M4 - Final music video meets client brief

While filming, we were conscious of Andrew Goodwin's theory about music videos, so there were, in the edit, moments where the lyrics and visuals matched up completely. Also the use of mise-en-scene with the rabbit character and the iconography of no iconography, mentioned in our D1. His theory says that there is a purpose for music videos- and ours was to promote our artist and give them rightful notoriety. Most of the shots matched up with the lyrics sung such as the clock part right at the beginning, which is one of the concepts presented by Goodwin (mise-en-scene and links between the music and visuals).

Our music video promoted the artist by using their music and the end card, at the end of the music video. We also published the music video on the creator's channel and promoted them on Twitter. 

ARTIST'S FEEDBACK
"I'm happy to have people listen to my music and find meaning in what I do. It surpassed expectations."

The artist was very happy with our music video. 

So, did we meet the brief? 

This was the brief we were given. 

We created a concept video with live-action video, it runs for the entire length of the song with a few seconds afterwards as well for the credits. The brief shows that we need to have created a video for an established artist or local band, we chose a local band which fits with the brief. We believe it is appropriate for the target audience as it obeys mostly all conventions of the genre, purposefully subverting some of them to create intrigue, this is explained more thoroughly in our M3 [click here to see our M3]

We worked in a group of 3, which was also in the brief as the maximum people allowed in the group, (hazel, ellie and natasha). I took on the editing role, natasha was the cinematographer and ellie was the director. As the brief specifies, we each had our own individual roles within production, as you can see here and here.

All content we made ourselves, they are all therefore from a copyright-free source, fitting with the brief as you can see below.

You can see our production documents along the righthand side of our blogs.

Our final video uses the entire music track for Claws
with time to spare - we made sure we had ample shots
to cover this.

Our video definitely fits the bizarre, otherworldly
the tone that some of the others in the genre met (ie.
Mr. Brightside by The Killers), however it isn't
monochromatic like we had planned. We did
tone down the saturation of each colour, instead
upping the blue of the coat and the red of the scarf for interesting pops of colour.
As for iconography, we did end up with some mystery shrouding the identity of the artist and, due to a slight change, we only got shots of his hands.
I think we've very clearly reflected the song's lyrics in a visual format, and at points enhanced them rather than blatantly illustrated them for the viewer.

The typical indie genre conventions tend to be out in the open in nature with easy-access, low budget locations. Our budget was 0 so we were forced to go along with this regardless. As full-length shots are normally used, along with wides and prolonged stills of individual objects or characters to establish them from the beginning, we immediately introduced the rabbit character after setting the scenes and tone of the video with a slow zoom in on a clock from a wide shot. We established a motif of very bright colours on the clothing and unsaturation of surroundings to demonstrate a contrast between the two. We tried to play with shadows and darkness, taking conventions from the rock music videos (as they have darker themes and are often shrouded in darkness). Darkness and lack of light is obvious in many of our shots (the alleyways, the tunnel, the graveyard). 

FILE EXPORTS

I created a new project and made it suitable for the country we are in, along with a resolution that would allow the video to be shown on tv (1080p, apple proress 422). The frame rate had to be 25p as that is the standard for all European countries and we are in Europe.

We exported a lower quality version to be  compatible with YouTube by following these steps:

1. FILE > SHARE > MASTER FILE
2. Amend SETTINGS
3. Choose H.264
4. Save the master file in your Music Video folder on the DESKTOP and call it Claws H264 version.

H.264 is a type of video compression commonly exporting and distributing high-resolution video.  H.264 is a lossy file which means that when it is compressed (made into an h.264 file), some of the data is lost in the process, making it look a little laggy and fuzzy sometimes. The files are still high quality but have bits missing from them.

This is our 2.19GB video export.

These were the steps we followed:

1. FILE > NEW > PROJECT
2. We chose 1920x1080 resolution 
3. Set it to 25 frames per second to be compliant with UK/EUROPEAN television HD broadcast standards. 
4. Apple Pro Res
5. The music is Stereo at 48kHz as this is broadcast standard.

It ensures image loss is restricted and the detail of the video remains. It can export in full 8K, 4K, HD (up to 1920×1080), many others I may have missed off. Apple ProRess 422 discards pixels from the video, making it look much less obvious than an h.264 export while still remaining to be a lossy export.