DRAFT: Evaluation Question 1

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

The first step we took in making our main product was choosing the song to base our Music Video around. We had come up with a list of songs which we both commonly liked, and listened to each of them individually numerous times, but the song we liked the most was ‘Good Life’ by OneRepublic. We began to understand the lyrics of the song and started to map out ideas in our minds of what we had wanted in this particular video, the upbeat tempo of the song also really helped us to figure out the camera angles and cuts we wanted so it would portray the storyline effectively all the while still looking professional.

                

We started to look at other videos by different artists and bands to try and get inspiration for what we wanted to do; the idea which we both liked was to shoot some of the scenes in London. The reason for this is because in the very first line of the song, it says ‘Woke up in London yesterday’, so by connecting to the literal meaning of the song, it would give the audience an instant connection to where the video is set. We watched numerous videos on YouTube and really liked the ones which portrayed an isolated atmosphere; our favourites were Snow Patrol’s ‘Open Your Eyes’ and The Verve’s ‘Bitter Sweet Symphony’. We really liked use of having a one shot video like the one used for ‘Open Your Eyes’, this particular video featured a point of view from the camera, mounted on the front of a car driving around Paris. I thought that this was very effective as there wasn’t hardly any editing at all, I really liked the simplicity of it and I think that this is the reason why it is so effective. The other video which we really liked was ‘Bitter Sweet Symphony’; we really liked this particular video because it portrayed isolation where he wasn’t really connected with the world around him. Even though he is walking down a busy street with people walking past him, when we were watching the video, it didn’t seem like he was in sync with everyone else. So, when we had decided that we were going to use the city for our music video, we began to realise that the song wasn’t talking about how great the city really is, so to prevent the video from not making sense, we thought that it would be a good idea to do a contrast between the City and the Country. This way, we could incorporate the iconic London landmarks which would make the video interesting for the audience to watch as they would instantly recognise it and it would flow with the song as it talks about the ‘Good’ parts of life.

In the process of coming up with ideas, we had to factor in the theorists such as Goodwin and Mulvey. Starting with Goodwin, we tried to incorporate the link between the actual lyrics of the song to the visuals of the video, an example of this would be the London shots we included in the very start of the video, referencing to the lyrics of the song 'Woke up In London Yesterday' and cutting to the shots in the city itself therefore amplifying the lyrics to the audience making them more connected and involved with the video. When thinking about Mulvey, we took her theory of the 'Male Gaze' and applied it to our Music Video, as we featured a female actor for the majority of the video, we think that this is shown through the use of camera angles and mis-en-scene such as the clothing she wore in the video.
                

At first, we challenged the usual conventions of not having a performance in our music video. But when we had finished our draft, we had found that it didn’t quite work as well as we had hoped. So in order to fix this, we had decided to put a performer into the video singing parts of the song making sure we cut into the right moments so the video would flow properly. We thought that it would be strange to the audience as to why there is a male singer and a female actress walking about the city and country, so we had come up with an idea of creating a story behind that the two were in a relationship in the past and he sings about her while she walks around lost and vulnerable by herself. To make sure that the audience got this, we featured a shot of the singer holding a picture of her in his phone and then  dropping it onto a seat, where the camera zoomed up to see her clearly.

                

Looking at my digipak, I think I have again challenged the usual conventions of featuring the artist on the cover. I have done this because I wanted to keep the band sort of mysterious from the audience; I wanted their music to come across more than what they looked like. The idea of me not featuring the band on the front cover came from the Kings of Leon’s Come Around Sundown and Coldplay’s Viva La Vida where they both featured an illustration, not themselves. I kept to all the images used on the digipak Black & White so it would instantly connect with the Music Video. I had chosen the colour red because of the iconic things around London, for example with the old telephone boxes, old buses, letter boxes. I wanted to incorporate this colour because I wanted it to relate more to the setting of the video even though you don’t see the colour of these objects in the video because it is Black & White.

                

The inspiration behind the poster was the same as my digipak, I chose to use the same picture as I did for that because I wanted to create a branding that would it make recognisable to the band’s fans and it would also help distinguish who they are. When looking at my research on posters, I found that most of them featured the artist posing in a strong position to get people’s attention. I would say that again, like my digipak, I have challenged the usual conventions of posters because I did not follow the usual conventions of putting an artist or a band on there. But I thought that this would work because I wanted the band to be more mysterious, I wanted the sound of their music to represent who they are, not what they look like. Like the Gorillaz how they have animated characters playing them in their videos.