Learning Outcome 4

Artistic and professional: production values; effectiveness; creativity; clarity of interpretation; execution of vocal and/or instrumental performance skills; fulfilment of objectives; audience response; target setting; working relationships; self-criticism; management of time and tasks Vocational: eg target audience for work, potential for further development, nature of work and possible markets, economic viability.

Evaluation

Production Quality

I thought that the production quality of our videos was really good. I have experience with using video editing software and for this reason was able to get the settings correct with effective camera changes/overlays and transitions. I also made sure that each piece of video had the same aspect ratio (16:9) for display to avoid letter-boxing. I think that one thing that particularly set us ahead of some of the other groups was having a video that synced to the music. This was due to my making a click track and so on. I also synced video with some lyrics which was good such as when Emma sings "It's like screaming...", and I put two clips of people screaming at that exact moment. Attention to detail like this helped our performance to work well. The same goes for the lyrics Emma wrote which were great, and the general standard of playing which was pretty good as we had made sure to practice a lot. I think that we could have improved the peace video however, as it did not have a structured 'Story' of events in the video, and was not synced to the music. If we had more time I think we would sort that out to make it even better. We also weren't all that organised with costumes, and ended up having three of us all wearing green, when it was meant to be multicoloured.

Effectiveness

Someone from the audience told me afterwards that the conflict performance was "Very moving". I think this goes to show that the effort put into this one paid off. I think that the song (Mainly written by Emma) really fitted the purpose of the performance. I think that the guitar soloing that Teddy did was also very good, and I also felt that the reggae feel we decided on really fitted the 'Peace' purpose of the second piece. I feel that the going into the Last Post at the end of the conflict song was particularly effective and emotional.

Creativity
We tried our best to be creative. Some things to point out here were the including a rendition of the Last Post at the end of the conflict song as a key and tempo change. This added complexity to the music and helped to draw it to an extra emotional ending, as mentioned in effectiveness. I think that we could have improved on creativity when it came to costume however, as our costumes were a little un-thought-out. The fact that we didn't have much choreography wasn't detrimental to the performance in my opinion. This is because the focus of the performance was the videos. We wanted people to watch the video and listen to the music. It was less important for them to watch us as performers.

Performance Skill
Like I said above, the amount of practice we did really helped make the performance come together well. It was smooth and felt tight. For me as a drummer, I think that I could have been a little more creative in the conflict song, as the part I played was quite simple. I think however that I stayed well in time to the click and did not overplay which would have detracted from the other instruments. I was impressed with Spencer's bass playing and thought it really added to the performance. I also liked the synth sounds ben was adding, and Teddy's guitar soloing. I thought Emma's voice sounded really nice and was in tune throughout the entire performance. I did however think that she could have had slightly clearer diction, as you couldn't always hear  what the words were. Other than this though, I think that it was a solid performance by everyone.

Target Setting
We made good use of target setting - especially through the facebook page where we made posts asking for things to be done, helping each other out, and keeping ourselves on track. We gave roles to each person so as to get everything done, and made sure we were prepared on the day with all the equipment needed, unlike some groups which had to borrow laptops and other pieces of equipment.

Self-Criticism
Although I have already mentioned some things above, one thing I noticed which I should improve on is that I sped up towards the end of the Peace song. This was because it was my solo and I got a bit carried away. I will make a note of this, and practice doing solos to a click track in order to get better at going a bit crazy without speeding up!

Working Relationships
In general, we had good co-operative working relationships. There were a couple of problems though such as Sophia not wanting to do reggae. However, we got past this by giving her one of the main parts of the song. Another problem was Ben, who hardly ever came to practices. We once rang him to ask where he was and he hung up. We still made sure to keep him informed however each time we did eventually see him. Other than those few small hiccups, we all got along really well, and helped each other out on parts we were stuck on such as structures and teaching each other the correct chords and so on.

Summary

Overall, I think that we did really well. Looking back at the videos of our performances, I think that the songs we wrote are actually really good, and it really shows what can be achieved as a group effort when everyone pulls together. Although it was a little rushed towards the end with getting the videos edited in time, I think that they too were good, and really matched the songs and added to the overall performance. No one made any obvious mistakes, and the the performances ran smoothly with no technical difficulties.

Learning Outcome 3

Here are the actual performances of the two songs, starting with Conflict:

And the Peace one:

We eventually decided on black costumes for conflict, and multi-coloured for peace. For choreography, Sophia plays right at the back behind the audience for the conflict song so as to surround the audience. She then marches around the audience and onto the stage for the peace song.

Learning Outcome 2

Here is a video of us practicing the peace song at my house:

 

Although you can't tell from these 2 practices of the peace song (Because Sophia didn't turn up to practices), It was my idea to do a call and response between vocals and Sophia's cornet. What I mean by this is that there is an 8 bar introduction where Sophia plays a melody line over the top of the reggae chord sequence which Teddy came up with, before we then enter the verse. The verse goes 4 bars of singing, followed by 4 bars of cornet solo, followed by another 4 bars singing, by another 4 bars of cornet solo. This is the call and response idea that I thought would work well in the song, and give Sophia a good part. This structure was my idea. I then thought we could go into a bridge of some sort. Ben came up with a chord pattern for this, which we decided worked better as a chorus, making the song go intro > verse > chorus. I also suggested that in the parts where Emma is singing in the verses, we should all play slightly less to give room to the vocals. To do this I only play hi-hat in the parts where Emma is singing in the verses.

