Evaluation: Question 1

My final media product has a lot of generic media conventions. In relation to Laura Mulvey we used dismemberment, which is featured in the start of our video.  We had a close up of our artist’s face, chest and behind. We did this to attract a wider male audience and to add a convention which is featured throughout pop videos, with artists such as Rihanna and Britney using dismemberment a lot in there videos. The Male Gaze is featured quite a lot in modern music videos, which relates to the ‘male dominated world’ that Laura Mulvey describes. I was mostly influenced by the idea of the male gaze by Rihanna’s video for Rude Boy. Within this video, Rihanna is barely dressed whereas the male dances are appropriately dressed. Also, the choreography was designed to show Rihanna as very sexual towards men rather than the other way round. One can argue that this emphasises male dominance in relationships.

Rihanna is seen dancing for the males as they stand and watch.

     In connection to Cara Vernallis we used special effects such as Slow and Fast Motion, Reverse, Motion Blur, Equalize, Colour Correction and Light Rays.

We used this as our original footage was quite dull and would bore the audience. We used Light Rays on the footage with our lead artist in Lee Valley; this was due to weather on the day of filming as it was cold, and raining. The Light Rays created a lighter and magical tone to the clip. We also used Colour Correction a lot, as we discovered that the footage taken in Banksy Tunnel was quite dark we used the Colour Correction tool to correct the brightness. I also edited two other clips: one with Lyah on the steps at Regents Canal, which I colour corrected so that the clip became purple. I then converted a clip of lyah in lee valley to black and white. We also added text to our music video; this was to engage the audience more as they could sing along with the artist. We wrote in Bubblegum font as it was big and animated which worked together with the general tone of the video. We used colours such as yellow, blue and green as they are bright and attractive. Vernallis also mentions continuity editing, which featured a lot in our video, we had a range of shots but we kept going back to them, so that the video wouldn’t become difficult to follow.

I decided to use special effects because I watched Outkast's Hey Ya which featured alot of special effects for example, The lead artist was the whole band.

 

Kanye West’s video for The Good Life, inspired me to use text in our video because it brought life to what would have been a very plain video. The text was similar to the font used in our video as it was big and bright and caught the audience’s attention.We related to Andrew Goodwin, because our music video was an example of Disjuncture because our video is autonomous from the song lyrics. Because our video had no connection to lyrics this meant that our creativity wasn’t hindered and we were allowed to produce a completely different video from the lyrics.

We did challenge pop conventions as we used hip- hop dancers in our video; to make the clip go along with our song we used slow motion. We decided to add the dancers because we wanted the video to have a variety of people and we also needed a filler to keep the audience interested, from watching the final piece at the Screen on the Green I think that the dancers were well received as it was unexpected of a video in this certain genre. We also used an animal in our video because we thought that it would add a playful and care-free tone to our video, I was partially inspired by Beyonce’s video for Run the World (Girls) because it had a large focus on powerful animals. I decided to use this theme but in completely different way because young audiences particularly relate to animals.

In regards to our ancillary print products I think they are very conventional, I was influenced mainly by the advert for Madonna’s MDNA album, I thought it was simple without being to plain and easy to emulate.  I included the artist’s, name, URL and record company. I also included the release date, reviews, and the availability. I think my poster is very straightforward and conventional whereas my album is very loud and attractive. I used space as a running theme because I believe that with pop artists there isn’t any limits, whereas with other genres such as rock, indie and hip hop colours, themes and tones are quite limited and similar.

Overall I think that Intersexuality was a big theme in our video, other videos in our genre e.g. Marina and the Diamonds video for Oh No as it featured a lot of colour and locations. Our final product has challenged and conformed to conventions which helped us to create an entertaining and exciting video.