Question 1 - Evaluation - Lucy Clark

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

When we brainstormed our ideas for our music video we decided that we wanted to do a music video that was not of the typical type. Once we had put our final idea together, we thought that the use of the politicians masks would satisfy this as it is different and not what you would expect from a student film.

We also deviated away from the typical structure of a music video and used performance, narrative and concept, something which is uncommon in a modern day music video (normally only 2 of these are used). As well as this, the comedy of the video is also unusual as a lot of the time a music video tells a story in a more serious way. The comedy side of our video we feel really makes it stand out amongst others which are perhaps of a more serious tone. Therefore by doing this, we feel that it will attract a wider audience too.


We feel that our music video complied with that mentioned in Andrew Goodwin’s theory featured in ‘Dancing in the Distraction Factory’ (1992). Our music video complied ironically with the genre characteristics, for example, we tried to show a kind of rebellious side to the politicians because the punk genre normally consists of quite unruly personalities and we wanted to show this in our video, but in a less obvious way. As well as this, there is a relationship between the footage we filmed and the lyrics of the song. We purposely did this because we wanted to include the narrative aspect to our video, for example the footage at St Pauls showed the political crisis that our country is experiencing and the footage we filmed at Abbey Road matched the lyrics “phoney Beatle-mania has bitten the dust”, this also explains the relationship between the music and the visuals and has an intertextual reference. We used close ups on during the performance part of our video, in particular David Cameron as normally, a record label would insists that this was required in order to promote the artist(s). This is done to create a visual style/motif which will appear across further work.

Mise-en-scene was a big factor which we in-cooperated into our video because we feel that this too makes a video more memorable and different to others. The use of masks and props such as tea cups & saucers, magazines and newspapers which help to describe aspects of London we feel were effective in doing so. We used tea cups as we thought that because they are a typically British object, that it would further support the British idea that we were putting forward in our video.

After looking at videos similar to this one such as Blur ‘For Tomorrow’ and The Smiths ‘Panic’ we liked the way they had portrayed the cities, which is what we intended to do with London. The Blur video visited landmarks in London which we also did, although by doing theirs in black and white, it gave a more vintage quality to the camera work, portraying London as it used to be seen. We intended to use some black and white footage in our video, for example where it says “a nuclear error” we were going to use a piece of footage from archive.com of a nuclear power station in black and white. We decided not to do this in the end however, because we thought that the old footage wouldn’t fit in with the modern style of our video. Another influential video is The Verve's 'Bitter Sweet Symphony'. Set in London, the video follows Richard Ashcroft as he walks through busy London streets, ignoring everything around him including people and traffic. In some ways, this video resembles ours with the idea of walking through London and disregarding the general public. Lily Allen's original, low budget music video of her song 'LDN' which follows Lily around London and also features some footage of London landmarks such as the London eye, Buckingham Palace, a park overlooking the city and the underground again is similar to ours. The video was low budget like ours and I feel that this video shows that even for such a well known and influential performer, a video like this can work. 


Before we began to film our music video, I looked at some other videos and director Hype Williams' work (http://gliscoproductions.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/hype-williams.html). I found it fascinating through researching and analysing videos the amount of work and money that goes into a large budget video. Williams only tends to work with hip hop/r n b acts and therefore has a recognisable style throughout his videos spanning over his 20 year career. This includes frequently flicking between the artists in the song, also putting them in different locations throughout the video. As well as this, I found that he regularly uses close up shots on the performer, something which is often required on the brief from the record label as a promotional tactic. 
A video which particularly interested me was the iconic 'Vogue' video by Madonna (directed by David Fincher) (http://gliscoproductions.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/vogue-madonna-video-analysis.html). Fincher chose to portray Madonna in a sexy yet sophisticated way, also featuring famous icons from the past. The video fascinated me, not only because of its journey through The Golden Age of Hollywood, but because of it's representation of both men and women and equality though the lyrics 'it makes no difference if you're black or white, if you're a boy or a girl'. I feel that the inclusion of all 3 main political leaders for the UK, that this too shows equality. Our video relates with the audience through it's normality of just walking through London and going to the tourist attractions and therefore this shows similar traits to Madonna's 'Vogue' video.

