Evaluation Question 1

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

Which Videos were you influenced by and why?

Andrew Gooodwin gathered that music videos do not follow the traditional structure of TV/film. Some of his ideas are illustrated in this Calvin Harris video for his song Feel So Close.  Therefore some of the features of our video are unconventional and we drew inspiration from this video.

We used similar camera edits to show the nature of the characters backgrounds e.g. focusing on key elements of the costume like the shoes of the characters, as seen in the gif you can see that the editing is focusing of the characters clothes and we felt it important to so something similar in our video as this helps show the backgrounds of the characters regional identity. In our music video we made sure that specific items of clothing were relatable to the characters surroundings, for example of the the characters, similar to the boy in this gif, is wearing Doc Martens and a denim jacket. Doc Martens are associated with punk/ urban/ city culture, which is the theme of our music and the video whilst the supporting character in our video was wearing a pladue shirt wrapped around her waste, making reference to the youthful urban 90's trend and Converse trainers which are also recognised with teenagers and casual informal apparel. 

               

We used text to overlay the motion of the music video similar to that of this Calvin Harris video. By doing so we broke the conventions of a normal music video as this a replicating the use of title cares which is common in TV/Film but not music videos. We felt that because this is used in many Rap/Hip-Hop genre music videos that in this case it worked and made our video interesting.

(Examples of title card used in TV Series the O.C. and Film American Hustle)

(Example of title cards used in Music Videos- Beyonce- Drunk In Love and Justin Timberlake- TKO)

(Use of title card in our video)

We were also influenced by the use of mis en scene and interaction withe the camera in the rapper Kanye West's video for his song All Of The Lights. We thought the use of sunglasses in the video added a sense of curiosity to the protagonist so we gave both our artists in our group XO a pair of personalised sunglasses, also keeping them cool and fresh as sunglasses have been associated with celebrities in pop culture more specifically rappers so in that's sense our artist would be relateable with this trend.

Also the still camera shots of the estates captures the rural life of the characters in the video so we also showed still shots of Brick Lane where we filmed some of the video as there was a lot of graffiti art, as well as embankment as London is the hometown of our group and in this area we were able to show iconic landmarks such as the London Eye and London Bridge to make it obvious to a global as well as local audience where our group come from and what city they are representing.

The use of base tracks in this video are very effective and add emphasis to the fast pace of the video, this was effective and good to use in our video as it was also quite fast paced and matched the energy of the song. 

(Screenshots of location stills)

 (This was also evident in the Feel so Close Video which used a form of synergy incorporating the title of the song with the graffiti art in the video also keeping intact with theme of youth as the characters are teenagers in this part of the video)

(Example of rapper Kanye West's interaction with the camera linking to Andrew Goodwin's theory of the Star Image-A lot of the time the artist will be very interactive with the camera looking straight down the lens this helps the audience identify with the artist. We felt it important for both the rapper and the singer in our group to do this as its more entertaining for the viewer and adds personality to the artists. )

Did you decide to challenge the conventions of the genre for some reason?

We were also influenced by the use of effects in the video. Throughout the video there is a use of a flicker effect, we incorporated this effect into out video as we felt it made it more interesting and gave the video more dimension diversity. This illustrates Carol Vernallis's theory of music videos having specific editing which differentiates from TV and Films conventional editing styles. Whilst we took inspiration from Kanye Wests video we also felt it important to look at the videos of the artist song we chose in out case it was singer Jessie J and we found the same effect used in her video for her debut song Do It Like A Dude. as seen in  the video bellow it is used several times but we specifically liked the parts which cut to her lips and decided to interpret it in our video.  

(Use of effect in Jessie J video)

     

How We Did It:

(Final edit in our video)

Digipacks&Advertisements which influenced images and style of final Digipack&Advert:

I looked at Rihanna's Digipack for her album Loud

The image and the album is carried out in all aspects of the Digipack. The inside is a stretched image of the artist laying in roses staying true to the red/flower like theme whilst the CD has an image of a rose incorporated into it.

I liked the idea of the Digipack outside and inside not straying to far from each other. My these was graffiti and street style. The front has a clear image of the artist like that of the Loud cover and a continued pattern of a brick wall on the front and back with graffiti style art illustrating the title and spine. My inside is slightly different but the repeating pattern of the album name resembles graffiti whilst the inside image features graffiti art in the background. I liked that Rihanna's CD had a rose inside of it so I incorporated and X into mine so that the CD would appear as an X and an O symbolising the name of the duo.

Like that of the 'Loud' advert mine has the album cover followed by reviews and where to buy the album.

Evaluation Question 1.

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

Relating to Andrew Goodwin's theory - Our music video consisted of Amplification as the lyrics connect to our video and adds layer of meaning.



