directors commentary

by Tom wood

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Our music video has been inspired hugely by Eminem - My Name music video because he takes the humour out of the song which is what we have done in our music video by jumping around in most of the song because we felt as a group that that’s what the song is about. In Eminem’s music video he relates the words that he is rapping with the actions that he is doing which we have used in our music video by acting out the scenes we have literally taken the meek out of the song which was partly inspired by Eminem. From the beginning of doing the story board we knew as a group that we were going to reverse the jumping at some points in the video because we felt it would be different and new in a way that we did it. We created something new and original while editing our music video: when Mo jumps of the wall we made him jump to the trumpet, we the trumpet in the song is heard Mo jumps down but when it is heard again we reversed it so that he jumped up the wall for a short period of time, when the trumpet is heard again he jumps up the wall a little a bit more up and finally when the last trumpet is heard he jumps fully down to the ground ( I am really bad at explaining things so its better if you examine the scene it self). In our music video we explain what jumping is which is different from other music videos and original at the same time. We used a lot of low angles in our music video which where inspired from Eminem feat Cashis 50 Cent & Lloyd Banks - You Don't Know which uses low angles to make the stars look big. In conclusion I believe that our music video is original because its different from the music videos that are played on MTV.

Editing

I think we did very good on the editing, we have used a few different special styles to suit our soundtrack. I think the best edit we did was the one right at the beginning when we made Moe’s jump off the wall match the beat, we had to slow it down to the precise speed of the track and then reverse it so that every time the trumpet is heard he changes from jumping off the wall to jumping back up again. The group all had an input into how fast it should be and when it should be reversed etc and it all came together to make a very cool effective opening sequence. One of our hardest tasks to overcome was lip syncing our video to the actual soundtrack, the original house of pain main vocalist changes from fast pace to medium pace throughout the tune so it was near impossible to get it spot on however we used the same technique of slowing down our video to suit the soundtrack and in the end it looks almost as if moe is actually singing the song himself. Plenty of our original footage was well out of sync or way too long for our video so we did a lot of marking in and out after we had captured the footage off the camera, I personally don’t think that we cut out anything that we could or should of used. We did a long take of Beatrice, Marcel and Moe jumping between the gaps in a castle wall which was way too long to edit in as a full sequence so we decided to brake it up and mix and match with other shorter takes, this made it look like it was filmed at a faster pace and keeps the excitement of the tune going, the original house of pain video to jump around was very busy and fast paced just like the tune itself so we decided to keep it that way. the only aspect I think we might get marked down on is continuity, there are very few scenes in which we are wearing the same outfit as we were in other takes but in the original video they aren’t wearing the same outfits and we kind of nicked that idea so I hope they realise this and don’t hold it against us.

by tom wood

Blog problems

I tom am the fourth member of the group, due to problems with my log in on the blog i havent posted anything up until this point however i have still been involved with the blog

by tom wood

Technolgies in the construction, resarch, planning and evaluation

In the production stage we used camcorders to film and we used cameras to take photographs of the location we used in the video. We used chroma key on final cut pro to create a background for the scenes that we filmed in front of the green screen.

When we were putting the video together we used Final Cut Pro. This was a really good programme however we did have several problems when we first started using Cut Pro because we weren’t use to using it on Apple Macs. Another problem we had with the Macs was that they did freeze and crash while our team was editing the video

While we were making the video our teacher advised us to put screen grabs into the blog. To do this we had to use a programme called Preview, this programme allowed us to copy what was currently on the screen and turn it into a picture that we could save.

the original vs the remake

After watching our finished music video I decided to watch the original music video, compared with the original music video our music video is better because it relates so much to the song whereas the original was just the main guy from house of pain rapping without ant of the lyrics being performed out e.g. the periodical son has returned in the original music video was just rapped out while on the other hand in our music video we went to the effort of getting some kind of white rob to highlight that tom was supposed to be the prodigal son.

