vicariously through Cherry. The target audience is both male and female but because Cherry Red is a female, she will naturally appeal more to women who wish to emulate her.
When creating my digipak I looked at the conventions of digipaks and CDs such as the design features and colour schemes used, as well as determining the overall theme of the digipak by analysing existing digipaks. To do this I analysed three existing CD front and back covers (blog posts: Textual Analyses of ‘Riot!’, ‘Pretty Reckless EP’ and ‘Bleed Like Me’) as full digipak covers are extremely hard to find on the internet and I do not own any myself. For my CD artwork I decided to stick with the main theme of the music video, that of blood, and so I took photographs of Leann spitting up blood for the album cover, spitting blood into a white sink for the back cover, a cropped view of her face with her mouth covered in blood for the inside cover, a logo and lyric extract for the inside left, and photographs of fake blood swirling in water for the CD and DVD covers. When editing these images in Photoshop (blog post: Digipak Construction) I used RGB Curves to add contrast and a slight red tone to the photographs which darkened the blood so it looked less bright, and therefore less fake. The blood used for the digipak and the music video itself was a mixture of 10ml of red food colouring, 10ml of milk and half a pint of water. The overall consistency was not very true to life as blood is much more dense and viscous than the liquid I used but it served it’s purpose well enough. For all of the text in the digipak covers I used two fonts called News Goth (a sans serif font already installed on my computer) and VTC Nue Tattoo Script (a font I downloaded from dafont.com). I chose these fonts because sans serif fonts are being used more and more these days as they can look striking but also effective, such as Lady Gaga’s The Fame Monster, which uses a font very similar to News Goth. The VTC Nue Tattoo Script was also very effective, but conventional to alternative rock because, as the name implies, it is a common style of script for tattoos, and tattoos are typically thought of as anti-mainstream (especially when used with this style of script). I placed the album title/artist name on the blood coming from Cherry’s mouth as if her name is coming from inside of her and that her identity, Cherry Red, is as big a part of her as the blood running through her body.
For the artist’s website I, again, analysed several band websites belonging to alternative rock bands (blog posts: Textual Analyses of the websites of Paramore, The Pretty Reckless and Spinnerette), all of which features a female lead singer. I created a template for my website (blog post: Website Construction) and filled it with things conventional to band homepages such as links to a forum, a photo gallery, a video gallery and a news feed. I also included sections down the left and right side of the layout such as download links that would hypothetically direct a user to iTunes to buy the album. This is important as I wanted to make sure that users had an easy way of legitimately buying and downloading the album rather than resorting to illegal downloading. Illegal downloading has started to become the norm and it is most dangerous when considering my target market, 16-25 year olds are the most common perpetrators of illegal downloading. This is another reason why the whole concept of having a physical digipak release instead of a normal CD release is important because the more attractive the album’s design is to the consumer, the more likely they are to want to physically own it for themselves. This is also why a DVD included in the release is much more common these days as it is a lot more difficult for illegal downloaders to find the bonus content from the DVD than it is to just find .mp3 files (though not impossible, unfortunately).
During the pre-production phase of my production work, I drew a storyboard (blog post: Zombie Storyboard) which was made possible through the use of a pencil, a pen and some paper, but I also used a scanner to upload the images I had drawn onto the computer and was saved as a .jpg image file, which then meant I could upload my drawn images to Blogger. However, drawing is not my strong point and the storyboard itself looks extremely amateurish and is not a true representation of what my music video would eventually become. I also made an animatic (blog post: Zombie Animatic) to show how my music video would fit together, however because of the low quality of the drawings it, again, was not a good representation of what I would create. My animatic was made on a very simple to use editing program, Windows Movie Maker. This media technology is commonly used by amateur film-makers and fan video creators who piece together new edits or existing material, for example a television programme or an Anime series, they will edit together their films using this free software as opposed to Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 which is not free. I personally don’t feel that making a storyboard or an animatic helped my production move forward but I realise it is an important part of the production process for some. Like last year’s Foundation Portfolio in Media, I again stored all of my coursework, including pre-production, production and post-production, on a web-based Google-owned, blogging site, ’Blogger.’ This blogging platform is very easy and free to use. It also keeps records of the time and date of published posts so it allowed me to be much more organised with my coursework than I perhaps would’ve been if it were all handwritten on paper. It also meant that my coursework was safe and stored in one place, however I did almost delete a very important post once by my own mistake and had I not coincidentally had the preview window open at the same time I would have lost the work forever and would have had to redo it - instead I simply copied the work from the preview directly into a new blog post. Since then I have been backing up my posts in Word documents but thankfully haven’t needed to use them as of yet.
