Evaluation Question 1

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

For our media project, we decided to make a performance video of the song 'Secrets' by One Republic, and accompany this with a digipak for their album and a magazine advertisement. Before we could begin construction of these tasks, we needed to undertake research into the forms and conventions of music videos in general, and specifically music videos from the alternative rock genre, as our song was part of this genre. I looked into videos such as 'It's Raining Men' by Geri Halliwell, and then music videos by Kasabian and The Red Hot Chili Peppers to understand the forms and conventions typical of our genre. Ultimately, the video and ancillary task had to act as a promotional vehicle for the band as a whole.

The first aspect that became apparent when analysing videos from the rock and alternative genre was that nearly every video was entirely performance based or had an element of performance within it. There is a strong focus on the instruments used to create the music in the rock genre, so the music videos have a large amount of shots, particularly close ups of instruments, to show the dexterity of the band members and drive the editing of the video itself. Cuts to the drum beats were particularly common. We decided that to create a music video typical of this genre, we had to make a performance video and comply with the typical conventions of rock videos.We did contemplate making a narrative side to our video, however, the rough cut turned out to be a success as an entirely performance based video, so we stuck to this idea.

One of the most typical conventions of the rock/alternative genre was to have emphasis on the lead singer and lots of shots with the lead singer looking directly into the camera. This was emphasised when we recieved our feedback for the rough cut, when the majority of people stated that there needed to be more shots of the lead singer doing this. This type of shot creates a connection between the audience and the people in the video they are watching. Typically, the person in a band that the audience are most likely to remember is the lead singer, so we needed to portray him in as many ways possible. We utilised a range of shots, for example medium close ups of him looking directly into the camera, a long shot of him standing at the microphone, and an extreme close up as he sang the chorus. These types of shot were similarly portrayed in the videos by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Kasabian and the Stereophonics.

The other band members were also shown, however none of them looked directly into the camera. We filmed close ups of their faces and long shots of them playing the instruments in order to establish them as well as the singer, although we kept the emphasis on the lead singer throughout the video. In the majority of videos we watched, the other band members are shown in the video to indicate who plays which instument and show their skills. In the videos, they are seen concentrating on the music rather than building a connection with the audience.

As we found when watching the music videos on YouTube, there was a high emphasis on the instruments within the video. The instruments that can be heard and seen in a music video can drive the editing and affect the use of types of transitions and cuts. A small video can be seen below showing how the different instruments and pace of music affected our editing.

Question 1 Mini Clip from Jamie WGSB on Vimeo.

The close ups of the instruments were vital when making our video as the video needed to show that that band members could play the song well and also depict to the audience the sounds that they were hearing. The instruments we had in our music video were the cello, violin, drums and guitar, all of which were vital when illustrating the music in different parts of the song. These types of shots were also seen in many other videos that we watched. As the cello was not a typical intrument of our genre, we had to look into other videos to see the sorts of shots we could use for the cello.

A typical place for performance videos to be filmed were open spaces, rehearsal areas and stages. The Red Hot Chili Peppers and Kasabian both used open spaces for their videos, whereas Oasis used a rooftop to stage their video. The setting of a performance video is not the most important part of the video, as the setting should not detract from the performance of the song, however the lighting had to be clear so that the band were always shown clearly in the video. To keep the emphasis on the band, a plain area is normally used to stage the band. With this in mind, and the theme of religion and confession stemming from our song title 'Secrets', we chose to use a church to set our video in as this had a large area for the band to set up and also tied in well with our theme.

The items of clothing that the artist is wearing in a music video can depend on the song and whether the video is a performance or narrative. What an artist wears can also determine their iconography, particularly with artists such as Lady Gaga, who has become known for her obscure outfits and clothes. We did not use a logo to promote our brand, but chose a smart/casual style of clothing for our band. We chose to do this because of the type of song we chose, which has a slow build up particularly with the cello, but also has a fast paced chorus. The formal type of clothing was fitting as we were going to be shooting the video in the church, and also shows the audience a level of sophistication about the band.

Some music videos use many visual effects to emphasise aspects of the music. Within the Red Hot Chili Peppers video, they use a slow motion effect to emphasise the guitar solo towards the end of the song. Within our video, we used effects in transitions to reflect changes in pace of the song. The lightbulb transition and additive dissolves were used to show how the pace of the song slowed down at the end of the chorus.the fade transition was also used in the beginning of the song as it starts out slow, and the fade out was also used at the end of the video to signify the end of the music video.

Throughout our video, we had to include camera movement as this was typical of our genre. Many other videos use camera movement to accompany the actions and movements of a lead singer, and in our video we needed to include camera movement to create an authentic, dynamic feel to our performance video. During the chorus, quicker movements of the camera are used  to reflect the change of pace in the song and the speed at which the lead singer is singing. At the opening of the video, pans and slow camera movement are used to accompany the slow pace of the cello music.

One of the final conventions we had to stick to was including a logo and song information in the video. We had  chosen for our video to appear on MTV Rocks as this featured many similar bands. An MTV Rocks logo was included in the video on the top left corner and the song information was keyframed to fade onto the screen at the beginning of the song.

When creating our ancillary tasks, the influence of existing products was very important. We looked at many existing digipaks before creating our own, in order to understand the typical things we needed to include such as barcodes, copyright information, a band website and labels. We also needed to look into albums from our genre of music to get an understanding of their layout and colour schemes.

We found that the images on the front cover of a digipak could be abstract art as we saw with the Muse cover, or could be an image of the band. We thought that the best way to link our three products would be to have the band members on the cover of the digipak and also include them on the advert. We saw that the majority of album covers with the band on the front had a layered image, with the lead singer at the front looking out at the viewer and the other members behind. We used this style of image on our digipak to show the importance of the singer, create a connection to the audience and show the band together.


From the digipaks we looked at the colour scheme and style remained the same throughout the album, with either patterns or colours being repeated across all four panels. We used a black and white colour scheme and incorporated the doves idea as a pattern that we could repeat across the panels of our digipak. Looking at the Eminem album and the U2 album, a different image of the artist appeared on the inside cover of the digipak, so we also included an image. We desaturated the background to keep to the black and white theme but left the band members highlighted as they were on the front cover.

The font we chose for the digipak was used across the whole of the album, but we changed the size of the writing depending on the importance of the information. We saw a similar style used on the American Idiot album by Green Day which changed the size and colour of writing to direct the readers attention. We did this by making the band name larger than the album name, making the track list the largest piece of writing on the back cover and also making the copyright information very small.

When creating the magazine advert, we had to link the advert to the other products we had created and also look at the layouts of current adverts. The main image on a magazine advert was the lead singer or band, an this allowed the audience to recognise the band. We used this on both our adverts, firstly with the whole band and secondly with the large image of the lead singer.

As with the digipak, we used the same font across the advert and resized/recoloured text to attract the audiences attention. as we had seen in the Ed Sheeran advert and the Elton John advert the artist name, album name and release date were all the largest text on the page to show importance, so we used this convention on our adverts. We also adopted a simple back and white colour scheme again to link the tasks and keep the emphasis on the image of the band.

Lastly the labels and smallprint were also featured on the adverts as we had seen examples of adverts which included record labels and a HMV logo to indicate where the album was available to buy.