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Question 2 - Evaluation - Lucy Clark

Question 2 - How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

The term 'branding' means to identify a product, and we feel that our video displays significant usage of branding. We have done this through the use of masks, probably the most recognisable and memorable pieces of mise-en-scene used in the video. As well as the masks, the 'British' theme also adds to the branding of the product that is our video, as we have used props that would be associated with Britain. The importance of doing this was to capture the attention of the British audience, and familiarise other countries with our country. 

The lettering and font used in our video reflects the anarchistic behaviour that the genre portrays. The font is very similar to that used by Sex Pistols on their infamous 'Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols' album which too displayed that of rebellious behaviour, fitting alongside the genre characteristics. We chose to use this font as The Clash and Sex Pistols were from the same genre and shared similar traits in what they stood for. The font is familiar to its audience and therefore we believed it would be suitable to the audience. For example, if a teenager was looking at CD's in a shop and they were familiar with the Sex Pistols music and they saw our album cover for The Clash, even without knowing about The Clash, they would be more likely to pick up the album simply because of the font. The red and the blue colours used in the font also add to the British theme of red, white and blue which is effective in supporting the British ideology. 

We chose to do a simple design for our digipack cover and magazine advert. This is because the simplicity is often the key to gaining an audience. It stands out and is eye catching because of the colours used and the picture used, not because of a busy background. Therefore we felt that is was most appropriate to stay simple because of these reasons. The colour scheme throughout the video, digipack and magazine advert has remained realistic and continuously of a British colour-scheme, purposely done for continuity throughout. 

We began putting our ideas together in September 2011 where as a group we did various mindmaps and written timelines of our ideas. Further to this, we did a powerpoint presentation to our class which included our ideas, about our group, costume ideas, a wordle mindmap of associating words to do with the genre characteristics, an analysis of the lyrics by us, the time line, inspiring videos and a printable questionnaire in which we asked all class members to complete afterwards. The questionnaire provided us with supporting ideas from our peers and what they liked and didn't like about our ideas so far. After we had considered the ideas from our peers, we put together a storyboard of shot ideas on yellow post-it notes. We then individually photographed them and uploaded them to the mac computers and then to Final Cut Express, our editing software. We were going to make an animatic storyboard, fitting to the music so that we could clearly see how long the shots needed to be and how many more we needed to add (http://gliscoproductions.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/blog-post.html). We realised that we had vastly underestimated the volume of footage we required and spent several hours filling in the gaps, drawing more images, uploading them to the computer and adding them to the animatic storyboard. This gave us an excellent idea of how much footage we would need when it came to actual filming. We are so thankful that we did this task or we would have not realised the amount of footage we would need.

We were then aware of what we needed to film and so began to film our video footage. It took us several days and trips to London to complete as well as an evening at school to film the performance footage. It took longer than we had originally planned for because of the bad weather in November and December and only being able to do the filming on weekends because of school. We edited the footage we had gained from the weekend in the following week of school and made note of other ideas we could film. We did this for several weeks, and we eventually finished filming in the Christmas holidays. We had a deadline of January time and as a group we like to stick to deadlines and ended up being the first group to finish our music video, before the deadline date. This gave us time to reflect on our video and get audience feedback for our evaluation without rushing. 

During the editing time, Ellie G put together the digipack. She worked hard on creating ideas and re-drafting until we were all happy with the finished product. This teacup design was our first front cover draft. Our influence for this design was Arctic Monkey's 2011 album 'Suck It and See'. The album cover was a plain colour with just the album title written on it, plain but very effective. We loved the idea of doing a similar design but adding something British to it, which we chose to be a teacup. However, after the design was nearing finishing, as a group we decided against it because although the artwork worked by Arctic Monkeys, we believed that for our digipack to match the theme of our video, we needed to create a design that was more eye-catching and reflective of the albums anarchistic nature. This led to the creation of what eventually became our final digipack cover after many re-drafts (http://gliscoproductions.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/digipack). Because me and Ellie S finished the video on time, we decided to create the Magazine advert using Adobe CS4 Photoshop. We drafted the advert 3 times until we were finally happy with the product. 