The original music video in my eyes is to slow paced and you cab kind of get bored with it, I feel it’s the type of music video you would want to watch once or twice because when you come to watch it the third time you can get bored with it however on the other hand our music video is slow paced at the beginning so that people can disguise the intro from the actual song. After the into the music video is fast passed which is what normal music videos seen on TV are which is what we wanted to achieve. Our music video can be played over and over again and the view won’t be bored because it has humour in it which the audience can laugh at each time they watch it. I believe that the audience will rewind the music video if they can so that they can laugh at certain parts of the music video.

shots from the music video

these are some of the shots from the final music video.

this shot was really good but in the middle of song mo said the lyrics to fast and i wasn't able to fit it in with the speed of the song.

i choose to have the screen go to black while editing the end of this shot because it showed a bit of violence and i showed that by using a black screen,

SHOT LIST OF THE MUSIC VIDEO

MEDIUM SHOT – Tom, Marcell and Mo walking past the camera to show that they are the main people in the group.
MEDIUM SHOT – Beatrice being a TV presenter
LONG SHOT – Tom pointing to the white board which has a picture of an animal.
MEDIUM SHOT – The three guys in the group chilling at the side of a cabin.
WIDE SHOT – Mo jumping in reverse from the ground the top of the high wall.
HIGH ANGLE – Marcell getting his head off the table.
CLOSE UP – Tom going from the camera to his DJ equipment.
CLOSE UP – Mo’s feet jumping
MEDIUM LONG SHOT – Mo jumping in slow motion.
EXTREME CLOSE UP – Tom spinning the decks.
WIDE SHOT – Mo jumping of the wall
CLOSE UP – Marcell’s feet jumping.
PAN – Beatrice, Mo and Marcell jumping at the castle field wall.
CLOSE UP – Mo’s feet jumping
PAN – Beatrice, Mo and Marcell jumping at the castle field wall.
WIDE SHOT – Mo jumping.
PAN – Beatrice, Mo and Marcell jumping at the castle field wall.
MEDIUM SHOT – Marcell and Tom chilling while Mo sings to the camera.
LOW ANGLE – Mo going into the camera trough the gates and then backing up.
MEDIUM SHOT – Mo, Marcell and Tom.
MEDIUM LONG SHOT – Mo jumping across the ceiling.
LOW ANGLE – a group of some of my friends trying to be rap stars.
TWO SHOT – Mo punching Marcell in the eye and the throwing him into the house door way.
MEDIUM SHOT – Tom, Mo and Marcell chilling at the cabin.
MEDIUM SHOT – Tom opening the door of the range then entering it.
LONG SHOT – police standing still.
LOW ANGLE – all 4 of us.
LONG SHOT – Mo and Marcell
LONG SHOT- all us jumping.
CLOSE UP – tom trying to DJ.
WIDE SHOT – Mo, Marcell and Tom jumping on the stairs.
HIGH ANGLE – jumping.
CLOSE UP – Mo’s feet jump.
HIGH ANGLE – more jumping.
LONG SHOT – we jump closer to the camera.
MEDIUM SHOT – Tom in range.
MEDIUM SHOT – Marcell’s hand around Beatrice’s shoulder. Mo smacking Beatrice.
LOW ANGLE – rapping.
HIGH ANGLE – Beatrice, Tom and Marcell sat down reading the Bible (Psalms) and mo jumping into the shot. Mo comes from the bottom and says lyrics while Tom is dressed in a robe; he is supposed to be the periodical son.
MEDIUM SHOT – Tom and Mo rapping. Tom holds a lighter and folds his hands into a shot gun.
LOW ANGLE – Tony reacting to the shot gun (shocked).
WIDE SHOT – the police car and parade.
MEDIUM SHOT – Mo and Tom rapping.
LOW ANGLE SHOT – Mo, Tom and Marcell.
MEDIUM SHOT – Bina getting up and jumping around.
CLOSE UP & LONG SHOT - Tom DJ.
CLOSE UP – feet jumping.
LONG SHOT – various people jumping in different locations.
CLOSE UP & LONG SHOT – Tom DJ.
LOW ANGLE – want to be rap stars.
SPLIT SCREEN –all four of us chilling
LONG SHOT – chilling again.
MEDIUM SHOT – police man, robot
.LONG SHOT – walking
MEDIUM SHOT – Marcell rapping.
LONG SHOT – walking on bridge, Tom rapping.
LOW ANGLE – Kerri dancing.
HIGH ANGLE – Marcell waking up and seeing Tom who is dressed as a zombie.
LONG SHOT - Tom chancing Marcell down the corridor.
LOW ANGLE – Kerri and gang spitting out lyrics.
LOW ANGLE – jumping.
LONG SHOT – jumping closer.
HIGH ANGLE – jumping in kitchen.
MEDIUM SHOT – grand ma dancing.
LONG SHOT – various people jumping down the stairs and entering the cellar.
LONG SHOT – Tom walking towards the camera, he puts his hand over the camera which turns into a black screen.

