Evaluation - Activity 1

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

The song we chose was Lily Allen “knock ‘em out”. The style of the video is quite quirky and upbeat, it reflects the song genre as well as the artists tastes and attitudes. The style is mainly narrative with performance revolving around the main character within the narrative. It is a normal narrative and doesn’t contain anything abstract, which makes the story more prominent and allowed us to create style, flare and character within the performance side. We followed conventions of a music video by using lip synching and having a narrative.

Evaluation

We used a number of settings and locations for out music video including a pub and a local estate as well as blank walls to do the majority of the lip synching we also used some other minor locations such as filming the local A road for the opening of the video. The settings and locations are typical of a music video as they directly reflect the narrative and story line. The settings and locations for our video were chosen to relate to the narrative and all add a character for the song.

The costumes and props we used were carefully though out to reflect the settings and the songs. For the lip synching we used a variety of quirky outfits, dresses and props such as the flowers and in some unused shots we used hairbrushes etc. we did this to reflect the style of the artist as well as what was happening within the song and narrative. For the pub setting we used casual outfits for the boys and smart-casual outfits for the girls to present that they were trying to impress without going over the top. Other props we used included the picture of the house on fire at the end and magazines, each adding to the song in different ways so it wasn’t boring and just lots of plain lip synching. The final outfit we used was at the estate, we dressed our main character (who represented Lily) down in a tracksuit, it was supposed to be casual to reflect the setting as well as what she says in the shots such as “I’m pregnant” , to represent her uncaring nature. Another key outfit we used was our main character in the wedding dress scene, we did this to represent what she was saying at the time and the extra effort of finding this shop and this outfit added an extra effect and really made the shot.

We used many types of camera work within our music video, not only still shots and frames but a range of pans, zooms and many shots where our character moves in and out of the shots as well as to and from the camera to create variety. We had a range of shots like close ups and long shots, each serving a different purpose and creating a style for our video. We used continuity to create a flowing story line which made sense to the audience.

The editing within our sequence is edited to the beat of the song with the lip synching in time with the song. This took us a long time to perfect but we think it works well with the song as performance is one of the main elements of the song. The editing was straight forward as we used normal cuts, no transitions or fades etc. we decided to do this as we felt, if we did, it would have removed the focus from the song. However, we did edit a few shots slightly, we brightened up a shot as when we filmed it, due to the angle, the lighting wasn’t bright enough and the second edited shot was a clip we made slightly faster to make the lip synching in time.







The performance side is a key area within our music video. We filmed the entire song a number of times in many different locations as to find the best shot, encase the shot we had planed didn’t fit as well when we edited the song together. The performance took place in a number of locations, this included the pub (for some of the speaking parts); the local estate for the introduction; a number of blank walls to create a studio like atmosphere for the personal performance parts; and some minor places like Ellie’s car.






The song is a quirky, upbeat pop song, typical of the Lily Allen genre. Her songs tend to be about serious/everyday subjects which she turns on the head to create a flare which includes her personality. Our video suggests the genre of the track as our main character is upbeat and has a real personality which reflects the song choice. Using costumes we made our main character pop-y and young to represent the artist. As well as this, we kept the theme of the video quite light, using a pub scene and a light hearted situation.




The artist doesn’t have many videos, including the song we chose but some of her videos shown on youtube.com include: Smile and 22. Smile in particular could show how we conformed to her videos, as it revolves around the artist’s performance and story. She is the main character within the video and also does all the performance. However the video Alfie, contains a number of cartoons and plastic models and the Artist playing a fictional character, dressed up in costume in a obviously created set, so it could be seen we subverted in this way. However she does lip synch, another conformity our video followed.