Our digipack is a typical 6 square digipack that you would find in your average modern day CD. The digipack usually would be made of a card or paper outer binding, with one or two plastic trays to hold the CD. We did not opt for the use of brushes because of the simplistic idea that we held. A big inspiration for the idea of the back cover was 'The Great Bear'. Artist Simon Patterson used a tube map to group people, rather than the names of the stations. This idea was a big influence on our final back cover, sharing similar characteristics. 

After looking through magazines such as NME and Q to gain inspiration for our magazine advert, we realised the importance of including star ratings on the advert. This is one of the main features on adverts alongside the inclusion of where the music is available from and the bands web address. Therefore, it was important to include these in our advert. Our overall piece is similar to your average magazine advert for an album, consisting of the necessary information and conventions as others. This is important for the branding of not only the album, but the band too. 

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Question 3 - Evaluation - Lucy Clark

Question 3 - What have you learned from your audience feedback?

We made an audience profile in which we suggested the type of person that would watch our music video and the characteristics that they would have (http://gliscoproductions.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/audience-profile.html). We looked at the genre is more detail and then looked at the audience demographics for channels such as MTV Rocks, Kerrang and Scuzz TV which would most likely show our video and the viewing figures showed that on average MTV Rocks was the highest viewed channel on average in comparison to the other ones we looked at. MTV Rocks showed average daily viewing figures as being around 94,000 and 497,000 per week (http://www.barb.co.uk/).

After doing this we proceeded to create the typical stereotype that would watch these channels and more importantly, our video. We came up with a stereotype of a typical viewer of our video. The viewer is 17 years old and he attends college on a daily basis. In his spare time he enjoys listening to music from the rock/punk genre and going to gigs with his friends. He reads music magazines from the punk/rock genre such as NME and Kerrang and watches music channels such as Scuzz, MTV Rocks and Q. He also watches music programs on regular TV channels such as BBC for example ‘Never Mind The Buzzcocks’ and ‘Top of the Pops’.

As well as this, our stereotypical viewer would shop in high-street shops such as Topman and Urban Outfitters as well as some vintage shops such as Rokit.

We showed to the class what we have done so far, overall we got really good feedback. Our peers especially liked the fast paced editing of our video as they thought it matched the song really well. To add to this, our classmates said that they liked the shot of the various road signs at the end of the video. They thought it was funny, lighthearted and cheerful. The negative feedback we got was on the shot of the cars and taxis, our class thought it was too long and needed to be made shorter. We have taken this feedback on board and are now changing our video to make it better.

When we were first coming up with ideas for our music video, we looked into other videos which are set in one particular city or place and looked at how well it worked, We looked at videos such as The Smiths ‘Panic’ and Blur ‘For Tomorrow’ which are set in cities, the Blur video being in just one city and The Smith’s video in several places. The Blur video like ours shows landmarks in London such as the River Thames, Trafalgar Square and London buses and is shot entirely in black and white, giving a more traditional feel to the city. We thought that it would be a good idea to use some black and white footage in our video however, upon re-evaluating our idea, we decided against doing this as we thought it would look odd in comparison to the color footage that we would use throughout the rest of the video. These songs are also of a similar genre to our one and therefore the viewers are likely to want to watch this video because of the similarities.

By getting audience feedback throughout the process of putting together our video, we managed to alter things that our audience thought we could improve on or change. For example, one of our classmates said that the shot of the traffic that we used on the lyric “engines stop running” was too long; therefore we cut down the length of this shot as we too agreed that it was too long. Another example of how audience feedback has affected our video is the way that we used close up shots on the performance parts. Originally we filmed the footage so that the entire band was in the shot all of the time. However, we used the zoom tool on final cut to alter this after getting this feedback. By doing this we have picked out different band members to feature at different times, for example the close up of Ed Milliband playing the bass guitar. This works well because it takes away the focus from the lead singer David Cameron.

