In what ways does your media products use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Laura Mulvey
'The Male Gaze' (Taken from my previous Blog)
We chose to completely challenge the idea of a 'Male Gaze' in our music video. After doing a lot of research about the pop Genre and finding out that its mostly young children and teenagers who listen to this genre we agreed that it would be totally inappropriate to even try and make an attempt of attracting the male gaze. Instead we made our artist/Duo relatable to our audience. Our target audience like most target audiences for pop music was young children and predominately teenage girls, Our duo 'XO' are both teenage girls so we tried to make them come across as real as we could whilst keeping within the conventions of a music video. We did this by dressing them in clothing that we would see a teenager wear i.e. Casual blouses & Jumper's, Converses and varsity Jackets etc... and other small things like the way they slyly danced to the music. Unlike the 'Male Gaze' our duo dont do anything provocative and sexual to try and attract a mans attention, they simply represent the youth of the present day, casual, fun and heartbroken.
Carol Vernallis
There were quite a few things that we used from Carol Vernallis's theory and there was some things that we couldn't really do to a degree.
Watching many other music videos I found out that this statement is correct, by music videos breaking the continuity and using a variety of different shots in a matter of seconds it really engaged me to continue watching. This is one of the reasons why we chose to apply this statement to our own work.
An example of how we applied this is below. This clip is from the beginning of our final music video, our aim of these couple of seconds was to use the broken continuity technique to engage our audience, I felt that this was a really good way to put it because not only did it keep our audience engaged but it went in time with the beat of the music.
- The main characters in our music video are the artist and throughout the whole video they predominately sing towards the camera
- Base Tracks & Locations are repeated consistently. The clip below is from the second verse of our song, there are 6 base tracks and 2 locations. You can see that a few of the base tracks are being repeatedly shown for example the one where the artist is sitting down facing directly to the camera. Although there is only one base track that was shot in Granary Square and 5 in Piccadilly circus we did we did show both locations at least twice.
Beginning and Ending
We showed this through our use of effects and lighting. Our video opens with the Bad Tv effect and a red bar with transparent text saying the title of the song 'Excuse My Rude' going across it and the same thing is done at the end except this time the duo's name 'XO' on the red bar. Also we start our video in broad daylight and after the second verse all of our clips have been shot at night, we did this because it was something that was mentioned in one of our lessons when we was doing our research and we thought that it would be a really good technique to use to be able to follow this part of the theory.
Beginning = Bat Tv effect, Red Bare with title of song & Shot in Broad daylight
Ending = Bad Tv effect, Red Bar with the duo's name & shot at night time
Easily recognizable Item
Sunglasses
We chose to use sunglasses as our synergy item, in most of the clips in our video our artist is seen with these sunglasses on, We planned to make sure that our duo would be wearing there sunglasses in our video and in the images that will be on our digipak items.
What videos influenced us
Rizzle Kicks - Down with the trumpets
Many of my ideas came from this video. I decided to focus on the Rizzle Kicks because the duo was similar to what I thought our duo should be like, young, british, cheeky and normal, these all come across in this video and when I was watching it I was also looking at the framing and the way that the video has been shot. A specific idea that I got from this video was the artist walking towards the camera and the camera moving backwards giving the artist space to walk in front, this is seen at 0:31, 0:38, 0:41 and other places in the video.
Our Example
Another technique I got from this video was the camera circling the artist while they sang to the camera, this is seen at 1:40 - 1:47 .
Our Example
Also the way the duo sings each others lines, in this video when one of the artist is singing or rapping there verse the other is behind them dancing and sometimes saying some of the lyrics of the other persons verse.
Our Example
What we Challenged
In the end what we decided to do is keep most aspects of the Pop Genre and challenge 'The Male Gaze', We wanted our video to be as relatable as possible to other young children and teenagers so we kept it quite normal and innocent.
What we Developed
Another thing we challenged was the variety of shots used in the first verse. Instead of having loads of different shots we thought it would be a good idea to take the risk of having most of the shots from the first verse 'In your face' so we made majority of these shots close of up of the artist singing to the camera. We did this because of the meaning of the song and the lyrics, the song is referring to somebody who is quite selfish and arrogant and the verse comes in quite forcefully so we thought by having many close ups in the beginning would make it more effective
Ancillary
Reminder of the Do's and Donts
My Ancillary Work
How I Applied the Dos and Donts
The Dos and Donts state that you can use a maximum of 2 fonts, what I've chosen to do is use one font in different ways. The Font that I used was 'Century Gothic', as you can see above, I used it normally, I used it in Bold and I even changed the colour in some cases but the font has stayed the same throughout. I added no extra unwanted effects to the font, the only thing that I have added is a simple 5xp stroke to the title of the songs on the track listing and this is hardly a special effect.
