Evaluation

Our music video could be come under many different genres. Some people would refer to it as “UK Grime” whereas others could think it is more “Funky house” even though there is no specific genre for the song, we know what other music videos are in the similar category and this is because we researched into other music videos thoroughly when we began filming our own. We looked into many different music videos such as other songs that had been done by Ms Dynamite and also looked into songs such as “bonkers” by Dizzee Rascal and “never be your woman” by Wiley. Even though these videos follow the conventions of an urban music video, they are all very similar and have a main performer and narrative. We did not want our video to come across as the stereotypical video that would be done by UK artists and so we came up with an idea that broke the conventions of a music video, especially those of a UK video. Our video is different as it is not a polished off video that is clean and perfect, It is real footage and catching people there and then in the moment and showing real reactions instead of things that are rehearsed 99% of our video is spontaneous and that is what makes it unique because there we never see videos that are unrehearsed that come out good. Nowadays when you switch on the TV you see reality TV shows and programs all about catching people in the moment right there and then. Sometimes when you rehearse something too much, you can see in the video that it is not original but is instead just copying what you have seen on TV before. We wanted our video to be a realistic video with real reactions and real every day people. If it had been a normal music video, they would have got people to dress up as take away men or tattoo artists but we wanted to catch the real people there and then and this is what made our video what it is.

We looked at other music videos t see what has already been done, not to give us an idea of what to do because we wanted to de something completely different o what has already been done. We did not want our music video to look like the traditional music video with the big glossy cars, and half naked girls and lots of jewelry, we wanted our video to look original and unique but most importantly we wanted to video to make people smile and feel happy because there are too many videos that are about death and broken hearts. Our video is unconventional and that is what makes it stand out from the rest because we took a simple form of filming which was just a hand held camera and point of view shot but we used it as creatively as we could and the end result was better than we thought it would be.
When we finished our video our focus was on the CD cover and magazine. We thought that the CD cover was an easier task because we had gritty urban locations near by and we also thought that we would use one of the locations that appeared in the music video as a location for the photo shoot. W chose to use the bike path because it represents the area that we live in and shows what is around us. The bike path is covered in graffiti and so it gave us an interesting mise en scene for the CD cover. We did the majority of our photos on the bike path because the path carries on for miles and miles and so we could just find different spots of the bike path and each one had a different interesting mise en scene. Our CD cover goes perfectly with our video because it has the same feeling and look to it. Our main character is dressed in bright vibrant colours on the CD cover and so she stands out against certain backgrounds that are not so bright. The outfit she is wearing is different and unique and so it compliments the video as the main character is what carries the video. If we had a boring person that does not stand out then the video would not have worked but because our main character was unique and creative, our video ran smoother than it possibly could have. In terms of the magazine advert, we made the CD cover the main focus because we know that at our age when we like an artist and see the advert in the magazine for their new album, we look at the album cover specifically to see what’s on it. Especially for the genre that we have done because many times there is often an interesting CD cover for music of this type. We made sure that we kept it simple but interesting and said it was available at shops where most young people would go e.g. HMV. This is a shop that is always full of teenagers and so saying the album is available there is more realistic than saying somewhere like ASDA because even though ASDA do a good music section, HMV is somewhere that has people of our target audience more. Being teenagers, we know that when we pick up am album, we look for something that relates to us, and so the location shots that we used were clever in some sense as if somebody picked up the CD they may recognize the place and so they immediately feel connected with the artist because they feel they are from the same background. We think that this is important because the artist must connect with their target audience in a personal way in order for the audience to ant to buy their album and so the pictures selected for the album cover were thought through carefully.
The advantage that we had when doing our music video is that we aimed it at people of our age group so subconsciously we put in things that would attract people our age anyways because we are not attracted to things that are not really for our age so this was an advantage to us as we did not have to think too much about what attracts out age group and target audience because we were the target audience. And so, this meant that when we showed our product to our audiences, we got some very good feedback because people thought we got it exactly right in terms of what they wanted to see.
We got our product around through facebook and YouTube because that was the fastest and most efficient way to do it. We got really good feedback because people thought the video did it was aimed to do which was to make people feel good and make them smile. At first when we had done the first draft of the video, we did not get so much good feedback from teachers as they thought the concept had to be worked on and the footage must be shortened in order to fit the song. We took the constructive criticism and improved the video so that it looked much better but we kept certain things that teachers suggested changing because some teachers liked it and some teachers did not. We expected to get this sort of feedback from teachers because they are of an older audience and they are not the target audience and so when they feel they do not connect with it, we know why because it is not what they are used to in terms of music videos because we were trying to do something new and unconventional. However, we really appreciated their advice because it helped us look over something’s and improve the video even more. When we uploaded the video to facebook we tagged all our friends in the video and got our friends to tag their friends and so the video was viewed by hundreds of people. Nearly everyone believed that the video was good and was unique and this gave us confidence with it because when we first planned the video we understood that it was either going to be really good or really bad. We connected our YouTube account with the facebook account and so every time somebody commented or liked it, it popped up on everyone’s news feed which meant that other people would view the comment that they wrote which meant they had automatically viewed the video.
We chose not to use green screen for our music video because we wanted all our footage to be original footage to put forward the fact that it was a girl that had found a camera and gone out and filmed her days out. We used a hand held camera to create realism because she the majority of it was from her point of view and this made the video more urban and gritty because it shows that this girl in the video does not have the equipment to get filmed and create an amazing music video so instead she’s found a camera and just gone out with it. We did use still shots but there were not so many because we wanted to maintain the fast constantly moving pace of the video. When it came to editing the video on final cut pro we edited the majority of it first and then saw that what we had done for our first draft was not so good. So we made the cuts very small and so in the end each cut of the video lasted for no longer than a couple of seconds because the song was fast and so we had to shorten the cuts in order to increase the speed of the video. We used many different editing effects such as earthquake, glow, bloom, dazzle, colour change, bad film, bad TV, mirror, blink and bugs eye. These are editing effects that basically gave us realistic looks to our footage especially the bits where we used the colour change because it made the video vibrant and funky.


