Group 33: Evaluation Question 1

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

My music video follows and implicates quite a few aspects of Andrew Goodwin and Carol Vernallis theories, in terms of camera work, structure and most importantly editing. After looking back on some of my earlier bloggs I noticed Goodwin stated that music videos have been using the artist as both the character and narrator in their music videos. It is for this reason that before making our music video we decided to take this into consideration and follow this convention by using our artist as both character & narrator. One other convention in relation to Goodwins theory that we followed was that we made sure we had many shots of our artist looking directly into the camera; we did this to make the audience feel as though they are connected to the artist. Quite importantly our music video relies heavily on repetition - which in my opinion is a very significant convention of a music video. Whether it be though our recurring Mis-en-scène or our base tracks that we keep reffering back to throughout the video; I feel that we accoplish this convention particularly well.

However, Carol Vernallis states in her book ‘Experiencing Music Video: Aesthetics and Cultural Context’ that edits in music videos come much more frequently than in films and also that editing seems to occur in a rhythmic basis in relation to the beat and tempo of the song. Implication of this is quite evident in my our video, because the majority of our cuts are intime with the tempo of the song. We also decided to use some slow motion at one point, in the shot where water is shown to be thrown at one of our actors. In my opinion I think that we brake the rules of continuaty editing rather well with many different shots interlaced to the form our video. In addition, we have several obvious edits that are designed to draw attention, such as speed editing, which we used in the shots where the camera seems as if its doing a 360 around my artist.

Whilst undergoing the planning stages, we thought quite in depth about other existing music videos and how we could draw inspiration from them. The first and most prominent example we looked at and was influenced heavy by, was Calvin Harris - Flash back; the original video by the artist ofcourse. What we liked about the video was its use of fast, uptempo and on the beat editing. As you can see in the video below we also encorparated this feature into the start of our music video aswell.

In adition to the calvin harris video, we were also inspired by videos with text at the beginign. The reason for this is that you don't see text at the start of music videos very often so we included it in ours to make ours stand out from the croud more. Below is a Giff image with some of the inspirational videos that use text at the start (You might have to click on it to activate it):

In recent times it seems as though a woman's role in a music video is to simply be there to appeal to the male gaze. I mentioned in one of my previous blogs that Laura Mulvey states "In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male glaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure which is styled “accordingly" in other words women are shown as objects instead of people.

As our genre is electro-pop which is mostly listened to at parties we decided to go against convention. Even though we dont specifically have many shots of women being shown by themselves, apart from the obvious party scences; below is a Giff image of some clips from our music video showing how we wanted females to be portrayed:

Whilst analysing other videos for inspiration, I noticed that a lot of music videos advertise products for companies (Product placement). We also tried to incorporate this convention in our video. Below is a slide show of examples of it in existing videos and also in ours:

Another aspect from another video that heavily influenced ours in terms of Mise-en-scene was Mr medicine by Eliza Doolittle. The particular shot that influenced us was when she is shown to be wondering along some escalators. Watching that video as an audience we felt that it gave off a real sense of loneliness and isolation as her and My artist are both shown to be wandering empty streets. It influenced us so much so that we went and did some research and we found out that it was shot in barbican - you can imagine how thrilled we were when we found this out, as barbican is only a 10 minute bus journey from out college.

One of the most important aspects of our video, in terms of Intertextuality and MES was our red cups. You normally see them in american parties, so we felt that it was only right to include them as a convention in our music video; because we also had a party in our video. I feel that i blogged quite extensively about the importance of red cups and video's involving them that inspired us. But the video that stood out for me was New Money by Lil twist, as they include this piece of MES in almoast every scene.

Below are some of the examples from inspirational videos, and how we encorparated the elements that we found inspirational:

For my ancillary work, I researched many different examples, drawing on existing digipaks and magazine advertisements I had at my disposal. My digipak was influenced predominantly by Calvin Harris' digipak. It inspired me to, like him also make my image of the artist Negative; which i mentioned how I did so on on of my previous bloggs. Another Digipak that heavily influenced me in terms of colour scheme and text was one by example. It inspired me to give my digipak a sort of urban feel to it - hence the city vector and the rougged font.