Question 4 Draft

Question 4 1st draft from Joshbrison

Question 1 write up

Evaluation.

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

During our media course we created a music video for ‘The enemy’s’ song ‘Away from here. Since we didn’t have any past experience in creating a music video we decided to carry out some research in order to enhance our understanding of the industry. To begin with we decided to research into how different bands and artists appear within their videos. We looked at different bands that are have a similar genre to ‘The enemy’ including ‘ Arctic Monkeys’ and ‘Catfish and the bottlemen’ and we found that the majority of theses bands all have a very similar image when it comes to how they dress. We found that the members in these bands tend to wear skinny jeans (usually black) and a T-shirt. We decided to stick to this convention because we felt that this particular image is fitting to the genre and if we were to wear something like a suit, then we would look out of place not only in the video but in the genre also. However, at one point during our video, we have decided to challenge this convention and dress our protagonist (Josh) in shirt and trousers, the reason which we have done this is because, at this particular time in the video, Josh is in his working environment (where he would look out of place in a pair of skinny jeans) and therefore we were able to dress him in a more formal sense, without the risk of making him look out of place.  As the narrative in our video takes part over a few days, we assured that Josh didn’t always appear in the same clothing throughout the narrative, however during band performances, all members are wearing the same clothing they were in previous shots.

After this we decided that we needed to further research into how different artists/bands appear. We wanted to find out what was the normal number of members for a band in our genre. Again, we looked at bands such as the ‘Arctic Monkeys’ and ‘Catfish and the bottlemen’, which both consist of 4 members. We considered having four band members in our video, one to play the Bass guitar one for the guitar one for drums and a lead singer, however we felt it looked better and more realistic if we had the protagonist singing and playing guitar, which only required us to have three members in the band. As there was only 2 of us working on this project (Robson & Josh) we had decided to ask Matthew if he would play the drums in our music video, he thankfully agreed, which gave us a three piece, which helped us stick to the conventions. The reason, which we wanted to stick to this convention, rather than taking the easier option and challenging it, was because we felt that, if we wanted to create a believable band performance, we would have to assure that all instruments (Guitar, Bass Guitar, Drums) were being played during the video, which wouldn’t have been possible with two members.

During our research, one thing that we queried was what is more popular in a music video, band performance, narrative or both. We found that many artists tended to include both band performances and narrative within their video.

Whilst watching ‘The enemy‘ and other bands, we found that the lead singer generally plays the role of the protagonist throughout the video, for example Dave Grohl in Foo Fighters’ song ‘Walk’ (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PkcfQtibmU), during band performances the camera is constantly focusing on Dave, with him being the frontman also throughout the narrative the story is being told from Dave’s point of view. We chose to incorporate this into our own work as we found that if the story was being told for the lead singers point of view, it will hopefully create a star image (within the frontman) for the audience. We also thought that it could become confusing if we kept switching characters between narrative and performance, as it would be unclear to the audience who they are meant to focus on, which would therefore make it more difficult to create a star image.

During our research we also found videos that only stick to either narrative or performance, for example in Foo fighter’s song ‘Best of you’ (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_L4Rixya64&ob=av2e) the music video is entirely performance based. We felt that this wasn’t a very effective way to keep the audience interested in the video and we actually found that this makes the video increasingly boring, consequently losing the audiences attention. This therefore further prompted us to create a narrative/performance-based video.

Digipak construction progress 2

The screen grab above shows our 2nd draft for our digipak. As discussed before, we have decided against using the train station band shot, as we felt the lighting was too poor to use for our cover, we therefore decided to shoot in the college studio, where we had full control over the lighting.

We Also decided not to use the shot from behind Josh (Protagonist/ Lead singer) as again, we thought the lighting was too poor. Instead, as shown above, we have used a low shot of a taxi as it links with the constant transport theme and the idea of getting away.

However, our trip to the train station wasn't completely wasted, as we have still used some of the images for the inside panels of the digipak.

This is only a rough draft, and we are aware that somethings need tweaking, for instance the copyright writing on the bottom left of the back cover is too small and almost un-readable on the printed version of the digipak.

Magazine advert Draft 1

This is our first draft for our Magazine advert, we have decided against using the image of the band in the train station as well feel that the lighting in the image is poor.
After creating this we are now editing our digipak in order to change the cover of the digipak to the image shown on this advert.

Within the advert we have used popular music critics 'NME' and 'MOJO' in order to give the advert a more realistic look, to enhance this we have also included the 'download on iTunes' image.

Our record label is shown in the bottom right of the advert however we are working on moving it somewhere, where it may be more noticeable.

Digipak construction progress 1

The screen grab above shows the progression which we have made for the production of our digipak. We decided to have the photo shoot in a train station as we thought it would link in well with the narrative of getting away, also this location is used within the video so we felt it would look more relevant on the digipak because of this.
This is only a rough idea of what our digipak could look like, however we are still experimenting with different images, fonts etc...

Digipak shooting updates

 Today we went to Seaton Carew train station to take some photographs for our digipak. We decided to use this location as it is one which we have used within the video, so it will therefore be familiar to the audience and also because it ties in with the idea of getting away.

Here we have taken a long shot of the full band, we intend to use this image for the cover of the digipak, however we are aware that we may need to re-take this image due to lighting issues.

We don't intend to use all the shots we have taken however we thought it would be ideal to gather as many as possible so we are able to experiment during the construction of the digipak.