Creative Evaluation

Kirsten Hendry A2 Media Studies

1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of

real media products?

Throughout our music video, myself and Ian have both applied and challenged Goodwin’s Principles in order to create a well established media product.

Genre Characteristics: Many indie and acoustic music videos include lip syncing as a way of identifying that genre of music. Within our music video, me and Ian both shot ourselves lip syncing to the full song from several different angles and used some of them throughout in order to create a performance based video.

This image shows a part of the video where Ian is shown lip syncing to parts of the music.

As well as this, myself and Ian also incorporated a narrative base for our music video. This is shown throughout where the girl is getting ready, gets to school and finds out that the male character is in love with her. In addition to this, we also used a concept based idea within our video within the scene that shows many hand cut paper love hearts being pushed through the letter box. It plays no real part in the video but it is unique and still conveys the idea of love.

Establishing a relationship between music and visuals and lyrics and visuals:

Within the video, myself and Ian have applied this principle when matching the visuals and lyrics.

In this image you can clearly see a series of lockers, these act as a signifier that thecharacters are within a school setting.The lyrics ‘and you make this feel likeSchool’ match the visuals as the idea thatthey are in school is reinforced both inthe lyrics and within the visuals.

This means that we have applied this principle in order to create a more coherent music video.

I have used close ups of the artist and / or star image motifs:

Throughout mine and Ian’s music video for ‘You, Your Cat and Me’ we have used a variety of close ups of the artist and have also included the convention of star motifs.

Close up: Here are images of a variety of close ups that myself and Ian have used in order to establish who the artist is and to add depth to our video.

Star Motif: Due to our artist being modest and laid back, it was difficult for myself and Ian to chose something that would make him stand out and be unique. We chose to have him wearing a tie, a signifier that connotes respect but also a little authority. I believe it makes our artist stand out to many mainstream artists today.

There is frequent reference to the notion of looking and voyeurism in my video:

This is where me and Ian challenged Goodwin’s Principles slightly. We wanted to establish a romantic notion, with a young teenage boy who is deeply in love with a girl at school. We did not want to include elements of voyeurism in our video as we felt it draws away from a loving and romantic aspect. I believed that voyeurism is connoted with stalkers and many unpleasant things, and so we decided to portray love in a different way throughout our video, thus challenging this principle.

Although we challenged this, I still believe our music video is effective in achieving what we wanted.

I have developed a visual style and brand identity through the matching of typography and house colours etc. across the three products:

Throughout our video, me and Ian have developed a brand identity across all three of our media products. Within images 1 and 2, you can see Ian is wearing the same tie and the angle of the shot is almost the same. Image 1 is a screenshot of our video and Image 2 is our final Magazine Advert. We have developed an identity for our artist with the plain backdrop and red tie shown.

Images 2 and 3 relate as they use the same typography, enabling the audiences to recognise our artist more clearly. This font is used for all information on both the Digipak and the Magazine Advert eg. Artist Name; Album Name.

Images 1, 2 and 3 all link as they all use the colour red. Images 1 and 2 with the red tie, and Image 3 with the red laces on the shoe. They all also incorporate the colour white within their backdrop, linking them together.

Image 1

Image 2

Image 3

I have included some Intertexuality references (to film/video game / TV / other music videos etc):

Me and Ian wanted to reject Goodwin’s Principles when it came to Intertextuality, as we felt that it would make our video less original and audiences may associate the reference with something negative.

We constructed the video with our own ideas and did not refer to any other media texts, although some shots and angles may be similar to those in other music videos, film or television, we did not do this intentionally.

Our Magazine Advert and Digipak shares similarities in layout and design to that of other adverts and Digipaks, however we formed our own product without wanting to refer to any other media texts.

By challenging Goodwin’s principles here, I believe it has not hindered any of our three products, but instead boosted them as they are completely original.

The type of editing used includes fast cut montage effects which is typical of the music video genre etc:

Within our music video we use a variety of editing techniques in order for us to create a unique video that relates well to the sound of the music. To match the speed and sound of the music, we tended not to use quick cuts, so in theory we reject Goodwin’s Principles. However, to match the concept based idea for our video, we used extremely quick cuts when showing the fallen paper love hearts on the floor.

Here we develop Goodwin’s Principle of fast cut montage effects as these 3 shots are all shown within just over 1 second. I feel this part of the video is highly effective and keeps the audience entertained as it strays from the fairly slow editing we have used elsewhere in the video.

Overall, I feel that myself and Ian have applied many aspects of Goodwin’s principles successfully and have established a fluent and unique music video. Where we have decided to reject his principles, I believe we have developed our own unique style of video, not getting lost without the guidelines outlined by Goodwin, as shown in not including Voyeurism within our product.