As a group we realized that upon deciding the theme of our video, which focuses on the relationships between politicians that our target audience may be expanded. It now is not only appealing to teenagers who will like the genre of music, but also to adults who have an interest in politics. The comedy side of the video too will interest people on a wider scale.  

We used the most well-known politicians of the moment to feature in our video because obviously our audience will be more likely to recognise and have some understanding of them, which again widens our audience. We also felt that because all three party leaders were featured in the video that everybody would be able relate to at least one of them as most people support one of these parties, again widening our target audience.

We portrayed the relationship between Clegg and Cameron as being that of a romantic one to add humor to our video. As well as this, we thought that because of the current coalition, it would make sense to have the two characters as being in each other’s company all of the time and despite them being from opposing parties, that they could be portrayed as having a good friendship/romantic relationship even though we know that this isn’t entirely true.

As well as this, we wanted our audience members to perhaps warm to the other politicians, which perhaps they don’t support or agree with, although it may only be for the duration of the video. It also brings a humorous side to politics, which is usually a very serious topic, which we felt was a very important message to give out. As we know, politicians tend to stand for different social classes, for example more working class people mainly support Labour whereas the wealthier, more aristocratic people generally support the Conservatives and this may be evident through our audience feedback, enabling them to relate more to the politicians.

We asked our classmates to watch our video through and write down a sentence or two summarizing what they thought of our video. At this point we are not yet completely finished our video and this will most likely reflect in our feedback.We will take this feedback on board and look at perhaps changing or adding things to our video, which have been suggested by our peers.

• Really nice shots, use color corrector to get a 'house theme'
• Captured the essence of London well
• Use the 'guardian' paper, not the Mirror.
• Close ups on performance
• Love the sequence of road signs
• Loved the fast editing, very effective
• Concept makes the video, for album cover maybe try to Photoshop a picture of Cameron
• I liked the fast cuts before the telephone boxes in the middle
• Liked the bits in bed at the beginning and the end great location use

Our video includes narrative, performance and concept, which is uncommon for a music video. Normally videos only include 2 of these and therefore this is why we chose to use all three. Originally we weren’t going to include any performance in our video however after discussing it with our teacher, he suggested that we should include a performance part of our video in order to break up the footage on London. We carefully thought out how and where we would film this part but ended up filming it outside on a last minute impulse. This was effective because the floodlight, which was attached to the brick wall, shun perfectly onto the band and instruments. However, once we had put the footage onto the editing computer, we realized that there was a regular flicker on the footage, which we could not remove. We decided to still use the footage as it was too late to re-film this part but we do feel that it isn’t entirely noticeable throughout. 

Lastly, we were lucky enough to receive some audience feedback from one of the members from The Clash itself. After posting the video on youtube and then posting the youtube link to Facebook, one of my mums friends commented saying that she was friends with Terry Chimes, the ex drummer from The Clash who infact worked on this song. She then contacted him and showed him the video. Personally, I feel that this is the best feedback we could have. It comes first hand from the person who was in the original video, and for him to say that we too did a ‘nice job on the video’ is very important. 


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Question 4 - Evalutation - Lucy Clark

Question 4 - How did you use new media technologies in the research, planning, construction and evaluation stages?

After completing our exam and coursework last year, our teacher gave us a couple of tasks to get us used to lip syncing and filming music videos as it is so different to filming a film opening. For our first exercise we were given the freedom of choosing a song and filming a basic music video in small groups which must include lip-syncing. We actually found this very difficult as a class and so our teacher gave us an exercise to do as a class, with teachers help. The first task was difficult because we didn’t fully understand how much footage we would need. However, the group task was much easier because our teacher filmed with us and reminded us of how much footage we needed. We ran the song through 5 or 6 times using different shots each time, for example one was a handheld shot and this involved me holding the camera and getting up close with the person who was singing. Other shots included a long shot, a medium shot and a shot from the floor looking up at the performer. The song was Tom Jones “It’s Not Unusual” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Zmk6aDvuOc) and as a group we were pleased with our overall product. This exercise helped us understand the importance of getting a variation of different shots and the volume of footage we would need. Another exercise that we did was our animatic storyboard which we did after doing our written storyboard at the beginning of year 13. In our group we are all quite bad at drawing and therefore we weren’t happy with our storyboard at all! We also uploaded a rough cut of our video to youtube after editing for several weeks (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34pigPEBH3c)