We wanted to keep the video very original though and use original footage because we wanted to show the real reactions of people and give it the natural urban look that it already had. we also decided to use the camera in ways that we were not advised to use in it so turning the camera around, and turning it in canted angles and using blurred footage. This all added towards our piece looking original. When we were doing this we were aware that it was either going to look cheap, or look original and we successfully made it look original but as mentioned before this was mainly down to the performer who was also the camera operator because she broke the conventions instead of sticking to what is expected of a video.

Detailed Analysis of our completed music video

Our music video begins with the main character sitting in her bedroom on her laptop. the music that is played over this is called "windmill" and it is a song that is played in the game "zelda" people will recognize this song as a song from a game as it sounds playful and comical. The reason we picked to do this is because the whole of the beginning is fast forwarded and so it goes nicely with the concept of her being bored at home and the connotations to younger people e.g the people in our target audience is that old projector style movies are dull and boring, so she is going to go out with a friend. the camera cuts to an eye line match to show her updating her facebook status which says she is going to "wile out" and this shows that she is a young girl as she is very active on facebook. she then send a text to her friend that reads "get ready to wile out" this makes it clear to the audience what she had already said to the whole of and now she is letting her friend know and also reinforces the key theme of 'wiling out'. she then goes to the toilet whilst everything is still fast forwarded and the same song continues to play, and starts fixing her hair and putting on her makeup, we incorporated this to show that her whole day is being recorded from start to finish and to show her getting ready and to show a typical girls preparation to get ready to go out, to enforce the sense of realty. The whole of this part has the "bad film" effect on it and the reason we did this is because we want it to seem like an old movie and this is also why we chose for it to be in black and white at the beginning whilst she is bored. We also felt that we had to add the extra bit of music at the beginning as the original song that we chose was not long enough to fit the brief of the task.
It then cuts to a point of view shot and everything is in colour and it shows the a girl putting on her shoes but he is the one holding the camera.at this moment when it cuts, the real song comes on and so it shows that she is getting ready to go out. she is zipping up her boots and getting ready to go and the words of the song are saying "Let me take you there you don't want to see, what this crazy cool is about to be" the audience can then tell that something is going to happen. The way that the song is mixed works perfectly with our video as there is once again a sort of scratching sound which would be made by real DJ decks. The quick change in tempo and to colour screen quickly shows the audience that her day has come into action. When the full base kicks in, we see her going down the stairs still from a point of view angle, and everything is shaking as we used the "earthquake" effect. we thought this was a suitable effect as she is going down the stairs and to make movement more obvious, we also made this bit faster and put a few "glows" over the stairs to add more colour. she then opens the door and it cuts to her being on a bus where we can see her feet, and the camera turns to the window where it reads"please do not put feet on seats" and she then readjusts her feet on the seat which is slightly comical because she thinks she is a rebel when it's hardly anything to brag about. she then gets into town and begins her proper journey in which shop names are shown to add to the mise en scene to make it obvious to the audience that she is in the city centre, however we used quick cuts of these shots so the audience did not get bored. when the first set of wile out's come, it is performed by the main character first to establish her straight away as the artist and this is in the train station but it then cuts to her continuing her mission in which lots of random clips are used.

