Advanced Portfolio Critical Evaluation

Our genre is Indie, and we generally stuck to indie conventions by using bright colours and fun themes. On  both our Cd cover and website we have displayed bright colours and polka dots to fit with The Pipettes personal theme of "The Polka Dot Girls". Our front cover of our Cd cover is cheeky with a hint of nudity and bright coloured polka dots. We used this to reflect the style of The Pipettes and their lyrical style. They talk about serious issues (e.g pressures of teenagers and things of a sexual nature) and put a fun twist on them.We have used conventional editing with lots of short shots to match the fast pace music. We have also used a conventional form for Indie, with a mixture of narrative and performance. We had more narrative than performance that tells a fun tale of the life of a school girl. This bright and youth orientated theme reflects the Indie style of the band. We have incorporated performance into the story by having guitars in the classroom (narrative). This does not necessarily correspond with the usual way of narrative in Indie videos. We felt however that this postmodern idea strengthened the "wild" unusual feel we wanted to put across. By having guitars in the scenes of a classroom we were contrasting the idea of normality and showing how odd this school girl is and in turn creating the obscure style we wished for.  

In editing we have used fast forward scenes which is a common editing style for Indie. It creates a light hearted feel to the video as allows us to show a lot in less time. The costumes are simple (school uniform) we wanted our main character to contrast against the extras in order to show how "whacky" she is. We therefore dressed our extras in normal uniform with simple hair and simple makeup whilst dressing our main character in bright pink socks, huge ponytails and bright orange and green makeup. Contrast is often used in mise-en-scene for Indie to create the out of the ordinary feel often presented within them. Overall the conventions we have used give our video the "wild child" feel we wanted with bright colours, crazy expressions and normal settings made unusual with such things as random musical instruments and bold makeup. 

Throughout our campaign we have kept a clear image and theme. Within all three sections; video, digipack and website the main themes have been school, sexuality and fun. We kept to the school theme in these 3 by in the video it is set within a school and everyone is wearing school uniform. We also see a school teacher and students in a classroom. In the digipack our CD is covered in school uniform items and the people on the front are all wearing ties which is seen throughout the video as well. On the website we kept a school theme by putting doodles all over the background which is child like and is on many school childrens books. 
Sexuality is maintained within the video as it’s clear that our main character likes both boys and girls which is also shown on the website as the some of the doodles show that she is bisexual. On the Cd sexuality is shown as there are both nude males and females on the front cover surrounding the main character. Fun is shown in the video by the main characters make-up, hair and acting. The acting and camera shots are very ‘slap-stick’ comedy keeping the video fun and light hearted. The website shows fun by the use of colours and images. The CD shows fun also by hair and make-up. We also see on the front cover everybody is smiling and happy. All of this also showing that our website, Cd and video are interrelated.

The target audience is teenagers as everything is very silly and funny which attracts the age group of 14-24, however the bisexuality within the video makes it attract to an older audience.


The audience feedback we gathered by doing a pitch and from people who watched the video whilst it was being edited and the final product and got their opinions on it. The issues that were raised during the pitch were that one of our scenes was in the toilets and was seen as to inappropriate for a video we therefore changed that idea to the main character by finding out the boy she likes is gay when he is playing rounders which is more childish and comical than the idea in the toilets. Another issue raised was that the song is too short. We sorted this issue by putting a narrative before the music starts. What we included was an old lady getting ready in the morning which was used to contrast the 'crazy' video. Another issue was that perhaps there was too many things happening, however we used didn't get rid of any ideas and used them all in the video as we felt that the more that was happening created a hyper/crazy feel to the video which is what we wanted. We managed to fit them all in by using fast cuts.
The feedback we got from when people were watching the video was that the narrative at the start was too long and slow. We changed this by cutting it down. Another feedback was that the lip syncing wasn't as strong as it could have been. Audiences enjoyed the video and liked the tongue and cheek humour that it had. They felt it was fun and had a good narrative.
The main problems were that the song was too short therefore we had to write a narrative for the start which we found made the beginning to the song very dull. However after shortening it down we found it made it better.

The technologies we used in the video was green screen and effects on Imovie. The green screen was used to create a dream-like effect with girls clothing coming off on each line of the song. The effects used in the video were; speeding up shots to create a 'slap stick' comedy effect to the chase scenes and a red glow to our main characters to show that she is angry.
Other technology used for the website and CD cover is photoshop which was used for the doodles and merchandise on the website to give it a childish effect and also so that the merchandise looked real. We also used photoshop on the Cd cover to put the front cover picture on a polka dot background so that it relates to the image of 'the Pipettes'.

We used technology to research our production by looking at 'the Pipettes' on google and learning that they are often seen with polka dots which we then incorporated into the video on the green screen and we also included this on our CD cover. We also used 'Youtube' to look for classical songs that we could put to the start of our video.
Online media such as the blog has allowed us to distribute the project to a wide audience as people can log on and look at our work.