Wednesday 8 February 2012

Evaluation One

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


When choosing my song, I decided on an acoustic song as I felt I knew the most about this genre, being the kind of music I listened to and enjoy. I decided I wanted to include a narrative and performance based video, and began my research looking at some of my favourite artists, and their ideas. This initially lead me to Xavier Rudd, an australian artist. However, his videos consisted mainly of stage performances and back stage clips therfore lacked the narrative I was looking for.
Here is an example below.


Finally the artist and music video that inspired me the most was Ben Howards 'Old Pine'. The video consists of performance based shots of the artist singing, and others focusing on the beauty of the landscape. This idea of focusing on the landscape I loved, it gave the video a sensual aethetically pleasing feel, and I wanted to achieve the emotion I recieved when watching this video, in my own music video.

However, I needed to still incorporate a narrative within my music video, therefore I decided to create a direct correlation from the lyrics to the visual images on the screen. This allowed space for performance, narrative and landscape shots to be used altogether.

for example the lyrics over this shot was,
"every night she kisses someone new"


I then began to compare my ideas to the band, 'Mumford and Sons' and what I gained from this reasearch is that most acoustic songs focus on performance within a beautiful landscape. Lighting, shot position and scenery is key in music videos to give the video a sensual feel, and make it aethetically pleasing. Here are some examples of my findings when researching this.





From these images you can see that lighting and scenery is key to a aesthetically pleasing music video so from this I began storyboarding to create this effect, but in my own way, allowing the visual image to reflect the lyrics.

Following on from this, I decided to look at what kinds of poster's and digipaks went with these music videos to help me decide how to approach my own. Mumford and Sons particularly approached the simplistic ideas with a relaxed approach. All band members were included and their dress sense reflects their image and genre. This in turn helped me to create shot formation ideas for my poster.


Other posters such as Muse used this relaxed approach aswell and this helped me with my idea to have the band with their backs to the camera walking through the forest, as this connected with the forest scenes in my music video.


Another factor of my poster which links to my music video and Ben Howard's video, 'Old Pine' is the Autumnal colours used. The change of white to orange in the text linked with the colour scheme of my video, aswell as allowing it to be easier to read.


I then looked at the range of album covers that the acoustic/folk artist Xavier Rudd has. One thing I noticed is the clear choice of colours, mostly autumnal and earthy for our shared genre. Here are some examples of this:



It has become clear that using a marketing image of just the artists face is only used mainly within R&B genres as this markets the music well as they focus on the artists image and style. Acoustic/folk genres tend to focus mainly on the image, and the colours used to portray an image of nature and landscape. This is something I decided to focus on within my digipak.