The reason we put so many different clips in is because she is "wiling out" which means she is going out and going crazy and having a good time. When the chorus comes and it is repetitively saying "wile out" we see mnay differnt people saying it which shows the community that we live in. when we decided that this was going to be the idea, we knew that it would not be easy because it was not a straight forward idea. There were a lot of people that were rude to us and a lot of people that said and did things that were not needed when they could just say they are not interested, but we got there in the end with finding people. Random people continue to say wile out and we see cuts of the main character on the bike path and in other interesting mise en scene like under a bridge. the song continues and we used many effects on it to make it look colourful and happy. There are random shots of people dancing and people doing gymnastics and signs showing all the places we went. We feel that this was more effective as it was all real so we did not have the problem of bad acting in our video and any cheesiness just added to the upbeat, comical effect. extreme close ups and cuts of different people smiling to make the audience feel more positive as it is a well known saying that 'smiles are contagious'.

The storyline continues and more random shots are used such as showing signs reading
"Donner kebab" We wanted to show the mind span of a teenager and show things a teenager would think and what they would do hence the randomness of what catches the camera's eye. We also added cuts of street signs pointing in different directions to suggest randomness and that the girl went wherever she wanted to. When the song finishes, the original camera sound is played and we see the main character with the camera going into a market an then it cuts to showing the shop keeper saying wile out, it then cuts to the main character in her bedroom and she is the one watching the video and laughing at the woman saying wile out we think that this was nice, showing the actual sweet nature of the people that we recorded and how much fun they had themselves participating in our video. The ending was done so that people could round it off nicely andput the story together that it was her with the camera and also so that people can get that she just wanted to go out and have a really good time. We think that the end shows a lot because it takes away the seriousness of people thinking a video has to be a polished video with somebody performing all the way through.

Levenshulme Train station

we used the train station as one of our main locations where Haleemah was performing the wile out part of the song. It was very effective as it created an interesting mise en scene and also gave the video the fast pace we wanted and suggested travel was occurring, this was important as although our video may have seemed rather random it had a main narrative of a girl going on a journey with her video camera and randomly filming things with her camera (hence the reason that many of the shots are hand held).
There is part of the song where it reminds and we chose to use the steps of the train station to do this because you can clearly see it is going backwards as the music makes a rewind noise as if the disk is scratching. The train station is also an urban looking gritty place as it has been there for many years. it is also a convenient location as it was close to us an so once again we just chose to take advantage of the locations we had around us. We had not noticed how many interesting locations to film were in levenshulme/burnage until we went and had a look around properly and discovered that there are some very interesting locations with interesting authentic mise en scene. the street with no name is a famous street simply because of the name and so this is a place that many people would recognise because it is in the "heart" of levenshulme which once again goes with our theme of representing where we come from and the type of people we are. We did not get permission to go on the platform because people do not allow filming as train stations and so we had to do it fast and then leave. Even though this was risky we thought it was worth it because the train station made a difference to the video because it was a location that had meaning to it. We also managed to get some over views from on top of the train station which were high angle shots. These shots were very well lit and showed the inner city of manchester and the fact that they were took from the train station made the shots look better as they were high and distant shots.

