Mart's Focus Group Feedback Wordle Art

I have used Wordle.net to create a 'word cloud' from the replies that we got from the focus group feedback questionaires. As it shows the most common recurring word was 'suitable' and 'good'. This shows that our music video was successful and the target audience likes our efforts.

Wordle says our music video is good and suitable!

Mart's Evaluation Question Four

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

Digipak – After planning ideas as a group as to how we wanted our Digipak to look like we settled on a picture of Jenny and Johnny together on a bench that showed their unity at that time and together as a group, seeing as their name is Jenny & Johnny we thought it would be strange to only show one member on the cover so all our ideas had to involve both of them on the cover.

Initially I created a picture to use as the front cover art that we have since used on the inside of the Digipak. This shows Jenny sat on a bed with her head in her hands looking visibly upset. Johnny is shown lying behind Jenny ‘flat out’ appearing to be sleeping after a heavy night out drinking which is referenced in the video. The picture had a variety of effects on to make it slightly unusual which is something that Jenny & Johnny are.

The text of the Jenny & Johnny on the Digipak isn’t a clip art text. After searching through various internet font websites, for example dafont.com we couldn’t decide on a suitable font as they were all either too formal for the fun characteristics of Jenny & Johnny or just inappropriate to use. We finally reached a decision and choose to create our own colourful font which I think works really well with the rest of the Digipak. The letters are all individual and were cut out of different magazines. They were then pieced together the different case of the letters, some upper and some lower show that the conventions of typing in all lower case or all upper case doesn’t have to be done.

Magazine lettering created our font

The inspiration behind the artwork on the Digipak was a dinner plate with spaghetti on toast on the plate with a dinner cloth underneath the cloth. Initially the cloth and plate weren’t going to be included and by chance I took the pictures of the spaghetti on the plate with a striped table cloth underneath it. Even though there wasn’t an intention for the plate or cloth it worked really well and Bronwyn and Beth liked the shot. Bronwyn then added the knife and fork along with a different table cloth as it the original one didn’t fill out the shot/cover.

Inside of Digipak. Very homely approach it like the video.

The editing of the Digipak was really easy as we had Photoshop to use on a Mac. Photoshop has lots of different tools that make it really easy to create professional looking material which hopefully we have achieved. For our research we looked on Amazon for the other artists Digipak’s. This allowed us to browse through many Digipak’s with ease without going to a music shop and physically looking at the Digipak’s. Additionally if we had looked in shops we wouldn’t have been able to look inside the case as they all now have security plastic casings around them.

Webpage – The webpage was created on iWeb on the Mac’s in the Mac Suite where I am now. In our group for the song Switchblade by Jenny and Johnny it was decided that I had the lead role in designing and creating the webpage. For the initial research I looked Jenny and Johnny’s official webpage, which has a plain blog layout which is slightly boring. I then looked at other artists webpage’s such as Florence and the Machine, The Fratellis, The Futureheads and Wye Oak. These other artists webpage’s shown me that the webpage didn’t have to be ram packed with different things and that simple was the best but to tweak a boring set layout and have different things that make it stand out from the rest as the webpage is one of few things that the artist can show the consumer that will differ them for the competition if their music is similar to other artists. 

Wye Oak's webpage is simple and very effective in my opinion.

From this I designed the webpage to have lots of pictures of our artist as at the end of the day they are what essentially sell the records as it is all about them. The artists or in our case the actors appear to sit on different words on the webpage to give the webpage a fun feel, to stride away from a formal looking plain layout blog like Jenny and Johnny have presently as their webpage. We had a sort of two layer approach to our webpage, the base layer had the table cloth with the name of the song partially hidden and the artists name around the main layer of the webpage. The letters of the song name and the artists name are in the same style that was used on the Digipak to keep the same conventions and look of that.

Our webpage adds a fun factor which Jenny and Johnny portray in their own products

For our webpage I used Photoshop to make the different images of the artists and the main back images. This is because I can use Photoshop quite well and if I were to make it on iWeb it wouldn’t look as good as it does now. The different tools on Photoshop made it really easy to achieve the look and feel that we wanted to create.

Overall – The online media technology has enabled us to distribute our project to a wide audience by allowing us to have an online blog that made it easy for us as a group to keep and share ideas and work on the project when we weren’t in class time. This means that we have done lots of outside work that have been crucial in making our music video. We had a Facebook group that we used to share ideas and communicate on lots of different ideas. Below are two screenshots of that wall.