For our A2 piece, we were lucky enough to have the availability of using the Sanyo HD cameras from school. Last year we found that the cameras we used were not of a good standard and believed that this contributed negatively towards our final piece. Therefore, after being given the opportunity of using the HD cameras this year, we would take full advantage of this. As well as this, we felt that last year we were not correctly taught how to use the special features that our editing software ‘Final Cut’ had to offer. However, this year we did many exercises involving practising using different effects and features and this really helped us to edit our video to how we wanted it. The tri-pod we also feel was easier to use this year, they were not as stiff and temperamental as last year and so this also helped.

Before filming, we carefully thought about where we wanted to film and also asked for other ideas from our peers. We did this by presenting the class with a power-point presentation of our ideas and then giving out questionnaires to our class and one of the questions asked for ideas on location. For example, one of our class members suggested we go to St Pauls to film and after considering the idea we believed that it would be an excellent one because of the protests that we happening there at the time. We feel that this is one of the main locations featured in our video as it adds to the political aspect of our idea. The London Eye was another idea that was suggested by one of our peers, and again we feel that from this we created a clever piece of editing that we’re proud of.

We feel that the use of camera work was of a high standard for our video. Ellie Scott, who did the majority of the filming, had a good technique and patience with the camera, always remembering to white balance the camera before using it. We think that Ellie was best for doing the camera work because she enjoys it and has a skill with it. We used a HD camera this year, which in comparison to the camera we used last year for our film introduction was a million times better. It was smaller and more compact, yet did so much more than the camera we used last year did. We were properly taught by our teacher the features of the camera too, which we were not shown last year. Therefore, we feel that the combination of the good camera and Ellie being our camera woman is one of the reasons as to why we are so pleased with the final outcome of the video. 


Personally, I am very happy with the way we have edited the video. I did the majority of the editing whilst sharing the duties with Ellie Scott. This was because I tend to have more patience with the software and Ellie is very good with ideas. Therefore, the two of us worked together to complete this. We used the software called ‘Final Cut’ which after struggling to use last year, we found to be easier this year after being taught about the shortcuts and different tools and their purposes. We used the razor tool to cut footage down to fit into the gaps of our other footage as well as using the mouse to drag footage to make it longer. We also used the marker tool which was a massive help to us. By using this we were able to cut to the beat of the music more accurately which is important for a music video. Without this tool we feel that we would have not been able to be so accurate with having the footage cut to the beat of the music, in particular the part at the end with the road signs.

During the filming of the performance part of our video we were happy with what we were gaining from it. However, after putting the footage on the editing suite and uploading it to Final Cut, we realised that unfortunately we had a slight flicker in some of the footage. Some parts were okay, and others were not so good. We realised that the flicker was not due to our filming technique but is a limitation of the shutter on the camera which could not be fixed, therefore we would not have been able to correct this. However, by this point, we decided that we did not want to re-film this part of the video because the same thing was likely to happen again. However, we did manage to get some footage without it and obviously this was the best footage. If we was to have had the time to re film it then we would have most probably changed the location and used a different light, however, this was not really possible as it was the last thing we filmed.

After learning the basics of using Final Cut last year I felt that it was easier to pick up the new techniques that our teacher taught us. Out of our group, I have the most patience with using the software because last year it was quite frustrating to use. Therefore, we decided that I would do most of the editing, which I was happy to do.

