Evaluation

QUESTION 1:
In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

We chose the genre of acoustic pop/rock because when we were looking into these types of music video we could see that it was easy to think of all different good ideas.

At first we considered doing a performance based music video but this was soon scrapped when we thought of a completely different idea after analyzing each what we thought the song was actually about.

From this it became apparent that we were to do a narrative based music video. We thought that this type of music video would go very well with our choice of song because of the pace of the music and also how it is quite a soft song at times but in other areas it picks up and changes. This also helped us to make our decision of doing a narrative based music video because as a group we knew that it would be easy to show the different moods of the characters as the song progress’.

Along side this, we also decided that it would be a good a idea to put a lot of the music video in black and white. The reason for this being; we were going to represent the clips that are in colour as good times and moments between the girl and the boy in the video as well as scenes that had a meaning to have colour, for example the tunnel to show off the different colours in the graffiti; and to put the bad times of the boy and the girl in black and white so it was obvious what the mood was.

We were able to establish a relationship between music and visuals and also lyrics and visuals quite easily, not only because the style of video that we had chosen, but also by the style of the song itself (a lot of the lyrics were easy to match the lyrics to the visuals etc).

This can be seen in our music video in particular areas, for example: when the artist says the lyrics “you try so hard to put on that brave smile that you ain’t got”, we could match this with the visuals by the girl in the music video doing a smile to the boy that the audience can clearly see isn’t a real smile and is just put on to show the mood.

We have also illustrated the relationship between the music and visuals a lot in our music video by there being lots of lip syncing, this is very typical for this style of song and video.

We were also able to show the relationships when it came to the editing stage; meaning before editing there wasn’t a lot of relationship. But when we were editing we were able to use fast cut montage to show relations between music and visuals, this was because as the pace of the music picked up, so did the variation in the number of shots and also how quick and short each shot was held for.

This point leads me on to my next area in the music video where we were able to establish a relationship between the music and visuals. This can be seen by the shots used in the music video changing on the beat of the song. For example, towards the end of our music video when the boy in the video is walking through a snowy field, the shots are changing on every beat. Whilst creating this relationship, we were also “killing two birds with one stone” but we were creating jump shots, which is also very typical in this genre of music video.

We have used close ups in our music video of the main boy as he is the main selling point of the music, thus being our star image motif. This is displayed in all of our work that we have produced (video and both ancillary tasks).

The reasons for us creating this star image motif was because every piece of music and video out at the moment needs a selling point, and as he is in the music video through-out we knew it would be a good idea to make him “the face” of the music because if people were to watch the video they would see him and then see him on advertisements and realize who he is and what he is involved with.

Another star image motif that we used in the process was the use and re-use of the of the tunnel with the graffiti, we knew how eye catching it was, hence the reason we chose to feature it in all of our work.







In our music video we tried to include the notion of looking, which I believe in some areas we covered well. There are examples of this in our work, for example the camera zoomed in on the eyes of the characters involved, this is to capture a reaction shot of something that has happened. Another part of the notion of looking which we included was looking through a window (glass), this is when the boy is going to the girls house to get her back and the clip is in slow motion.

We developed our visual style and brand identity by using still images from our video and also typography from Microsoft work, for example, the brand identity is recognized as the graffiti, also creating our house colours; blue, green and grey. The typography that we used in our video and ancillary tasks are as follows; for our magazine advert we used Garamond and Gills Sans Ultra Bold condensed; and for the inside of the album cover we used magneto bold semi-expanded; finally for the outside pages of the album cover we used Bookman old style semi-bold. The reasons for us using these fonts were because we thought that they stood out the most and the fonts that most went with the images that we had used.

Although it was advised that we should perhaps look into using some form of intertextuality in our music video we decided against it. The reason for this was because we literally had hundreds of ideas coming from each member of our group thus we thought it was good that we had our own original idea.

Conclusion

In conclusion to this question, after looking at Goodwin’s Principles I can say that the conventions that we have used in all aspects of our work have helped to make our music video a success and we have a clear balance between them. For example we have ensured the following; that we created a good star image motif that the target audience of this type of music wouldn’t forget; we have ensured that there isn’t too much visual clutter and any unwanted footage or filling in images/clips; We have successfully used no more than three different house colours; we have left as little white space as possible in any part of our work; and finally we have included all information to make our final product look professional.