Evaluation Questions

1) Identity the task as well as the song and artist.
For our A2 practice task we had to plan, film and edit a music video for a song from a small selection, we were not given the chance to chose the song we selected the song by picking a number at random. Our song was called ‘A little drop of poison’ by Tom Waits which is a slow paced old style noir song.

2)How have you used digital technology during the construction of your video?
Digital technology has been a huge help during the construction of our music video, we filmed the video using a digital camera which allowed us to film high quality shots and upload them easily to the computer. We relied heavily on digital technology during the editing stage of our production, we used iMovie rather than iMovie HD because we found it easier to use when editing our first production at AS. The editing software allowed us to add various effects, we added the sepia and film grain effects as we thought these would work effectively alongside our song. In addition it allowed us to constantly change the length of the clips in order to ensure that they changed in time with the beat of the song which is vital in all effective music videos.

3)Discuss the planning stages of your production and the steps that you went through.
Our music video required a lengthy planning process before we could start filming, firstly as a group we came up with four different ideas. We simply all agreed on one of the ideas, this was the storyline about a business man and his assistant who gets her revenge. Before we started to storyboard each shot we deconstructed the song into verses and choruses and analysed and went through the lyrics deciding on which parts of the song we would use. We then drew up our storyboards, focusing on each individual shot stating the length, angle and type of shot of each. After this we decided on props, location and costumes that would be necessary for the production.

4)How did your research into music videos contribute to the development of your own production?
My group did not actually do any research into other music videos, although we did try to find other videos for our song we could not find any. There is not a video for our song, so research helped very little in the development of our production.

5)What did you think are the main strengths/ weaknesses of your production consider your audience feedback.
After filming and editing our video we showed an audience who gave us some feedback on our production. The main strengths of our production was the narrative, it conveyed the story well to the audience and the obvious bond between the two characters. We were also compliment of acting and the variety of different shots that we used, as we filmed from various different angles. However our audience states that there was a lack of continuity for example the full up cup of coffee is empty when Gemma places it on the table, it is then full up again when Dan picks it up. We should have also thought more about the props we needed as these where also criticized, for example we used a water jug because we did not have a kettle the audience stated it seemed unrealistic and would have been so much better if we had used a kettle. Finally our audience stated that the lyrics at the end were a bit random and did not really fit in with the rest of the video, which I agree with. We did this because we run our of footage. Looking back I think we could have added a few extra shots at the beginning and placed more emphasis on the bottle of poison, for example using some close-up shots of the bottle to shows its significance within the video.

By Rebecca Gomes