I did Challenge the rules of the text a little bit. The Checklist mentions that text shouldn't be over an image or the artist's face and what I did was put the album title 'Excuse My Rude' over an image at the bottom, I did this because I thought it was a nice area to put it and there was barely any space left to place it.
I kept within the colour limit by only using red and white as my main colours but it can come across like i challenged this rule because I used an image on the back panel that is very colourful.
All the Images that I have used are all in Focus and haven't been stretched or altered to make them look weird. A risk that i have taken with an Image that I have used was adding an effect. In the inside panel i have used one image to cover both sides, I added an effect to enhance the colours to add to the pop genre but in the list of dos and donts it says nit to use unnecessary Image effects.
'The Male Gaze' (Taken from my previous Blog)
We chose to completely challenge the idea of a 'Male Gaze' in our music video. After doing a lot of research about the pop Genre and finding out that its mostly young children and teenagers who listen to this genre we agreed that it would be totally inappropriate to even try and make an attempt of attracting the male gaze. Instead we made our artist/Duo relatable to our audience. Our target audience like most target audiences for pop music was young children and predominately teenage girls, Our duo 'XO' are both teenage girls so we tried to make them come across as real as we could whilst keeping within the conventions of a music video. We did this by dressing them in clothing that we would see a teenager wear i.e. Casual blouses & Jumper's, Converses and varsity Jackets etc... and other small things like the way they slyly danced to the music. Unlike the 'Male Gaze' our duo dont do anything provocative and sexual to try and attract a mans attention, they simply represent the youth of the present day, casual, fun and heartbroken.
Example - Images from Our Final Video
Carol Vernallis
There were quite a few things that we used from Carol Vernallis's theory and there was some things that we couldn't really do to a degree.
Continuity broken to keep viewers attention
Previous Example.
Watching many other music videos I found out that this statement is correct, by music videos breaking the continuity and using a variety of different shots in a matter of seconds it really engaged me to continue watching. This is one of the reasons why we chose to apply this statement to our own work.
An example of how we applied this is below. This clip is from the beginning of our final music video, our aim of these couple of seconds was to use the broken continuity technique to engage our audience, I felt that this was a really good way to put it because not only did it keep our audience engaged but it went in time with the beat of the music.
Edits become obvious so it draws attention
Previous example
The technology/Software that has been used to create the above clip was something that we didn't have so we chose not to include special effects to this extreme, it would've taken up much time and it wouldn't of been necessary to the lyrics of our song and the video that we were trying to make. What we did do on the other hand was decide to add video filters and simple effects that we could find in Final Cut Pro, going through all the effects was very time consuming as we repeatedly had to add an effect, render it and then remove it to test out another, Lucky for us one of the girls in my group found a video on youtube that somebody made showing all the effects on final cut pro and what they were called.
One thing that we did that wasn't so obvious was add a colour correction. We chose to do this because we wanted our pop video to be visually bright and in most of our original shots the colour came out quite dull. When we found the colour correction option in our video filters we started to experiment with the controls until we found a look that would be quite nice to use.
Altogether my group had over 30 different base tracks from different verses, different locations and different costumes. This gave us plenty of opportunities to add as many jump cuts as we could and this is what we tried to do. The above clip is taken from the beginning of our second verse, as you can see we never stayed on one shot for too long, all the way through we was jump cutting back and forth from one base track to another.
How we applied this theory to our video.
This was the video.
One that really stood out for us and the one that we felt was the only one that seemed suitable for a music video was an effect called 'Bad TV', we put this effect at the beginning and the end of the music video to mark the start and the finish.
Result...
Other examples of how we applied this theory to our video
These are a few obvious edits that we added in to attract our viewers and we believe that these edits will draw attention to the video
Not so Obvious edits
Not so Obvious edits
One thing that we did that wasn't so obvious was add a colour correction. We chose to do this because we wanted our pop video to be visually bright and in most of our original shots the colour came out quite dull. When we found the colour correction option in our video filters we started to experiment with the controls until we found a look that would be quite nice to use.
Result...
As you can see the colour has been slightly enhanced to give our new clips a nice bright look to it.
Jump cuts are frequently Used
Altogether my group had over 30 different base tracks from different verses, different locations and different costumes. This gave us plenty of opportunities to add as many jump cuts as we could and this is what we tried to do. The above clip is taken from the beginning of our second verse, as you can see we never stayed on one shot for too long, all the way through we was jump cutting back and forth from one base track to another.
