George Lawley

Media Evaluation

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

1. A shot that shows a link between lyrics and/or music and visuals.

Our song, has a series of lyrics that can easily be portrayed through visuals
however we have decided to focus on one of the most common lines
throughout the song which is the line Mr Blue Sky... We have attempted to
add clips/images of the blue sky as often as we are able to. It also makes
for a useful link between other clips. Other links between lyrics and visuals
are things like running down the avenue we have shots of a band member
running. You can see in the first image that when certain lines such as Mr
Blue Sky are used then imagery is also added.

George Lawley

Media Evaluation

2. A shot that typifies the way a record company would want their artist to be
represented.

Due to our target audience, not

being in the younger generations but instead with people aged over 30, we
have found that we have not needed to portray our artists in the normal
way, however so that the video still does appeal to the audience we have
added certain images of band members more subtly than you would expect
in many music videos aimed at a younger audience. For example the shot
used where the couple, band members, are sitting outside. If we were to
compare this to another music video Piano Man which is also aimed at an
older audience where we see the main artist front and centre and also
preforming. This is done to attract audience members into looking at the
band member/s.

George Lawley

Media Evaluation

3. A shot that illustrates how your video uses music genre.

Our music genre is Rock, with a sub genre of Classic Rock. Because of
this genre we have set our target audience to 22 +. However we do believe
that people below 22 would still be interested in this video, however with
other genres particularly focused on the under 22 group such as R&B. We
have used typical performance shots throughout the video, which is
extremely common in this genre. We have also decided not to follow genre
convention by not relying on large amounts of performance based, but
instead story based.

4. A shot that shows an intertextual reference.

George Lawley

Media Evaluation

We have based our music video on several different music video texts.
These other music videos include; several artic monkeys songs, Piano Man,
The animated Mr Blue Sky video and also several queen albums. This is
because all of these music videos use both narrative performances and also
and in our case more important, narrative performance. Piano Man, by Billy
Joel, is an excellent example as it incorporates lots of narrative lines as
well as a link between lyrics and visuals. It also effectively used a small
performance element.

5. A shot that demonstrates your use of camera.

We have decided, like many music video directors/producers, to use two

main shots to portray our artists such; close ups and medium shots. This
clearly shows the audience the band members. However, when focusing on
the sky we have gone with long, almost establishing shots, to really
emphasise the visual lyric link. This follows the conventions of the genre,
and music video that try and achieve the same as our video.

George Lawley

Media Evaluation

6. A shot that demonstrates your use of lighting.

As our song is very upbeat, lighting

was something that we very concerned about. The majority of our filming
took place outside, during the late autumn and winter. This meant that we
had to use lots of un-natural light sources to allow us to get the exact shots
that we want. This is quite commonly done, to ensure that the exact shot
can be created by the director. Lighting is also important is bring forward a
single item, person or idea. We have tried to do this by lighting the radio
prop which we have used throughout. Again our use of lighting seems follows
current conventions as you can see.

7. A shot that demonstrates your use of mise-en-scene.

We have used the image of the radio throughout the video, along with the digital
task. Our music video is rather conventional with its use of mine - en - scene its
subtle but portrays the decade that we are attempting to re-make. We have also
used to to add some of the sound effects, such as the first few seconds of the

George Lawley

Media Evaluation

song. We have tried to go down the similar rout of music videos such as Piano
man which uses Mise - en - scene to show what these music jazz clubs are like
and use it to be stereotypical. Music videos tend to use mine - en - scene to a large
extent to pass over a message. In our case our message is for people to just be
happy and enjoy nature. So we have used large numbers of shots of the sun,
outdoors and clouds. This has allowed us effectively I believe to portray our
message.
8/9. Two shots which you feel demonstrate something which shows you have
watched other music videos.

One of videos from which I took a lot inspiration was Billy Joels Mr. Piano Man
which portrays large amounts of emotion. The most important emotion that I
wanted to focus on was happiness. I also took inspiration from the video, with the
sub plots that we see happening between the characters. The mix of performance
and narrative really caught my attention as it tends to be quite unique in todays
modern music video market, however using this music video along with others I
found it to be very common in music produced around the same time as Mr Blue
Sky and hence been a hugely important factor into the structure of our video.

The second video that I have used to inspire our work is the music video for whistle
for the choir. This video has inspired us for the more technical elements, such as
camera shots, the way we decided to light the whole shoot and the way we have
edited the video. The video again is very traditional and hits our older target
audience, which is what we are trying to reach out to throughout the entire video.

George Lawley

Media Evaluation

10. The similarities between my music video, digipack & advert.

Throughout all our work we have tried to use similar colour schemes and visuals.
Our digipack front cover and advert use the same imagery however the layout is
different.
Our advert is split into thirds, which follows normal convention. As you can see
below we have also tried to use conventional colour schemes. The use of text and
other images such as the twitter & Facebook icons are also very conventional on all
modern adverts. Our advert is based hugely on Joe Bonamassas different shades
of blue album. If we compare this to our advert (on the right) we have used
almost exactly the same colour scheme on the 1st third and the 3rd third. The
middle third is based on our digipack design. This mainly follows current
conention.