A good example of this is 'Disturbia' by Rihanna, I think it fits with Andrew's theory of Amplification because of what the video displays. For example, the use of mise en scene, costume and make up. Combined they are all dark and dull and lyrically the words are fierce and strong.  Most actions in the video are out of the ordinary. One of the most distinct things is the setting as I   believe the black background links with the lyrics and song name.

In relation to my music video, I think our lyrics and actions in the video successfully use the amplification technique as our video adds meaning that does not oppose the lyrics but adds layers of meaning to the whole video. For example in our video, the way our artist are singing to the useless, worthless boys is shown through their own experience which is presented in the video as a projection shot where the expression on the artist face is because of the bad break up, which is displayed as a separate video behind the artist.  This shows how our lyrics connects to the video and what is presented through it. 


We chose not to use illustration or disjuncture as we want to create meaningful videos as his video is aimed at the boy who caused heartbreak - lots of emotion and attitude to show and portray this to the audience. 

In relation to Carol Vernallis, her idea of continuity is usually broken by the use of editing which our video consist a lot of.

A video which inspired me to use different and unique special effects was Micheal Jackson,
' Leave me alone'. This video was useful in seeing how effects worked and how they make your video look more fun and distinct.



An example of edits we used were special effects - Bad Tv

Colour correction - We used the colour correction effect to make our video brightness and colour stand out more, making certain clips more distinct then others.

Also Vernallis suggest that the use of base tracks changes the convention and breaks the continuity of music video. We also used base tracks throughout our video which gave sense of structure and continuity or repeated locations being differently.

A video which inspired me to use base tracks and how to use them was Beyonce's song  - 'De Ja Vu'

The different use of base tracks made the video have a faster pace, especially in the chorus, which was also the effect it gave to our music video.

Here are a few clips to demonstrate how our base tracks made our video have a good, steady fast pace.

These clips show the first and second verse, with 2 different base tracks in each.

Clip 1 - Camden, near the lake and brick lane 

Clip 2 - Piccadilly circus and Granary square 

I also thought camera work was important, 
and while filming, I was constantly thinking 
about if we had a good range of camera angles. Before going out to film, I looked through a lot of music videos to get some ideas, here are some shots that influenced me to use in my own video.

Close ups, 
High angle shots, 
Medium close ups and 
extreme close ups ( lips )

Did we stick to the conventions of our genre - POP ?

I think we stuck to the conventions of a pop music video. For example, our use of bright lighting and mostly bright costumes. which makes the video stand out more and also appeals to our target audience being mainly youths and young women. Also in pop videos, the artist are usually young and energetic which is the case in our music video with our artist being 17/18. There is usually synchronised dancing in pop videos which is usually performed by females, this is also the case in our video as we had a short dance routine. Lastly, the costume for the singers in pop videos are usually fashionable and vibrant which makes them relatable to the younger audience as fashion is usually important to them.

Here is a clip of a typical pop group doing their dance routine in their music video "move".

So overall, we stuck to the conventions on a pop video.

I looked at Rihanna's Loud album for inpsiration. What I took from this example, was a consistant colour scheme, and to have a photo going across the inside of the album/digipak. Also the advertisment uses the same photo as the album cover which I also did as it looked like it worked well and was the best photo to use as it showed our artist in a good way with our synergy - sunglasses/black shades.

In reference to my Digipak, and advertisement, I definitely wanted to make it colourful and bright to stand out but also to stick to the convention of the pop genre.

Especially for the front covert, I stuck to using 3 colours, Purple, orange and black. I thought particularly the purple and orange were bright. I thought from this you could recognise the genre of the artist being pop. 

For the inside of the album, I used another colourful photo to go across. Even though it does not really match the colours on the front of the album, there is still a variation of different green, blue, white and black shades. Also the natural lighting makes the photo overall more vibrant. 

The advertisement is similar to my album cover as it has the same colour scheme and a very similar photo. I kept it simple and think it illustrates the album in a good way. It is bright and colourful so sticks to the convention of the pop genre. 

Evaluation Question 1

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.

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.

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

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.
 

 How we applied this theory to our video.
- 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.

Final Digipak

Outside, Back and Front

Inside Panel

CD Disc

Advertisement

Final Digipak and Advertisement

Front and back of the Digipak.

Inside of the Digipak.

Advertisment for my Digipak.

I think the process of making the Digipak was difficult because it took me time to think how I was going to design the panels. However once you know what your doing, the process becomes easier because you have a set plan to follow which makes the process althogether quicker.

I was overall happy with my work, and I feel I produced the best I could. I put time and effort into it and also my teachers helped me when I was stuck so a big thankyou to them. 

Final Digipack & Advertisement

Here is my Final Digipack and Advertisement 

Advertisement Draft

My advertisement is quite plain I plan to add a brick wall background like that of the one on the CD and more colour to help it stand out.