Music Video Evaluation

When researching and planning for our final music video, I analysed two other John Mayer music videos. This allowed me to get an understanding of his work and what type of things John Mayer includes in his music videos. This led me to notice that John Mayers videos are all quite simple. They have simple locations, simple storylines and simple editing styles. This is why we chose to film our music video in woods. However, I did notice that most other John Mayer music videos were too simple and so we can came up with the idea to include flashbacks to show two different time periods which mixes it up from other John Mayer music videos.

There were not any texts included in our music video. This was because we felt that texts would have ruined the mood of our music video. Our chosen song is a slow song that has a serious storyline and not a fun storyline. By adding text we felt that it would have made the music video seem more fun. We also felt that texts in a music video should be included in an upbeat song which will help contribute to the fun side to the song.

I was unable to upload this video to facebook which I used to gather feedback for my digipak and advert due to the length of the video. However, I showed and emailed this video to some of my friends within our target audience and gathered some feedback from them. Overall, people liked our main idea and felt that the storyline was obvious and people were aware of the different time periods however some people felt that it was it not so obvious in the flashbacks. One person said they were unclear about the relationship in the panning shot when the couple are getting changed. She said she was unclear what was meant to be going on there and this made her unsure about whether the couple were together or not. Our idea for this shot was to show the gap between the two and the lack of interaction between them when they are in the same room. This was clear to some however some were unsure. Another said he was unsure about the shot where she is twirling. He said it was a bit ‘choppy’ and that it was a bit unusual how she goes running through the woods to standing still and disorientated. Our ideas for these shots were to have her run through the woods and then stop and begin spinning to make her look disorientated. However, when practising this shot, we decided against it as it did not look right to have her run, stop and then spin so we did the shots separately.

When constructing our music video, we used three main media components, a video camera, a tripod and a laptop. The video camera was used in order to shoot our music video and the laptop was used in order to access Final Cut Pro. The video camera allowed us to successfully film our music video and with the help of the tripod, we were able to shoot our shots steadily and neatly. Final Cut Pro allowed us to edit the shots we had shot for our music video. We practised using Final Cut Pro when we created our animatic and so we were able to use the program. This also allowed us to add effects to our music video such as one shot fading out and another shot fading in.

When researching our music video, we used YouTube in order to research previous John Mayer music videos to find out about his previous work and what common points about them were. We discovered that John Mayer always has a female as one of the main characters in his music videos. So we decided to use a female as the lead in our music video. We also had a male in our music video however he was only shown in the flashback scenes and so was not the lead character.

And we also discovered that John Mayer uses very common places to film his music videos. For example, his music video for Clarity was shot mainly at the beach and the music video for Daughters was shot with a plain background. So we took this into account when deciding where to film our music video which we eventually decided to film in the woods.

When planning our music video, we firstly created a storyboard in order to gather our ideas and have them in one place. The storyboard also allowed us to discuss possible camera movements and allowed us to order our shots and rearrange them. The media technology used for the planning stage was again a laptop so we could access Final Cut Pro. We used a camera to take photos of our storyboard and then we created an animatic. This meant that we could try out possible camera shots and see if they worked. If not, we could use Final Cut Pro to find a shot that would work. This meant that we didn’t have to worry about shots when filming as we already knew what shots we were going to do. This saves time on the days when we actually shot our music video.

When evaluating our music video, the only media technology used was a computer in order to access blogger so we could upload our final evaluations.