Note to Moderator

Dear Moderator

This is my individual blog for the Music Video coursework task for A2 Media. You will find a link to my group blog, along with the other students in my group on the right hand side. There is also a link to our teacher's central blog ("labelled Ms B Main Blog") which has links to all the student's blogs in the class.

On this blog you will find all of my independent research, mainly from before the production stage of the project. It has influences, treatments, initial ideas, and general research into the world of music video to show inspiration for our final product. There is also reflections on all stages of the project and the evaluation, posted as video clips which are also available on the group blog.

On my group blog, you will find evidence of my group’s planning and project development work, and any research we did together that influenced and inspired our project.

As well as a music video, my group decided to make an album cover and band website (in the form of a live myspace page) which are linked to the top of this blog, and the group blog, along with our final music video.

I hope that this blog is easy to navigate around. All of the blogs are arranged in date order from June - December 2009. I have used labels to identify all the research, planning and evaluation work I have completed on my individual blog. On the group blog, we have used the same system and any posts that I contributed to, or were individually responsible for, are labelled with my name.

Thanks

Nicholas Desmond (Candidate number 5257)

THIS BLOG IS CLOSED

After a long and fruitful project, sweaty hours in disgustingly hot edit suite, and a rollercoaster of emotion;

We're done. The end.
Thankyou for your time, I hope it was enlightening

Bye bye :)

Evaluation Question 4; Reflections

Question 4 was quite a difficult question to take part in a discussion about.  We found that it was more describing but when we got into the production section of technologies it all started to flow.  I felt that I made some really good points about the software we used and also the camera hardware and how it greatly improved our project.  However I think a lot of the time we came across a bit too optimistic, as there were some hindrances that we could have spent longer discussing like the exposure settings on the camera.  We didn't quite understand the zebra lines and this meant that throughout our shoot we ended up with a lot of really dark footage which made the editing process really difficult.  In future we would learn how to use our camera a lot better before going out on the main shoot, probably through test shoots and general practices.
All in all though I felt the question went rather smoothly and was a good end to our evaluation, and that I made good, frequent and relevant points throughout.

Evaluation Question 3; Reflections

I started off Question 3 of our Evaluation discussion and I feel that in particular, this and question 1 were my top moments. Myself and Matt got into a really interesting discussion about the difference in genres seen through the artists brand images. I really felt I made some good points about how R&B is based on the glamour factor and how rock is more based around the music. This was a big deciding factor in doing a performance video for us and so it was good to get this into our evaluation. We didn't talk too much about our original demographic however and in the future this would have been a usual thing to discuss.

Evaluation Question 2; Reflections

Question 2 got off to a better start than where we left question 1, with Ben leading us into a discussion of epic proportions about the codes and conventions of websites and album covers.  This meant that while covering the combination of our products we equally covered the theory that we had missed out of question 1.  Although I did feel a bit left out of this question and that I did not say as much as I had liked to, especially seeing as I did a lot of the design work for the album cover and myspace.  However we did get across a lot of points on genre signifiers and things that linked heavily with question 3 (which I lead) meaning that we could develop them later.

Evaluation Question 1; Reflections

I felt that the first question of our evaluation went rather well.  I feel that I gave an adequate contribution throughout this question and that I touched on some really important points.  The biggest problem was a confusion about what evidence needed to go in each question and so technically we missed out the album cover and myspace conventions and codes in this question.  Obviously this was bad as we would lose lots of marks but instead we managed to cover this in question 2.  Even though Simon was leading the question we managed to pull it off very much as a group and therefore has an equal share of points.  The question focused very heavily on Goodwin and Vernallis and I think we got into a really good level of depth throughout.

Myspace page

Here is our finished Myspace page in all it's glory:

Here is a link as well