Mart's Evaluation - Question One

Question One: In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms of convention of real media products?

In our music video Switchblade by Jenny & Johnny, we have used the conventions of an indie music video. These conventions are the use of low key lighting which we used while filming the house scenes. By not having bright light on our actors it created a casual not in your face kind of image. Other conventions are the use straight cuts, by keeping straight cuts in our video the pace of the song was kept at a steady rate. If we had been using different transitions the video wouldn’t have flown to the mood we created.

We added subtle changes to other conventions of indie music as our song had a folk twist to it. In folk videos, the artists appear very comfortable in front of the camera; this is something that our actors had trouble with and was something that was picked up in the feedback (question 3). By filming sections without them knowing the camera was on meant we filmed some casual shots of them without looking nervous.

In our video we have included many different shots, for example there are close ups as a note, mid close ups, long shots in the park which work really nice when filmed down the covered walk way. These are all conventions of indie music videos, the idea of the audience watching a band practice or similar is something that is used a lot in indie music videos. The image of a big scale production is rarely used as that doesn’t go along with the casual image of indie music.



A nicely framed shot with perspective angles.

However my favourite shot of the video was as talked about in my 'mini review' was the hand held section in the house with the spaghetti that included a rather nice point of view shot. We used a few handheld shots that worked really well and fit in with the music. We thought about filming everything on a tripod but the effect of handheld shots gave the audience the thought that those shots were being filmed by the actors while having fun which was a element we wanted to create aswell as the love story mood.

Point of view shot

The mise en scene of our actors and locations were easily achieved as Jenny & Johnny appear to like filming in natural surroundings while looking natural themselves so there wasn't any need for snazzy locations or over the top costumes. This is because their music is that of a homely feel, this way putting on a big show wouldn't have been appropriate for this genre or song. The mise en scene of our actor’s figure expressions we thought about. While our actors we playing their guitars by having them lightly head banging and having a uncaring facial expression. This is because they know that what the song is leading to at the end. The overall appearance of our actors was created by wearing black, red and dark blue coloured clothes. By having them wearing boots instead of skater shoes the convention of indie music footwear was changed but as the band have a slight folk image to them the use of boots created that look. 

Our Digipak doesn’t conform to the conventions of a usual indie Digipak as our actors are seen on the front and back of the cover. We used our actors image on the cover to illustrate the relationship between them which wouldn’t have been noticeable had we used for example the inside covers of the Digipak. Initially the front cover was going to be the CD insert cover. This shows the image of the spaghetti reading “Jenny and Johnny” on the toast. This is a feature in our video during a house scene and plays with a lyric “dine out on a dollar”.

Our webpage shows the artists or in our case the actors appear to sit on different words on the webpage to give the webpage a fun feel, to stride away from a formal looking plain layout blog like Jenny and Johnny have presently as their webpage. We had a sort of two layer approach to our webpage, the base layer had the table cloth with the name of the song partially hidden and the artists name around the main layer of the webpage. The letters of the song name and the artists name are in the same style that was used on the Digipak to keep the same conventions and look of that.

Jenny and Johnny - Big Wave Music Video


In the video linked above the location sat in the street in front of the car is used quite regularly throughout the duration of the song. We used this idea by having our Johnny sat on a bench in the park and we came back to this shot throughout our video. In this song, Jenny is the one who is singing the most and she is seen in various costumes in multiple locations. This is something that we couldn't do due to logistics and other reasons. However the locations and  costumes that we used are similar to those that Jenny and Johnny use themselves. There a few similarities in the two videos. Jenny and Johnny are known for having a very good friendship and one that is intimate. This is shown in shots of them kissing and laying on the floor together. We were lucky that are actors were in a relationship so they were happy to do kissing scenes.

Our actor playing the chorus and looking away from the camera

Johnny looking away from the camera while mid chorus

In this shot Johnny is singing the chorus line and is looking away from the camera, we tried to replicate this shot and it works quite well. The overall effect of not looking into the camera is something that we wanted to emphasise on as Jenny and Johnny do not look down the camera very often so to have them doing it in our video wouldn't carry on their conventions.

