Evaluating/analysing student's videos

15^th October 2010

Today’s focus was watching and evaluating past students music videos from the college. My group found this very benefical as it made us think critically as to what not to do and what makes a music video score high marks. After looking at the videos we now know to do the following:

1.       Have confident performers. This is vital because as a viewer you want to feel comfortable and at ease with watching the performance. They’ve got to be able to make eye contact with the camera and understand how the director wants them to perfrom. It’s important the performer makes eye-contact with the camera and not above it or to the side of it as we lose the engagment as an audience. Observing the videos we watched today, there were some performers that didn’t engage with the camera well and randomly ‘smiling’ at it instead of lip syncing.

2.       Shoot relevant footage. This comes with definitive planning beforehand and knowing exactly what to shoot and how this relates the target audience. Some footage we watched today were completely irrepleavant and did not make sense. We are going to try to avoid this by finfihing our planning folder in advance so we are not rushing before the deadline and by carefully thinking what interesting footage we can film that will capture the audience’s interest and meet the conventions of electro-pop genre music videos

3.       Target audience. Make it appropiate for the relevant target audience so they can relate to the video. Anothing obscure will confuse the audience. The purpose of a music video is to sell the song and market the artist to the target audience so it’s important you get the mix right.

4.       Advanced camera work. Framing is important. Getting a variety of shots such as establishing shots, long shots of characters, mid shots so the audience can see the artists visual style and image, close ups of face and even extreme close ups to see the lip sync. You should always film a   master shot so you have coverage of the scene and then move onto different shots. This way, you can always go back to this shot in the editing suite if things go wrong or you haven’t shot enough. We are going to use tracking in our video and a number of other shots to keep the audience interest. It is also important to film ENOUGH footage so in the editing suite you don’t have to re-use something you have already filmed.

5.       Effective lip Syncing. This is an important convention of a music video and should be done in conjuction with the lyrics of the song. The audience will immediately notice if the lip wordings are out of sync with the song. This will not only make you music video look unprofessional but will lose the audience’s interest as they will be critical of the fact that the singer’s lip movements are not in sync with the song lyrics. The advice we were given today was to make your performer say the words out loud because if they mim it does actually looked like they are miming. We will get our performer to learn the lyrics beforehand so we are not faced with the problem of the filming, stopping and reciting the lines to the performer. This would be time-consuming.

6.       MISE-EN-SCENE. Make sureeverything in the mise-en-scne is purposeful and is meant to be there. The lighting is also important. We watched a video today that was meant to have a ‘black and white’ effect but the lighting was to dark so you could only see the outline of the performer and not his facial expression and lip sync.

7.       Vary locations. We watched a number of videos today that had one or two locations for the duration of their 3 minute music video. As an audience, this was extremely boring to watch and our critical feedback was that they should have used more locations. In our music video we plan to have three different locations. This should gain the audience’s interest and not be boring.

8.       Effective editing. Many of the videos used some kind of special effect. Some looked ‘cheesy’ but others looked purposeful. They key with special effects is only use them if they will enhance that bit of the music video in a positive way. Some music videos we looked at today looked like they had put on the effect as a last minute decision because they were running out of time. We don’t plan to use special effects or CGI as our music video is going to be conceptual, so the video is going to be ‘weird’ enough. Editing to the beat is also important. A few videos we watched were out of sync with the music so it’s important the visuals and the instruments fir the rhythm of the beat. Our song is quite pacey and upbeat so this will prove quite a challenge to us but it is do-able. We will have to ensure we have enough footage to rely on.

Ashleigh.