We then did a photoshoot to get a collection of potential images for our digipack and magazine advert. To do the photoshoot we used a Nikon D40 digital camera. As well as this, we used the green screen for a more basic background which would make photo-shopping the photo easier. We used filler lighting for the shoot in which a light was put on the floor so that it shined upwards towards the people we were photographing. This filler light provided illumination for the parts of the image that was slightly shadowed to give full brightness on the image.

We used Adobe CS4 Photoshop to alter the background of the images as well as add effects to them. Ellie Glickman created the digipack and Ellie Scott and I created the magazine advert. Our teacher regularly have us feedback on the images we were creating, and Ellie Glickman in particular, made several changes to the 6 digipack images throughout the time, making them better each time. Whilst doing the magazine advert, we too had some difficulties at the start with understanding how to use the program. We had not used it before and because we had been editing, we hadn’t picked up the skills that Ellie G had. Our teaching assistant Jack was more than helpful to us, and when he wasn’t there, Ellie helped us with using the tools on the program immensely. The main tool we used was the magic wand tool in which we cut out the picture we wanted to use for the advert as it was on a busy background. It took a few attempts to fully grasp the technique of the magic wand tool and once we had done this, the rest was straightforward.

We used the website ‘wordle’ to make word clouds featuring words associated with punk-rock genre and London. We used this website because it is a creative and colourful way to present our ideas to our audience (http://gliscoproductions.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/word%20cloud).

As well as this, we used youtube (web 2.0) to gain feedback from viewers on our video. After completeing around 1 minutes worth of footage and editing, we put a rough draft of our video on youtube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34pigPEBH3c&feature=relmfu) and asked our peers for feedback. Using youtube worked in our favour as without this we would not have been able to gain feedback from ex-Clash member Terry Chimes and therefore uploading our music video to youtube was beneficial to us. Also, it’s a simple way to refer back to our video whenever we need it, for example for screen captions etc (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVsSYPm9BUU). 

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Evaluation, Question 3: Ellie Scott.

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

As a group we decided that our target audience profile was a 17-year-old boy who attends college. Our target audience likes to watch programs such as: Kerrang, MTV Rocks, NME TV and Q. Typically, he enjoys reading magazines that focus on the music industry and the Punk/Rock genre, which include the following: Kerrang, Mojo, Q and NME. We decided that our typical viewer would shop within High Street shops such as: Topman, Urban Outfitters and the vintage shop Rockit. To choose our typical viewer we ensured that the character is interested solely in the Punk/Rock genre and enjoys listening to bands similar to The Clash. We went on the website www.barb.co.uk to look at viewing figures of the typical TV programmes that our demographic would watch. The viewing figures showed us what programs are more popular than others, in particularly for our target demographic. Here is a link to our demographic blog post; http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=7146979394170621760&postID=375997397254153749&from=pencil.

When deciding what to add in our music video and what setting to have etc, we looked at hundreds of well-known music videos for inspiration and to look for similarities to our own ideas.  The first video we looked at was from Blur called For Tomorrow, this video was similar to our idea as it is set in London and visits all of the main attractions in London. We used this video as an inspiration for our own video, gaining ideas for main places to visit such as the river Thames, Trafalgar Square and shots of London buses and taxis. We also looked at a video similar to the Blur video as it is also set in London; this video begins with a shot of Big Ben, which is a shot we definitely wanted to include within our music video. As a group we also looked at Adele’s video for Someone like you, this video is set in Paris and is in black and white. We liked this video as it is alike our video idea in the fact that it is set in a famous city with several well-known landmarks. After watching this video we did think about shooting our video in black and white, as we liked the classic affect the dark colouring portrayed. However, we decided not to do this, as we wanted to include traditional London colours several times throughout the video such as Red, Blue and White.

