Advanced Portfolio: January 2011

We used the typical idea of love and betrayal, which has been often used in many alternative music videos, such as In the Shadows. We developed our basic story line on it but changed it into a more complex way, in which a lesbian betrayed her girlfriend and fell in love with a boy. We also adopted the structure of interaction between dream and reality from film (Muholand Drive), to explore the dark area in the human mind, which is not commonly seen in the alternative music video because the duration of a song is too short, and the distinct between reality and dream is difficult for audience to differ. If it is too complex, our targeted audience, such as teenage boys, may be bored, and girls would not like too dark story. To solve this problem, we used a lot of post editing effects, such as using watercolour on the dream scene and black and white on the actual memory part. This hopefully will help audience to understand the plot. We have also put much brighter colour in the dream scene to make the image looked more attractive to targeted teenage girls.
To keep the style of the Rasmus, we rebalanced the colour of singing parts to make a sense of loneliness. The effect is similar to black and white but softer. We also make our effort to break into the theatre to use the stage as performance location, making a sense of isolation, which is usually seen in the Rasmus’s video, liking singing on the beach or basement.

For the website, we did not choose the common sense of an organised structure but used a more relax and simple way to put the basic hyperlinks but still in the similar style of older one, which is dark and isolated. The CD cover is made to be recognisable for the customers, so we made it in natural settings and in unrealism style, which is similar to the CD cover of <Dead Letters>.
So overall our production is following the basic style of previous music video and CD cover in order to attract the similar targeted audience, but we also have made some changes about the content of music video and the style of the website, in order to refresh the eye of audience and make a stronger style for the Rasmas.

We related our music video, website and CD cover together throughout the preproduction, production and post-production. Before making the music video, we have already got an idea about what our CD cover and website are going to be like. We finally used the image we took at the outside of house where we filmed the killing scene. Because it is winter and the sunshine is gorgeous. So it is quite good to take pictures along with filming. For website, we used photo shop to make a picture of the band from the screen catch of performance in the theatre, and adjusted the colour of it to make it fit into the cold style and CD cover and music video. We finally changed our CD image with the rearranged photo of the band, in which the four has been put into the clock-like position, which is cool and connected with the website and music video. Making the same style of the whole products, we could get the taste of the targeted audience and make the style become the symbol of the band for the future.

We asked a few people also working on their own projects to watch our video and give us feedback on our work. The most popular issue arising seemed to be that the narrative was a bit unclear as to what was happening. Also, some parts were quite repetitive, and had long takes, boring our audience. We were a little disappointed when we got our negative comments, but we took it in and used it to make our video better. We decided to add effects to different parts of our video to differentiate between different parts of the narrative. We also cut longer clips and added more performance in, something in which we were lacking.
Looking back before we responded to feedback, I agree with the issues raised, and our video has been made better for it. The only problem with this process might be that because we got friends to evaluate our work, we hope they were telling us the truth and not hiding issues with our video to spare our feelings. We hope that wasn't the case and that people have been as honest with us as we were with them.

The technologies at our disposal proved very helpful in all stages of our coursework. Using iMovie for our editing proved to be simple, yet effective. There were plenty of different video effects to help us with problems in our narrative. Also, cutting and arranging our different clips was easy, yet wasn't very complicated, so we found it very easy to work with. Photoshop was also good because, although it was more complex software to work with, it helped us make a professional looking CD cover. As for research, modern technologies have really helped. Youtube has proved to be very helpful, as The Rasmus aren't a very popular band any more in the UK, so we couldn't find examples of their existing music video's just on music channels. All of The Rasmus' existing music video's are on Youtube already. Youtube would also be helpful in showcasing our music video as well. Finally, another technology we have found useful is our blog. It has helped us track all our progress so we can easily look over what we have done and have planned to do for next time, and for showing others what we have been doing behind the scenes on filming and in lessons.