Our Finished Product...

Here is our finished music video for Fire with Fire by the Scissor Sisters...

Commentary

This is a directors commentary explaing about certain shots we used, and different effects we used.

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

I believe that our music video is a representative tribute to Scissor Sister’s version of ‘Fire with Fire’, I believe this because the whole idea of their music video is to have fun and ‘spread the love’, As you can see we do show this in our music video especially during the chorus when the people are dancing to the music.

We tried to keep the music video short enough for the audience to keep an interest and not become bored so unfortunately in the final cuts we had to shorten the music video by about 30 seconds. The final length of the music video was 4 minutes, which compared to 3 minutes 30 of the average music video is acceptable. Although our music video does share certain aspects of other music videos i.e. length; it still is original in the way it is directed and by using a narrative. We made sure that the music video had a narrative so the audience can relate to their own personal experience, which in this case was an audition. As you can see in the music video itself, we shown the audience that singing can be fun and once you are in the moment you can feel like an actual star. The audience can also relate to their own personal experiences when listening to the words within the song, for example “fight fire with fire” can relate to everyday situations.

The way we directed the music video did represent ‘Scissor Sister’s’ style and the way they perform. When we did research on similar music videos by the ‘Scissor Sisters’ we found that most of the time their videos were very fast paced which was the result of many jump cuts and high key lighting. We then took this research and merged them into our music video, This is evident throughout the music video by the lack of fade in’s and outs we use, as well as constantly changing the backgrounds, different type of shots and their transitions. We believed that our music video was true to the ‘Scissor Sisters’ style in many ways, this of course was fun. We accomplished this by using their filming techniques but at the same time not mirroring their other songs or their actual version of the ‘fire with fire’.

As a group we created a spider diagram (which is on the blog) about what the narrative could be for the music video, we did analyze all of ‘Scissor Sisters’ music videos and found that they vary in simplicity from ‘Mary’ which was low budget and very easy to replicate, to ‘Don’t feel like dancing’ which is very complicated and full of special effects which had 102 different transitions. We narrowed the ideas down to 4 scenarios; a bullying scene, a dream, listening to an Ipod and finally an audition. We decided to go with the audition because there are hardly any music videos based on this subject; as this is an original idea we believed that this would grab the audience’s attention and therefore making them want to carry on watching. We have also included comedy into out music video during the chorus, we believed that this would make the audience remember these parts and then will tell their friends and family which intern will broaden our sales and downloads.

On the other hand we have included certain aspects into out music that you normally would see on other music videos i.e. close ups and low angle shots. We did also take inspiration from other music videos such as Take That (who repeatedly use panning shots on roofs). We also took inspiration from the posters of other bands and used some of their aspects in ours for example Michael Jackson's CD covers are generally dark or grey which as you can see our music video is mostly black with fire. We believe that because the CD covers and posters are black, the fire on them is eye catching and therefore it sticks out from all of the other CD covers from various other singers.

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

for the video, CD cover and the advertisement we have but fire on them to link i with our song choice, Fire With Fire, aswell in our music video we have clipse of fire. by linking the theme fire if you see the poster the the video you will know it is related and this could attracts the buyer. As well this creates formiliarity

The style of the album cover is linked in with the lyrics and music video. The front page involves fire in the background and the performer in the foreground. The 2^nd page is of the singer singing and in the background there are stars shining this relates to the back cover and to the song he says ‘underneath the sky, there a million lights burning brightly just like fireflies.’ The 3^rd pages is of a circle of fire which would surround the CD this page is very minimalistic but it is effective. The last page is very similar to the 2^nd page which again has stars anda close up of the performer. For the titles we used the same font for all the products again this creates familiarity.

Comparing our Cd cover tothe original, the scissors sisters CD cover doesn’t have a narrative to the song it juxtaposes against it. There CD cover it is of a man behind with a black and white filter and red font which draws you to the title which says ‘night work’. Unlike our CD cover which is a direct response to the song. The CD cover is minimalistic like the original album cover by the Scissor Sisters. Our album cover is also very simplistic . In the original CD cover the artist takes a picture of a mans backside which is opposite to our cover, our album cover is more colorful and contrasting.

The advertisement helps sell the product as it has ratings from recognised sources, which boost the selling of the CD because of the high ratings. This is our main stratergy, also we have used a similar picture to the album cover this again creates familiarity.

We have clearly stated on the advertisement that you can download the album from iTunes which is now a world wide known site. Itunes is virtual library of a wide range of items to go onto a iPod, iPod touch, Nano, Ipad or iPhone ranging from music, video, eBooks and films this is very accessible and is accessed by the Internet and is more likely to be bought than someone going into the shops.

If selling we would advertise in magazines, newspapers, and billboards about the new album, which will hopefully create people talking about the album and will then help the album to be sold. . We would try and achieve what the creators of ‘CALL of DUTY: BLACK OPS’ created. They told buyers about the game months before it was released samples were sold and adverts when it was release records were broken and shops sold out.

3. What have you learnt from your audience feedback ?

Our audience has praised some aspects of our music video, such as; they said the lip sync was good and they really liked the combination of humour and seriousness that runs throughout the video. They also enjoyed the use of green screen and they thought that it fitted well with the flow of the music. however they have also gave us some constructive criticism this included a spelling mistake in the opening sequence to our video,however when we came across this problem we had already handed our video in to be marked and so there was nothing we could do to change it.

