Final Evaluation 1

Evaluation question 1 final. from GeorgeAnderton21

Relative theorist: Throughout my work I tried to follow the 7 conventions that should be included in a music video. These conventions were as followed:

1. Links between lyrics and visuals
2. Links between music and visuals (complimentary, contradicting or amplification)
3. Genre characteristics
4. Intertexual reference
5.  Notions of looking (objectification of women)
6. voyeurism (direct gaze, other people looking at artist, insight into artist life)
7. Demands of record label.

However, we didn’t manage to achieve all the conventions but it was important that we included some. For example, for number 1 in our draft music video we made the link between the lyrics “turning my milk sour”, by using a visual prop of us pouring milk over one of the artist. Number 2, we tried to link the genre of the music which is Indie/rock with visuals that match this. For example, the type of song and genre that we chose is very energetic, therefore, we decided to make the visuals of our music video verry energetic to challenge this convention. Number 2 links with number 3 as we decide to make our music video very energetic, but also, throughout my media products I used fonts that are commonly used throughout the indie/rock genre, as I wanted to make sure that I was challenging Andrew Goodwins theory. Also, I used colour pallets such as pink and black, which is commonly used throughout our chosen genre. The 7^th convention that Andrew Goodwin stated is that it is a must that I follow the demands of the record label. It was important to me that I followed this convention because I wanted to make my products as realistic as they could possible be. For example, one of the demands is that the record name/ logo is on the digipak somewhere, therefore I challenged this and added the record label logo at the bottom of my digipak. 

Before we started filming any part of our music video it was very important that we carried out research from previous media products, to help us come up with ideas for our own project.

When planning for our music video it was very important that we all chose which genre we wanted to base our product around. After researching and discussing the many different genres, it was clear to our group that we wanted to choose the Indie/rock genre. There were several reasons why we chose this genre. One of those is that we all have a good understanding of some aspects in this genre, for example; some of us knew about the different styling of which the artists wear in this genre, which we felt would come to a great advantage for us when choosing what clothes to wear in the final video. We also felt that other genres could be too challenging for us and could cause too many problems when creating the video. For example, the majority of our group listens to the Hip-Hop/Rap genre on a daily basis; therefore we felt that this genre would be the best to use. However, we realised that this specific genre would force ourselves to challenge too many of the existing conventions in the Hip-hop/rap genre which could end up jeopardising our final grade. Due to this factor we felt as a group we should stick to a genre that we could still challenge the conventions but also keep it noticeable to our chosen genre.

From our research in looking at the three different types of music videos, which are narrative, disjunctive and performance videos, we were able to come to the conclusion that we should create a performance video. This decision was prompted by various existing performance videos that other male bands, like ours, have created in the past. For example, the band Kasabian used this type of video for the song ‘Eez-eh’ and Oasis used it for the song ‘Wonder wall’. We decided to use this type of music video because we felt that the conventions involved would help us create an extremely good quality final video, as we would be able to experiment and challenge other media products that already exist. Also, as we had limited space and props to carry out the filming for our music video we decided that a performance video would be best for us. This was because we only have access to guitars, drums and whatever props we had at home or could buy for a small cost, due to our small budget. Having a small budget wasn’t a problem, as from a lot of existing Indie/rock music videos they seem to look like they have been filmed on a small budget as well, for example, in the Kasabain Eez-eh video they have used one studio throughout the whole video. This was an idea that stood out for us as this was similar to our own situation, as we were unsure whether to use an outside back drop or to use the school studio. Also, in the same video Kasabian used some wacky props. We took this into consideration and decided we wanted to follow the same conventions by using some of our own crazy, out of the blue props, such as the cars and baseball bat. We also decided to challenge the conventions the Indie/Rock genre by having wacky outfits. We felt that if we did this it would make our product stand out from existing products and challenge however, this was beneficial to us because these types of props, such as guitars and drums are used frequently throughout the Indie/Rock genre.

 The research didn’t stop there; we then needed to start thinking about what we were actually going to do during the video. Because we had already chosen to carry out a performance video we decided to take inspiration from big name bands in the Indie/Rock genre. For example, we looked at previous videos by Kasabian, Oasis, Arctic Monkeys, Snow patrol and several others. We pin pointed and selected different parts of existing media products and started to create our story board. From what we found out, is that many previous Indie/rock music videos are very energetic, and has the band members moving around and getting up close to the camera, such as the ‘Eez-eh’ music video by Kasabian. As a result of this we wanted to challenge these conventions and use some of these ideas in our own work by using a lot of movement in our video and getting the group to get up close to the camera. A big part of our work was that we wanted to express this through the use of facial expressions and over the top dancing to match the up beat rhythm. For this we wanted to add in some extreme close ups of our faces. For example we did this at minutes, (0.51-0.52) (0.59-1.04).

In any visual media product such as a music video, the camera angles are extremely important and we took this convention into account. We looked at what professional bands such as Kasabian and Oasis have done in the past and tried to challenge them. As a result of this we used a lot of hand held camera shots with different angles, and also we used several static shots. For example we have used hand held camera shots at minutes (0.24-0.32), (1.06-1.12), (1.16-1.22), (1.25-1.33), (1.35-1.53), (1.58-2.04), (2.20-2.29), (2.40-2.49) (2.51-2.58). Below is some visual examples of this.

The final stage of the production of our media product was the editing stage. At this stage we traced back to our research so that we could gain some ideas for different types of editing to help our media product stand out from existing products. During our research we came across a performance video which had used extreme editing shots with a lot of negative effect filters in. The use of these filters made the videos stand out and caused us to use them in our own media product. However, to make our media product stand out from our inspiration we chose to play around with the effect and use a variety of different filters and colours, to help ours stand out over the rest. An example of the use of these negative effects can be seen at minutes (0.18-0.21), (0.26-0.29), (0.42-0.45), (1.05), (1.15) (.127-1.28), (1.34) (1.40), (1.45) (1.53-1.55), (2.36-2.37), (2.41-2.43), (2.47-2.49).