During the research stage of pre-production I garnered information from across the internet but mainly used the website Wikipedia, a web-based encyclopaedia notorious for it’s sometimes unreliable information, however with any information I used from articles on the site I always checked the cited source related to the information which was always from reputable sites such as bbc.co.uk. Wikipedia has an unjust reputation in my opinion and can be used very easily and accurately as long as users check the sources cited. One site in particular besides Wikipedia that helped me was an extremely informative article on socialtimes.com related to the concept of the online music video (blog post: The Online Music Video), concerning sites like Vevo and YouTube.
As for YouTube itself, this was another site I used extensively in my research and textual analysis and it is the easiest place to find a huge collection of music videos. I could also embed these music videos into blog posts on Blogger. This allowed me to easily access the video again in the future as well as view the video and analyse it in one place rather than switching between tabs on Google Chrome.
During the production phase of my music video I used my own Canon EOS 550D which allowed me to capture my footage on a 16gb Class 10 SDHC card in 720p .mov files. I could have also captured in Full HD (1080p) however my computer works best with standard HD (720p). I have a lot of experience with my own camera and was very comfortable using it for this production as I have had owned the 550D for eight months and previously owned a 400D for three years before that – which only took photographs and not video footage but the general controls were the same so having almost four years of experience with this brand of camera was a definite advantage. Because of my previous experience I knew exactly how to get the shots I wanted, for example the shots containing a shallow depth of field were obtained by setting the lens to 18mm, keeping the camera relatively close to the subject and manually focusing on the subject; the background would be blurred and look extremely effective. I used this effect a lot for the scenes in which Cherry is walking home from the field (blog posts: Shooting ‘Zombie’ Days 1, 2, 3, 4 & 5). In addition to filming my music video with my camera I also used it to take the photos used in my digipak. The photos looked great and were of a very high quality and resolution, perfect for if they were ever to truly be put into production.
Once all my filming was complete, I imported all of my footage from the SDHC card to my home computer and used Adobe Media Encoder CS4 to transcode all of my .mov video files into .mp4, a much more manageable, although slightly compressed, format to work in. I then imported the footage into a non-linear editing (NLE) program called Adobe Premiere Pro CS4, in which I already had some experience with, and began a new project (blog post: The Editing Process). Because I had used Premiere quite a few times before, editing was relatively simple for me, and cutting the video together was easy with the use of the Razor tool. As I previously stated, I wanted to attain a filmic look for my footage so I used the RGB Curves effect extensively, highlight the greens and reds in the footage but leaving the blues as they were. The overall effect was very pleasing and did look much more professional than the original footage. One scene that was a little harder to handle was the scene in which Cherry’s reflection acts independently of herself. For this I placed Cherry’s actual self footage on one video track and Cherry’s reflection footage on a track directly above it. Due to the way I shot the scene I made sure there was an empty space between the actress and the mirror itself so that there was an easily definable space in which to crop the top piece of footage to reveal the footage underneath. The effect was simply called Crop.
Then it was simply a matter of exporting the footage to create a working movie file ready to be uploaded to YouTube and burnt to a DVD, however it wasn't as simple as that for me as I began to have some very unexpected problems with Adobe Media Encoder.
