Evaluation

• In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
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• Our media product being a music video for the song 'Hearth and Home' by More Than Conquerors limited us to certain methods and conventions. For example we knew early on that we would have to match the pace of the song when it was both slow and fast. 
• Our particular song led us to portray a very sad and angry story and that is reflected in the genre of our band. Previous music videos provided us with examples of how violence and sadness were brought out through the music. We as a group decided to take this a step further with our character committing acts at the very tip of the scale i.e a murder and a suicide, both very grim ideas that are shown in the lyrics of the song. 
• Another concept that we chose to further develop was the idea of true love being taken away, in this case we developed this idea by having the husband character kill his wife out of rage off screen but show the immediate regret at his mistake.
• What we challenged in our video though is whether the audience should like our character of the husband on the run. Some of our audience might dislike this character as he has killed his wife in an angry rage and fled from those trying to bring him to justice but on the other hand some of the audience might be on the same side of the character, judging the murder as a mistake because as the heaven/forest scene demonstrates he misses and loves his dead wife and shows remorse to the point where he kills himself to be with her again.
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• How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

The combination of the website and the digipack were modelled and thought up around the video itself so we used existing elements from more than conquerors and modified them to suit the both types of ancillary texts. 

Intially we had problems coming up with ideas for each panel of it but our result reflects the dark settings and story of our video without spoiling any story elements but also the band shots in the collage depicts shots of the band when we filmed them in March intermingled with story element like in our video. Overall the digipack was effective in representing all elements of the video, the cover containing both elements of love and death and effectively portrays that to the viewer.

The website on the other hand being more geared toward publicising the band itself and contains less narrative elements and more performance focused photos, i felt that the website surrounded the video well and brought out the more informal side of the band whilst keeping the dark somber mood.

• What have you learned from your audience feedback?

From our audience feedback we have learned that the video seemed static with little camera movement despite the fast pace in some parts. I think this is particular problem in the various scenes with the torch pursuers and sometimes killed the pace at times.

The audience also commented on the bad acting of myself but this was essentially unavoidable we had no real options but the people in our media group. 

What we also learned from our feedback was that the song in some parts was out of sync, but even during editing we saw this but couldn't do much to correct this as we had to work with what we had as we had no chance of reshooting or being send a new song.

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• How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
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• Before we were issued a song to work with we compiled a lot of research onto music similar to More Than Conquerors but not contained to the same sub-genre. Last fm was vital in finding music that mirrored the band's as it showed similar artists and bands. From this we studied the work of several different bands noting the different stories they told, their concepts and the various shots and movements they used in their music videos. Some of the work that we viewed via YouTube used brilliant lighting ideas that we then applied to our own video for example the low creeping light of the night to convey a foreboding feeling.
• When we did get the song we began constructing the video around the music and by using Finalcut Pro X we were able to plan when we wanted to change shot right down to the exact millisecond. This kind of planning on the same software that we would use to construct our piece saved us time figuring out when to cut to the next shot. Finalcut also enabled us to make an animatic video of the song with storyboards showing us how the piece would flow against the song and also showed a framework of the shots in order, in context.
• During the construction of the piece the use of the more advanced sections of Finalcut helped add the polish to the video for example the use of optical flow helped make the wife's death more dramatic and the use of effects during the heaven scene makes it stand out as a flashback or afterlife scene depending on interpretation. What is probably unnoticeable during the shots of the band we edited in a beam of light like a torch to evoke that the character is being hunted everywhere and the band may harbor the murderer.
• Social media, in our case Facebook was essential in receiving constructive criticism through out all stages of the project from our audience. By creating a page for our piece we could put forward ideas and progress for the target audience to judge and add comments about our piece even before it is complete. It helped us reach out to our audience and gather their opinion so that we could evaluate our music video based on their comments.

Finished product

Digipack

After researching More Than Conqueror's artwork, and the artwork of similar artists we finally set out to design our digipack. The first cover we designed was the front cover. This was inspired by More Than Conqueror's artwork, the narrative and also the symbolic meaning of our music video and love.