To appeal to our target audience of those who enjoy listening to the Punk/Rock genre, we included various elements to target this audience. We wanted to include a very rebellious and controversial theme to fit with the Punk/Rock genre and how the genre is and has always been very aggressive and bizarre. To add to this, within typical Punk/Rock songs, and in particular those by The Clash, the lyrics usually go against the government and promote anarchy; we have represented this within our video with the Protests at St.Pauls. This is where our idea of the politicians came into our music video; we wanted to show how The Clash, especially within London Calling, do not like the government and their policies, we have therefore used irony by including them within our video.  The irony is conveyed by the way in which we have made out that the two politicians are having fun and there is no trouble within Britain, which obviously does not fit with the reality of the British government or the opinion of Punk/Rock bands. The irony and the mocking of the politicians targets our Punk/Rock target demographic and is something they would definitely like to watch. When looking at our target demographic, a young boy of 17 would probably not like the government due to factors such as newly introduced University fees, budget cuts etc.

Regarding audience positioning, we wanted our audience to put themselves in the position of the general public, not that of David Cameron and Nick Clegg. Our video, in particular the section focusing on the St.Pauls protest, presents the trouble our country is facing at the moment and how the citizens of the UK are obviously really angry and frustrated by the government’s actions. The audience, with the use of such positioning, is able to see the troubles within Britain and in particular London and the position of both the public and the two politicians. To appeal to our target audience, we, as a group, included various techniques within the making of our video in order to appeal to our target audience. An example of this, is the style of editing we adapted to our music video, we edited our video with very quick edits to fit with the fast beat of the song as well as the rebellious, energetic audience from the Punk/Rock genre. To add to this, the fast editing hopefully will keep the audience engaged. Our target audience of young people has to be constantly engaged whilst watching the video; this is why we included various mise-en-scene factors that would appeal to our audience. One of these factors was the masks that we introduced, these were featured to keep our audience interested with the use of comedy within our video. To add to this, our target audience is interested in politics and the affects it has upon the public, this is why we also had our characters wearing masks within the video. We also included various props to target our typical British audience, examples of this: are teacups, newspapers such as the Sun, telephone boxes etc.

Overall, we received very good feedback for all the work we did to contribute to our coursework mark. For our music video we managed to get four pieces of audience feedback to help us develop our video into a better final piece.  The first piece of audience feedback we received was on a powerpoint that we made in order to present to the class our initial ideas of our video and what it was going to consist of. We included the narrative of the video, the characters that will feature, where it will be set, and also mentioned factors such as costumes and camera shots. This went very well and everyone was very positive about our idea, commenting on the originality of the work that we have come up with. The last audience feedback we received was on our final finished video, this was very positive; our fellow classmates watched the video. They all thought that the video was very funny and entertaining and they specifically liked the stop motion affect that we included with the tape over the mouth. Also, our fellow pupils commenting on the colours involved, claiming they resembled London and Britain, the patriotic theme within our video. Our fellow classmates also commented on the narrative of our video, claiming that it was easy to understand and that it shows continuity throughout. As a group we were very happy with this comment, as this is how we aimed to make our video as it could easily have been very confusing for our audience and may not have been easy to follow.

We also gained feedback for our dig pack and our magazine advert, this was also very positive. Both our teacher and the pupils that looked at both the digi pack and the magazine advert said that we used the colours very well and stuck to the same theme throughout, keeping patriotic colours as a main theme- blue and red, making it similar to that of the Union Jack and sticking to a rebellious and aggressive tone. The aggressive and rebellious tone is portrayed within the digi pack as we have included images of the two politicians swearing, this is ironic as this is not how the audience would expect the two characters to be portrayed, as they are constantly presented as ‘clean cut’ MP’s.  The magazine advert also sticks to the rebellious and patriotic tone, as it is very similar to that of the digi-pack, with the same font and colours and the main focus being that of the two politicians. To fit with the usual conventions of a magazine advert, we also included the rating of the album from music magazines that focus on the Punk/Rock genre and we also have added logos such as the ITunes logo and the record company logo to make the advert look both professional and realistic. We thought it would be effective to keep the same theme throughout as this is what bands and artists normally do when promoting their video. It ensures that both the album and the magazine cover engage the target audience. Within our digi-pack we included text inspired by the Sex Pistols and their album cover, we used this text purposely as the Sex Pistols are also within the Punk/Rock genre and the text fits with the rebellious tone that we are trying to stick to as the text is bold, eye-catching and very colourful representing the trouble and anarchy the Sex Pistol and the Clash caused when around within the 1980’s.

