The Rocket Summer - Do You Feel, Analysis of camera work

The success of this video as a media text is completely to do with the nature of the camerawork, the video relies on a simple construct of the lyrics to the song being displayed as they are being spoken, on various peoples hands. The camerawork saves this construct from becoming dull by using a simple method of shifting the focus of the camera.

The pull focus technique is somewhat overused in this production, but to its credit it is overused effectively, nearly every shot within the text has this pull focus technique used within it. This continual rapidly shifting focus, has the same effect as cutting and changing to a new shot; the change in focus completely disrupts the shot changing its individual construct and effectively generating a new shot. the effect being that the rapid movement and change holds the audiences interest.

As well as the unnecessary amount of focus pulls, they have used a stop motion technique to create a large quantity of the shots available in this video, stop motion is the art of generating movement from stills by changing the elements within the shot overtime and capturing an image of every change; when compiled, these separate images become a movie. This is used typically in animations such as Wallace and Gromit. The effectiveness of it in this video however is to break up pan shots; in turn this creates a very raw and sewn together look, this type of look is a genre convention for this music video.

The shot types used vary from long shots to extreme close ups, often zooming between extremes rapidly, once again this type of rapid movement is designed to hold the attention of the audience.

I believe that this video has done fare too much to hold the audiences attention, so much so that i find it nearly unwatchable, but there are a few good points that can be drawn from this video, namely that it is important to consider the audience when filming, taking into consideration what will most hold the audiences interest but not go too far as to be annoying.

A Perfect Circle - Judith, Analysis of editing

Immediately noticeable, this video has two effects that are present throughout its duration; the first being the the " box camera" flickers, the procedurally generated effect that imitates a style of camera present in the 70's and 80's, comprised of picture defects sudden and brief flares, as well as an overall grainy image that would have been created from using analogue film. And the camera wiggle/jitter; the entire shot is moving rapidly, i would estimate that the entire mise en scene of this video moves on an x and y axis in both positive an negative fashions by up to 5 pixels every 0.25 seconds. This effect would possibly have been present on "box cameras", but i believe this has been added separately due to the inconsistency's of "jitter" relative to "box camera" flickers. The effect of all this is to capture the audiences attention, this effect is also consistent with the grunge underground genre, grunge music being an alternative style of rock that was created in the 1980's.

The video quickly cuts between shots, this is designed once again to hold the audiences attention. The video has an interesting colour pallet, notably changed in post production, it uses dark greens for the shadows, dirt brown for the mid-tones and pale blue for the highlights, these edits were put in place to help show the audience that the video is clearly of the genre mentioned. Not once within the video is there a fade to black, the attention is always on the band, perhaps showing a degree of narcissism but more likely it is a device used to promote the band, interestingly the subject of the video is the band and the product is the music, this suggests dedication to their music, to emphasise that point, the band is not situated anywhere that could be easily accessed, and nowhere in the video is there any sign of fans meaning their music is more important to them than anything else, this is considered a desirable quality from most genres of music today.

The overall editing does distract from the content of the video, the video is heavily edited, to the point at some key moments in the video that all subjects within the mise en scene are indistinguishable. This creates an experience for the audience that simulates a live performance, full of drama an no clear focus but the music itself. I can take from this, that editing a video in the right way could increase its success dramatically, editing is used in all manner of ways, it reinforces the perceived genre for the music video as well as creating a more enthralling experience for the audience.

Evaluation of Digi-pack

Incase the enbedded function does not work: https://docs.google.com/present/view?id=dg9jr4kn_0h4wmnmwf

Q3: What have you learned from your audience feedback?

I have chosen to use this feedback method because; a questionnaire often returns results that are unhelpful, with this interview process if an interviewee gives an unhelpful answer (As demonstrated in the video), they can be informed of the true nature of the question and provide helpful feedback. We did first try a group feedback method, however this was unsuccessful as the answers provided within the group often only came from 2 or 3 individuals, the shy members of the group choosing to participate to a lesser extent, with the method we have used the interviewee is forced to interact with the interviewer, meaning more feedback is retrieved overall and a more accurate spectrum of results can be compiled. The sample group we have used has a mix of all different types of student, not sticking to a particular subject focus e.g. Media students. As a result, the feedback given was varied; the overall result did however appear mostly positive. The manner in which we conducted the interviews was simple, each candidate was shown our music video, when the video finished we would turn the camera on and start the pre-prepared questionnaire, we believed that it was important to start the interview as quickly as possible after they had finished watching the video; so their opinions of the video itself were still fresh. The main and only real disadvantage to this method of collecting information is that it takes a lot more time than other methods, not only to shoot, but to compile.

We used a closed questionnaire because the results of a closed questionnaire can more easily be compiled into understandable information, rather than just lots of useless data that can be retrieved from open questionnaires. For example, giving a video a rating out of 10 provides accurate and measurable results, meaning one persons answer can be measured against another persons with a great deal more accuracy than if we had asked them something like "what did you think of the music video", answers to this question will almost always be useless, giving data such as "it was good" and "it was fun ", the problem being how to measure "fun" against "good", which one is higher/ better? The questions we asked were designed to give an accurate insight into whether our music video could be deemed successful or not; successful meaning likely to sell if put on sale.

The demographic of the people interviewed is as follows:

.male/female
.white (overall)
.17-18

As you can see, there is a need for some diversity, if i were to conduct the same interview again, i would be sure to sample a wider age range as well as different ethnic groups. The results retrieved could be bias due to the lack of diversity within the sample group. In saying this however, the group sampled did contain at least four different examples of youth tribes, meaning although they appear to be the same demographically, the large differences between subcultures could provide a large amount of variation between respective answers; in this case, they did not. The answers given were all largely the same, I would be sceptical in saying that the music video was successful from only this sample group.　　 I am confident that the method uses to collect information was the correct one, as it has the potential to yield the most accurate results. However i am unwilling to suggest that the music video we have created is successful based only on the group of people sample. As it stands i would say that the results were inconclusive.

Question 1: In what ways does you media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

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