The front cover of the digipack reflects elements of our narrative whilst containing aspects that are like more than conquerors drawings in When The Wells Run Dry. The daggers represent violence and the murder in the narrative and the weddings contain yet a romantic feeling to them.






The back cover is aimed to convey a creepy ominous feeling especially where the torchlight reveals the song list border by thin trees.

Both of the hands here are depicted to be cold and dead which tells the audience that these are the hands of the recently deceased that honoured the commitment of marriage.

The shattered glass is more metaphorical and represents the broken life of our husband character and how everything he knows is falling to pieces





The collage of photos is actually picture that we took during filming of the band but the pictures themselves seemed too bright and happy so we grey scaled them and distorted them to look more somber.

Website

The website consists of photos from our day of filming with the band but the lack of formal photo's in not in keeping with the dark somber mood.

sunnywithachanceofri.wix.com/hearthandhome

Filming Narrative

Despite the story being told backwards and dealing with problems we adapted to and solved we filmed chronologically with our murder scene being filmed first, then the running scene and fire with the climactic suicide of our husband character.

We organised to meet during an evening when we were all free and before we did we prepared a list of shots we needed to cover and how much time we needed to film. This proved useful and we set up the camera in the living room for our murder/death scene. We had to reshoot the bloody hands later on as the red colouring that we used for blood didn't look real enough to emotionally affect our audience.

At around 9 o'clock at n we headed out to Black's Path to film the scenes in which our protagonist is on the run. We started out with the fire scene as we felt that it made more sense to start with our most difficult scenes as they would consume the most amount of time. It took us a while to start the fire and find logs for our actor to sit on, but after arranging our set and setting up the camera to get the perfect image, we started the fire, but all the while making sure we kept it under control, as well as keeping at a safe distant from the fire so that he wouldn't get burnt. One problem that we encountered was that we didn't have enough copies of the photo to burn so we had the pressure of getting the shot the way we wanted in two attempts.

After extinguishing the fire, we wanted to film the torches scenes straight away as the police stumble across the fire just shortly as it was extinguished. To film this two members of our group climbed up a hill to reach a point just overlooking the spot in which our protagonist was resting. Here we filmed several takes of the lights discovering the spot so that we got the right angle, lighting and effects. After this lighting scene we moved onto the scene where the torches are almost on our main character. We had to film this several times to make sure we knew the exact moment the torches would land on our character, as well as how far he would run before getting caught. The end result looked good on camera with the torch shining right on the spot where our character was just after he had made a break for it.

After the torch scenes we set out immediately to film the running scenes. These scenes took the longest to film, and were also the most difficult. Due to filming in the dark we had problems with lighting, so we decided to use the torches as lighting, we initially had problems making the light look natural in the shots when he wasn't being followed but by positioning the torches further away solved this. The running scenes were set in different locations so we had to figure out where would be the best position to film so that we could create a fluid panning shot for both clips without the scenes jumping, what we did was we progressed up the path like we would normally and stopped to film each shot.

After the running/chase scenes were filmed we only had the suicide scene to film for that night, and after a slight hike up a rather steep hill we found a spot that our actor could fall from in which,using a bit of camera trickery, looked like he was jumping, when in reality he was falling onto the slope of the hill. Before we filmed we had to mark out where our character step to and fall so that he wasn't injured. Then we walked back up the hill and filmed the character running to that spot from a wide shot, mid shot, and different angles specified in the storyboard. Due to it being very dark we once more had to use the torches for light, but we worked them in with the narrative by making the conscious decision of having the character get caught.

We didn't get to film the heaven/afterlife scene until after easter but the script and as a result the video had been changed to a more ambiguous ending with less of our shots that we recorded that were more happy. The reedited scene worked better with the haunting images before the character falls to his doom.

Inspiration for falling shot

In regards to the falling over shot we decided to change the shot from something like this:
 1:12-1:16

to more of a slower collapse where our character drops to their knees then drops in front of our husband character.

Inspiration for running shots

One of the main inspirations for our sprinting/chase is the music video for 'my hero' by Foo Fighters. The handheld following of the main character is somewhat what we want to achieve with our chase but from the point of view of our pursuers.