For the camera work within our video, our teacher looked at our video and said that overall the camera work was very good; a good variety of shot sizes, balanced camera and tri-pod with no unstable shots and also the colours are highlighted well by the camera. The most positive feedback, however, was for our use of mise-en-scene, the use of settings, props, costumes, body language etc. Everyone that watched our video commented on the use of the Politian masks. All our classmates have said that they really liked the use of masks, saying that they ‘make the video’ and make it really entertaining and stand out from other traditional music videos. We also received really good feedback on the props used, throughout our video we included traditional English props such as tea cups in order to stick to our patriotic theme of Britain, our fellow classmates said that this was very effective and added more to the video and the characters of the two politicians. We included two costume changes within our video, the two politicians wearing masks and the ‘Where’s Wally’ scene. The costume changes, we were told by our classmates, added to the humour and comedy of the narrative of the video, especially the ‘Where’s Wally’ scene, in which gave the audience a refreshing change of scenery and added a new character, Ed Miliband to the video, targeting a larger audience; those in favour of the Labour party. As a group, we also received positive feedback on the body language of the two characters playing politicians, claiming that both characters looked similar and played the two politicians really well.

When meeting the OCR brief, I feel as though our group’s coursework is successful in meeting up to the exam board standards. We were given a brief in which stated that we had to produce a music video alongside a magazine advert for the album of the artists and a digi-pack album. We made sure, when making our video, that the camera work was stable and included a variety of shots in order to gain further marks for our coursework. To add to this, we made sure that we white balanced the camera every time before filming in order to make sure the colours within our video were visible and clear. As well as this, we made sure that the narrative of the video was reasonably easy to follow and that the video showed continuity, yet again in order to receive more marks for our work. Lastly, we also ensured that we featured a good setting and lots of suitable mise-en-scene factors in order to make our video more entertaining and elaborate on our original ideas. As a group, we do think that our video meets the standards of professional videos, obviously we do not have the equipment and funding to make videos as good as those made for professional stars, however I feel we have worked very hard and that is shown within our work. Within the performance scenes, the camera and lighting is not particularly good in comparison to that of the other scenes due to the shutter on the camera which was broken so we could not unfortunately change this. Factors such as this, do make our video look a lot worse than those made professionally, however we did not have the correct lighting and cameras to make this look perfect. The editing of the video matches the standard of professional videos as we ensured, whilst editing, that we edited on the beat and made it look very professional and clear.

As a group we are positive that are video features the genres essential ingredients and is very eye-catching and hopefully makes people want to watch it more than once and recommend it to their friends and family for them to watch and further pass on. To add to this, hopefully it is a song and video that people would want to download and buy after watching the video and even buy the album and digi-pack. From the audience feedback, I would definitely say that our video would be promoted to a wide scale audience even though we have targeted the Punk/Rock. I have come to this conclusion due to the fact that all my classmates, who are interested in several different genres of music, all enjoyed watching our music video and gave us really positive feedback. This therefore proving that even audiences that are not specifically interested in the Punk/rock genre, and enjoy listening to music from genres such as R&B, pop etc still enjoy our music video and would listen to it regularly through choice.

Our music video is most definitely unique and very different to that of the ‘typical’ music video, even from the Punk/Rock genre. Personally, I would say the unique selling point of our video is the use of the masks to portray the characters of the two politicians. Every bit of audience feedback we received mentioned the use of masks and how it has made our video have a ‘comical edge’ to it and has made it so very different to all other music videos. It would definitely be suitable to have merchandise made from our video, possibly t-shirts mocking David Cameron, Nick Clegg and David Cameron and even the masks we used within the video. I definitely think merchandise would be suitable as our video is very humorous and this is how we would make the merchandise; very funny and eye-catching. We could also add photographs from our magazine advert and digi-pack onto the clothing.

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