A2 Media Evaluation

My A2 production work is in the form of a music video, a digipak and an advertisement for the digipak. The song that I chose to do is the song ‘Wagon Wheel’ which is originally by the artist ‘Old Crow Medicine Show.’ The genre of folk rock arose in the US and UK in the mid 60’s with artists such as Bob Dylan and The Byrds. Folk Rock was mainly unheard of after the early 70’s, but with emerging artists such as Mumford and Sons and Ben Howards Folk Rock is making a comeback. Folk Rock is the genre of music that my video suits and it is this genre that I have revolved the artwork and scenes around. My Digipak and advertisement both fit in with the codes conventions of this genre.

My music video has both a Narrative and performance, which makes the video a mixture. This is a very common style for a music video. For the performance part of my music video the artist can be seen performing the song from different angles. The artist seen performing in the video is the actual artist performing the version of the song. When I first chose to do the song, I was originally going to use the Mumford and Sons version of the song as it was only a cover song and therefore has no official music video. However when I first started filming the clips for my video I asked the artist to be part of the performance part for the Mumford and Sons version that I was going to produce. When we started filming the part Jay couldn’t do the Mumford and Sons version properly because of his style and the genre of music he plays didn’t cover the same instruments. I suggested we rerecord the song completely and he do his own version for the music video.

For the narrative in the video I tried to follow the narrative described by the lyrics of the song, and filmed another male character travelling around in the countryside. I filmed at locations in and around Hedon, Thorngumbald and Sunk Island. I picked the locations in which I filmed on the basis that I wanted countryside locations which were virtually unspoiled and untouched to fit in with codes and conventions of the genre. I decided to set the narrative of the video in around the 1960’s. The costumes worn by the character fit in with the conventions of this era, as do all of the props and locations. I chose to choose this era to base the narrative of the song on as it was the decade that the genre of music was invented.

Example One

This was one of the first locations that was travelled too. It is located 4 miles from my house, and the last half a mile has to be walked due to where it is located. I found out about this location when the actor involved in my video, we found out that we could use the location but only for the one date we filmed on which was the . We could only film on this day because the land, which is an old false dock from World War 2, is now used as a game reserve by a local shooting group and would be used by them daily after that weekend. We filmed 9 minutes of footage on and around the dock, although when opened in the editting software I noticed a problem with the footage. Because we had had to cycle to the location, when leaving the bikes on the bank we had left them within the shots in a lot of the footage which left it therefore unusable. I wanted to go back to the location as it had the right conventions of the genre and looked correct for the narrative due to it remaining almost untouched for half a century. We called up the leader of the group, but unfortunatly, they had already began digging and building the hut in the middle of where we were filming. Example one is an example of one of the shots taken at the first location. This is one of that shots that was unusable due to the cycle that can be seen in the background of the shot. The scene that I planned to have in which the actor was shown sleeping on the log was replaced instead when editing with a longer pan shot of the location. I decided to do this when editting as not doing anything about the cycle would have lead to an issue with the historical accuracy of the video as it is set a long time before BMX cycles were invented.

When editting my video I chose to edit my video on my laptop. I chose to do this as it would give me the added advantage of being able to edit the clips I had filmed almost straight away. This gave me chance to try and edit the video as I imagined it when I was filming the scenes. I also chose to edit the video’s at home as I already had the correct software (Adobe Premiere Pro CS5) and would be able to do the editting whenever I needed to do it as I didn’t want to have to edit my video around everyone else editting due to the college having only five editting machines. I already had experience using the program because I have created multiple clip montages off BMX. The video’s I have created have gradually become better and better obviously due to the more experience I have with the program. The music video I created contained what I feel was the best editting I have done so far.