target audience

The target audience for our music video is mainly the younger generation as it’s a song that they can jump around a have fun with were ever they are. The younger generation can relate to the music video because in one of the scenes a couple of grand ma’s are dancing and having fun which is something they have experience when there parent or careers embarrass them at a party which they find hilarious. The older generation can enjoy listening to because as shown in the music video the grand ma’s dancing and jumping on their trolleys show that your never to old to listen to this type of song and that they have still inside

3. What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Our music video in the end turned out really good and I personally I think it’s better than the original music video because it got a lot of things going on. When we shown our music video to some students and teachers they did’t think it was that good, some said that it needed a lot of work doing to it. We took all of what they said into consideration and used our imagination and skills that we gained from making the beginning of a film last year. We told each other our ideas on how we are going to improve the music video to a better grade than what it already was. When I finally finished editing the music video I was so proud of how it turned out considering I did’t want to do the sing in the first place and I could’t wait to show it to all the staff and students who had seen it before because I wanted them to see if I improved it in any way. When showed to various people there comments towards the music video was really positive Olivia said “I wish I did house of pain jump around”, Osmond said “play it again” and Adrian said “it was much better than the one he had seen a few weeks before” having all these positive comments showed that we did improve it a lot but unfortunately we was’t able to film these comments as feedback on video because we had run out of time because we concentrated a lot of our time on making our music video better. Through the audience feedback we was able to make our music video better In a way that many people would be able to watch it more than one occasion. We changed a lot of the music video through audience feedback because they gave us the feedback we needed to know if we were going in the right direction with our music video and thanks to them we were able to make our music video which suited our main target audience. In conclusion we took the audience feedback into a lot of consideration which made our product better in the light of the feedback we got..

Analysis of the house of pain cd cover

The original idea of the group for the CD cover was to take an individual picture of each group member to jump and while jumping the picture would be taken, the idea was to cut out the body from the picture and the put it on another graffiti picture but when the picture was cut out in our eyes it didn’t look professional. i toke into consideration of the reasech i did and after allot of thought, I came up with the idea to have us look like we are jumping and having a lot of fun in the door way of a house of pain. The front cover of the CD is Marcell he is holding on to the frames of the door way while in the middle of jumping. The name of the group “house of pain” is written in various styles of graffiti writing is situated above the door. I choose to have two speakers in graffiti on the left and right hand of the house because I felt that the music from inside the house was being played outside. I choose to have the shamrock leaf on the CD cover because I wanted to connect with were the group is from, because I felt that their culture was a significant part of where they come from which is Ireland I also went on to show this by putting the name of the song in the colours green, white and orange because I believe that on the original cover of the song them colours signified that they were from Ireland. I the same picture for the two insides and the back of the CD cover.

Analysis of the house of pain tour poster

The group decided to design a tour poster to advertise the group doing there jump around tour, the idea was that the three guys was going tour be on the front of it. I had a lot of ideas while designing this but I kind of just went with want I could do with the picture on my laptop. I got the picture of the three guys in the group which I put on the right, then got a graffiti picture which I put on the left then I did the name of the tour in graffiti. I put the name of the group in similar style to what I used for the name of the song on the front of the CD cover because I felt that it connected with the Irish flag. I also put the shamrock leaf on the poster to connect with were the group is from.

second location shots

Current Filming Staus - December

When we showed what we had filmed to one of our teachers we were advised to change and to not use some of our footage as we could possibly get marked down as some of the footage was shaky and there was not enough light meaning that sometimes the footage was too dark our cloudy. From own experience we knew that it was really difficult to have a fully lip synced video, at this time we decided to do research into old music videos from 90’s and some old videos from our college though this research we found many similarities in this videos. They used a variety of shots angles where it was difficult to watch the lip movement and there were shots that unrelated to the video but were supposed to portray a “bad boy image” of the rappers.

