Block B      ADVANCED PORTFOLIO CRITICAL EVALUATION

                                      James Bowler, Jon Watson, Kieran Booker                                                                     

                                                                                                                                                                                                               

1)      The Genre of the band we used, MGMT, is psychedelic pop. This genre is very surrealist in style. We have used very strong elements of the psychedelic style, such as bright colours and mesmerising patterns. This is most prominent in the performance part of the music video. We also explored some surrealist conventions such as floating heads, evil clowns, cardboard tubing, superman and the Swedish flag. These all compliment the way that MGMT display themselves in their music videos. Our music video has conventional short shots as well as some long slow motion shots to fit with the pace of the song. We have made certain actions in the video reflect the music as its happening. We’ve been greatly influenced by the style of the band, and our strange narrative reflects their style. The use of fancy dress style costumes emphasises MGMT’s quirky style an flamboyant costume, the more homemade style of some of the costumes added to how effective the video turned out to be. At the end the band walks off screen and the green screen is shown, this displays an element of postmodernism. This challenges the existing conventions of music videos as the production is revealed. We also didn’t want to use the conventional band in front of a green screen, so we used green t-shirts to give the band members floating head and arm appearances. Challenging these conventions allowed us to focus on performance in a different manor than we had originally intended.

2)      We have maintained a clear image and theme for MGMT in our range of products throughout our campaign by emphasising on the bright colours and hippy styles that the band has previously put across in all of their work. We did this through looking over everything we could find by MGMT as well as other artists related to them, their genre of music and their styles of fashion ect and then we tried to come up with ideas that would relate to these.  We intended to interrelate our website, cd cover and video for the music production project by using common themes and making it obvious to people looking that these was all from the same band, to do this we first decided that we needed something that could be shown on all our pieces but not seem out of place in the general theme of things, we decided on creating a cartoon logo which we used for our central piece on our website and as the cover of our album. The cartoon seems relevant as it looks psychedelic just like MGMT’s other album covers as well as sticking to the themes of imaginative dressing up and costumes from the video. Their overall purpose is to make the products all seem like they are related to each other and to put across to the viewers that these are all products from the same band. I believe that we successfully used a range of ancillary texts to put across our product. 

3)      We learned a lot from our audience feedback after showing them the video. We gained a lot of praise, especially for the green screen effects and lip syncing accuracy. At the time of the showing also, we were praised for the mix of both narrative and performance seamlessly working together as one. Our feedback was to just tighten up each clip and transition to smooth certain clips together. We aimed to meet these points and during editing we gave most clips transitions to smooth them together, although not too many as it would be overdone. The green screen clips had different effects on them but all similar, with effects such as zoom blurs and false colours to match the video to its psychedelic genre (with the rainbow colours and blurred effects). Also some other feedback given was that the battle scenes needed to be zoomed in as they were too far out. This seemed a problem at first because we had hardly any time to reshoot, but then we realised on iMovie we could use a smooth zoom function, which would have the same effect as shooting it again with zoom. We agreed with all of the audience feedback, as it helped us eventually ‘sell’ our artist, with more effects and a smoother outcome. We felt it really enlightened us as we had majority of the class praise our video but was also given constructive feedback which helped our video become entirely complete.

4)      We used an iMac with iMovie, Adobe Photoshop and iWeb to construct our creative work, accompanied with a blogger.com account to ‘blog’ and diarise our progress during the work itself. On the blog, our planning folder had to be scanned and noted on to show your progress at first, and eventually, during the editing and image work, we kept posting multiple drafts of our work until the final copies themselves, which would then be posted and evaluated upon. This showed our progress constructively I feel. We used the Internet video sharing website Youtube to gather influences, such as music videos themselves and what effects they use. It was in fact Youtube that helped us garner ideas for the green screen effect, as we watched a video called ‘Photoshop Handsome’ by Everything Everything, which shows the actual effects we wanted. Influences aside, the blog itself made us drive our creativity more. After making the blog design match that of the ‘Psychedelic genre’  we wanted to post every piece of work we did and every thought onto the blog so that we could have an in depth look back at our progress from the start if we wanted to.  Using the blog, and social networking website Facebook, we were able to distribute our music video to a wider audience. Youtube also was used to distribute our video, as we wanted a bigger audience(the world) to possibly see our video and post what they think, to give more connectivity and gain a little bit of praise in the process.