How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

Final Front CD Cover

Final Inside Cover (Back of Front Cover)

Final Second Inside Cover (Back of Back Cover)

Final Back Cover

Final Magazine Poster

For our print based work, I have used a pattern of bad-omen type images and effects. For instance I used an effect called “chrome” on most of the pictures, as it contributes greatly to the evil, supernatural look. Along with this I have made sure that the protagonist and the antagonist are both isolated to give some sense of similarity between them, and of how the antagonist is an inner demon of the protagonist.

As the music and most of our video has dark tone to it, I wanted to mirror this in the art work. Which is why the main colours of the covers are black and red. Black, symbolising darkness and red to symbolise anger, blood and gore.

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

Our music video was inspired by other popular music videos of its genre, mainly previous Prodigy videos, we used the music video for Voodoo People as a prime influence for its simplicity and professional look. As we looked at different music videos in the genre we pin pointed the main characteristics of a music video in the genre. They consisted of:


A primarily disjunctuve narrative – This was the case in most of the videos with them having no logical plot, but well shot scenes.

Fast pace – The songs were mostly fast paced, and so the shots were well in sync with the song’s beat.

Dark and gritty – Now with most videos in this genre the music video’s theme’s were dark very and urban. Rarely were there any daytime shots.

With our music video we decided that we needed to do something original but still keep with the common themes in a music video of this genre. We decided very early on that most of the shots will take place in urban areas at night, or in dark places. We then decided to make the plot disjuncture but something you can still put your head around. We made it with a simple premise, of a man running from his own demons, but used a physical manifestation for this, that way we had a protagonist (played by Mohammed Adel) and an antagonist (played by Ashriel King).

In our disjunctive narrative, the protagonist is running from an unseen foe, the fact you don’t see what he is running from until the end creates an air of mystery and built up tension throughout the video.

We made the music video with a quick cut rate, the speed of every shot is determined by the tempo of the song. So when there was a sudden tempo shift from fast to slow, we would increase the duration of the shot on-screen; this is in keeping with the common conventions of a music videos of this genre where the video is manipulated by the song.

The conventions that we went against were the lengthy performance of the band that was playing. Usually in conventional music videos of this genre, the band would usually be seen performing throughout their vidoes, or at least the band would make an appearance. However, our video is completely about the narrative, apart from a very short sequence where Mohammed is freeystyle dancing in town. We had no lip-syncing, guitar-playing or anything like that. We planned to film people dancing at a rave on Halloween, but some complications arose and so we didn't manage to do so.

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

For audience feedback, we would have filmed a question and answer, interview style video then upload it to our blog, but we ran out of time and so we did a questionnaire instead.

Here is our questionnaire

1.What did you think of our Music Video?
2.What was good about it, if anything?
3.What things would you say could be improved, if anything?
4.Do you think the video editing went well with the music track?
5.Could you mistake this for a professional video, or is there obvious amateurism?

We showed our video to fifteen people at once then asked them the questions off our sheet in an interview style. Here is their general response.

Question 1

•'It was good...'
•'It was great!'
•'Yeah yeah I liked it, it was good...'
•'I thought it was good...'

Question 2

•'The ending was the best…'
•'Yeah I liked the ending…'
•'The ending was pretty good…'
•'I thought the editing was the best; I just didn’t like the song…'
•'I liked the bit where everything was sped up going backwards.'

Question 3

•‘Err, I’m not sure really…’
•‘I think the one bit where you can see the phone in Mohammed’s hands should be cut. Cos you can just about see it when walks up to the camera from the darkness.’
•‘Nothing for me really…’
•‘I think there’s one part in the town scene where Mohammed’s face isn’t lit properly, but that’s it…’

Question 4

•‘The editing was brilliant!’
•‘Yeah it was...’
•‘Yes, definitely…’

Question 5

•‘Don’t get too cocky…’
•‘Yeah I reckon it looks pretty professional…’
•‘It was well good, but you can tell when something is professional and when it’s not…’
•‘The camera quality of professional videos is much better than the cameras we have to use. If it was done with professional cameras then probably…’
•‘Yes…’

How did you use media technologies in the construction, research, planning and evaluation stages?

We actually didn’t use any green screen for our video because we thought it usually looks quite amateur with the type of cameras we use. Most people usually use green screen when doing some sort of performance e.g. lip-syncing or dancing, but we didn’t have any lip-syncing and only one short dance sequence (Mohammed freestyle dancing in town). Furthermore we thought it’d be innovative to have no green screen and simply use real locations for all our scenes.

