T1-05 Music Video 2012: Matt - Final Evaluation

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

Demonstrating genre by characteristics: The main characteristic that we followed was the close up shots of lip singing. For example in this still image, we can see a close to mid shot of Alyssa singing. We followed this convention to make the video have more feeling towards the artist who is singing.

We didn't follow the conventions of having a dance routine or band performance scenes, mainly because these feats do not suit the feel for Ellie Goulding’s song Human.

We also didn't follow the convention of there being a narative behind the shots. There wasn't really much of a story line apart from a girl who wanted to be considered as human, but that was as far as it went. The video's lacking narative doesn't link in with the lyrics, which is unconventional.

Lyrics & Visuals: There is a small relationship between lyrics and visuals in the music video. The lyric 'Ocean' is said and there are many oceanic sea shots that can represent the ocean. Also the mention of 'Human' and 'I would give my life to be human' has links to the actress in the video. The links made are that she is human and that she never faces the camera. The fact that she never faces the camera adds intrigue and mystery to the character and reinforces the lyrics 'I would give my life to be human' - this concept can provoke the audience to think about the possible mystical aspect of the actress.

There are other instances of links between lyrics and visuals. The line 'I hope I will get the chance to be someone, to be human' has the actress striding boldly through the sea. This could make the audience think that this is her chance to prove she is human and give off the impression that she will use the sea to prove that she is human. 'To be someone' could be suggesting that she wants to be human but a bit more than human, not just your average Joe. She may want to be recognized by people as someone, an influential being, instead of just a wall flower. This is shown in the video by the actress walking into the sea with a certain ambition in her strides.

Also the lyrics 'I would give my life, I would give my life', at around 3:19 in the video and the actress is shown running along the beach. I think this is representing the fact that she is running towards something that will make her human or maybe running is what she believes will make her human. The concept we have shown is fairly abstract, meaning it isn't completely obvious and to the untrained eye, it is a girl walking around on the beach for no reason. But when you look deeper into the video you will see that there is a girl who is doubting her existence of being human and she is saying she would give her life to be human.
There is another link between the 3 products: the name of the Album is 'Dreamscape' this has a link with the Human music video because the beach is quite a dreamy scene. It is helped by the fact that the actress is wearing a cream knee length dress. The dress is relevant because it helps to make you believe that its a dreamy place because you are unlikely to wear a summers dress at the beach when it's foggy. Also the beach is empty, taking the belief that it is in a dream not reality. It is a fairly picturesque scene with an empty foggy beach in a summers dress. The actions that the actress performs are relativity dream like or abnormal for reality. For example running along the shore, this would be normal for a summers day but for a cold foggy morning it isn't, this reinforces the idea of it being a dreamscape.

. Music & Visuals: There is a relationship between the visuals and music. For example at the final chorus there are some jump cuts between 2 long shots of Cat running up the beach. This shot was effective because it cut on the beat giving a more lively edge for the end of the song. However I think that the clips could have been better positioned due to sometimes the cuts went from left leg to left leg again instead of right leg left leg right leg. This made the clip look less professional, we would have changed it but we didn't have time.

Another way in which the music and visuals have a relationship is that the lip singing visual is in time with the music. This makes the product look professional and makes it harder to tell that the singer isn't singing the song live.

5 Voyeurism: In Human we don’t have much voyeurism happening or emphasis on the female form. The video is seen as much more pure, gentle and natural, rather than about sex, love and modern culture. If we compare Human to videos such as Beyonce or Brittany Spears. Beyonce and Brittany Spears often wear provocative clothing to suit their song’s fast rhythm. They often have dancing semi-naked men around them to show that they attract the opposite sex very easily due to their attitude, looks and personality. In Human, Cat is wearing a dress, but she is not dressed showing unnecessary skin like Beyonce and Shakira.

Intertextuality: We didn't know this at the time but midway through the post-production stage we found an Ellie Goulding music video similar to ours.

B Both take place on a beach however ‘Anything Could Happen’ has other shots of a couple of vehicles but they do their lip singing on the beach where we do it inside in a lit environment. However both videos challenge pop music conventions but the Ellie Goulding video does have a strong element on a love story.