Context 1: Assignment 1 Task: Essay: My Design Process.

While analysing the design processes which I implemented, I will be specifically looking at the music video I created in A level Media Studies: CSS – THIS MONTH DAY TEN, where we had to create a video for a song that didn’t already exist. As this was a group task it was difficult to come up with ideas that everyone agreed upon and other times it was just difficult to get those ideas out of my head and into something others could visualise. This leads me to my first design process which was inspiration. We all decided to note down any visual styles of existing work that we enjoyed and could see potential in, this varied from adverts that were on TV at the moment, to old Clint Eastwood films. We then listed any artists we enjoyed and came to a mutual decision on the song and artist, one we would all be passionate working with. The main inspiration for our video was the CSS – Alcohol video, which has arts and crafts made characters and environments, all being animated with sticks and stop-motion.

Cadburys advert.

The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly stills

 

                            
                       
  

Now we had our inspiration we started to brainstorm any ideas we could incorporate into our video, the look of the characters, the pace of movement to the song, the background images. We annotated everything so we could future reference our original ideas and be reminded what it was we wanted to do.

Next we started to identify our target audience, we collecting qualitative and quantitative data on various subjects, this involved the age range of CSS fans, Opinions on existing CSS video from both fans/not and the subculture that our artist most appealed to. This helped us better understand the audience that would be viewing our product, the preparation was crucial as we now knew what was expected from this particular artist, conventions that would be most suited to the age range and generally stopped us from creating something personal that might appeal to us but not the intended target market.

With all our inspiration, ideas and data we began to prototype and develop our video, we made rough templates of characters and environments to view which best suited the music, we experimented with different camera angles and shot lengths in an attempt to create the best atmosphere, we slowly narrowed down the concepts until we were satisfied with the end result.

First design for house/stage

After we had completed the developing stage we decided to show clips and extracts to fellow students and tutors, this gave us varied feedback and issues that we didn’t necessarily notice, the opinions and advice allowed us to further refine our product, perfecting it and eliminating any problems, which ultimately gave us the finished product. For example we got complaints about certain hand-held camera movements making people feel sick, so we decided to tone it down.

    Finally we came to the conclusion that our product was effective in achieving what we set out to do and would have the correct impact on our target audience, being confident with our work we rendered it and released it into the market. (Well into the examiners hands.)

              End Result: CSS - This Month Day 10   

Samuel Dobson