Evaluation Question 1

In What Ways Does Your Media Product Use, Develop Or Challenge Forms & Conventions Of Real Media Products?

In our music video we both challenged and followed Goodwin's Principals so that it had the sense of a real music video and we made sure that the principals that we challenged were to the advantage of the music video and not because we didnt want it in our video.

This can firstly be seen in the genre characteristics of the video as our chosen artist was in the genre of acoustic music like artists such as Jack Johnson and John Mayer so we chose to create a performance based video as this seemed the most suitable for both the genre of the artist and the song. The screen shot to the right shows both artists, Tom and Jamie which shows that the video was performance based as we filmed them both playing and the majority of our video is both the boys playing like we have seen in other videos such as Green Day - American Idiot as rock bands and acoustic bands/artists do tend to use perfomance based videos more often than not. Acoustic videos do also tend to be more relaxed and chilled to mix with the music which is why we chose the location of the hay barn. We found that the location was original and the mise-en-scence matched the music better than filming in a room or the school etc. After watching other videos from the same genre I started to realise that the videos with the same kind of music as ours tended to have videos filmed outside, in fields, parks, beaches and in locations that are based around nature.

As we chose to do a performance based video and after analysing the lyrics to the song that we chose to use we decided that the video would follow Goodwin's principal that the music will follow visuals however the lyrics would not dictate what happens in the video. We used the beat of the song to decide how long we kept shots for and also made sure that when Tom's boot is shown, he is tapping it in time to the music which we managed to get in time with the song when we edited.

After researching other music videos and Goodwin's principals we knew that it was important to use the advantage of close ups in our music video because we decided to use our artist to promote the music/artist rather than creating a star motif. As it was important for us to use close ups we made sure that we had them of both Tom and Jamie. To the right are screenshots from our video, of two of our close ups that we used.

The image to the right also links to the fact that we have referenced to the notion of looking in our video. We purposely asked Tom to look directly into the camera whilst singing so that we could capture and use the idea of voyeurism. This means that when our audience are watching the video they will be able to connect with the artist more whilst watching and feel as thought they are almost being sung to personally.

We have created and developed a visual style and clear brand identity by matching the colours, images and typography on all three of our products. By using serif page plus I was able to use the exact colours from the photographs I took on the day of filming, and use them for the deisgn of the ancillary tasks. I also made sure that the typography was the same on each product, although to make the cd cover and magazine advert interesting and appealing to look at I had to use a few different typographys. However, I made sure that they were the same style of serif font so that they all had a link when on the products and didn't look odd.

As we only shot in one location, we needed to make sure that the music video was as interesting as possible so that it keeps the audiences paying attention for the entire video. We started by using a small bit of colourisation to brighten up the hay in some shots as there were a few shadows which showed up in the corners. One of the main pieces of editing we did was use fast cut montage as this is typical in music videos, we carefully picked out a selection of shots that we had filmed and cropped them together with blurred transitions inbetween to make them flow. W did use a couple of transitions including dissolve and blurring however, we felt that too many would be over the top and make the video look too much.

When creating our cd cover and my magazine cover, I made sure that I followed the convention s carefully for each one so I had the correct industry information on each one and used the idea of visual clutter which means that there is a purposely busy design on the digi-pack and magazine advert. One of the most obvious conventions that I followed was the rule of having 3 main house colours, otherwise the products can either look too dull or too much for someone to look at. After looking at the images I took and the music video I decided that the 3 colours that I would definately use in the ancillary tasks were blue, brown and yellow. This means that when the audience looks at all our products they will be able to see the direct link between all of them.