The End.

 

Evaluation Question Four

Please excuse the poor quality.

Evaluation Question Three

How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Evaluation Question Two

Evaluation Question One

In what ways do your media products use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Throughout the course of making our music video, we stuck with, as well as veered away from, many of the conventions of real media products. We used the theories of both Goodwin and Vernallis and followed them very closely throughout.

Goodwin

Goodwin states there are three main types of music video, one of which all music videos will fall under. The types of music video are as follows.

Illustration - Where a story is told throughout the video
Amplification - Where a completely different story is told to the video, but it adds to the songs meaning
Disjuncture - Where there is no link between the video and the song, and they both hold completely different meanings - the most common type

Furthermore, Goodwin looks even deeper into music videos and their conventions, he also believes that:

• Music videos usually reflect the the song that they are partnered with, and therefore are often set in the modern day
• Lead characters and narrators in music videos are often portrayed by the singer in the video
• When performing, the artist generally looks into the camera to attract the attention of the viewer and to help make them feel involved in the music video and the narrative itself

 What would Jewellers do?

I think the route we took in making our video is fairly clear, with an evident use of the Amplication idea throughout the video's entirety. While the music video talks about the singers passion for diamonds and her adoration of them over men and love, we took a completely different route, with our band members attempting to rob diamonds, which, while retaining the theme of diamonds, is an entirely separate story from the song. We had several characters being portrayed in the video, and keeping with Goodwins theory, they were all portrayed by members of the band. This is obvious as we interject between two different scenes, one of the band performing in a dimly lit room, and the other of the same people planning their big heist.

Here is one example, as the idea of diamonds is emphasised on screen.

Vernallis

Carol Vernallis spoke about the style of editing used in music videos, and she spoke about how cuts and edits draw attention to themselves, something we did quite often. We did this through the entire music video through the means of cutting in time with the music itself, through the means of laying down markers on beats and bars. These come most obviously towards the beginning of the music video, in the slower, more guitar oriented part of the song. We also threw in lots of edits that were very stylised, such as this one, where four shots appeared at once, one after the other.

Not only is there this obvious shot, but several, with an overlay of CCTV cutting in at points, creating the heist effect that we were hoping for!

Inspirations

We took a wide variety of inspirations throughout the production of the music video, all for a variety of different reasons, firstly came the basic idea - the heist, which we took from Hoobastank's 'The Reason'.

While our heist wasn't as prominent and detailed as the heist in this video, it is still a very similar idea, with not only the heist, but also the gemstone and various shots, such as the shot from the inside of the safe whilst it is being opened. This is where we got idea from, but in terms of a lot of the shots, we took inspiration from The Arctic Monkeys and their video 'I Bet You Look Good on the Dance Floor'.

There are lots of obvious contrasts between the two videos, especially when comparing the singing and bass playing!

The fact that we did not go out of our way to replicate these shots and yet we still managed to produce similar results, is a sign of our genre and the typical shots you'd come to expect of it, except our bassist is much less chunky.

Finally, I took a more personal influence, trying to work it into the project through the means of costume, the lack of colour and the flat out bizarre nature. The video that inspired me was 'Reflektor' by Arcade Fire.

While, fortunately, our video wasn't 8 minutes long like Reflektor, there were lots of similarities. First of all there was the clothing, which although you can note the dark clothes, there is also the obvious choice of the huge masks. I liked these and in the end we went for a more basic approach of it, with the masks of the Royal Family. Furthermore, we can see that the video is in black and white, much like ours, which helps to create a creepy, but very suave and cool atmosphere, which I think we did very well to replicate in our music video, and in turn helped us to also create an atmosphere!

Ancillery Work

My ancillery work took inspiration from a variety of album covers and advertisements, primarily, Muse's lackluster 2009 'The Resistance'. I liked the idea of the colours bursting out upon a black, white and grey background and implemented it onto the face of a diamond, which came out rather nice.

There is a clear comparison to be made in every area here, from the idea, to the colours, even down to the positioning of the band names and album title, including sizing. I thought The Resistance was very eye catching and therefore it was exactly what a debuting band would want from their very first album, due to the fact that in our genre of music, most bands do not tend to put their own faces on the covers of the album, so the band name and an eye catching design took the forefront. 