Current Editing

Our Current editing is basically coming together quite nicely and we now have all the footage we want linking in new ideas and footage with some older material the editing at times can be frustrating because when adding footage not on the previous timeline the computer basically changes all previous work out of their positions on the timeline and we have to basically edit it all again fitting bits and pieces into their correct manner and can be a problem especially when a lip synching method is used on one paticuliar part of the music video so getting them exactly on time with the lyrics to the song can take quite a long time despite all this our current editing is almost complete and we basically just need to add other elements and effects fix it up and we are good to go. The group has constantly tried to sort out what we need to do for the video and spent a lot of time outside of lessons to edit our film to perfection extra filming footage will be added in on behalf of the groups approval. On the editing aspect of the film many techniques have been used not necessarily what we enjoyed and focused but purely what the examiners reaction to this would be and what marks would we get for certain camera angle shots and editing. we also have the help of teachers who have a high expertise in that area of media showing us what we did wrong and helping us to make the video to the standard we and both the exam board want.

how effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

Our music video brings the humour out of the song. The video show various people jumping around in various locations which in our opinion that what the song is about. The song is up beat and we showed this by the use of quick editing. If the song gets played any where people automatically think to start jumping and that’s why we take the music video in this direction because we felt that we as the people who are making the music video felt that we knew what our audience wanted. The music video of Eminem - My Name Is he takes the humour out of the song and displayed it into the music video by doing various things which the audience will laugh at over and over again and its because of him we did the same in our music video e.g. in our music video we have some grand ma’s having fun by dancing to the song which shows that your never to old to listen to the jump around record. The CD cover goes on further to show that the song is about having fun, this was show by me designing the CD to look as if each of us is jumping and we are enjoying ourselves in the door way of the house of pain. Over all I believe that the music video reflects the CD so much because we have been able to show the fun side of the song on the CD. For the magazine cover I designed the poster for the jump around tour, its different because is does’t show humour but show the seriousness of the group. This shows that the group can be funny as well as serious s at times. I have used graffiti for the title of the tour because it reflects what’s in the music video; I wanted to connect with the background used in some of the shots in the music video. I have put the venues where the group are going to be performing in orange because orange is one of the colours of the Irish flag which can be seen on the CD cover. The CD cover will attract a wide audience because it connotes that if you by this CD you will have fun and this has been shown in the music video. Overall I believe that the music video complements the CD cover and the CD cover design complements the magazine poster. The music video along with the CD cover sell the product the most and the magazine poster helps sell the group more but the CD cover still sells the group but to an extent. In conclusion the video, magazine advert and CD case all complement each other in various ways to try to sell the single to a wider audience

i mac problems

Because our group was a bit behind in editing, i stayed behind after college on 9/12/09 to do some capturing which we filmed on that day as well as editing however it didn't go according to plan; the i mac kept on freezing so i didn't get much editing done. on the 10/12/09 we had a lesson in the afternoon. while editing i made a decision to edit from the begging of the song because if u put something new in the time line it moves everything you have edited already. i did allot of editing in such a short period of time. i was nearly at the end of the song, everything was going great ,i edited the lip syncing and it was on time, i had put all the editing transactions in the music video but the unexpectedly happened the i mac shut down so faSt that i didn't have time to save anything. when the i mac loaded up everything that i did in that lesson had gone deleted. i was so gutted tears where coming from my eyes. because the i Mac lost all the work we did in that lesson we had to start again which meant we were now even more behind than everyone else. after taking time to calm down, Tom started editing from the beginning, after a while i toke over from Tom and started editing but found it hard to try and mach the lip syncing and i couldn't remember how i did it before, so because it was frustrating that i wasn't matching the lip syncing i decided to start again because i though maybe if i edit it to how it was before i might be able to figure out what percentage would be best suit the lip syncing, at this stage i had stayed after college for more than 3 hours trying to edit the footage that was lost.while editing i got frustrated not being able to match the lip syncing with the song because Mo sang to fast and Marcell sang to fast at some times and other times he sang to slow which was a challenge i had to overcome.

