EVALUATION QUESTION 1

IN WHAT WAY DOES THE MEDIA PRODUCT USE, DEVELOP OR CHALLENGE FORMS OF REAL MEDIA PRODUCTS?

At the beginning of our project, we researched what the main concepts were that were included in music videos that belong to the Indie/Folk genre. We discovered that they mainly use Narrative based videos, which portray a story usually linking the to the lyrics of the song. For example, we have chosen to link the lyrics to our music video by showing the two characters in several different locations (hense 'Come and Go').
A lot of the time, indie/folk songs are about loving someone or the artist's relationship with someone - which usually means the music video involves a boy and a girl as the main characters.

GOODWIN THEORY
We applied Goodwin's theory to our media work as when the lyrics 'Come and Go' are sung, the female character is shown travelling through locations in London, implying that she is going somewhere and leaving the male character. At the end of the video, a montage of the female is shown, implying that the entire song was about her and a specific ending is not given. Showing the male character in the studio singing the song, also showing him writing the song which implies that he has made the video/wrote the song to declare his love for the female character.

BARTHES THEORY
Having studied Barthes' theories on myths, we decided that we could apply it to our music video. The representation of sexuality is shown through the music video as it is clear the two characters involved were/are in a relationship. Our video would be an open narrative as the ending is left so that the audience can decide themselves what they think happens to the pair. They are in control of whether they think the couple have broken up or are just in a very rocky relationship.

POSTMODERNISM
The theory of postmodernism is included on the CD cover(s). We chose to use the aspects of the Gorillaz - Demon Days album by making the covers seem like mugshots. However we chose to challenge the album by instead of having all four images on the same page, we allocated one image per page so the picture would be more intimate.We developed the idea by having the colour scheme in black and white, which linked to the colour scheme of our video.

Another example of using/challenging/developing we used was from Lorde's video to 'Royals'. In the video the picture changes alongside the beat of the music, which is what we did in our music video every 1.2 seconds (roughly). Lorde's video, like ours, is both performance and narrative based - showing her singing against a blank wall. We chose to challenge this by showing our male character performing in the studio whilst recording the song. We developed the idea of the video by again, using a black and white theme throughout to create a sense of nostalgia.

 In our video we have used the artist as the male character and an actress posing as his lover, the female character. Throughout the video, stages of their relationships are shown when they are together and when they aren't. In a lot of music videos that portray a love story, the couple in focus are shown arguing at some points in the video - so we chose to include this in our project to enable the audience to understand that the two characters in focus are a couple rather than just two random people.

The main scenery associated with indie/folk music videos is greenery and nature so we included establishing shots of trees, Hyde Park, Bristol Harbourside and shots from around London. By using a well known British landmark we hoped to engage the audience a lot more as we discovered from one our audience feedback interviews that an audience like it when  they recognise places in music videos/films etc. Also, a lot of music videos are filmed in and around London so we chose to use that aspect of a real video.

We filmed the artist  in a recording studio, this challenges the forms of real videos as we chose to make it performance based as well as narrative based - this enables the audience to gain a connection with the artist and see the emotion on his face when he is performing the song. When a music video is both narrative and performance based, usually the artist is seen performing infront of a crowd, or just singing into a microphone/to the camera rather than actually being filmed in a recording studio with all the recording equipment.

At the end of the video, there's a montage of the girl played along to the lyrics that are sung at the start - this develops the idea that the girl is what the artist wants and is a group of clips bunched together from throughout the video, thus suggesting that the entire song is about her and that the artist is completely in love with her.


How does the video work well with the song? We did our best to ensure that editing was done so that some

of the clips (mainly the establishing shots) were in time to the beat of the music. For example, the first instrumental of the song involves several establishing shots of trees, sunlight, a boat etc. and each are shown on every fifth guitar strum.



We linked the lyrics of the song to the video by implying that the two characters are in a relationship and are very temperamental - we show the two characters separately at the beginning of the video and then towards the middle, show them arguing to make it clear that they're in a very 'rocky' relationship. We didn't include a clear ending, so the audience can make their own minds up about what happens to the pair- ending it on a montage of the girl implies that the atrist is still in love with her and can't get her out of his head. This goes against the conventions slightly as in most indie/folk music videos there is a clear ending.