The importance of Facebook!

Facebook played a large role in our video because as we all know, facebook is faster than word of mouth. The speed at which information travels on facebook is ridiculous. We got our video and uploaded it to facebook. We then tagged all of our friends in the video which means that the video was then on there homepage. It then meant that every persons friend could see the video that we had posted even if we were not friends with them. We also made a group on facebook asking or people to view the video. We had some very positive feedback from people saying that we had done a good job with it. The reason we picked to use facebook is because facebook is so fast that within a few minutes you could have hundreds of views. It also meant that people could see that other people had viewed the video and that meant that they could also view the video and so the chain continues to however far it goes. We were also able to tag people in the video which appeared in the video. when you tag somebody into a video on facebook it says they "appear" in the video which was an advantage because then people are looking out to see who appears in the video, or they may have seen somebody they knew in the video and then passed the link on. in terms of getting things round, Facebook is the best thing to used because it never fails to gossip!
we also managed to get our videos on to youtube aswell and connect both facebook and youtube together which means that anybody that viewed the video on facebook, automatically viewed it on you and so the ratings were the same. The advantage if putting it on youtube a swell as facebook meant that we got feedback from people that we do not know personally and so the meant that we got a lot of constructive criticism. It also meant that people subscribed t the youtube account which was good because that also showed on peoples home[ages on facebook so if they had not seen the video, they would have seen the subscription and wonder what it is and then by clicking on it they automatically view the video and so the videos ratings goes up each time somebody views it.

Album Covers.

Ms Dynamite tends to have dull album covers in gritty places but wearing brighter clothes. We think that she has created this mise en scene because she wants to maintain the look of coming from a run down area as she did not have much whilst growing up and wants to show that she is real and therefore make her audience relate to her. She has also made the background look dirty as she can sometimes be classed as a 'grime' artist, a sound that came from the london underground music scene, so she has used the metaphor of being 'grimey' to represent this particular music genre. On most of her album cover she is wearing some sort of tracksuit with trainers and this is because she is sort of a tomboy and makes her appear more androgynous to appeal to a wider market of both males and females but it also goes with the whole concept of her being an MC and the typical style of dress that is associated with this profession. With our album cover we went for a different look by dressing up in funky clothes of very random colours but keeping it feminine, we did this to help specifically market her recent change from grime music to funky house, so we made it fun and flamboyant and exciting. There is no example of how Ms Dynamite herself would have represented this change as the songs on our album were only released as a mix tape after Dynamite lost backing from her record company, however we seen this as a positive as it allowed us to be more creative with our own album cover without taking too much inspiration from her, hence making our idea more original. We used a bike path as the location for our album cover because we thought that it represented the song correctly and we thought that it gave an urban out look to the song, as it had multi-coloured graffiti already on the walls we used this for some shots as we thought it looked raw and captured the urban essence but we also used some shots with blank walls as we knew that these shots would give us more possibilities to play around with them on photoshop and easily add anything that we wanted later on. We tried to use many different shots such as a low angle shot, to show her dominance of the cover as she is the main selling point. We also played with a choice of long shots and mid shots as we felt that our mise en scene of clothing and key props was very important to our shots, we felt that we should use long shots to see her whole body so her total outfit could be seen so all colours were incorporated, however we also wanted to use mid shots so key props such as her multi-coloured nail varnish and the headphones she was wearing could be clearly seen,we used these as headphones are commonly referred to for listening to music in your own world, so we wanted to make t seem as if Ms Dynamites music was in its own world, different, fresh, new and in a league of its own. It turned out rather lucky that we used this prop as our original idea to create our own graffiti spelling out Ms Dynamite using photoshop could not work as it looked quite tacky when being created by hand as neither of us are very artistic and we could not download another font as the mac computers would not allow us to download it or convert it from PC, so instead we had to improvise and decided to carry on the headphone wire to spell out or text. We used a specific font as many of them were either to swirly or very small and hard to read so did not stand out enough, we then joined it together to make it look like a flowing lead. Although our covers did not look completely professional we are both quite proud of them as during this project was the first time either of us have attempted to use photoshop, so we had to learn from scratch and use a textbook to try and work out what we would have to do to try and make a certain effect.
We don't personally think that Ms Dynamite has very interesting album covers because most of the time it is just a big picture of her and not anything else in the frame so when we were doing our cover we tried to show the mise en scene aswell as the artist. Our pictures were very good and clear photo's and so luckily they did not need any editing done to the original photo in terms of contrasting etc. This was a huge advantage to us because it meant that we had less work to do when it came to putting the cd together. we had good lighting and the colours that we picked stood out so it made the picture vibrant.
we kept ms Dynamites theme of it being urban and gritty but we added colour to it. The fact that the location is gritty and grim but the artists is in bright colours adds contrast to the picture and makes the mise en scene more interesting. The good thing about our main character is that she dressed how she normally dresses which is diferent and unique and very colourful and so it was easy to pick the right clothes to wear which was also to our advantage as it meant that she then did not have to impersonate anyone. we think that in a way we were lucky in terms of who played the main character because certain people would feel embarrassed to do certain things but Haleemah was not as she is an out going person who does not care much for what people think and so this helped a great deal.

