Evaluation Question 1In what ways does you media product

use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Demonstrates genre characteristics – Narrative Based Video

We decided to make our video a narrative based video, as we believed we would be able to portray our song lyrics with literal meanings that would tell a story.

Our video can be compared to ‘16 Military Wives’ by The Decemberists. This is due to sections of lip synching and the slow, continunual editing. Also both videos have different characters representing different people.

In narrative based videos, the lyrics tend to match the visuals, we have certainly applied this characteristic to our video. The action shown is explained by the lyrics, here are some examples:

‘There’s a boy with a smile, thinking about Marie..’

‘I saw him looking at another woman’s heart..’

Presence of close ups The record label will request lots of close ups of the

artist in a narrative music video. This is a method of promoting the artist and develops the artists brand. The close ups also help the artist develop motifs which may reoccur across their other work. We have challenged this

convention unintentionally as we have only included a couple of close up shots in our video. When were watching our footage back, we receive advice to add more, we agreed with this but we did not have time to film additional footage with close up shots, so we left the video how it was. We do not feel this has compromised our video, but it is just slightly less conventional.

Relationship between music/lyrics and visuals

Our whole video is based on this convention of music video, so we have followed this very strongly.

The focus of the shot is explained by the lyrics in most cases throughout the song and the chorus is talking about the artists feelings, so is matched with a simple shot of the artist singing against a wall. Here are some examples of this convention in our video:

‘The slits too thin to get them’

‘There’s a man with a bald patch at the back of his head’

‘A group of sweaty girls’

Intertextuality Our music video does not have many intertextual links, the only one we

have is the use of a common chorus shot. For the chorus of our song, we used the same shot of the singer against a wall.

This is a common convention of music videos and an example we found to took inspiration from was 'Live Your Life' by TI, ft Rihanna. In this video, the chorus of the song is sung by Rihanna and the shot used every time is in the same location, her dressing room. This is contrasted with the varied locations used throughout the rest of the video. We recreated this effect.

This is the shot that we reused for the chorus

This is the location shot that is reused for the chorus in the TI video

In our ancillary products we had more intertextual links than in our video. The initial idea for the front of our digipak came from a photo of Diana Vickers, that was taken during a photo shoot. In the image we found, Diana was leaning against a tree and we really liked the look and feel of the image. We tried to recreate the effect when experimenting with digipak ideas.

Developing Brand Identity We have developed a brand identity for our artist

through our music video and ancillary tasks. There are common links throughout all 3 products which created a sense of cohesion.

We have used the same styling for the music video and photographs on the digipak.

We have chosen a font that suited the style of Jose Vanders and have continually used this font throughout. Further to our projects, the artist could use the font on any merchandise etc.

The photo we have used on our album cover is un-posed and she seems very down to earth and natural. This makes her identity very relatable for our target audience. This is developed inside the digipak with the use of a personal message from the artist and some relaxed pictures of the artist.

We have used natural lighting and rural setting for our video, as well as the photographs on the ancillary tasks. This is due to us wanting to make a connection between all our products. We have used the grey colour scheme throughout as well, which further develops the brand identity.

Editing techniques The majority of our video has slow, smooth editing to create a natural continuous feel to

match the idea of the singer going on a journey. In contrast the opening sequence of our video is made up of quick cuts between shots, that match the upbeat tempo of the introductory music. This means we have followed Goodwin’s theory.

We used images of parts of the train station, intercut with footage of the artist walking down a path towards the station. This set the scene, and the audience was immediately aware of where the artist is. This limits confusion later on in the video.

We got inspiration for this idea from Rihanna’s ‘Don’t stop the music’ video, where the quick edit matches the beat of the track, amplifying the music and creating a link between the two. In this video, the footage of Rihanna is intercut with black shots to create a blinking effect.

Lip synching We were first planning to make a video without any lip synching

and were instead going to use just visual representations throughout. We thought that good lip synching would be difficult to do and if not done well, would look amateur.

We decided in the end to give it a go and I’m glad that we changed our mind. I think the lip synching is a really good part of our video and it wouldn’t be as strong without it. It is more conventional to have lip synching as many videos of similar genre to ours contain it. This makes our video look more believable and realistic.