Advance Portfolio Ashleigh Chrich

I have created a music video to accompany the song entitled ‘That’s how strong my love is’ by signed and highly successful artist, Alicia Keys. My plan was to create a video that portrayed a different side to the artist than what would normally be expected, showing an emotion story of personal loss and subsequent heartbreak. My idea was to focus on the artist as a normal person, rather than a celebrity, showing how the loss of a loved one can entice deep emotion and cause devastation, which is what celebrities tend to hide away from the prying eyes of fans. I have incorporated some of the usual codes and conventions of a music video including shot lengths that match the rhythm of the music, close up shots of the artist, lip syncing so that the music matched the moving image, location change and performance. However, due to the fact that I was focussing on the personal side of the artist, I avoided the usual ‘glitz and glamour’ by not using strong make up or outfit choices, which helped emphasize the fact that she was a normal person just like everyone else. In addition to this, I included a narrative to commence and end before and after the actual song itself. This was to entice the audience in to the silence. For example, if a potential audience member was doing work whilst having a music channel on in the background, the long silence would make them want to look up, and then they would potentially be drawn in to the music video by the narrative. An example of this in an existing piece is Lady Gaga and Rhianna's 'Telephone'.

To compliment the music video, I also created a CD cover and website in order to advertise and sell my product. In my opinion these items worked well in expressing the theme and emotion shown in the music video. My CD cover consisted of an image of the actress which I added effects to make it look blurred, to reflect her emotion. I believe that the art stands out very well and would attract potential customers in a shop. I made the titles colours match the image which I think worked well. I was very pleased with the final project and think it related to my music video well. I aimed for my website to also show the personal side of the artist by basing it on a blog like format, and the blog entry that is accessible on the home page is very personal and shows her feeling on a matter close to her heart. I incorporated links to Facebook and twitter in order to create a community within the product.

My intended target audience is a mixture of teenage girls, and middle aged women. I gained my audience feedback through posting my video on Facebook and Youtube and then asking people to fill in a survey of what they saw. I asked both males and females of different ages to gain a good sample of feedback. The feedback i gained showed that some people didnt quite understand the fact that the male role had died in warfare, so in response to this, i included the image of a poppy at the end of my video which made the narrative clearer to the audience. Apart from this the audience feedback i gained was really good. However, in my opinion, i feel that my music video wasnt as good as it could have been but the audience feedback didnt reflect this.

In relation to this, I do not feel that this process is entirely reliable as I feel that some people will just put good comments so that they will not hurt my feelings, or feel embarrased.

In order to create my piece, i have used such technologies as imovie, photoshop, imovie and blogger. These applications enabled me to create my media texts easily. I found imovie very easy to use, and the most difficult was photoshop as it is so detailed and technical. One media technology that i used to include in my piece was the college's green screen. I used this to create a news report and i believe it worked very well. To research and plan the creation of my piece, I researched exsisting music videos by using You Tube. This enabled me too look at how genres effect my creativity and gained ideas that I was then able to adapt to my own piece. The hardest thing i found was using photoshop as it is so complicated, but in the end I was extremely pleased with the outcome of my cd cover.

An example of one of the four recees I did in the locations I was intending to shoot. These were useful in finding how suitable the location would be as well as allowing me to think how the scene would be in my head.

Part of the story board. This was very important and was crucial when it came to editing. I split each scene with a green line and highlighted where the performance was in order to make it easier for myself. This also gave me small targets to work towards which seemed to make the task easier.