Saturday 13 March 2010

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

There are many different theories to the conventions within music videos. The first one I am going to look at is the General Theory.
GENERAL THEORY: LYRICS: Establish a general feeling/mood/sense of subject rather than a meaning.
MUSIC: Tempo often drives the editing.
GENRE: Might be reflected in types of misè-en-scene, themes, performance, camera and editing styles.
CAMERAWORK: Has an impact on meaning. Movement, angle and shot distance all play a part in the representation of the artist/band (close-ups dominate).
EDITING: The most common form is fast-cut montage, rendering many of the images impossible to grasp on first viewing, so ensuring multiple viewing, so ensuring multiple viewing.
Often enhancing the editing are digital effects, which play with the original images to offer different kinds of pleasure for the audience.
INTERTEXTUALITY: Not all audiences will spot a reference, which would not significantly detract from their pleasure in the text itself, but greater pleasure might be derived by those who recognise the reference and feel flattered by this. It also increases the audience's engagement with, and attentiveness to the product.
EXHIBITIONISM: The apparent more powerful independent female artists of recent years have added to the complexity of the politics of looking and gender/cultural debates, by being at once sexually provocative and apparently in control of, and inviting, a sexualised gaze.

When researching and reading about this particular theory, I realised how our music video could relate to each of the different sub-headings within it due to the song words, genre and tempo of the song we chose.

Lyrics: Many of the lyrics used within the song create a mood and and atmosphere that is quite shocking, yet mysterious at the same time.
'Well it covered your body it was pulling you in, so i kicked an i screamed and i sank my teeth in. You cried get off me, get off me, get off me please, but i drowned you out i was trapped'
This is a line from the song that I feel is very visual. By just reading these, a picture can easily be created in peoples mind from these particular lyrics and they also tell exactly what kind of music video would be created to this song.
Music: The music contains a beat the whole way throughout the song which helped to drive the majority of our editing. It meant that we was able to do quick cuts throughout our music video that created an element of surprise for the viewers.

Genre: Although the song is a very upbeat song, the choice of lyrics within it are more picturesque of which is what we decided to concentrate on. By using different scenes for different parts of the music video, it created a sense of 'what happened next' within our viewers. The graveyard was our main location as we wanted the viewer to think about why the characters are there and how they got there so that they had that question in their mind when watching the video.We also wanted to create a sense of awkwardness withing our viewers, so added in disturbing shots that would shock the viewers. These shots included:
Vampire laying and rising on a grave. This shot created a big element of 'why is she laying on a grave', and this was one particular question that we wanted our viewers to have. As this vampire haunts our main character throughout the whole video, there is an element of mystery as to why she is doing so which also poses the question. However this shot i feel is very strong as it contains just the vampire and the gravestone. The eyes of the vampire are very mysterious and scary, however these have not been edited - just made black and white. Main character 'cutting' wrists. This shot was the main shot that shocked the viewers and got the most feedback from people. A lot of people didn't understand why the main character would be slitting their wrists, however that again is the questioning we wanted from adding in this shot. We loved how people got shocked by this as it made us realise how the shot did exactly what we wanted to do. We felt as if the target audience would also enjoy watching a shot like this as from looking at our research, they love the element of surprise. By adding in this shot to our final cut, people were not left thinking that the music video was predictable in any way. Vampire touching main character. This shot shows the vampire 'seductively' touching the main character. When viewers looked at this particular shot, they automatically thought about why she is touching the main character like that, and why the main character does not flinch. They therefore found themselves questioning whether this vampire is real, or whether she is just a figment in the main characters imagination. Other people also found themselves asking about what this vampire is going to do next as they felt scared and worried for the main character. Again, this was a strong image for us that we wanted to show to get the element of questioning from the viewers.

Camerawork: Within our music video, we used many 'awkward' that would help create the scary element within the music video. These 'awkward' shots include:Main character waking up. Medium close-up. We felt as if this shot was an 'awkward' shot as the camera is looking face down on the character waking up. This shot works well as it shows the emotions of this character whilst she is waking up, or fidgeting in her sleep. When watching this video, we know that this shot shows the character opening her eyes quite quickly and from this, we do not quite know whether she is waking up as a person, or whether a 'demon' like character has taken over her in her sleep. This shot to us was very powerful as you can see the facial expressions in which the character has which creates a sense of shock and an element of questioning as to what is going on.
Main character sitting on the floor with candles around. 'Awkward angle'. This shot I feel is really interesting as to me, it almost creates the sense that the camera is just recording the character sitting there. The candles surrounding the character almost appear as if they are some kind of spirit from her, yet we do not know the reasons as to why she is sitting there surrounded by these candles. This again adds to the element of questioning that we wanted our viewers to have.

This is very similar to a shot within the film 'Paranormal Activity' where the character is sitting on the floor in her bedroom and the camera follows her, and carries on recording. This particular shot within the film was right at the end and i know many people got 'freaked' out by it due to the scary nature of this film. However, with the scary nature in which we have shot and made our music video, we hope this type of shot creates the same sort of reaction as the particular one in the film did.

Editing: Whilst editing our music video, we tended to use 'fast cut' editing as our music had a strong beat which we was able to use to our advantage to create our video. We also used many different tools within Final Cut that helped us to adapt the effects on particular shots within the video to help gain the viewers attention and create pleasure for them. An example of some of the shots in which we edited include:

Main Character sitting on bench. Effect - Bad TV. This shot originally was of the main character sitting on a bench which was slightly slanted, in the middle of a graveyard. However, after we changed all of our shots into black and white, the shot became more distinctive when compared to other shots in which we had used, due to the bench appearing unstable and 'dodgy'.Main character standing in graveyard with glass of blood. Sin City effect. When editing our music video, we wanted to include blood that would stand out to the viewers. We therefore decided we would use the Sin City effect to separate the colours so that the blood in the individual shots were made to be colour, where the rest of the shots would remain in black and white.

Main character fidgeting in bed. Shot sped up. When editing this particular clip, we decided that we wanted to speed it up otherwise the shot would be too long. After doing this, we found the shot fitted in well with the music and I started to realise how it had been edited and therefore looked similar to a specific shot in Rihanna's video for Disterbia where she is throwing her head around which again had been sped up during the editing.

ANDREW GOODWIN'S THEORY Visuals either illustrate, amplify or contradict the lyrics and music. Genres often have their own music style/iconography.
When looking at the two ancillary tasks, and comparing them to Andrew Goodwin's theory, I feel as if the visuals illustrate and amplify the way in which we are trying to introduce the band by including the different images that are included within the main music video.

Also by using only black and white images, as well as dreary colours, the band is being introduced within a different genre as not many other bands use the same type of colour that we decided to use.






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