Evaluation Question 1

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

 Crystal Castles – Celestica
The video contains lots of mid shots whilst singing, walking along in the woods or in other urban working class looking areas. Throughout the singing contains cut aways of children dressed in black either playing instruments or playing, which provides an eerie weird twist to the video. One mise en scene particularly is that of a graveyard in some woods, it looks magical but has a sombre feel to look at. Some shots are that which have a pull focus or are just out of focus, which we have used also.

Health- We Are Water

This video which is of a similar genre to Crystal Castles is a video consisting only of narrative which is that of a horror film weird feel but it suits the music quite well. The mise en scene is of a dark forest with fog and snow throughout as well which adds to the eerieness.  The shot types vary so much that the it keeps the attention of the audience. The narrative is soley of a female running away in a mess with make up running down her face, from a scary looking bald topless man with a big sword in hand. This idea is very different and interesting to watch despite the fact that it doesnt have a performance element.

 

With inspiration from the We are Water video, in the middle of the video we decided to show the realism of the couple and not just the happy loving flashbacks, so they have an argument and we have various shots showing the couple running, as is done in the Health video. With inspiration from the female in We are water, I made our actrss have her facepainted to have a black and white face with it running over her face, as it is interesting to see as its different from the usual. We followed the conventional mise en scene of the band with the graveyard and forest theme used within our video as it is in theirs; too keep with the eerie feel of the band and with the lyrics. Within my video and the Crystal Castles videos, tracking shots are used of the singer to capture his singing. The conceptual idea within their video is the shots of the young children playing instruments and looking ghostly strange, so we wanted to capture a morbid story happening throughout our video which consists of the depression of the male and his lost love. We developed the conventions of a music video by integrating the conceptual story of him walking backwards and singing whilst having flashbacks of him and a female. Their videos captures a morbid feel with Robert Smiths sombre style; flashbacks of him sat in the bath clothed, arguing with the female and her then looking like a monster and her being sick, these integrated with the happy flashbacks work well together and it maybe challenges their normal conventions of a video as they don’t show any sign of happiness within their video. We have also challenged the conventions of a typical music video as it could be criticised that we have less of a performance involved, but we thought it important to gain a good story narrative to sell the band and the featuring artist. The health video proves that within the genre to have an interesting narrative with lots of different shots can be quite interesting to watch, they have no performance element  and it still sells the band to the type of audience we are aiming at. So in comparison to other bands within the genre we are quite fitting with the amount of performance, we have enough of the singing in the chorus’ and randomly throughout the video to maintain the interest of the audience. With the band featuring as buskers as Robert walking past them it gives the mysterious edge that they seem to have in their videos. We kept to close up shots whilst they sang as we understand that it’s essential for the artists to look into the camera and connect with the target audience. 

From feedback from the older generation I've been told it has an independent 80's music video feel, which is similar to videos from Joy division and The Cure, which is a post modern approach as these old bands are coming back into fashion and we've been told that we've captured this well. Although our video isn't performance based like Joy Divisions, it has a similar authentic quality with the way it is filmed, the setting of working class locations and the naturalness of the performers.