Jenny singing to Johnny in a shot together

Johnny singing to Jenny in a shot together

For this shot we continued with using conventions that Jenny and Johnny use on a frequent basis in their music videos. As they are a duo they do a lot of shots together even if only one of them is singing. For our video we felt we had to include some shots of them together to carry on and maintain the couple image. Jenny and Johnny’s performance image is very biker like.

Biker image while performing

In our video we didn’t want to portray the biker image as we wanted a different tone to that for our song. The tone we wanted was the love image and this is often seen in a biker image as they are often seen to be big and scary. By having casual clothing with biker boots this used a small section of their biker image while with keeping with the indie love look. 
While creating the webpage using iWeb, I was unsure of how to add hyperlinks onto the page as we had imported a flat image from Photoshop as I found working in Photoshop easier. The only downside is that I had to create all the links in iWeb. I looked on Youtube for a tutorial and followed the following one and the hyperlinks worked.

14 Key images from our music video

Below is a selection of key images from our music video with annotions. We think that these are the main images that appear in the video as it follwos the storyline and narration that we wanted to show in the video. This narration matches the song and lyrics well in our opinion. =]

Push effect in chorus

Nicely framed shot of walkway

Very start of our video

'Mirror effect' what isn't a mirror or meant to be a mirror...Greenscreen FTW!

Our actor as Johnny peformaning singing section

"Sleeping throug the afternoon...."

Lovely shot of "Jenny and Johnny" written in spaghetti!

"with your feet on the ggrrrooouuunnnnddd"

A nice couple shot in the 'good times'

Feeling playful in the park...

"Here's Johnny!!!"

3...2...1 look sad! =[

....still in that fun playful mood! =]

General instrumental filler.

Beth's mini review!!!

As we have previously posted, our music video is now finished! Wahooo! Now that the hard works done it's just the evaluation that we have to finish. But before we move onto that, just wanted to type up a few words in review of our video :) I am really pleased with our video overall. My favourite part about it is the green screen effect we used on our photographs. It took alot of work to get those right but I think it has a real wow factor and we are apparently the first students at our college to attempt it so yay for us! I also like the push transition effect we used on one of the choruses. Initially we were worried that the effect would look too amateur and cheesy but were forced to use it as the vocals overlapped and we wanted a smoother transition between the shots of our artists. In the end I think it actually looked good and fit well with the song. I was also pleased with our finished film as it has so much shot variety including CUs, MCUs, MS, LS,over the shoulder shots and hand held shots as well as alot of different angles. However, there are some elements of our video which I am less happy with such as the arrow scenes in which I think our actors look slightly awkward. But overall I don't think this has too much of a negative effect on the video :) See you for the evaluation! :D

Mart's mini review!!!

 So now that our music video is finished it is time to look back over the drama of editing it all. With the proper evaulation to come later on in this blog. Myself, Bronwyn and Beth will do each do a mini review of the process.

After lots of stressing and the few usual mini arguements which were going to happen regardless I think that we have created a very good video for the song Switchblade by Jenny & Johnny. We have some brilliant shots in the video that are use many of the different shot types. A shot that I particularly like is the one below. Technically it may not be the best as it is handheld but that kind of shot was very much needed and it just works brilliantly in my opinion.

As decribed in a earlier blog post, this shot took a lot of work as the spagetti was messy and time consuming, we eventually finished it and I shot the handheld section (as I was the tallest....yay for tall-ish people =]). Away from the me shooting the clip I still think it is very good as it ties in the CD cover and webpage into the video which not many videos and covers do.

Bronwyn's mini review!!!

Yay we have finished our music video. It’s been quite a roller coaster to get it done but overall I’m happy with the end result. I’m happy with the ides we came up with for the song especially as it was quite hard to think of ideas, as it wasn’t upbeat. I think as our band is unknown hear we had an advantage to producing our music video as no-one is expecting a certain style compared if we did a band well know like Florence and the Machine. I’m really happy with the screen effect of the burning paper as no one has done it before in the college and people have no idea how we did it. That is a high light to our music video. I’m glad we were able to use a nice location like Victoria park in Ilkeston that add something nice to it. It worked well by having a narrative and performance base music video as it work with the song. I think if we went back in time I would have stuck to the shot list as it had more varies of shots and had more action going of, which we didn’t film. The parts of the film I’m not to happy with is the pushing off effect but it was the best way to fit it to the song as the lyrics over lap each other. Also the arrow bit as it’s really cheesy and our actor looks uncomfortable. But I’m a happy bunny with the final piece.