Evaluation - Q1

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

I think our video is just used to make the song attractive, almost like Andrew Goodwin's theory of disjunction. Rather than conforming to generic pop-videos of this nature, I wanted to challenge Goodiwin's disjunction and portray his theory of amplification instead (as seen in Sugababe's 'Push The Button'); this is where the video doesn't necessarily follow the narrative displayed in the lyrics, but adds layers on top of it ("I get so used to being alone / My choice this time I'm in the zone"). 

GIF from Sugababes' 'Push The Button'
This video conveys Goodiwn's amplification

For our original pitch, my idea was to convey Larah, Anca & Dionne as generic bachelors living a life full of 'drink, debauchery, hungover and repeat' - almost like a vicious circle ("Not saying I don't want to take a chance / Coz it's all open to romance / I know it's crazy but I must say /It ain't easy being me"). However this idea was quite complex to portray -  it didn't help being the only technical man on board, perhaps we should've filmed one girl performing as appose to three. I think this idea was partially good as it conform towards Mulvey's theory of the male gaze as we would originally convey women acting sexy, senseless but ultimately venerable. Though the male gaze is predominately used in by male rappers in their videos (as seen in Kendrick Lamar's 'Backseat Freestyle'), whereas female artists like Nicki Minaj enforce the male-gaze to convey their empowerment; because of that, we thought it was particularly important to enforce this. We were able to achieve this through use of high-angle shots and provocative clothing (short-skirts, see-through tops, etc.). However, our focal point of the male-gaze was through the use of red-lipstick. Because the conventions held by red connote that the girls were dangerous and ultimately passionate, I strongly believe we created our own form of empowerment creating the male-gaze in a positive light.  

Example of the male-gaze being enforced; both in rap music
(Kendrick Lamar) and pop (Nicki Minaj).
Notice how the women in Nicki Minaj's video
are standing tall as oppose to the one in Kendrick's

I think my ancillary work would be the strongest part of this project, not because I worked on it alone, but because I take great satisfaction from a good digipak and it's contents as well as an tracks in a retailed album. Looking at previous student's works, it's fair to say I had raised a high-bar for myself. To be specific, I wanted to step out of this convention held by students that the ancillary only needed to have: 4 panels, a couple pictures, the craziest fonts/colours you could find and a section in which you dedicate the album to friends and family. 

A deconstruction of my digipak, I compare it with Sugababes' 'Change' 

My fictional record publication was Record Islands, I thought I want to replicate an album/advertisements just like them: so I followed the norm of your typical retailed-album. I used: idents, composed my own copyright information, used two different fonts for the whole project, a songbook and a well-designed disc - I conformed to the idea that your album should be as good as your album (but in our case, our music video). The only thing I challenged was the colour-scheme used. For a pop-group such Little Mix's 'DNA', their albums are quite colourful, whereas I stuck to the mono-chrome (black/white) colour-scheme I tried to incorporate this in the video too. The connotations held by red also summed up 'The CandiHearts' in the best way possible way. A problem I came across in the advertisement was that I wasn't sure of what the conventions of logos and idents were.  Originally I was led to believe that use of social ident (Facebook, Twitter, etc) were a necessity, however, during research (Jessie J, Marina And The Diamond & Ellie Goulding) I saw none were used. After large-debate (and a couple blog posts) I decided to follow in the footsteps of the professionals and leave it out entirely, with the exception of an logo for a retailer (iTunes). 

To recap on Vernallis, she argues edits in music videos are a lot more frequent that in film. We conformed with her main theory that editing follows a rhythmic basis closely to the song. Just like your generic pop videos, ours included:
- A lot of jump cuts
- Editing to the beat (in our case however, ultimately the chorus)
- Speeding our edit down and included slow motion to fit in with the beat
I looked closely at Sugababes' 'Ugly' for comparisons in Vernallis' theory. I composed this short video on iMovie, ', editing both videos one-by-one - enjoy!