Evaluation Question One.

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

ANDREW GOODWIN’S THEORY

• Visuals either illustrate, amplify or contradict the lyrics and music
• Genres often have their own music style/iconography
• Close-ups should always be included
• The artist/band might want to develop their own star iconography, which becomes their star image
• Voyeurism is a common theme within music videos
• Intertextual references are also popular
• Goodwin argues that the female performer is frequently objectified principally for display purposes, often through a combination of camerawork and editing with fragmented body shots emphasising a sexualised treatment of the star.

STEVE ARCHER’S THEORY

• There needs to be a strong and coherent relationship between narrative and performance in music promos.
• Music videos will cut between a narrative and a performance of the song by the band
• A carefully choreographed dance might be part of the artist’s performance or an extra aspect of the video designed to aid visualisation and the ‘repeatability’ factor.

JOHN STEWART’S THEORY

• The music video has the aesthetics of a TV commercial, with lots of close-ups and lighting being used to focus on the star’s face.
• He sees visual reference in music video as coming from a range of sources, although the three most frequent are perhaps cinema, fashion and art photography.
• Stewart’s description of the music video as ‘incorporating, raiding and reconstructing’ is essentially the essence of Intertextuality, using something with which the audience may be familiar, to generate both nostalgic associations and new meanings.
• The video allows more access to the performer than a stage performance can. The mise-en-scene, in particular, can be used to emphasise an aspirational lifestyle.

This is the dress that Claire wears for the rare jolly scenes of the video. There is an angelic flair about it and she looks radiant in every shot she is in wearing this garment. The Mise-en-scene was a constant worry in our heads- how each outfit or item of clothing can affect the overall subliminal message of each shot. If the outfits and physical appearance were not thought about so carefully then the video would have a lot less of an impact upon the viewer and would be a lot less convincing when taken as a whole.

This is the outfit that Claire wore for the majority of the video. The colour black holds many obvious connotations to death and morbid topics which were necessary for creating such a video as we did. We felt that she should be dressed very demurely and 'normally', with tights and a skirt of reasonable length so that the viewer can fully absorb what is taking place within the shot as opposed to being sidetracked by the character's clothing.

Here is an analysis of a number of carefully selected shots from our final video and the reasoning behind them:

(by clicking on 'menu' and 'full screen' you can read all of the text)

Question 1

Walking through Southwark train station I suddenly noticed a poster advertisment of Ellie Goulding's album 'Bright Lights'. If this poster were to appear as a single page spread in a magazine then it would be classified as a magazine advertisement. I felt that we could really take aspects of this poster and work it into our magazine advert design.

Taking inspiration from existing primary sources is a very useful way of managing to achieve a plausibly professional final product. It also means that you are forced to loosely follow guidelines set by real adverts so the product you end up with will never look too foreign or random.

The main influence Ellie Goulding's poster had upon our design was the text content and positioning. She provoked us to include quotations and really to emphasise the band's name.

Many of our shots were desaturated during the editing process. The thought process behind it being, trying to differentiate the past from the present. As to add depth to the music video, we shifted between tenses regularly. This added a sense of confusion and disorientation to the video.

A lot of music videos use desaturation for a number of reasons.

In this video, desaturation is used to portray the journey in which the character is going through. The video becomes a lot darker, with a lot more negative space, and the darkness within the shots begins to swallow the character. The darkness in itself is used to tell a story.

The use of desaturation within the music video for Falling Down is pinnacle to the video in order to represent the tiring nature of the actress' daily routine. The desaturation emphasises the nighttime backdrop and casts the character's face in shadow.

Amy Winehouse's music video for 'Back to Black' bases itself upon a very similar subject as our video. Both emphasise death using a combination of morbid activity and graveyards. Although the use of black and white is constant throughout this video, there does not need to be any differentiation between the happiness and the present because there are no happy times within the video. The entire video's tone is melancholic (which is reflected in the constant desaturation).

In the video for 'I'm Your Baby Tonight' by Whitney Houston black and white is used unconventionally. The video flashes from colour to black and white while she is dancing. I believe this is due to the power of the song that she is singing. Both the vocals and the lyrics are very strong and at times overwhelming. The black and white flashes are used to simply add interest to the video, to add a twist to a conventional dance video.