Locations like the bike path.

Parts of the video were filmed on this bike path because it is a gritty place with lots of grafiiti. We believed that it went nicely with the song as the song is not about flashy expensive places but is about people from real areas that just have fun with each other. We also did a photo shoot on the bike path because we thought it represented the UK music industry well as many UK artists are from areas that are not so well off and there is a lot of vandalism and gritty areas. Placing the main character on the bike path created an interested mise en scene as there were so many different colours and so many different connotations surrounding the area. It was not easy to film here because of how many people were passing by but we managed to get the footage doen in the end. We chose to film specifically under the bridge and infront of the bridge becausre the bridge gives the bike path the authentic look that we wanted and also framed the main character well as there was grafiiti on both sides. There is one bit of the video where Haleemah is against blue graffiti, wearing a blue coat and a blue wig, this was not intentional but it gave the video a clean look to it as evrything looked in it's place. All these sorts of locatons that we went to contributed towards our end product but the bike path was a key location as it represented the song.it also gave the video the extra thing it needed as it was a location that is there but is not used a lot other than for when people walk their dogs or go for a jog. we thought that since this location is so close to our house we should take advantage of it whilst we can. We concidered filming on top of the bridge aswell as underneath but the reason we chose not to is because the camera could not go high enough to get a high angle shot because the bridge was too high and because we are both too short we couldn't reach over to see what was being filmed and so even though it would have been a good shot, we just stuck to filming underneath.

Green is Good :)

Haleemah's appearance in the video in terms of hairstyles and outfits changed through out to show that she was a unique and different person. By doing this, people watching the video immediately see that she is not the typical person you nornally see and so this goes well with the ceoncept of "wiling out" as it is about not caring what people think of you but instead, doing what you want to do and having fun. The hair and outift changes also brightended up the video as certain effects that we used in the video didn't brighten up the video enough and so the fact that she was wearing a bright coloured wig, made it so that we had less work to do in terms of editing and effects. It also added more humour to the video as at some points she was in bland backgrounds wearing a brightly coloured wig and so it all worked well when it came together.
Ms dynamite appears wearing dark colours in her video because she comes from this gritty urban background and she wants to maintain that look, and when u see most of her music videos, the locations are often dull as well. We did not want this to be the case when it came to our video because we wanted to make people smile and brighten up there day and so bright colours were important because our video is a strong visual instead of the focus being lyrical content. We thought the best way to make people happy is to show happiness and bright colours because when people see rain and feel the cold then they are not normally happy but when people feel the warmth and the sunshine then they are normally in a good mood. We remembered simple things such as these when we were filming and applied these concepts to our own video. We also made sure that when we did filming in the dark there was some sort of brightness about it so for example we would shine a bright light or something so that it maintains a happy feel to the video as our main target was for it to be a "feel good" video.