Tom Bates - Evaluation Activity 1

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


1). This clip shows the equipment that the band uses, and shows some of the conventions that the band have included, as they are a rock band, a perfomance is seen to fit in with the forms of the genre. Also the location is established in this first clip. This clip shows the lighting of the day. We were very fortunate to have a good day for the shoot. We deliberately chose to have the band enter before the music begins, this was an intertextual reference to many rock bands. This is used because it is the expectation of the record label. As our chosen genre is Rock, we chose to use a standard perfomance using all band members.

 

2). This clip has a lyrical reference to the song. The lyrics 'you push,you pull, you try to power through' are heard, these lyrics are heard as we see the narrative established in this clip, as the boy next door character is seen to find an empty bottle of milk. We sucessfully used lip synching throughout, we made certain that lip synching and the editing of instrument playing to music was constant.This was made easy by having the band in the music video as appose to having external actors.



3). This clip is a lyrical and visual reference to the song. It also has a narrative visual relationship. On the line "traffic jams inside of my head"we can tell that this isnt really the norm and is a bit jumpy. This was done deliberately because this clip shows the state of mind of the 'boy next door', and shows his mental state. I like this shot because it gives the audience a marked contrast of forrest to urban town. It changes between the performance side of the music video and the narrative.   



4). This is a low angle shot of the lead singer Matt. It follows the conventions of the rock genre. This in partiular is an intertextual reference to the Foo Fighters' song 'Pretender', they use low angle shots to emphasise the band members and their instuments. we used it to give a nice edge to our music video, I personally think that it means they want to elevate to a higher position in the music business. We can see the natural lighting, this is a nice still I feel ,because it shows the forest contrasting against the suit.

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-EU-Xwm7RY

This is a link to the song 'Pretender' by Foo Fighters.





5). This clip shows the strong narrative of our piece. I feel that this shot sums up our music video as the girl is in view but the character we empathise cant talk to her.  This is an over -the - shoulder  - shot, there is also a reverse in the music video so we can see both perspectives. I think this shot sums up the lyrics from the song quite nicely. I think we chose to use a strong narrative as this would be the criteria set by a record label of our genre.        



6). This clip is a lyrical reference to the song. It once again shows the state of mind of the "boy next door" character, this is an extreme close up of the phone. This is used to emphasise the lyrics of the song. This idea helped us to connect the performance to the narrative, this has some intertextuality to it as many bands use this technique in their videos to continually promote the band members' faces.         

7). This clip is a good shot I feel because you can see all the instruments of the band. We found this part a bit tricky because we were so focused on the editing of visuals to music, we tried to get all the instruments (and Matt) playing at once in sync. Lots of bands/artists use spilts, we chose to use ours on the instuments as appose to the artist's face. We initially tried to make an equal split of quarters but the frames were too large, so we deliberately made them all unequal in terms of shape and size. This was because we didn't want to follow the normal format of quarter frames.   

8). This still frame shows all the band members in one shot at the same time, I feel that this is a necessity in a music video, especially in a rock video, because it is here that all context about the band is formed. I think the constant theme throughout is that the band are aware that they are not a 'moody' band and are not trying to be, they want to be taken seriously but dont mind having a laugh. This is a longshot of the band. In this shot, we can see the convention of lighting, in this case it is the natural lighting of the forest. In all our shots, we deliberately decided to edit the music to the visuals in terms of the lip synching and the actual band's instrument playing, as this can make the audience believe in the music video.

9). In this shot, we see an extreme close up of Matt's mouth. As this happens he sings the lyrics "Not today", this clip is an intertextual reference to a few rock songs, but we chose one similar to that of the song 'Pretender' by Foo Fighters. We use a few extreme close ups in the music video, but I chose to use this particular one because it is the final frame of the song and I feel that it gives a pinnacle moment to the music video. In our music video, we didn't really use any SFX, this was because we wanted to keep it quite naturalistic. This is not always the expectation of a rock band's record label, but we wanted to show that we wern't tied down to a label, we wanted to express ourselves in a different way. There are only a few uses of SFX in the whole video.