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

During our time filming and editing we used a variety of media technologies in the construction, research, planning and evaluation stages of the project. Firstly during planning we started of with the use of the Apple Mac computers and went online to research what type of genre we could do. Through extensive research on video sharing websites such a ‘YouTube’ we all agreed to make a music video for the song ‘Fire With Fire’ by the Scissor sisters’. After agreeing on the song we then all came together to come up with shooting locations, for this we used Google Maps to find the precise places to film. Also before we went any further we went onto the website Blogger and created a blog to showcase our progress through this project.

Once the shots and locations were agreed on we started with the storyboard, for this we hand drew the storyboard and wrote the shots and lyrics underneath each scene, then with the use of a digital camera we took photographs of each individual shot and uploaded them into the iMovie. Once all the images were in iMovie we arranged them in order and imported the track over the top of the images. We then changed the length of each images to fit the actual length of the shot it represents. Once this was done with converted it to a MP4 file and exported it out of iMovie. Then we uploaded it onto the blog to show what we will be doing in each scene and how each shot will be laid out.

Next we went filming and the camera we used was a Canon Legria FS306. We used the camera on a tripod to capture most of our shots as this provided the steadiest shots. This camera was quite straight forward to use as it recorded straight from the memory card and this enabled us to quickly and easily upload the videos onto the Apple Macs, however we did stumble across a problem when uploaded as the editing program we used which was Final Cut Pro did not recognized the file format of the raw footage and so we used a video converter to convert all the files so they were readable on Final Cut Pro.

Once we had collected all the footage with the Canon Fegria FS306, we then used a JVC GY-HD250 camera with TV adaption’s to film our green screen scenes. These cameras were accessible to us through the use of the new facilities at the college. We filmed various shots using different camera angles. Once we had recorded the shots we then transferred them to the computer we were editing on, and again we had to convert the files so they were readable on the macs.

Once all the clips were uploaded and converted onto the computer we opened up Final Cut Pro and transferred them into this program, we then renamed all the raw footage to enable us to see exactly what we were working with. We also downloaded an mp3 version of the track ‘Fire With Fire’ and imported this into the timeline. Once editing we showcased a variety of skills such as the use of the chroma key, this enabled us to convert the green screen scenes into actual footage that we were going to use. To do this firstly we got the raw footage from the green screen (which showed the characters on a green background) and placed this scene onto the timeline one line above where we actually wanted to place it, then we got the shot that we wanted to put in the background and placed it underneath the green screen scene, after this we went into the effects tab on Final Cut Pro and choose the chroma key, we then dragged the chroma key onto this green screen footage and this allowed us to remove the green areas from the shot, once the green areas were removed the background was then visible in the original green screen shots and this was how we used the chroma key to edit the green screen.

The track we used was over 4 minutes long and through a little discussion we decided we had to trim it down a little, to do this we used the razor tool in the toolbar and took away approximately 35 seconds of the original track, this enabled us to get the best out the scenes and shots we had captured as we were not stretching them to make then fit or putting things into the video that were of no relevance to the rest of the video.

We used a variety of different effects throughout our music video these included; speeding up clips, to do this we put the clip we wanted sped up in the timeline and highlighted it, we then went into the edit tab and there was a tab for changing speed, to speed a clip up we increased the percentage and to slow a clip down we reduced the percentage, additionally to reverse the clip, under the same tab there was a optional box to tick if you wanted to reverse a clip. We also adjusted the brightness and contrast of each clip, to make them more vivid.

Additionally on the blog we have demonstrated the use of various technologies including mp4 files, photographs, links, and word posts. The mp4 files we put on the blog included the iMovie storyboard we had created. We also uploaded location shots of where we were going to film; we did this before we started filming, as it was part of our planning process. Other images we uploaded were screen shots of Final Cut Pro with our work near completion show, we focused on the timeline and preview window. We also took a lot of ‘behind the scenes’ shots while our filming both on location and in the green screen room; these are also on the blog. Finally the word posts that were published included daily entries of our time filming and editing (a description of what we did that day), other entries included location shots and an analysis of the original music video where we got our inspiration from.

CD covers and other ideas.

I believe that this CD cover is original therefore i believe that this is eye catching because of the bright colours and the simplicity of it. As a group, unfortunately we decided not to use this CD cover because it is not truly representative of the song apart from the fire in the back-ground. on the other hand we did use some aspects of this CD cover and use them in the final pieces of work. For example in the final Poster we inserted the Scissor Sisters logo to pay homage to the band.















This is another Cd cover which once again wasn't used as a final piece. we believed that it wasn't truly representative of the song or the style of the music video, we also realised that there wasn't enough information on the actual Cd cover itself. This was a group members second attempt at creating a Cd cover so the Scissor Sisters logo was used, but as you can see we agreed that the logo wasn't obvious enough and was difficult to see.





















This is supposed to be what the CD would look like, although it is a good idea there was no actual need to use it. we all decided that even though it did look good, there was some flaws. For example at places it is badly 'photo shopped', also the writing is difficult to read seeing as it is sideways. It was also argued that although it is the same colour scheme (yellow, orange, red) it did not represent the idea of fire. as a group we also believe that the eye did not relate to the actual song, therefore it would be better if the back ground was an image of fire.