We didn’t really use any special camera techniques; as most of our filming was done handheld. The closest thing that came to special equipment we utilised was a steadicam. We used this when filming the long, sped up close up of Mohammed walking down fourteen flights of stairs. This was used to mimic the snorricam effect where the camera is attached to the body of the actor, facing them directly so that when they move, it appears as if only the world around them is moving, but their head stays in one position. To achieve this, Mohammed had to hold the camera out straight ahead so it was facing him and walk down the stairs, all the while keeping his arms as still and straight as possible. The camera was attached to the steadicam to ensure little shakiness.

We did use a tripod, though rarely because we had a lot of shaky tracking shots. The only smooth, non-wobbly shots we did were the one where my character makes appearances at the start and end of the video, and where Mohammed’s characters walks out from the darkness up to the camera with a mobile phone light in his hand, illuminating his face. We wanted that shot to appear is if he has something glowing in his hands, which I hope we achieved.

The most common editing transition in our video wasn’t the ‘cut’, it was a sped up version of the ‘cross zoom’. That is what creates the bouncing in and out effect. The reason I chose this was because, if cut to the beat (which I did) it can make long tracking shots less boring. You could have a five second tracking shot, then, after putting in a few cross zooms, it doesn’t seem too long. Also, in my opinion, cutting all the way through with no other transitions would look quite dull, especially with the track we had.

I inserted a lot of video filters in our video to improve the footage. The earthquake filter caused the frame to vibrate and shake, as if the cameraman (which was me) couldn’t hold the camera steady, which is what we wanted. We used that effect on most of the stable, tripod shots as we wanted to show that the protagonist was feeling under pressure throughout most of the video.

Another one of the filters I used was the bloom effect, which increased the brightness on any lights in the shot. This made the world around the protagonist seem more threatening with large angry lights blazing all around him. Moreover, it looked good.

I did a lot of speed level changes to a lot of our shots, as that is what you get in a lot of music videos these days. Also, high speed shots went well with our track, as the song itself had a very fast paced beat.

CD cover Inspiration

This was one of our inspirations for the CD cover. We used the chrome effect on the computer to achieve the what this picture did.

Music Video Commentary

Here is a link to our music video commentary. I apologise for the terrible video quality, lack of music and blank audio spots. Thank you and enjoy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_5qtcv4yU8

CD Cover (Initial Ideas)

Here is an idea for our front cover

Here is an idea for our first inside cover

The next one was a idea for the second inside cover

This next image was an initial idea for an inside cover. We ultimately did not use it because we had lots of audience feedback suggesting it was way too plain. So we made some changes.

The following picture was said to be too amatuer to be a in the Print Based work. The reason for this was that the visibility levels were very low.

Idea for back cover.

Our Music Video

Here is a YouTube Link to our A2 Music Video. Enjoy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58dpeG1Sc88

The Acting

As the protagonist of the disjunctive narrative, the role I had to play was surprisingly, physically demanding. I actually lost five kilograms of body weight after the production stage because there was so much running involved. Our directors (Adam, Ashriel and Reuben) made me do so many takes for each shot (especially Adam and Ashriel with their perfectionism), and it required a lot of effort on my part, seeing as though most of the video is of me running around.

Below is an image taken by Reuben of me running in town at around 1:00AM, with cameraman, Ashriel running after me to catch every movement.

CD Cover Research

The song of our video is called 'Omen' by 'The Prodigy'. The CD cover used for the original song is quite different to the one that we are using. However, we do draw inspirations from it such as the dark, creey look. Compare the two, ours to The Prodigy's. On our own CD cover, our co-producer, Reuben Gill drew the text of the cover instead of writing them so it can give a more creepy feel and more creative touch.

Post Production Stage - Editing (Part 2)

I have now finished editing our video and it looks fantastic, at least that's what we think (and a lot of other people do too). Below is a screen grab of our finished timeline.

This part (below) of the timeline took me around twenty minutes to complete. It's towards the end where everything plays in reverse extremely fast.









Seriously, there may be only around five seconds of video, but there were so many cuts, shots and transitions involved that it took me quite a while to piece it all together in order to get that sped up, going backwards effect. It wouldn't let me reverse all the little clips at once, so I had the tedious job of doing them individually.

The Darkness Shot

This shot is part of the fourth shoot. Honestly, the shot of Mohammed coming out of the darkness with a light emitting from his palms was thought of on the spot by us all. It was filmed in a graveyard, and we went to that grave yard that night beacuse we thought we could get some decent footage of Mohammed running through the cementary, scared as hell, but when we got there we found that it was too dark to film pretty much anything. The camera couldn't pick up enough light to see Mohammed sprint. So we filmed that shot with the protagonist coming forwards slowly deep from withing the darkness, towards the camera, on his own, surrounded by pitch blackness, holding one light in his hands (it was a mobile phone by the way) so he was visible to the camera. This added a great horror aspect to the video. This shot has nothing to do with the plot of the video, but is simply part of the disjuncture.