Evaluation - Question 1

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

As our CD cover is following the same style as covers such as 'Love it when you call', 'Sewn' and 'Twelve Stops and Home' in comparing it with one of those covers it is easy to spot what is similar about The Feeling covers to the one we made. As the real covers have all similar looks with the similar effects they look like they have we wanted to make sure that our own cover resembled the same look as the originals.

Comparing The Feelings cover with the 'Love it when you call' music video points out what concepts on the cover relate to the video in anyway. The obvious object such as the telephone cord is something you can notice straight away relating to the title and the telephone call that the song is based on. In the Sun is Shining cover the source of light or 'sun' is the traffic lights which isn't really at all obvious and goes into more detail which could come off as confusing and complicated for the audience. Looking at other magazine adverts where the CD cover always seems to be a part of it we decided to make the CD cover 3D which the new feeling characters we designed would sit on, making it a large focus of the cover.

The characters are versions of the real people. The Feeling band always seem to have pictures of them as a group which all tend to look identical so we thought we would put a twist to this duplicate look and change them to characters, much like 'Gorillaz' band do. When discussing with our focus group (younger sixth form students) and we discussed out music video they mentioned that it would be too confusing to stick with the story-line we had and have a band included. With this feedback we decided that creating characters for the role instead would be more subtle yet not disinclude the band members all together. The main reason we created them as a replacement for having a band as our feedback suggested a band would be too much complication to put in our video with our storyline.

Other bands such as Gorillaz or Coldplay have either used characters generally or in a video.

Comparing our products with the Feelings brand helped us add in certain yet subtle objects that were needed in order to make it authentic. For example the record label was put on the magazine advert which we got of the website. We also got The Feeling neon sign off the website so that it would be recognizable by a feeling fan that has visited the website. Looking at ‘Twelve stops and home’ the CD cover and the advert we noticed that the text on the cover was used on the advert as well so we made sure we did the same on our advert, shown above.

Doing a content analysis of these music videos helped me pick up more information on areas such as music genres and what they tend to include in such videos. With quite a few music videos from the same genre (such as The fray or Foo Fighters) having similar aspects in their videos compared to our own music video.

With the music video the whole main theme of the video is 'madness' a lot of quick cuts are included. At main parts where the quick cuts of the carousel is spinning very fast along with flashbacks its similar to the 'Pink' music video 'Who Knew' towards the end where all of the fairground rides are going fast along with quick cuts/flashbacks. There is also a link to Rhiannas music video Disturbia where the main theme is madness.

The robotic moves and the costumes give it a horror theme, along with the dark and creepy settings (smoke, fire, chains).

Putting in colourful cheerful locations in our music video such as the carousel and park also helped tone down the violence behind the story. Making it a theme of madness yet different to Rhiannas approach by using brighter locations compared to darkness and horror.

Another video in particular, ‘ANTHEM’ by Filo & Peri ft Eric Lumiere, is extremely similar to our storyline. Even simple locations like the park are locations we used for our video. In the video they use messages instead of a character to lead the man on where to go.

‘Over my head’ the music videos from The Fray also use text in their videos for main lines. This is the same method we chose. However they use the boy to sing the lyrics, which we did not use in our music videos to avoid complication with our storyline. Typical use in ‘The Fray’ music video is graffiti and a test paper. With our video, throughout we have used graffiti to use on walls or billboards.

In Foo fighter’s music video ‘Everlong’ they include photos to show happy memories. This is a more subtle way of showing memories rather than flashbacks. Using black and white makes it obvious it is a memory from the past as well as it being a photo, which is similar to our sepia effect used in our music video.

In our video, automatically it was the man character that killed the woman. Stereotypically being the ‘stronger’ gender it would be expected to find the man has killed the woman. In scenes such as the graveyard were filmed at night to give it a scarier effect, as it would look less spooky if it were filmed in the daylight. With certain objects were crucial in making the video seem real. Such as the ‘blood’ that was used when the woman was lying on the floor, which without it would have not been obvious she was dead, Therefore without these objects it would make these scenes less realistic.