As you can see, none of these artists have put their own faces on the covers of their albums and therefore I felt it would be breaking a basic convention to go against this, and stuck with the design. I did, however, place the band members' faces inside the digipak, to make up for this!

The theme continued on the inside of the album, with lots of black and white artwork, only being replaced with the arrival of the song titles and the middle board with the blueprint. 

Personally, I believe I did very well to strike a good balance of both challenging the conventions of the indie rock genre, whilst at the same time keeping a familiar and typical style that our audience would come to expect, therefore doing well to establish and keep a fanbase, whilst at the same time keeping them very interested about the product. I liked the way in which I kept the black and white style of the music video in my ancillery work and I think it is a good way of giving our band a theme that we can take with us! I believe it is very professional, and all in all I am satisfied with the product!

Album Advertisement

Evaluation Question 1

In what ways do your media products use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

In our video we attempted to adhere to forms and conventions of real music videos whilst also being a little different and slightly challenging them. We used our knowledge of Goodwin and Vernallis' theories to inform and guide us in the making of the video.

Goodwin

If Goodwin saw our video he would probably say it was an example of 'Amplification' and I would agree. This is because our video certainly follows key elements of the lyrics (diamonds are forever), but our overall story of the diamond heist is not mentioned at all in the lyrics, but it definitely doesn't contradict them and I would actually say it's a pretty good match for the song in tone and mood.

"Diamonds are forever" Fits the lyrics
introduces new meaning of heist.

"They are all I need to please me" Fits the lyrics
introduces new meaning of "I" (masked theives)
 and "Please" (dancing with diamonds)

Vernallis
To make our music video look as professional as we could we tried to use many of the features that Vernallis wrote about. An example of this is obvious edits that draw attention to themselves and are also in time with the beat of the song. I have uploaded a short clip from the beginning of the video that contains a number of these features.
The cuts between shots are in time with the beat of the song, some in a more obvious way than others. An example of obvious edits would be in our use of the four-way split screen between the three band members and the diamond and how each part of the split screen appears in time with the music. The clip also contains a number of base tracks such as a close up of Steven singing, a mid-shot of Ella playing the bass and a longer shot of Steven/the band. All of these shots are repeated throughout the video in the chorus section, giving the video structure.

Which real videos influenced us?
Before we started making our video, the videos I cited as influences and inspirations for ours were from Hoobastank (The Reason) and Arctic Monkeys (I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor and R U Mine). I think if you look at our video you can definitely see aspects from all of these. For example...

Shot types from 'I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor'
The main thing we took from this video was the shot types and composition for the performance aspect of the video. We chose to use this video as it is by the same band and is a good example of the conventions of the indie rock genre. Using these shots was a way our video conformed to conventions of real music vides in our genre. Here are some shots we used:

Colour Scheme from R U Mine
From R U Mine the main thing I wanted to use from that was the 'colour' scheme, by which I mean the black and white. However it isn't just that it's black and white as there are many black and white videos it is the specific amount of black and white from the levels and the look it gives the video. I think the effect we put of black and white on our video is very similar to the one that Arctic Monkeys used in R U Mine. See the similarities here:

Storyline/Structure from The Reason
The overall storyline and idea for our video is very similar to the video for The Reason by Hoobastank (they are both diamond heists), therefore this is probably the video ours is most similar to. We used a similar structure to Hoobastank combining both performance and narrative. I would say aside from the overall structure and idea one of the main things we took from the video is the various elements of iconography of diamond heists that they feature in their video such as a blue print, diamond, safe, CCTV etc.

The Digipak & Advertisement
For my digipak and advert my influences were a little less obvious but there are still clear existing media products that helped me create this design. As far as keeping to genre conventions go I think my digipak and adverts do generally conform. I found in my research that the majority of indie bands either don't have a picture of themselves on their front cover or they have a kind of obscured picture of them so mine fits in with that.

Influences

One of my influences was Kanye West's artwork for the album 808s and Heartbreak. The main thing I took from this album was the font style as well as some of the colours.

The fonts

The colours I used were the same.

My other influence was a kind of minimalist graphic design style I saw online and I blogged about. I couldn't find any real albums with this exact style but here are two cartoonish type ones which I think you can draw parallels with.