Cd cover research

The cd cover generally took a lot of thought however we all came up with a suitable image that relates to music video and we all took into consideration what we had to exactly do. we basically individually researched the original band aand what there cd cover was however despite creating the song their cd cover when seeing we all realised this had no relevance to the song so as a group we basically though of something thats appealing eye catching and that basically grabs the audience at first look so we searched images and ideas on the internet and we shown at the end of the lesson what results each having a positive review on the group so from there we made our decision. The images we found on the internet we had to basically make sure there was nothing unsuitable about it all where there images of violence drug abuse and so on so we made sure we focused paticuarly on a positve image where we can bring our message out very clearly to the audience and hope to a good feedback.

the shamrock leaf - House of Pain

The shamrock is a three-leafed old white clover symbol of Ireland. It is also a common way to represent Saint Patrick's Day. it is evidently seen on the badge of House of Pain's album cover.

reseach into music videos

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGcKiVZrFdc
This music video by Eminem feat Cashis 50 Cent & Lloyd Banks - You Don't Know has been very influential because of the way the camera (low angle) is situated in order for the artist to be rapping to the audience which is very common in many American Hip-Hop music videos.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAw9axFwzvU
The music video of Eminem-Beautiful has helped me come up with the idea of having an intro for our music video. In our music video at the beginning we defined what jumping is.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_MKtg_C9pQ
The music video of Eminem - My Name Is music video has been very inspiring because Eminem takes the fun side of the song by relating what he is rapping to the actions going on in the music video, sometimes in the music video Eminem is very serious at times and others he is taking the meek out of the song which we have related to in our music video by being serious at times as well as taking the fun side of the song.

locations for extra footage

Kitchen
Cellar
Naawab restaurant
college corridor
Manchester - parade

filming extra footage for the music video

because our music video lacked a bit of footage, i asked a few of my friends to help me do some extra jumping around on the 21 November. I filmed some shot in the kicthen as wellas the cellar but because of the lack of lighting some of the footage didn't turn out right in the cellar. unfortunately time had run out because they had to go out, me and two of my friend went to the Naawab restaurant were i filmed some more shots of jumping around in various parts of the restaurant however some of the camera shots were a bit shakey because i filmed without a tripod. On the 26 November i went and did more filming but this time in Manchester, lucky for me it was the right time to go filming because there was a Parade going on at the time which was perfect because in the original House of Pain's Jump Around music video they had a Parade. i filmed the Parade from the beginning until the end but from various points of the Parade which could be added in our music video, it was also extra footage just in case we run at least we would have had some back up footage. On the 27 November i asked a group of friends if they wanted to be in the music video as rapster, but unfortunately some of them turned me down and i had to work with what was left of people who wanted to be in the music video, which in the end turned out good as well as fun.

reseach into promotional album or tour posters

Billboards are created to promote the new single of the band/artist as well as the promote the tour that the band/artist are doing so that people would be able to know when there new single/album is coming out ready for download, tour posters are put on bill boards to advertise and tell people of when and where they are going to be on tour. the examples below would be taken into consideration when making our final product:

reseach into cd covers

THESE ARE THE ORIGINAL CD COVERS OF HOUSE OF PAIN'S ALBUM FINE MALT LYRICS WHICH FEATURES THE SONG HOUSE OF PAIN.

THIS CD COVER AND CD SHOWS HOW TO RELATE WHATS ON THE CD COVER TO THE ACTUAL CD WHICH IS SHOWN BY THE POSITIONING OF THE STAR BEING IN THE MIDDLE WHICH REINFORCE THE NAME OF THE ALBUM.

THE CD COVER FOR KING OF LEON'S ALBUM SHOWS THAT AN ALBUM COVER CAN BE AS SIMPLE AS PUTTING ONE FOURTH OF AN IMAGE OF THE BAND ON THE COVER.