Evaluation Question 1

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

Where have your ideas come from? How were you inspired to do what you did?

We decided as a group we were going to use the song 'Chasing the moon' by My Future Lies. We all liked this song a lot and was the genre we liked to listen to. When listening to the song we thought of loads of ideas for the story line we could do for our video. I started brainstorming ideas for what the purpose was of a music video. Then I started researching and analysed existing music videos similar to that genre of the song and print work.

There really wasn't a major music video which helped influence our ideas as our concept was different as we didn't focus on binary oppositions eg relationships which tends to happen a lot in this genre, e.g. the script videos. When studying videos I found that most of them had some links between the lyrics and the visuals as stated on Andrew Goodwin's theory and this was a convention we followed. The song 'Hero of war' by Rise Against  and the film 'Saving Private Ryan' did help influence our ideas though this video had a slightly different story line to what we have its has a same concept of a soldier in denial and lost who he is. We based our video along the lines of the emotions shown in these videos of the soldier emotionally upset with what he's been through and just wants to find his way home back to his loved one. A main influence in our creativity was creating our mood board which helped us bring our ideas together with different emotions. We were inspired by some lighting choreography by similar bands of our genre, for example Simple Plan's video 'Save You'. The idea of having our main singer involved in both the performance and the narrative was inspired by the script where we looked at their song called 'Nothing'. This wasn't the only song of theres where the artist was involved in the narrative most of their songs did this, the Fray's songs also did the same which told us that this was conventional to do in this genre.

During the creation of my print work I referenced real media products to my genre to get an insight of what the layout tends to look like and the design of colours etc. I noticed black and white was popular in my genre which i chose to do and from this I think i developed a strong design of my digipak and my poster. Looking at existing similar artists it helped influence me on the individuality of each digipak and how there is a strong link between their theme of their print work to their music video. This had influenced me greatly on the design of my digipak giving me a reference point of where most things should be placed such as the bar code and labeling on an album design.

How did audience research direct your creativity? 

Throughout my project I conducted regular target research with my work. I used my target audience for their opinions and feedback for improvements.The main work I got feedback from my target audience was the development of my digipak and advert and the improvements on my rough cut which helped me create my final cut. The audience feedback which was conducted gave us a good insight in what they wanted and affected our editing of the music video as we listened to what they suggested and acted on that. We added more transitions which was suggested by them to create a smoother cut between each clip which made it look more proffesional, they also suggested adding an extra moon clip into our video as we were lacking in having enough scenes of the moon which the whole video was based on 'Chasing the moon' which we took on board and added in. I referred back to my audience profile and my moodboards during the start of my project to keep me on track and tried to keep consistent in my theme throughout the whole process.

How different are your products to 'real' media products?

Our video is very conventional compared to being different to real media products. Our video could be seen as different to other media products as we have a female within our band where you find most bands of this genre tend to be just male. The storyline of our video is quite conventional to our genre where the lyrics match the storyline. The colour theme is also conventional using a popular colour theme of this genre. We got to use the performance lights to enhance our video and experiment with different angles which let us create a more realistic 'media' product as this is conventional in most music videos to enhance the performance but none of this was different to what our genre does.

To what extent have you been original/how have you used redundancy and entropy?

Earlier in my blog posts I researched how videos can be redundant or entropic. When analyzing the same music videos of our genre we noticed most of the videos were mostly redundant than entropic which we took into account. However we wanted to add an interesting element into our video. After our intial ideas we decided we wanted to create a emotional journey of a soldier which the audience can emphasise with. This mean't we could include entropy in an redundant plot line which would appeal to our audience. The idea of journey is quite redundant as you can imagine someone walking to get to a specific place which is quite orginal. However we made it entropic by changing the settings and adding little querky things into the video. For example the still shots of the toy soldiers at the start of the video and the little kick the character gave at the end when he got to his home, this adds humour which makes it more interesting than him finally finding
his home which the audience wouldn't expect to happen which makes it entropic.
This is an orginal idea which doesn't normally get used in music videos of our genre.