Evaluation 1-
In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
As we
decided to use the song ‘save the world’ by Swedish House Mafia, this meant
that we knew whatever we finally created it would be compared to the bands top
hit single and music video. So to avoid our music video swaying towards
replicating the official video we needed to have a strong idea/story life for
our version, we created a variety of mood boards which gave us inspiration for
the ‘house genre’ we was going for, as we chose house as our genre of music
this meant that we knew our editing and shots were going to need to be cut
quick and have a larger range of shots compared to another genre e.g. blues.
Although
our music video does include the stereotypically ‘club’ like scenes we felt it
was important to add something different so we came up with a story line which
evidentially fits the lyrics to the song, most examples of house music videos
that we looked up included a main scene of a female which is sexually empowering and engages more to the male
audience, however we felt that this wasn’t necessary for our song because the
story life over powered this. Things which
ended up influencing our group for a story line were other music videos we
watched in class, this allowed us to understand the real conventions of a music
video and what we was going to need to do and add to ours. We felt it was good
to go with a story line because it allows the audience to go on a journey
through the music video unlike many which are just random clips placed one
after the other, ours included a sense of continuity with a beginning and
ending.
Our music
video had inspirations from other music videos such as “Animals” by Martin
Garrix where he gets the audience involved through the use of live footage at
festivals, raves and concerts. When we was capturing these shots we had
difficulty with the steadiness of the camera as people were dancing and banging
into us while trying to get the footage, however when we uploaded and edited
these into the final video it looked good as it made you feel like you was at
the concert, drawing in our audience. Martin Garixx's video for animals is a video which captures not only the conventions of a music video but also shows the abstract look as they are dressed up as animals. This kind of video would have been one we was hoping to do but the lack off lip syncing oppurtunies meant we couldn't.
When we came to deciding the costumes for our
characters we looked into what scene they were going to be in, in them certain
clothes. We wanted all aspects of our music video to look realistic so we
looked into the costumes with detail such as wanting Kieran’s character to look
dull, dark and a ‘drug addict’ look, so although it may only seem like he is
wearing a black t-shirt and tracksuit bottoms it clearly represents the mood,
feeling and persona of the character. Whereas you can see that Emma’s character
is wearing brighter clothing/normal day clothing to again represent her
character showing that you don’t have to be out of the ordinary to “save the
world” which in this case was the other characters world.
After
watching Swedish House Mafia’s official video it showed a lot of dark shots,
such as in the streets, the shot of the car and then the robbers again dressed
in black which then led to the ending being brighter and more full of life
after the dogs saved the world. We felt it was important to go through our
story line in a similar formation with the start seeming darker and then as the
video progressed the shots became more fun, exciting and full of life (e.g. the
festival scenes) this is why we chose locations such as the abandoned garage to
create the darker parts of the videos and then the vibrant use of festivals and
concerts later-on, This leaves the audience on a high note and feeling happy
after watching the video.
Camera work and editing are the main aspects
of the music video, so we knew that we were going to need to find the best
camera’s we were available to. We originally filmed our thriller on iPad but we
decided that we only needed our iPhones and certain apps for the music video
meaning it was easy to transfer equipment when moving to different locations. Although
we only used the schools editing software Pinnacle we had already had access to
this last year so we knew how to work it and knew more about the editing
process.
For the opening fo our music video we decided to use a shot which we shot on an iPhone app, which looks like four small hearts beating on the screen in time with the music, we thought this would fit our genre because it shows a random abstract shot which starts with the main beat. It then goes onto a close-up of Kieran's head getting out a bath suggesting that it's the start of a new day. Many House music videos have the start with someone waking up and then what leads on from that in their day. We changed the opening to our music video a few times because at first we just had a picture of a yellow background with the name of the song and band as this is a convention which fitted a few others, however when we fitted all the other clips in with this is created a tacky kind of look to it so that's why we came up with our original opening we have now.