Here is a video of us practicing the peace song in college:

In this video we have got our change into a different pattern after the second chorus sorted. This chord sequence was again Teddy's idea. I decided to give it a fast upbeat feel on the drums too to add excitement to the music. I then suggested that since it seemed really fun to play on drums that it could go a bit 'crazy' in a good way and have a guitar/drum solo climax towards the end. In this video we attempt this. Emma came up with the idea of dropping back out to just her at the end on the piano.

Here is a video of us practicing the conflict song in college:

 

In this video we were testing out playing the piece to a click. In other words, me and Emma would have a click in our headphones in order to sync perfectly with the video I was making at the time. This was my idea, as I thought it would be very effective to have camera changes and lyrics synced to what was happening on screen. We made a Cubase file and set a tempo we were happy with. I then recorded Emma playing the song to the click and used it as a guide while editing. This was our first try with the click to see if it would be successful.

Here are the finished videos I put together:

Conflict

 

Peace

We all helped to gather the videos used, Emma and I did most of the ideas as to the 'storyline' of the video as a whole, while Spencer helped direct the order of videos for the first half of the conflict video and suggested things such as putting an explosion video at the moment emma plays a loud chord on the piano.

The idea of the conflict video is to show how conflict is constant all the way from world war 1, ww2, vietman war and now modern day. It is meant to highlight the fact that we as humans never learn from our mistakes and that it is unnecessary. I also made sure to include a reference to Call Of Duty - a popular game based on war to highlight the fact that although it is fun to play a game, it really does happen, and thousands of people die. It goes in chronological order, ending with modern day. Due to the song we wrote ending with a version of The Last Post, I thought that it would be good to switch to a video Sophia posted of The Last Post. This also serves as a memory part of the 'storyline' - looking back and remembering all that just happened in the video.

The peace video is more of a general montage of 'Peaceful' and peace making things such as people on a huge water slide, people playing on a beach, a tribe meeting a white person for the first time, an elephant drawing itself and so on. It is a reflection of the good side of the world, showing the beauty of nature and human interaction at it's best.

Learning Outcome 1

Sources: themes eg social, cultural, historical, ethical, spiritual and/or moral issues; textual eg autobiographical material, literary and non-literary text, poems, stories, dance notation, music scores, sheet music; visual eg painting, postcards, photographs, artefacts; aural eg music, audio recordings, live sound; media eg films, videos, newspaper and magazine extracts Exploration: eg exercises, improvisation, research, discussions, idea and thought mapping, try-outs

Planning

After being put into a group by our teacher and told the brief of Conflict and Peace performances, we began discussing our roles in the band and brainstorming ideas. We first decided who would be playing which instruments, and then went on to discuss ideas for the conflict performance. We decided that Teddy would play electric guitar, Emma would sing, Spencer play bass, I would play drums, Sophia trumpet/cornet and Charlie rhythm guitar.

We then decided to make written notes on this, which I took down and later wrote up. We decided that it would be a good idea to make a Facebook page in order to stay in contact and collect our ideas together out of college. Here is a screenshot of our dedicated page with my written up notes uploaded!

We started brainstorming themes for the video and song we would compose, and relating these ideas to how they would work both visually and as music. Most of the ideas here were by me and Emma. You can see the themes in the image. We then began coming up with ideas for the music we would write to accompany the video. We each came up with ideas such as those you can see written on the plan, such as playing in a minor key to suit the mood of the piece.

To address the implementation of dance and choreography to our performance, we started thinking about audience participation and how we could do this. We discussed clothing and came up with various ideas for conflict as oppose to peace.

Some of our ideas:

• Wear black for conflict, white for peace
• Wear multi-coloured for peace
• To add to the black, we could each wear one item of camouflage clothing (My suggestion)
• Wear uniform of some kind

This could tie into the choreography, i.e. changing our clothes between the two songs to emphasise the contrast between to two pieces.

Finally, we allocated roles for each of us before the next meeting. These roles were starting points and enabled us to effectively progress the task in hand by all tackling a different aspect of the organisation and covering everything from collecting conflict videos from YouTube to writing the lyrics of the song. Once Teddy had made the Facebook page, we then began discussing ideas and organising ourselves through this Facebook page.


Further Planning

A lot of the planning from this point up until the actual performance happened on Facebook. Here I have some screenshots of some of the posts.

I then made two pages on Facebook - one for conflict videos and one for peace videos. This way we could all post suggested videos into a place where it is easy to see them and keep them in order. We could then discuss and comment on good ones or bad ones accordingly.

 

Here are some more planning and organisation posts:

As you can see, I made sure, along with some of the others such as Teddy and Spencer, that we stayed very organised on Facebook. In the end, although I was relying on everyone else to collect conflict and peace videos, I ended up collecting quite a lot of them as well. Spencer and Teddy were very helpful however, as well as some videos posted by Emma and Sophia.

I did all the editing on my laptop using Sony Vegas as you can see in this image:





















I did the same for the Peace Video.

I was partly influenced by this video for my conflict one. I thought it was very effective having the lyrics going across the screen, however as a group, we decided it was best to not have the lyrics on the screen as they would distract the audience too much.

Assessment Criteria

Learning Outcomes