Evaluation 1: In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

For the music video,  we were inspired by a number of artists' videos, including the three shown below.

This song,by the Oxford band Stornoway, gave us the idea of filming Imogen on a roundabout, with the background moving and the artist staying still. I think this works well as a shot because it helps establish Imogen as the main singer and artist involved with the song. The moving background is irrelevant to the audience, so it does not need to be still and distracting.

This is a screen shot from our music video, at a part where Imogen is on the moving roundabout. There are things in the background such as trees and a children's playground, but as they go by quickly they are symbolised as being unimportant to the narrative. This happens again when Imogen is walking through a crowded street in slow motion and the people aren't noticing her, as if she isn't really there at all.

This shot was in slow motion as it helps to establish the character's role and place in society; she is an outsider, and unlike the other people on the crowded street, is on her own, showing that she is different to them. 

The video for Massive Attack's song Unfinished Symphony gave me and my group ideas on what to do for our music video. We originally planned to film Imogen walking from Waterloo to London Bridge continuously, like this video does. We felt that this technique would work well as an establishing shot for our artist, showing where she is from and how she is and outsider from the rest of London by dressing her in odd-looking clothes to make her stand out.

However, we later decided that this was too ambitious, as we didn't have the equipment or permission to film a continuous walking shot in central London. This meant we had to think of a new idea for our video, so we encompassed the shots of iconic parts of Central London with other video types, such as  the extreme close up on the lips and the reverse slow motion shot with the leaves.

The final video, blink-182's video for Always was an inspiration as the way it cuts between the scenes makes it look like a continuous shot throughout the whole video, though it is in three separate parts that occasionally join together, like at the start and end of the song. We originally wanted to do something like this for our video, but we didn't have the time or space to make such a complicated video, instead we filmed a number of base tracks going throughout the song, like on the roundabout to cut back and forth between.

 

These albums covers all have their main artist o the front cover of their respective albums, and so does mine. However, my front cover has a photograph of Imogen up closer and slightly tilted to the right hand side, and her face lightened, like on The Libertines' front cover. Like on Jack Penate's album, I have used the same colour font for the album title and artist's name, to keep in touch with the colour scheme. He has also made the artist's name bigger than the album's title, so any first time listeners are not confused, and know that the person on the cover is the artist themselves. The Darwin Deez and Morrissey albums are both very simple as well, as they just show us who the album is by and, in Morrissey's case, the name of the album. All have lighting effects on, but none are as prolific and obvious as mine, where I used the spotlight tool on Photoshop to eradicate some of Imogen's features.