Evaluation Question No 1

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Our music video is of heartache portrayed by the performers from our group. This was influenced by many artists in the music industry that also represent this emotion in their music and music videos. Adele herself was one of our biggest influences; although she did not have a music video for “Set Fire to the Rain” We looked at some of her other music videos as most of them show the same kind of emotion and are heartfelt too. We looked into what different kinds of shots were used in her music videos to show motion and to put across the particular message across; for example, we decided to use the Sofa and the antique table as props because in Adele’s music video to “Rolling in the Deep” she is sat down and looking away from the camera which looked really effective as if she was really traumatised by the emotions she was feeling, this way the viewers can see more of the emotion she is portraying through her face and not be distracted by anything else. We also looked at how she acted in her other music videos; this gave us an idea of how to make our own video look more realistic for the type of genre and song. We decided to shoot on lots of different locations, a variety in the studio and many in Manchester too, with both night and day scenes, we decided this was best because most music videos in general – like the ones we reviewed at the beginning had a mixture of many scenes, and kept switching to and from them.
We developed different forms and conventions from other videos, however used many our own ideas too. The theme for the music video was that the three performers were being “played” by a male character. However, through different circumstances, we were not able to do this. This gave us a chance to let the viewer make their own mind up of what is going on in the video and let them use their imagination to what is happening, and decide for themselves why the performers are so heartbroken. It doesn’t give a clear view on what has happened to the characters, so we steered away from linear narrative. Most music videos of this genre would have narrative parts, although we didn’t include direct narrative, we added scenes of the performers in town where they weren’t lip synching and paying no attention to the camera, these for example include all three girls walking on their own giving a feeling of loneliness. This happens in most of Adele's music videos by keeping to the "emotional"side of things and sticking to studio scenes, which we also did.

With the amount of time we had to produce our video, in my opinion we did well to produce out music video, as it is shows many conventions of a real media product. We have made precise transitions in the editing process to help the video run smoothly, like cutting to the beat for example. We felt that this was very important to make our video look realistic and run smooth like a real music video. For example, when the beat is slow at the beginning of the song, the editing is slow pace, and when the song fastens up toward the chorus, the editing is faster to build more tension. This is seen in nearly every music video, so we knew this would be an important factor.

During the process of planning and filming our video, we needed to make sure that we kept a relationship between the lyrics, music and visuals; this is seen through the actions of the performers and the facial expressions as well as the narrative scenes in the screenshots above.

Although our music video relates to real music videos, we wanted ours to be origional, this is partly why we chose three persormers to lip sync to the voice of Adele, this is very unique within the music industry.