Evaluation

Our brief was to make a music video for a target audience of our choice. We decided that we would have a young female target audience and chose to do the song ‘I love it’ by icona pop. My role in the production was to develop who our target audience, create a questionnaire, find a theory to use in our video, decide on our costumes, draw a storyboard, do a lot of research into other music videos and media texts to help give us ideas for our own, and star in the video. For our research we did a lot of work in our lessons, looking at other music videos and thinking of what we liked and disliked about them so we got a better idea of what genre we wanted our video to be. I also independently looked at other forms of media such as TV shows and movies that could inspire us.

We chose pop as our genre as we know pop is a female dominated music industry and we were a group of three girls. The conventions we have kept to for pop is that it stars three girls (as pop usually shows young women) and we also used jump cuts as we had a lot of shots in our final video and wanted to do this as we know it is a convention of pop music as it keeps the video up beat and exciting.

One music video that inspired ours was ‘hit me baby one more time’ by Brittney Spears and we used the idea of being in school and daydreaming about being elsewhere.

To plan our video we all came up with a narrative together and I drew a storyboard for it and I also planned what costumes we would wear through the video and we planned the locations we would film in.

When we actually went to film it went well as we got all the footage that we needed for our video and as we are all friends we were able to communicate well with each other so we did not face any problems.

One thing we could of improved on is that the people in our group could be more reliable when it came to showing up on time because some members of our group did not always come in which made it difficult to plan without them.

When editing the video the problem we faced was that our song was longer than we thought so our story board was too short, but we very easily overcame this easily because we had enough footage to add in more clips so that the video was long enough. Another problem we had was that we were all new to iMovie and did not know how to use it however we quickly got the hang of the basics of it and were able to edit our video.

We decide that we would show our video on YouTube so that everyone around the world will be able to access it. We knew that our target audience is likely to be on YouTube and listen to music on there. It is also something that people can share on social networking sites such as Facebook and twitter so the video is more likely to go viral. We knew that some of our target audience was young girls and therefore were probably impressionable and we did not want to represent women as sexual objects because we realised that we could be seen as people to look up to for younger girls. I think overall our video went well as it was an upbeat, fun video. I feel that it did not capture the rebellious spirit as much as I would have liked, but I still think the video will be enjoyable for our target audience to watch.

Personally, my favourite sequence from the video is near the end when the video starts to reverse for a few shots before it goes back to the school setting from the beginning. I liked this because the shots used were stots of us dancing or with a lot of movement and I think it looked very good when it all reversed. It fit in with the music that was playing in that part of the song and it is a good way to end the adventure because it is as if you are rewinding it to the beginning of the video when the girls are just in the classroom.

One convention of women in the music industry that we tried to break in our video is the sexualisation of women. Usually in pop videos the artist wears very little clothing and does provocative dancing, but we did not want to be sexualised and did not follow any of these conventions. We wanted to show the friendship between girls and them having fun instead.

I think we represented the social group of teenage girls as the places where we went were all places that teenage girls would hang out with friends to have fun. Our characters were all represented as cool and fun which we wanted because then our target audience may feel like they are relatable people.

I think we successfully reached our target audience of teenage girls and young women because we showed many school friends our video and got very positive feedback from our target audience.

If I was to do this again I would try and invest in better equipment to use like better cameras and lighting.  I would also try and schedule my time for planning and filming better so no time is wasted and we could possible spend more time on editing or getting more filming shots.