Chorus of Fools

The Crookes

The Crookes formed in 2008, with the name inspired by the road they lived on in Sheffield. They are all English literature students, therefore their lyrics are very poetic and meaningful. We wanted to use The Crookes because we were particularly interested in their Indie style music and 1950’s feel. Due to their unique image, we wanted to make sure the video reflected the band and create a unique video just like the band.

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

When we decided to make our music video, we wanted to push the barriers, be creative and go against the normal conventions. We had many ideas of what to do, but it was all very conventional . This is why we decided to use complete animation throughout the video. Originally we were going to incorporate some footage in the video, but apart from the opening scene, we decided to use only animation. The reason for this decision was to challenge media forms and conventions of most other music videos and also to challenge ourselves. We got our inspiration for the video from The Maccabees video, Toothpaste kisses. This is the only successful band we have seen that has used this sort of animation for a video. Looking through their list of videos, we saw that they also like to push the barriers and challenge conventions by being creative. The first and main way in which our video challenges convention, is that it is solely animation. By animation I mean that the story of the video is told through manipulating pictures and creating motion to tell the story of the song. We knew that we needed to keep a narrative going through the video so we needed to keep the transitions of the photos smooth and fluid, if not it would just be a few photos moving about. We wanted to make it like a moving photo album and creating scenes of what was happening. I feel that this idea challenges conventions of most music videos in a great way. The ‘traditional’ music video would feature the artist, maybe lip synching to the song, and the story would be told though the acting of the artist along with extras.

It would usually be the lip synch of the lyrics which tell the story, whereas in our video we have used photos and other symbolic images to create the story and narrative. I feel that the photos tell the story of two young people coming together, then the struggle in the middle as the family falls apart, with the happy ending as they get back together. This follows Todorov's theory behind music videos. He calls is the Classical Narrative. He says that a music video starts with an Equilibrium (the normal state at the beginning. Any opposing forces are in balance) followed by the Dis-equilibrium (An action or conflict introduced into the narrative) and finally followed by the New-equilibrium (where the conflict is resolved and the narrative strands are tied together).Following this format may mean that we did infact follow conventions, but we just portrayed it in an unconventional way. It would have been conventional if we had used Todorov's theory and filmed it in a studio with the artists etc. I feel we followed conventions with the narrative, but developed it by using animation.

How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts? Throughout the production tasks I have tried to keep a consistent theme throughout my work. The video relied heavily on pictures, black and white images, sepia tones and fonts, therefore I have tried to incorporate this is both my Digipak and Magazine Advert. I feel that the Digipak sticks to the house style and theme of the video particularly well as I have incorporated many of the images used in the video, on the front cover of the digipak itself. I decided to create a collage of images for my front cover as I didn't think it would be right to go with a traditional front cover image of the band, as we didn't incorporate a image of the band in the video, therefore it would have looked out of place. I think it was essential to keep the house style throughout all the material linked with the video, as it keeps the strong theme evident throughout.When making the magazine article I kept the same colours and fonts throughout and a picture of the Digipak. On the magazine article I have not incorporated any images apart from the digipak itself, but the house style is followed through. Throughout the video, digipak and magazine advert I have kept Monotype Corsiva font. I feel that this font represents the band and as it was used in the video, I wanted to keep it strong throughout the project. I think it is essential to keep the house style throughout as it shows that they all go together and represent the same band and song.

The idea of the magazine article was to advertise the digipak, in which the digipak included our video. For the audience it wouldn't have many sense if they didn't all have to same

house style, to show they are all for the same thing. I feel that I have created an effective project in which all the materials

work together and represent the band well.

As you can see, I have used the same fonts and style throughout the digipak, magazine and magazine advert.

During the video making process, we used many new, as well as ones we already knew, technologies to complete it. The biggest hurdle we came across was using Adobe Premiere Pro. Firstly, we had never used Premiere before, and had also been made aware that it was not a programme predominantly used for animation. We had to learn many new techniques in Premiere, including how to move, crop, colour change, rotate and scale images. Another useful tool we found useful, was when we learnt how to reverse parts of the timeline. We used this at the end of the video when we wanted to reverse some of the previous footage we already had. We also had to decide how we would make the video flow, making the objects move across the screen. We did this by using key frames. We also learnt how to import images from Photoshop, which we had scanned in to the computer, and with the help of our teacher, how to import the track for the video. There was many different tools that we did not know about at the beginning of making the video. We came across a lot of tools simply by trial and error, and as we were not familiar with the programme, this was the best way to do so.

How did you use media technologies in the construction and research,

planning and evaluation stages?

This is how we developed our video, using key frames

Another programme we used was Adobe Photoshop. We had used this many times before, especially when completing our AS Magazine Project. It took a bit of refreshing our minds to feel comfortable using it again, but it soon came back to us. We used Photoshop mainly to remove backgrounds from photos and crop images to later import into Premiere. We also used Photoshop to correct flaws on some of the photos as they had a few marks on them as they are very old. Another useful piece of technology we used was the video camera. Although we didn’t use much footage in our video, we filmed the opening of the video. We used the camera and tripod to film the opening and closing of the book. We used the tripod to make sure the camera was still enough to film to the book well and make it look professional. Other simple technologies we used throughout the making of the video were programmes such as Microsoft Word and Paint, for simple jobs such as simple cropping and colouring to pictures. I also had to get to grips with Blogger. We originally used Ning, but felt it was holding us back slightly as we simply did not like the programme. This is when we decided to swap to Blogger as we knew how to use this and could get on with the pre-production straight away. We used blogger to upload and keep track of all our work, both pre-production and post-production. We learnt how to upload images and other documents such as Google documents and slideshare files. We also learnt to import YouTube videos using the embed codes.

I also used Google Documents to help us in pre-production. I chose to use Google Documents to create PowerPoint's and other documents as it made is accessible to use from any computer I may be on. It was a simple programme to use and I found it very helpful. I used Google documents to create PowerPoint's mainly for pre-production work when researching artists and directors.

I also set up a Twitter account, to import my tweets in to my blogger. I used twitter to update the status of our group, and inform people of how we were getting on and how far along the making process we were.

I also had to get to grips with Blogger. We originally used Ning, but felt it was holding us back slightly as we simply did not like the programme. This is when we decided to swap to Blogger as we knew how to use this and could get on with the pre-production straight away. We used blogger to upload and keep track of all our work, both pre-production and post-production. We learnt how to upload images and other documents such as Google documents and slideshare files. We also learnt to import YouTube videos using the embed codes. I also used Google Documents to help us in pre-production. I chose to use Google Documents to create PowerPoint's and other documents as it made is accessible to use from any computer I may be on. It was a simple programme to use and I found it very helpful. I used Google documents to create PowerPoint's mainly for pre-production work when researching artists and directors.

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/2376H3B

Audience feedback about our video has been very positive. It seems that the audience believe that it was a good idea to use animation and they also said that the video fitted in with the style of song. They all agreed that the Indie feel of the band was portrayed well by using animation. It seems that the audience feel that the video is very creative and using the old photos was effective. The majority of feedback on the Survey Monkey suggested that most people expected our video to be shown on music channels and YouTube. I was very happy with this as the audience obviously believe it has the potential to be shown on music channels with professional videos. The Crookes have also commented on the video, and really liked the fact that we used animation as they were not available to appear in the video themselves. They said they enjoyed watching the video and liked the creativity. From the audience survey I have conducted on Survey Monkey, I have not had any negative feedback, but obviously I know the video is not perfect and there would be a few things looking back on it that I would change.