Evaluation Question 1 - Alex

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

A music video is usually filmed in a certain format or structure. This is either narrative, concept driven or performance based. A narrative music video is when the music video itself tells a story with the lyrics and can be followed like a story by the audience. A performance based video is a music video that captures the artist performing the song, usually in a casual environment. And a concept driven video is based around a single idea or concept and are usually unusual and sometimes even surreal for the audience.  Our music video is filmed in a narrative structure. Although there aren’t any lyrics to the song, the audience can tell that a story is being told through the imagery that they are watching. It is also presented in black and white (film noir) which is French for ‘black film’ from the late 1940’s. In this current day, not many music videos are shot in black and white which is how our music video goes against the conventions of our genre of music being ‘house music’.

Trippin' on you is a typical house music video. This conveys all the conventions of a house music video including a house party, bright colours and a main female protagonist. 

Our music video has challenged the forms and conventions of typical house music videos. Main conventions of them are usually house parties, bright colours, and women dancing in very little clothing. Our product is the opposite of typical house music videos as instead of making it a performance structured video, we have made it into a narrative based video. We have gone ‘against the grain’ to make it more interesting and challenging.    

Our mise-en-scene was to look urban and gritty and so we used an estate as our setting. 

 Our influences for the urban setting and council estate came from the video 'On my own' Blame ft Ruff Squad. They both show elements of rough areas and somewhat abandoned. 

As our film is about one character in particular the camera has been made to follow this person around to focus on the one character in particular. As there are no lyrics in the song we chose, we didn’t have to edit any lip syncing which made it easier as we could put any clips or snap shots of filming where ever we seemed it appropriate. We have some pictures and footage editing to the music and so fits to exaggerate some beats in particular.

Comparing our video to other house music videos, it looks and feels very different. This shows that we haven’t been majorly influenced by other music videos. We added some subtitles in our film to get across the feelings of other characters towards our main character in the video. This gives our video a type of silent movie feel to it. We were slightly influenced by people such as Charlie Chaplin and his black and white silent movies. We have tried to get the main story across to the audience without any lyrics and with a small amount of subtitles and dialogue.

The 'We no speak Americano' video was perfect for showcasing the Charlie Chaplin old black and white film feel. We tried to incorporate this without our video looking like an old film. So we have added subtitles and dialogue in during the video. We also looked at Eminem's 'Without you' where they use speech bubbles to communicate to the audience what they are thinking and saying through the video. 

Our video has gone against the likes of Goodwin’s music video analysis as what he says should be included is what would usually be included in a typical house genre video, but as ours is very much the opposite to that there is no reference to voyeuristic treatment of the female body or intertextual reference to tv programmes or demonstrate the usual genre characteristics.

When branding our video, our influences came in very handy. Such influences are videos like Ed Sheeren ‘A team’ which portrays a female protagonist and a black and white film. Another being Yolanda be cool’s ‘No speak americano’ as we have tried to make our video like an old silent movie with subtitles. Other influences include Chicane ‘Popiholla’, Britney spears ‘everytime’ with the bath scene. These were all big influences into our music video.

 The 'A team' video was a big inspiration also as our main protagonist was also trying to find her way. The video was also all filmed in black and white and these pictures show the likeliness of the two videos. 

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