Camera moves in time with the music
It was quite difficult to include this in our video because I had to think about weather the camera was moving in time with the music and making sure that the artist were both shown clearly, this being said all the clips in our video were shot handheld using a fig rig and in some base tracks we slyly see the camera move in time with the music, this is shown in the sequence below, the base track where both the girls are standing up making gestures towards the camera and singing at the same time. if you look closely you see that the camera sort of moves towards the artist then away from her.
Andrew Goodwin
This is my Prezi that I created on Andrew Goodwin's theory.
- The main characters in our music video are the artist and throughout the whole video they predominately sing towards the camera
- Base Tracks & Locations are repeated consistently. The clip below is from the second verse of our song, there are 6 base tracks and 2 locations. You can see that a few of the base tracks are being repeatedly shown for example the one where the artist is sitting down facing directly to the camera. Although there is only one base track that was shot in Granary Square and 5 in Piccadilly circus we did we did show both locations at least twice.
Beginning and Ending
We showed this through our use of effects and lighting. Our video opens with the Bad Tv effect and a red bar with transparent text saying the title of the song 'Excuse My Rude' going across it and the same thing is done at the end except this time the duo's name 'XO' on the red bar. Also we start our video in broad daylight and after the second verse all of our clips have been shot at night, we did this because it was something that was mentioned in one of our lessons when we was doing our research and we thought that it would be a really good technique to use to be able to follow this part of the theory.
Beginning = Bat Tv effect, Red Bare with title of song & Shot in Broad daylight
Ending = Bad Tv effect, Red Bar with the duo's name & shot at night time
Easily recognizable Item
Sunglasses
We chose to use sunglasses as our synergy item, in most of the clips in our video our artist is seen with these sunglasses on, We planned to make sure that our duo would be wearing there sunglasses in our video and in the images that will be on our digipak items.
What videos influenced us
Many of my ideas came from this video. I decided to focus on the Rizzle Kicks because the duo was similar to what I thought our duo should be like, young, british, cheeky and normal, these all come across in this video and when I was watching it I was also looking at the framing and the way that the video has been shot. A specific idea that I got from this video was the artist walking towards the camera and the camera moving backwards giving the artist space to walk in front, this is seen at 0:31, 0:38, 0:41 and other places in the video.
Our Example
Another technique I got from this video was the camera circling the artist while they sang to the camera, this is seen at 1:40 - 1:47 .
Our Example
Also the way the duo sings each others lines, in this video when one of the artist is singing or rapping there verse the other is behind them dancing and sometimes saying some of the lyrics of the other persons verse.
Our Example
What we Challenged
In the end what we decided to do is keep most aspects of the Pop Genre and challenge 'The Male Gaze', We wanted our video to be as relatable as possible to other young children and teenagers so we kept it quite normal and innocent.
What we Developed
Another thing we challenged was the variety of shots used in the first verse. Instead of having loads of different shots we thought it would be a good idea to take the risk of having most of the shots from the first verse 'In your face' so we made majority of these shots close of up of the artist singing to the camera. We did this because of the meaning of the song and the lyrics, the song is referring to somebody who is quite selfish and arrogant and the verse comes in quite forcefully so we thought by having many close ups in the beginning would make it more effective
Ancillary
Reminder of the Do's and Donts
My Ancillary Work
The Dos and Donts state that you can use a maximum of 2 fonts, what I've chosen to do is use one font in different ways. The Font that I used was 'Century Gothic', as you can see above, I used it normally, I used it in Bold and I even changed the colour in some cases but the font has stayed the same throughout. I added no extra unwanted effects to the font, the only thing that I have added is a simple 5xp stroke to the title of the songs on the track listing and this is hardly a special effect.
I did Challenge the rules of the text a little bit. The Checklist mentions that text shouldn't be over an image or the artist's face and what I did was put the album title 'Excuse My Rude' over an image at the bottom, I did this because I thought it was a nice area to put it and there was barely any space left to place it.
I kept within the colour limit by only using red and white as my main colours but it can come across like i challenged this rule because I used an image on the back panel that is very colourful.
All the Images that I have used are all in Focus and haven't been stretched or altered to make them look weird. A risk that i have taken with an Image that I have used was adding an effect. In the inside panel i have used one image to cover both sides, I added an effect to enhance the colours to add to the pop genre but in the list of dos and donts it says nit to use unnecessary Image effects.
No comments:
Post a Comment