Although editing the music video together was entirely problem free, the same cannot be said for actually managing to export the project as a playable video file (blog post: Encoding Issues). Therefore I wasn’t able to upload any form of rushes to YouTube after each session of editing which is extremely regrettable. I initially thought it was because I had transcoded the original .mov files taken from my Canon EOS 550D into compressed .mp4 files, despite having done the exact same thing with no exporting problems many times before, however after consulting my college's technical advisor, seeking advice in forums and actually contacting Adobe for technical support it seemed as though there was nothing that could be done besides filming my project's output preview in Premiere Pro with one of college's HDV cameras and then making a new project for it in Premiere Pro, something that would severely degrade the overall quality of the music video itself.
However, when all hope seemed lost I thought I would try reinstalling my operating system, Windows 7, on my home computer and then reinstalling Premiere Pro and see if the project would then export successfully and to my surprise it worked first time, thereby eliminating the need for an extremely degraded quality recording as a substitute.
I also used another Adobe program, Adobe Photoshop CS5, to create, design and edit my digipak (blog post: Digipak Construction) and artist homepage (blog post: Website Construction). I chose to use this program because I have used it before many times, during the Foundation Portfolio production work and my own personal projects, and am extremely confident with the software and it’s features. When editing the photographs I had taken specifically for the digipak I primarily used the RGB Curves effects, the same one I used in my music video production, partly because I know this technique very well but mainly to keep an in house style with the colour tones of the music video and of the digipak. When designing the website I felt that using Photoshop would, again, be best rather than any other program, such as using Dreamweaver (which can create real coded websites) as it’s the program I feel most comfortable with. I stuck to the overall theme and colour scheme prevalent in the digipak and music video, using primarily reds, blacks and whites, and this was again to keep up the in house style. Other computer programs I used during this project include Microsoft Word 2003 was also used for storing blog posts and for writing up this evaluation, and as I previously stated, I used Windows Movie Maker to create the animatic.
I believe my overall production, consisting of the three texts which are music video, digipak and the website, has been very successful, as my audience feedback attests to. To gain my audience feedback I asked my tutor, Tim, to show my music video to one of his AS Level classes and get them to fill in a questionnaire I had devised (blog post: Audience Feedback). I was determined to get honest feedback from people I did not know, which I do not think I could have gained if I had simply asked my friends and classmates what they thought of it because there would always be some bias in the results. Fortunately my music video and ancillary texts was received very well, attaining an average rating of 3.7 out a possible 5 for each area I asked about.
I am extremely pleased that the audience members, AS Media students who are regularly exposed to many music videos thought that mine was effective too. I'm also very happy that my audience believed it would appeal to 16-25 year olds because they themselves are a part of that demographic and to get a positive response is very encouraging. The feedback also proved that all three of my texts have an in-house style and are easily recognisable to each other.
When asked, “Overall, did you enjoy the video? Why?” 15 out of 17 people answered ‘yes’ to this question and gave some very positive feedback such as "excellent editing and very original story" which I am extremely happy about, however 2 audience members answered ‘no’ to the question; one person said that they thought "the editing was amazing but the song's just not my cup of tea" which is perfectly understandable, and the other said that there was too much blood in the video for them to enjoy it. A sentiment echoed in the additional comments section below which I shall discuss next.
I also obtained valuable critical information such as when I asked for, “Any other comments?” the vast majority of my audience members said that they felt there was too much blood within my music video, which is certainly something I would definitely rethink if I were to re-make my music video, however it should be noted that they still said that they enjoyed the video and gave high marks for the questions.
For the sake of this evaluation I have only spoken about the conceived and actually produced video for ‘Zombie,’ however my first initial concept for a music video was a music video for the song ‘Keeping It Close’ by Blood Red Shoes. However due to different factors; 1. my male actor, Scott, dropping out of the production midway through, 2. my over-eagerness to film and therefore not planning thoroughly enough, 3. my choice of distant location in which to film and 4. extremely unpredictable snowfall for about a month barring me access to the aforementioned location (a beach on the northeast coast), this music video was abandoned and a video for ‘Zombie’ by The Pretty Reckless was conceived and produced instead after the Winter half term. You can see on my blog how well the original production was going but I am still glad it all happened, as I feel that I learned from my original video production and put that knowledge to good use when creating ‘Zombie.’
Word Count: 4,079 words.